No matter where you are in life -- whether we're living in the pit of despair or having everything comin' up roses -- there's always a larger perspective that could produce a quantum shift that leads to a more joyful perspective.

To live a life that continuously expands moving into uncharted territories of joy, bliss, and abundance, we must be conscious, awake, and willing to explore.

Until we take time to reflect and celebrate all that makes us fortunate, we miss the opportunity to truly size the fulfillment, joy, and love that is available to each of us.

Each of us, has literally, a never-ending stream of reasons to be grateful. If nothing else, we can be grateful for the air that we breathe and its continuous supply of oxygen and life.

Here's a quick list of amazing, yet simple things to be grateful for:

The ability to smile

The ability to feel love

The ability to give to others

Having a friend who cares

Having food to eat

Fresh water you can drink

The sight of a sunset

The feel of soft fabric

A place you can call home

The sun

It is our responsibility to taste, touch, feel and savor the miracles, blessings, surprises, and possibilities that are unfolding deliciously at every moment of our existence. This is how to be alive. Failure to miss the delectable beauty that exists inside every moment is the failure to live.

Inside gratitude, presence of all aliveness awakens and exposes itself to our hearts. Here is where our hearts swells with love, appreciation, joy and profound divine acceptance of all that is. Gratitude is where our divinity and our humanity merge.

The level of joy you experience in your life is in direct proportion to your experience of gratitude.

You can have all the money, love, and success in the world, but if you are not present to the happiness, fun, ecstasy, and bliss it gives you if you let the moment of joy pass you by then despite your outer circumstances, your life will always feel meaningless and empty.

But with gratitude, you can be in a jail cell, eating bread and water, and discover the uncontainable joy of being alive and aware. Maya Angelous book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings depicts that freedom of the soul to discover joy transcends all external cages.

Whenever we are in disempowering situations, we must learn to accept it is because we are entering the situation with a disempowering attitude.

Gratitude is the shift we need to bring us back into empowerment. Gratitude is a choice available through inquiry and practice.

At any moment -- even emotionally challenging moments -- you can choose to stop, breathe and create gratitude, by asking these four simple questions that can transform your life:

What complaint, belief, or excuse can I surrender right now to feel closer to gratitude?

What can I be grateful for right now?

What is the lesson or wisdom of gratitude at this moment?

What action can I take right now to let in the feeling of gratitude?

Living a life filled with gratitude is a muscle that needs to be developed. Surrendering your complaints and excuses is another muscle. I invite you to make the choice to develop these complementary muscles as a regular practice in your life.

Inviting oneself into gratitude at our most difficult times can often deliver us from resistance, from our story, from our fears. It transforms our experience from one of misery to one of hope.

Gratitude teaches us that the purpose of every moment is to love what is -- to peer into divine perspective and discover the beauty all around.

If you connect to this higher purpose, of loving what is, you empower your life with new energy, perspective, passion and humility. You open yourself to the wonder, surprise, and reverie of life.

Gratitude is a catalyst to seeing the world free of resistance. From this perspective, you can allow life to be. You can allow others to be. And finally, you can finally allow yourself to just be.

Here is the process of filling your whole being with gratitude and ultimately, with pure joy, power and love:

Invoke gratitude for everything that brings you joy

Invoke gratitude for everything you ignore

Invoke gratitude for every experience you endured in the past

Invoke gratitude for everything you resist or struggle in the present

Gratitude allows us to transform our chains into our freedom. When we fully receive and understand the truth that we are perfect, the world is perfect, and everyone else is perfect just as they are then we can finally be free.

Then we can finally accept the divinity, the abundance, the wisdom that we already have. That is our transformation from humanity to divinity.

Copyright 2005 Coco Fossland