Count your blessings – this oft-repeated exhortation can seem cliched. To appreciate its potency, let’s consider two significant benefits of counting our blessings.

Feeling enriched: When we strive to count our blessings, we consciously direct our attention toward the valuable things that we already have: health, family, friends, financial security, peaceful socio-political situation. Suppose we don’t have all these or even any of these. We still have heat, light, air, water, life itself. When we consciously dwell on whatever blessings we have, we value them more. Thus, we protect ourselves from the common human weakness conveyed through the saying: familiarity breeds contempt. And the more we value those blessings, the more we feel enriched.

Once counting our blessings becomes our habit, the memory of our blessings stays with us more and more. Thereafter, whenever we see something we don’t have, we may feel momentarily dissatisfied, but we soon remember our many blessings and return to a state of inner contentment. Such cultivation of satisfaction is a laudable mental discipline (Bhagavad-gita 17.16).

Becoming a blessing: The more our habitual counting of blessings makes us cheerful, the more we spread good cheer wherever we go. By our habit of looking for blessings, we see the good in others and appreciate them. Even when they do something wrong, we see the potential for good that lies untainted in their souls and encourage them to manifest that potential. Even amid adversity, we see the hidden seed of opportunity. In a society darkened by so much bad news and by so many complainers and cynics, we become a blessing: a ray of welcome light, brightening the days and indeed the lives of those around us.

One-sentence summary:

The more we learn to count our blessings, the more we appreciate how blessed we are and the more we ourselves become a blessing.

Think it over:

  • Has counting your blessings ever made you feel enriched?
  • Have you ever acted in a way that made someone say that you were a blessing to them?
  • Count your blessings daily for a fortnight and note the difference in your disposition.

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17.16: And satisfaction, simplicity, gravity, self-control and purification of one’s existence are the austerities of the mind.

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