When we strive to cultivate gratitude, one of the most disheartening pitfalls on our path may be our struggles with our weaknesses, especially if those weaknesses seem to triumph repeatedly. If we have issues around anger, craving, or addiction, and those behaviors keep recurring despite our earnest efforts to restrain ourselves, then we may start feeling resentful about why we are stuck with such crippling weaknesses. During such frustrations, gratitude often becomes the furthest thing from our mind.

Thankfully however, we can cultivate gratitude even amid these situations. How? By shifting our focus from what these weaknesses have taken away from us, which generally centers on our capacity to function responsibly, to what these weaknesses have provided us: powerful reminders of how we need a strength beyond ourselves. Ultimately, those reminders can point us toward the attractive, purifying, and benevolent divinity, Krishna, who resides forever in our hearts. He can be not just our greatest rescuer from our worst weaknesses, but also the most fulfilling reciprocator of our deepest longing for love. 

Thus, if we develop our relationship with the divinity within us, even if we were stimulated by our failed confrontations with our weaknesses, then that journey is still auspicious and will propel us toward a bright future filled with not just freedom but also fulfillment. This is a future we might have missed out on if we had not been hamstrung by our weaknesses. And this is a future that many others, who may not be hamstrung by weaknesses like us, still miss out on because of their illusory notion that they have no need to connect with the divine.

When we thus see the blessings hidden within the seeming curse of our weaknesses, we can shift our focus to that blessing and thereby cultivate gratitude for the door toward spiritual growth that our weaknesses pushed us to perceive and pursue. 

Summary:

We can’t be grateful for our weaknesses, yet we can be grateful for how our weaknesses forcefully remind us of our need for a strength beyond ourselves.

Think it over. 

  • When we are battling with our weaknesses, why is it difficult to cultivate gratitude? 
  • Amid such battles, what shift of focus can help us cultivate gratitude? 
  • Contemplate how any of your weaknesses has pointed you toward the divine source of all strength.

Audio explanation of article is here: https://gitadaily.substack.com/p/grateful-for-our-weaknesses

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