Discover Your Life Purpose With Gratitude

A lot can be said for an attitude of gratitude, but did you know it can also help you clarify your life purpose?

If you rarely make the effort to feel grateful, you are probably familiar with a pervasive sense of boredom, frustration, dissatisfaction and emptiness. Even if your life circumstances are bearable for the most part, you might still feel a bit disconnected and aimless on a regular basis.

A shift toward a more appreciative mind-set can trigger incredible changes in your life - one of which is inspiring you to move toward the activities that speak most deeply to your spirit. In other words, your life purpose!

Here's why:

1) Gratitude reconnects you with your authentic self. Whether you call it your soul, your spirit, your essence, or your authentic self, this is the part of you that experiences your life on the deepest level. It is not only who you are, but who you were meant to be. It is the part of you that is most pure and abundant, and from which the rest of your life springs. Your authentic self is the part of you that is naturally joyful, lighthearted, loving, compassionate, generous . . . and yes, grateful. As you focus more and more on gratitude (as well as joy, passion and love!), you automatically shift into this part of yourself. You feel happier and more loving - and express these emotions freely and easily.

Most importantly, your authentic self already knows what your life purpose is! Whether you believe you have a predestined purpose or you can choose your purpose - the deepest part of you understands the activities that make you most happy. The more you can connect with this part of yourself, you will feel inspired to move naturally toward those activities.

2) Gratitude helps awaken you to limitless possibilities. The deepest part of you also knows that for every desire born within you, a corresponding possibility exists. Perhaps you know what you would like your life purpose to be, but your skeptical mind won't allow you to go for it. You make excuses about how hard it would be, how you have too many demands on your time, how you don't have the talent or experience required to do what you really want to do - but gratitude can change all this. The more time you spend being grateful, the more positive you feel and the more easily you can believe in the seemingly impossible. A grateful mind-set convinces you that even if you can't see a clear path to your dreams, a path must surely exist and will make itself known at the right time.

3) Gratitude helps you honor the best parts of yourself and everyone else. The more you can build yourself and others up, the more you will find yourself fulfilling a powerful purpose in life. It has been said that our life purpose has nothing to do with us personally, but with all of the lives we touch through the fulfillment of it. That's powerful! If you focus on expressing gratitude for everyone you encounter, you help them to become better people. You build them up, encourage and support them. Likewise when you express gratitude for yourself.

When you are fully connected to a sense of reverence and gratitude for your life experiences, you cannot help but attract ever greater levels of meaning and purpose in everything you do. Your very focus on the goodness of life triggers a flow of abundance and clarity that can illuminate even the darkest path.

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