Each week on The Grateful Dad Radio Hour, I reflect on what I’m grateful for in a segment titled "My Moment of Gratitude." This week, in the holiday spirit, I am offering something a little different, based on the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, in the form of A Four Worlds Gratitude Prayer: I am aware and grateful for the four worlds in which I live…
I am grateful for the physical world, for the ground on which I walk, for the clean fresh air I breathe, the water pure and cold that flows over this planet. I am grateful for my body, and the life that runs through it, for every organ and limb, and for my physical health and the strength to arise and face each day, knowing that this is temporary, and that I must honor my body to keep it healthy. I am grateful for my beating heart, for my mobility, and for the ability to take in nourishment and expel waste, with gratitude for all of the basic building blocks of the physical world.
I am grateful for my emotional world, the ability to feel and sense. I am grateful for the feelings of joy, and also of sadness, and the range of emotions that I share with other humans. And because I feel, I am grateful for my ability to empathize with others, to know and understand their emotions, as I too have felt that way before, with gratitude in the world of emotions.
I am grateful for the mental or intellectual world of my thoughts and awareness, the world of knowing. I am grateful for the head on my shoulders that knows, and sees, and thinks, and I am most grateful when those thoughts are positive, and that I can learn something new from everyone I meet, and everything I read and encounter. I am grateful to be able to think and read and reason and speak and reflect and dream and debate and connect, with gratitude in this world of the mind.
And I am grateful for the spiritual world, the world of mystery and faith, the world I know without knowing, trust without seeing, and believe in without thinking. I am filled with gratitude and wonder for divine beauty, and for those many, many things I cannot explain that make up the spiritual world for which I feel eternal gratitude.
For these four worlds – the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual – in which I live simultaneously, I am truly and eternally grateful.
So, that’s my moment of gratitude as a Four Worlds Gratitude Prayer.