Can you allow yourself, for a while, to look for what you’re grateful for about others?

It’s such an easy habit, perhaps supported quite powerfully by your own inner-critic, to keep on looking for all the ways in which people are disappointing, hurtful, irritating, obstructing, confusing and frustrating to you. You may not even quite realise that you’re doing this – how your background mood has quietly become one of scepticism or cynicism or despair.

So perhaps you could take up the practice of looking truthfully for a while in a different direction: at what you can be genuinely grateful for in each person, however small.

Write it down. Make a list. A long, ever-growing list of what you come to see.

The point of this is not to blind yourself to your difficulties or frustrations but to open your eyes to a wider kind of horizon than is available to you now; to bring about new kinds of possibilities, conversations and relationship with all the people who, right now, you can only see as obstacles to your intentions; and to find how out they might be supporting you and taking care of what matters to you in many more ways than you can currently see.

Photo Credit: kevin dooley via Compfight cc