Thought Leader: David Steindl-Rast

Click for Ted Talk: Want to be happy? Be grateful.

“The root of joy is gratefulness...It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”

Renowned spiritual leader and Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast trained for 12 years in the Benedictine monastic tradition before receiving permission to practice Zen withBuddhist masters. He went on to become a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell, where he was the first Roman Catholic to hold the Thorpe Lectureship, and co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies, as well as gratefulness.org.

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Notes  from talk:

Grateful living. Every moment is a gift. We haven’t earned it, we haven’t bought it but it is the most valuable thing that could be given to us. This moment is a gift. The gift within this gift is the opportunity. Opportunity is the gift within every gift. Every moment is a new gift offering a new opportunity.

“Does that mean we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not! We can not be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. On a personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. But, I didn’t say we can be grateful for everything. I said we can be grateful for every given moment, for the opportunity."

“We can arise to the opportunity that is given to us. When a difficult thing is occurs to us, it’s a challenge to rise to that opportunity. And we can rise to it by learning something, which is sometimes painful."

“And if we fail, we always get another opportunity. That is the wonderful richness of life."

"How can we find a method that will harness this? There is a very simple method: stop, look, go. You need stop signs in your life." 

"A grateful world is a happy world." 

Suggested Book: 

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More Quotes: 

“Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness, and gratefulness is a measure of our aliveness.”

― David Steindl-Rast, Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings

"Look closely and you will find that people are happy because they are grateful. The opposite of gratefulness is just taking everything for granted."
— David Steindl-Rast in The Music of Silence

“We are never more than one grateful thought away from peace of heart.”
― David Steindl-Rast