The first thing we need to understand is that no person has taken birth only to serve us. Every other person is also on the path of life just as we are. As a kind gesture, out of love, they do things for us. Even your own wife or husband is doing a very kind act of serving you, of providing for you or taking care of you. Of course, marriage calls for give and take but the husband or wife can never be taken for granted. They can never be thought of as our birthright. Especially between partners, a lot of things are taken for granted. Somehow, this idea has taken root very deeply in our society. Because of this, many marriages fall apart today.

I tell you, even during a physical relationship there can be such deep gratitude for the other person’s body. It will make the whole thing a divine experience instead of mere physical pleasure.

When you can derive so much pleasure because of the other, why not feel gratitude towards the other for it?  If the other is deeply respected from the beginning, many marriages can be saved.

Each individual plays an equal part in life. No one should be taken for granted. There has to be some gratitude for every person on planet earth. I always tell people that even if things don’t work out between you and your wife and you have to part, part with gratitude.

Every relationship brings some good into our life.  Every relationship is auspicious in its own way. Only, we were not able to see it that way.

The problem is that somewhere we feel people are waiting to hurt us. It is not so. It is only our own insecurity which we project on others. We have a self-defense mechanism which causelessly plays in every relationship. It is driven with the thought that others are waiting to hurt us. This very mechanism will disappear when gratitude flowers.

We are all looking to label relationships as good, bad, ugly, etc. This applies to any relationship, whether it is mother and child, boss and employee, or even between friends. So many people feel ungrateful to their parents and society for conditioning them in certain ways.

In one of the gratitude meditations that we offer, we ask people to first give their gratitude to their parents and all of the people who gave them their mental setup, their attitude. Please understand that with the intelligence that you have now, you are able to see that you did not receive the right kind of mental setup earlier. You are now trying to transform to a new mental setup. That is perfectly alright. But it is not right to curse people who gave you the earlier mental setup. Those who gave us this body and mind did not have any intention to deprive us or disturb us in any way. Whatever they knew as their best, they just gave to us, that’s all. We are going beyond it now because we have become more intelligent.

Just feel grateful to them, that is enough.

One more thing is that whenever you feel truly grateful to the people in your relationships, you will never try to possess them. You will look at them as beautiful individuals and leave it at that.

Possessiveness happens only when you think of the other person as an object and not as an individual.

With gratitude, you will allow the person to have his or her own space. Decide consciously that you will respond with pure love and gratitude for the next couple of days, whatever the situation may be. Just for two days, decide not to react the way you have been reacting all these years. Decide that you will respond only with pure, unassuming love. You will see that all of your relationships take a turn for the better. Automatically you will start seeing each and every person as a unique creation of Existence, as a reflection of the Divine. You will feel deeply connected to everyone and everything around you. Not only that, you will find tremendous compassion towards everything around you. If you were a person who gets angry easily, you will find the anger disappearing. All the energy that was invested in other negative emotions will get released with this growing gratitude. You will be a compassionate and loving person.