Oprah Winfrey: GRACE AND GRATITUDE

Oprah's Super Soul

Oprah

Society & Culture

4.6 • 32.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of Oprah’s favorite quotes comes from German mystic Meister Eckhart. He said, “If the only prayer you say in your entire life is ‘thank you,’ that will be enough.” Oprah says when she started keeping a gratitude journal more than 20 years ago, it was one of the most important things she’s done. The daily practice of writing down five things to be grateful for balanced her life in subtle and inspiring ways. "It sounds simple,” Oprah says, “but when you go through the day staying conscious about what you put on your gratitude list, it shifts the lens through which you see the world.” In this episode of Super Soul, Oprah sits down with luminaries like Mark Nepo, Ram Dass, Elizabeth Lesser, Reverend Ed Bacon, Tracey Jackson, Paul Williams, Geneen Roth, Cheryl Strayed, Caroline Myss, Gretchen Rubin, Shawn Achor, Marie Forleo, Lynne Twist, Louie Schwartzberg and Norman Lear to discover that the practice of gratitude can elevate our lives to a state of grace. Interviews with these talented writers, speakers and thought leaders are excerpted from Oprah’s Emmy Award-winning show Super Soul Sunday. You can also find this compilation and other insightful conversations in Oprah’s best-selling book The Wisdom of Sundays.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of
0:07.5	the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present.
0:16.0	Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right
0:23.0	now.
0:24.7	A great blessing of being broken open is understanding that no experience, nothing that's happened
0:30.5	to you is wasted. Challenges are just life's way of moving you forward in another direction
0:37.2	sometimes. Learning to live from this place of gratitude helps you see past the pain
0:43.0	until you reach a state of grace you never even imagined.
0:47.1	I talk a lot about paradox because I have found paradox, the tension between seeming opposites.
0:53.4	They've always been great teachers for me. We can't deny our humaneness, in fact we need
0:58.7	to accept our human. Having an open heart means feeling it all. So I was just writing
1:05.3	the other day about being grateful, thanking God that my experiences have hollowed me
1:11.0	out like a hollow bone. But I was never thankful while I was being hollowed out.
1:19.3	And I think that's very human. So I think the thing for me when I have experienced difficult
1:24.6	things with family or friends or in life situations, it's very hard. I certainly wasn't thankful
1:31.6	to the pain in my stomach when I was recently ill. I didn't want it to be there. But trying
1:37.3	to hold the larger view at the same time is where gratitude lives. So let me give you
1:45.1	an image. If we're at sea and you're in a raft and the swells of the sea are huge,
1:53.1	when you are lifted to the top of a wave you can see for eternity. When you come down
1:58.7	into the belly of a wave you can't see anything. The kind of gratitude we're talking about
2:04.2	is not to deny the fact that you're in the belly of a wave and that wave my crash on you,
2:10.3	but to never lose sight of the horizon even though in this moment you're not seeing.
	...

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