Gurupurnima presents us with an unparalled opportunity to pay gratitude to the Guru, or the Teaching Principle of God. The reason why it is so important that we pay gratitude to the Guru is because it is He Who has nurtured us right from childhood like a parent and taught us through various means and situations; things which we wouldn’t have learnt in our school textbooks.

Significance and benefits of expressing gratitude to the Guru

• Reduction in Ego: Often seekers forget to thank God when their prayers are answered or after deriving Bliss from rendering service. By paying gratitude to God for all the things in our lives we acknowledge the Lord’s help. This in a way helps to also reduce our ego, so that we rely less on our capabilities and more on our faith in God to give us the capability. Gratitude is a means of offering the doer-ship of an act to God / the Guru, hence it helps in reducing the ego.
• Increasing Spiritual emotion: When we have spiritual emotion which means having an intense awareness of God in our lives we constantly experience the Guru’s grace. One of the most essential attributes of spiritual emotion is our ability to pay gratitude for all that the Lord has given us.
• Guidance: For a seeker the all-wise and all-knowing Guru skillfully guides the spiritual progress of the seeker, which if left up to seeker alone, would have taken many lifetimes. For this, the seeker is eternally indebted to the Guru.

Examples of expressing Gratitude