Gan'en Jishin

Gratitude is the central emotional practice through which The Secret turns attention away from complaint and scarcity and toward appreciation, expectation, and abundance. Rather than treating thankfulness as a polite response to good fortune, the book presents it as an active force: a way of changing thought, feeling, and the signal a person is said to emit to the Universe. Its decisive promise is that appreciating what already exists prepares the conditions for receiving more of what is wanted.

Definition and First Practice

The practice begins with a deliberate inventory. Joe Vitale asks what a person can do immediately to begin turning life around and answers with a list of things for which to be grateful. Making that list redirects attention from what is missing, from complaints and problems, toward what already feels good. The change is therefore psychological before it is material: the practitioner moves from rehearsing deprivation to rehearsing appreciation.

The book repeatedly insists that gratitude must concern present possessions and conditions, not only hoped-for improvements. A person who says that the desired car, house, spouse, or health is absent is still concentrating on absence. The recommended correction is to notice what is already available, even something as immediate as having eyes with which to read or clothes to wear. Appreciation of the present is described as the emotional starting point from which further good can be attracted.

Gratitude and the Law of Attraction

Within the book’s account of the law of attraction, gratitude changes the frequency of attention. Everything surrounding a person, including circumstances that provoke complaint, is said to have been attracted through thought. The same principle is applied to debt, difficulty, and fear: persistent attention to unwanted conditions is presented as a way of keeping those conditions psychologically and energetically central. Gratitude supplies the opposite movement by making desired qualities, rather than deprivation, the object of sustained feeling.

The practice is linked to expectation as well as appreciation. James Ray explains that a person’s current circumstances are not an unchangeable identity but the residual outcome of past thoughts and actions. Defining the self by an inadequate bank balance, an unsatisfying relationship, or poor health is therefore said to reproduce the past. Gratitude interrupts that identification by allowing the practitioner to feel differently before external circumstances have fully changed. In this framework, thankfulness is not merely retrospective; it is a way of refusing to treat the present residual state as the final definition of life.

Gratitude in the Creative Process

The book places gratitude directly inside the Creative Process of asking, believing, and receiving. After writing down a desire, the practitioner is instructed to begin each sentence with, “I am so happy and grateful now that…” The sentence is designed to join a future result to a present emotional state. Giving thanks as though the desired thing has already been received is said to emit a signal to the Universe that the thing is already possessed, because the feeling of possession has been activated in advance.

This method extends gratitude into a daily ritual. Each morning, before getting out of bed, the practitioner is encouraged to feel thankful in advance for the day ahead, “as though it is done.” The emphasis falls on emotional rehearsal rather than passive wishing: gratitude is used to establish the inner condition associated with fulfillment, while doubt is treated as a competing signal that must be released and replaced by the feeling of receiving.

Historical and Personal Examples

The practice is given historical authority through Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich, whose 1910 chapter on gratitude is identified as its longest chapter. The book also presents gratitude as a recurring element in the teachings of great spiritual teachers and as a habit shared by all the teachers featured in The Secret. Most of those teachers are said to begin their days with grateful thoughts and feelings, making the practice a common thread across otherwise varied forms of instruction.

Albert Einstein is offered as another model. Despite poor beginnings, he is described as having achieved extraordinary scientific distinction, and the account says that he expressed thanks hundreds of times each day. His gratitude included recognition of earlier scientists whose contributions enabled his own learning and achievements. In the narrative, gratitude is thus connected not only with personal gain but with acknowledging the chain of knowledge that makes accomplishment possible.

Joe Sugarman provides a contemporary example of gratitude as a settled way of life. After watching The Secret, he contacted Rhonda Byrne and identified the gratitude process as his favorite part of the film. He attributed much of what he had achieved to using gratitude and continued the practice despite his success, applying it even to small occurrences such as finding a parking space. The example matters because gratitude is not portrayed as a temporary exercise required only by people who lack money or recognition; it remains necessary after success has already arrived.

Scope, Results, and Limits of the Teaching

The book gives gratitude its strongest endorsement through Joe Vitale’s claim that, among everything he has read and experienced while using The Secret, its power stands above everything else. If a reader adopts only one element of the teaching, he recommends continuing with gratitude until it becomes a way of life. That formulation changes the practice from a technique into an identity and a rhythm, something repeated until appreciation becomes the default response to experience.

The wider narrative places this practice beside stories of dramatic change. The film The Secret was created through a process the production team itself interpreted as applying the Secret: after Rhonda Byrne flew from Australia to the United States without a single teacher secured, the team filmed fifty-five teachers across the country, gathered more than 120 hours of footage, and released the film eight months later. As the film spread, people reported healing, financial gains, restored relationships, and transformed businesses. Gratitude is presented as one of the emotional mechanisms through which such outcomes are understood, although the cited stories are personal testimonies rather than controlled demonstrations.

The teaching also appears in smaller, more immediate examples. A young man imagined a feather with distinctive markings and found the exact feather two days later at the entrance to a high-rise building in New York City, which he took as proof that focused thought could attract a specific object. Colin, a ten-year-old who loved The Secret, wished before sleep that he could enjoy the major rides at Disney World without waiting; the next morning, his family was selected as Epcot’s First Family of the Day and received VIP treatment and walk-on passes. In these scenes, gratitude belongs to a larger imaginative discipline in which belief, expectation, and emotional certainty are treated as forces capable of organizing circumstance.

The same logic is applied to health. The book describes the placebo effect as evidence that belief can influence the body, noting that a tablet presented as a cure can sometimes have the same or a greater effect than the intended medication. It also recounts Cathy Goodman’s personal story of breast cancer: she repeatedly thanked the Universe for her healing, imagined herself as though cancer had never been in her body, and watched very funny movies so that laughter could replace stress while she pursued recovery. The text does acknowledge that medicine should not be rejected in an acute, life-threatening situation. Even so, gratitude is framed as part of a sweeping worldview that attributes physical, financial, relational, and social outcomes primarily to the direction and emotional charge of thought.

In that worldview, gratitude is both empowering and morally demanding. The claim that people attract what surrounds them, including accidents, debt, and collective disasters, gives individuals a strong sense of control but can also shift responsibility toward those who suffer. The book extends the same inward attribution to negative public events, warning that repeatedly focusing on what is unwanted creates more of it and that attention to violent or tragic conditions adds to their presence. Its preferred response is to notice contrast, identify what is wanted instead, and direct thought toward joy, abundant food, love, and well-being. Gratitude therefore functions not only as self-help but as a proposed ethics of attention: the reader is asked to choose appreciation over complaint and to treat that choice as consequential for both private life and the wider world.