Cultivating Gratitude
When the moment is effortless, spread your wings and be thankful...
During those moments of reprieve, when life offers us a rest from the work of managing our internal and external lives, gratitude may come quite easily. Thank you for my humble place on earth; thank you for the moon that hangs low and bright across the field, we might say. Or thank you for the stillness of this moment; thank you for this breath which sustains me. It seems altogether possible for us to then imagine wings spreading, taking flight into the great expanse of an uncertain future. Moments of such grace deserve our gratitude for the peace that renews us and restores our faith. We know that without the ebb tide of life we are flooded, overwhelmed, lost in a sea of "doing" without a counterbalance of ease and replenishment. This is plain to see. And so we naturally bow with thanksgiving to the peace of a moment, the beauty of a still landscape, the preciousness of belonging and believing. How effortless our gratitude can be when the moment is effortless.
What then becomes of gratitude when life serves up our portion of physical or emotional pain? Where is our thanksgiving when we are hurt, betrayed, triggered by trauma, lost, alone, or afraid? How do we bow to the moment when the moment feels intolerable or void of meaning and service? Gratitude during our darkest hours does not come so easily. Yet it is in those very moments of darkness that we must make our way down the winding road toward gratitude, for that is the pathway toward wisdom and transcendence. Cultivating gratitude during painful times includes the acknowledgement of our physical and emotional experience. It is not an exercise in denial or avoidance. We must know the depth and breadth of our pain. We must stay present with our feelings and our thoughts about those feelings. We must allow them to inform us. They are messengers of the soul, and they will persist or return until we discover what is meant for us to know.
So how are we to make the journey from darkness into the light of gratitude? What must we remember in order to shift our thinking from the immediate, gripping, felt experience of pain to the wellspring of gratitude which is both source and tributary in our lives? First we must smile with compassion at ourselves. No loving shift of energy, from darkness to gratitude, has ever been made without a remembrance of our self love. In this age of belief in the power of our thoughts to create our reality, we can mistakenly focus on self blame or shame when our darkest hours arrive and we dwell there. How have I created this dark experience in my life, we might ask. While taking responsibility for our co-creative process is key, this responsibility is not meant for us to deepen our darkness with blame, shame, and recrimination. Darkness in our lives, in all its varied forms, is a call to action. Sometimes it's a cry for self care or communion or faith. Sometimes it's a resting place or a grieving place. Often it is a mystery that is in the midst of unfolding. Always, though, it is an opportunity for self compassion and gratitude.
Our first responsibility is to grow our capacity to see beyond the singular experience of our human suffering to the shared experience of pain that we all are charged with during a lifetime. The Buddha reminds us that it is attachment that causes suffering, while pain is inevitable. Our attachment to an idea, a relationship, an outcome keeps us in the dark. Often our attachment to who we think we are or to our infallability or our altruism blinds us to the opportunity for a much larger scope of purpose or a much deeper healing. When we remember that pain is an integral part of our human experience, and that folded into the pain experience are messages that we are meant to know, we move ourselves from victimhood to self compassion. I am not alone; I am not persecuted, we might realize. In this experience there is both loss and gain, we might recognize. And if we lift our eyes from the loss, while holding our grief tenderly in our hearts, we are able to see the richness of the experience as it leads us to an expanded sense of self awareness and compassion.
With our focus then on the opportunities within any painful experience for a greater awareness or a deeper healing, we loosen our grip on the immediate felt experience and open our hands in wonderment or curiosity to that which is mysteriously embedded there. We become listeners to our intuition, prayer partners with our moments of solitude, receivers of information from nature, our meditations, the people that surround us. We pay close attention to the occurrences that we would ordinarily view as coincidence. We allow the flow of messages that come from places known and unknown to inform and instruct us. We make note of them. We take them seriously. We treat them as the gold threads that run through our lives, precious and integral. We lean back from our day to day living just enough to see the light embedded in our darkest hours. And we wait. Sometimes we wait longer than we want. And in that impatience we notice an opportunity to cultivate more hope, more faith, more trust.
And then one day it dawns on us: I am surviving this darkness because of my capacity to see opportunity. I am more alive, more aware, more capable as a result of that darkness, we may notice. We see that we have shifted our perspective and broadened our view. We appreciate the new pathway we have cleared out of our darkest hours into a greater awareness. We know that this pathway is transcendent. And with great humility we are taken to our knees. By honoring ourselves, by honoring our darkest hours, by honoring the messages that have been delivered, we have been gifted a transcendent experience. And we are grateful. Our gratitude is as deep as the darkness once was; its light sees us through. And we remember. We remember our self compassion; we remember the opportunities. We remember the listening, the prayer, the mindfulness. We remember our earnestness and our patience. We remember the pathway of transcendence. And when our dark hours return, as they will, we continue to remember. For now we have an understanding of how the cultivation of gratitude becomes both source and tributary in our lives. And we bow with thanksgiving to it all.
