 I am not one for forced gratitude. I am not one for forced anything...joy, happiness, smiling, socializing. I am not for it possibly because I am not good at it. That is not to say that I do not think gratitude is vital to experiencing life with more gentleness. But gratitude has become one of the tools of spiritual bypassing. Often our suffering is met with “focus on what you are grateful for.”
While the intention of redirecting our energy is admirable, this invitation often comes from outside ourselves from a person who cannot accompany us in our suffering. The invitation is more about them than us. Or maybe this forced gratitude comes from within, because we are not able to accompany ourselves in our suffering or we have internalized the cultural message of “good” people are grateful. So we turn away from it, and focus on the good things, the happy things. And in this turning away, the happy things are not quite as happy as they could be because we have not attended to what is also in the room: our pain and discontentedness. During this time, when so much of the world is in crisis, gratitude can feel complex for some and a welcome relief for others. You do you. But my invitation is why do you do what you do? Do you think you should feel happy and grateful right now? Are you continuously overriding your impulses and feelings to appear grateful? No judgment - we all have cultural conditioning to unpack. This unpacking is what leads us to become more of ourselves…and sometimes we unpack and find that Yes, we do want what we have been taught to be. Personally, this year I am grateful for the invitation into gratitude. It has been a challenging year in my household. I have witnessed the difficulty, made space for it, railed and resisted against it, accepted it, and bowed down to it. And because of this, I believe I have space to meet the gratitude invitation more fully (ask me in a week or two and you may get a different answer). In the research of gratitude, specificity is crucial to the honoring. I would also add that being truthful to one’s self is a valuable ingredient…you don’t have to profess to be thankful for something that you aren’t. So yes I may be thankful for the surgical interventions that have saved my life, but I am not grateful for the pain I experienced (as one of my teachers says, pain is an overrated teacher). When things are difficult, I focus in on the smallest thing I can truly be grateful for (although sometimes I do not get to this step). Wherever you are in your relationship to gratitude - a huge fan, a skeptic, in a break up - honor it. Gratitude, when not a societal construct or something to check off our spiritual personality trait card, is a natural state we ebb in and out of. The ebbing in and out is one of the keys to knowing if it is a bypass or a more emergent state. If gratitude is something you are considering this holiday…the recipe to explore is specificity and not lying to one’s self, and also making space for the difficult. I am grateful for those I call friends and family this year because they have helped me remember that I matter when I have forgotten, and that has made life more meaningful and less lonely. I am grateful for my clients because I am continuously reminded of the beauty of humanity, opening up more access for compassion - for myself and others. I am grateful for my animals for showing me everyday what it means to be an animal, and this remembering helps me to lean into my own animal nature, offering spaces of more ease and resilience. And I am deeply grateful to each one of you who takes the time to read, reflect, and reach out after each of these newsletters because without you, I would not learn, grow outside myself, and create as much as I do. And creation is one of the very acts that keeps me here on this earth. Holidays are complex, stressful times for so many. They are bittersweet moments if we have loved ones missing from our tables. Or holidays can touch our wounds of othering and marginalization. They might require us to turn away from our needs and desires so that we may tend to family, safety, and to our survival. However this holiday lands for you, I hope you know you matter. And how you feel and what you do doesn’t change your worth. You matter and I am grateful you are here connected to me through these words and this screen. My invitation this holiday weekend in the US (and everyday from here on) is, find some small drop inside you that believes - without a doubt and without any need to do anything - that you matter…and tend to that seed drop by drop until it is a whole forest within. With much gratitude for your beingness… Valerie
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 Here we stand in the in-between, the doorway from one year to the next. I was born at this in-between time. I was starting life on the last day of the year, when everyone else (except my birthday twins) was closing a chapter and readying to pick up with the new. It is a strange time to have a birthday (in my experience). Lots of energy, lots of expectations, and a celebration where the focus isn’t really on the present but what’s to come when the clock strikes midnight. For me, birthdays are joyous certainly, and they also conjure up deep reflections within. This paradox is much like standing in a threshold - you are neither here nor there, OR maybe you are both here and there.
In my tradition, thresholds are something to be sanctified. We place a ritual object called a mezuzah within our doorframes. This relic for me is a deep reminder that beauty and the divine can inhabit the smallest of spaces. And no matter how small or large a space is, it can be a place for contemplation, connection, and devotion. At this gate of the new year, I invite you into reflection with me. Not to change anything (you can if you want), but to take account of your life lived. To create space for what dwells inside you: your hopes, dreams, frustrations, disappointments, resentments, insecurities, talents, grief, gifts, and everything else which resides in your being-ness. Where are the thresholds inside you - the places where two emotions, two feelings, two thoughts touch? What is the smallest drop of reverence and devotion you can invite into this internal threshold? What oh-so-very-ordinary, mundane space inside you can you adorn with a sacred, beautiful energy to show how miraculous the ordinary truly is? I hope as you move into this next year, the threshold is a space where you can leave behind what no longer serves you, and step into the mantle of wisdom, compassion, gentleness, and knowing. Blessings, Valerie |
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