Thanksgiving

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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