Excerpts from "Thoughts on Gratitude" 11/22/23
Listen to the audio here.
A lot of us, myself included, feel like we're doing something wrong because we are not sufficiently grateful. And my first bit of wisdom for you is to try to relieve yourself of that pressure. There is nothing wrong with not feeling gratitude. You do not have to feel gratitude. Don't worry about it.
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I love the fall foliage. A few weeks ago. I went on a hike about 20 minutes from my house. There's a tower that shoots up about 15 stories and I walked all the way up until I was standing above the tree tops. To my left was the Hudson river and to my right were miles and miles and miles of tree tops flecked with red and orange and gold. It would have been so easy for me to take a few minutes, appreciate it and walk back down. But instead, I stayed there and said, “Thank you.” I really felt gratitude for the beauty of the Hudson valley. And I used willpower to stay in that gratitude and to honor it.
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One thing you might notice as you tune into gratitude is that there are feelings that arise with the gratitude. Grief. Or frustration. Or resentment. We gave these words new names like resentitude. Or saditude. Or griefitude.
What do we do with these co-writing emotions? Well, one way of thinking about it is that we need to process these emotions before we can feel gratitude. But in certain instances, we can simultaneously hold (but not repress) negative emotions and so we can focus our attention on gratitude.
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What is gratitude though? A dictionary will tell you something like a feeling of thankfulness, which doesn't get us very far. It sounds like a circular definition. Gratitude is gratitude.
How about this for a definition of gratitude? Gratitude is an emotion that arises within us naturally in response to receiving something that we truly want or need.
And so the path to gratitude for many of us comes by paying attention to what we want or need and seeking to meet those desires and needs.
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Our culture makes a show of gratitude at the expense of the real thing. We were all taught to say thank you when we were not genuinely grateful. Well, my dear friends we were all taught wrong.
If we want to cultivate gratitude, we need to start making the distinction between when our true needs and true desires are met and when our true needs and our true desires are not met. The more we play pretend, the less we get to experience true gratitude.
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When I say thank you and mean it, it is felt by whoever I am speaking to. We can even say gratitude is a form of love.
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Sometimes I feel grateful for unpleasant experiences because of what they can teach me. But sometimes I feel grateful for unpleasant experiences because I am at least having an experience. This soothes me. Not in a way of avoiding what's there. But in being ever more intimate with it. Because a part of any bad experience is still the gift of experience.
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Life was given to us utterly and completely as a gift. And so gratitude is a natural response to this gift. This gift of the universe to the universe meeting its need to experience itself through us.
Listen to the audio here.
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