A note from Erin:
Happy first day of Fall! (Or Spring if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere!) My favorite season.
I love the changing leaves, the harvest, the back to school vibes that got me to clean my entire desk yesterday. Most of all I love the obviousness of impermanence and the way it paints everything with the brush of preciousness. It makes me feel grateful for the temporary gifts and beings in my life.
I’m a huge fan of gratitude.
And like Brene Brown says so humorously, not just the attitude of gratitude, but a gratitude practice. (She talks about how the fact that she wears yoga pants and has a yoga attitude is fundamentally different from having a yoga practice.) True of gratitude also!
When I’ve taught gratitude practices in the past, one of the most relieving and helpful points that people love like crazy is when I suggest they not force themselves to be grateful.
Please. Let’s not do that.
Have you ever had a voice in your mind, with a tone something akin to the Wicked Witch of the West? It says, “YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL!”
Oh, that well-meaning but oh-so-unhelpful part of consciousness that wants to shame you for feeling sad about something when there are hungry people with flies in their nostrils somewhere in the world, so YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL, dammit.
That voice usually shows up without an iota of kindness. It frequently wields “should” like a whip, hoping to chastise you into behaving in a better way.
Well, I’d like to say with all due respect that that’s entirely unhelpful bullsh*t.
Before gratitude, we have to befriend what’s here.
Before nudging ourselves to feel grateful, we have to let ourselves feel what we feel. With compassion.
If your shoulders are tight and your mind is running amok with a list of your shortcomings and all the things you should’ve accomplished today (never mind that even Wonder Woman couldn’t have accomplished even half your to-do list) the least helpful thing you can add on top is that witchy voice saying, “YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL.”
I mean really, how does that make you feel?!?
It makes me feel like cowering, and a little ashamed, and all around baaaad. Not what we’re going for with gratitude practice. Not at all.
And yet, gratitude is so miraculous!
A phrase I love so much is this: There’s room for it all.
What a relief to grow beyond the idea that I have two choices: I can feel stressed or grateful. Period.
I can feel complainy about something in my life, or I can feel grateful.
I can feel heartbroken about shootings and refugees and climate change and politics, or I can just snap out of it and feel grateful.
There is so much more room than what is offered by this little trap of binary thinking.
This or that.
Snap out of it! You should be grateful! Um, no. Just no. Such an impoverished approach to being human.
We all know about the research indicating how gratefulness can improve your health, your mental state, your relationships, your life in general.
But you can also improve your bitchiness and your inner critic’s territory in your life if you let him or her drive your gratitude practice.
So please, let’s not do that, ok?
I’m opening registration for my annual Embody Gratitude Project today and I’m so excited about it, once again. I love this class so much. It’s so wonderful to turn the dial up on gratitude, even a little bit. But we won’t be approaching it Polyanna style, or Wicked Witch of the West Gratitude-Dominatrix style either.
It’s a simple and spacious class, with a weekly invitation to a specific gratitude practice, a little shot of gratitude-espresso (which often comes in the form of a poem I love) and a chance to review at the end of the week.
That’s it.
5 weeks swimming in gratitude practices can have a surprisingly powerful impact. You can read here what some of last year’s participants had to say. I hope you will! They’re inspiring.
As you probably know if you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, I’m a fan of the writer Mary Oliver. And completely aside from analyzing her merits as a poet, I want to stand on the mountaintop and praise her quality of attention, her eyes which are so ready to see beauty, to experience awe at ordinary miracles.
I remember years ago when a friend gave us our first Mary Oliver book – her collected poems – and I thought, “Wow, she and I could walk down the same street, but she is having such an amazing experience!” I wanted to learn how to do that.
Mary Oliver shows me how to grow my capacity to pay attention to the world in the most life-giving ways. Gratitude practices help me live like that regularly.
wind sculpture garden in Santa Fe
I’d love to invite you to join me for my 3rd annual Embody Gratitude Project.
We start on the Monday of Halloween and go through the week of Thanksgiving in the US. These practices are such a boon to wellness, to our relationships, to allowing ourselves to be awed by this temporary life, in the midst of our challenging, beautiful, heartbreaking, miraculous world.
Know this: I will never ever tell you “YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL!” Never. And I’ll encourage you skip saying that to yourself.
It’s a brutal world sometimes. Amazing loved ones lost in the fog of dementia. Relationships ending or struggling big time. Financial stress. People dying. Health crises. The US presidential election! Dreams that didn’t work out. Watching our loved ones suffer. Feeling ourselves aging. Let’s not pretend its a cake walk! But let’s also not pretend that there are not abundant miracles of kindness and beauty and goodness all around. It’s easy to miss that. Especially if you watch the news more than you cultivate gratitude.
Feeling sad about a loss? Perhaps, instead of wielding the instruction, “YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL!” you might begin with this:
- feel the ground supporting you
- place a hand over your tender heart
- offer warmth and welcoming to what is true in your experience right now, even if some part of you thinks it should be different
- perhaps say something like this line from Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: “Darling, I care about your suffering.” Say it to yourself, and mean it.
Only AFTER we do this, and once our inner life unclenches, (which it likely will when it feels that we really do mean it when we say we care), only then do we turn our attention to include gratefulness. The beauty of the September skies. The sweet smell of leaves. A stranger who was kinder than they needed to be – at the grocery store, in traffic, at a restaurant. The sound of the voice of a beloved who today, miracle of miracles, is alive! And we know it won’t always be the case. Water to drink. A hot shower! A car that started. Plenty of food for dinner.
Ah – the GIFTS!
But never do we shove them down our own throat.
Seriously, that inner critic can ruin so many good practices.
I’m passionate about not only protecting gratitude practice from that part of consciousness but also encouraging us to love that part into liberation.
Maybe like this:
A pause.
A noticing the tension that says “I shouldn’t be feeling what I’m feeling and I need to fix myself.”
“Oh,” I say, “that must be so hard for you to think I need to be different.”
A hand on the heart.
“Sweetheart, I care about your suffering.” or “You poor kid! You are really feeling judgmental, aren’t you?” or “Oh, yes, that is so hard for you. I’m with you.”
When I do this, something unclenches.
I am soft again. I remember I am not stuck.
I am available once again to relish in the many things I’m grateful for.
Today, at the top of the list, I’m grateful for my own capacity to be kind.
I hope you’ll consider joining me for this year’s Embody Gratitude Project!
You can register below. I’m making it super easy. It’s just $95 for the 5-week class. I like to keep the price super low because I want anyone who wants to grow their gratitude to have support to do so.
In the meantime, let’s avoid using gratitude as a whip, shan’t we?
There really is room for it all.
With love,
Erin
a sculpture on Canyon Road in Santa Fe
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