Gratitude Shmatitude!
Do you ever feel this way? I do at times. Thankfully not today in this moment, and yet I find myself regularly resisting any notion or opportunity to feel thankful. I have stopped resisting and/or trying to talk myself out of it when this happens, and so again thankfully, these thoughts and feelings hold less power over me. And ta da! It's become easier for me to recognize and be with them, and in so doing they seem to shift of their own accord. I can even go so far as to say I've grown to love them (even if I don't immediatley like them).
Sometimes I question, with all that's going on around us in the world, if I even have the right to feel thankful. I'll feel as if I'm being disloyal, uncaring, or bypassing a deeper feeling of unrest - being disingenuous. Sometimes I can easily access this deeper feeling of unrest, and other times it feels off limits. Frozen - my heart's own personal permafrost.
And yet, I should feel grateful, right? Where I live is beautiful and peaceful compared to many places in the world. Unlike many I have a warm safe home and my physical needs are more than met. I have friends and family who love me. I feel, much of the time, as if I'm part of something bigger and perhaps even matter. It really doesn't make any sense, does it, that any part of me would resist feeling thankful? And yet I do.
I don't suppose this frozen part - this permafrost - would have anything to do with it, do you? The parts of me I still deny - you know like the pain and discomfort lying in wait underneath the ways I've tried to tune out and/or work around the harsher parts of living and being in this world. Those parts waiting their turn to be healed.
A Course in Miracles says that everything is either love or a call for love. It's not always easy to recognize, and yet I've come to trust in its truth. It's easier to see love when it's obvious, or in forms we readily embrace. It's harder to see in it the feelings and thoughts we deny and suppress, or whitewash over and wish away. And yet, these are the parts of us which need our love the most. Even though not readily recognized as such, a call for love is love.
So this holiday season it's my wish that we can all be with ourselves, even the more difficult parts of ourselves and do so with love and compassion. If we can do this, then maybe we can come together as a species and imagine a world where all calls for love are met with love.
WIshing you, this Thanksgiving and always, much joy, peace, and all the best - in whatever form that takes for you.
Switching gears! Here's what's new:
