How I (Begrudgingly) Learned to Give Thanks

.... and a note of gratitude to you, the Reader

I remember a time of great mental and psychological distortion within me. It took me 4-6 hours to wake up every morning and convince myself that washing my face was a worthy activity, because it seemed to take so much of my life force to do so.

I was deep in depression and lacked any interest in life. Absent vitality, I used all my power to maintain a facade of ‘I’m fine’ to the outside world. It was essential that no-one knew that I had come quite undone.

It made absolutely no sense.
When you live as I did, in a wildly hypocritical existence there is no way out. No way, but through it.

If you’ve been where I was, to awaken in a body that you hate, in a life that you want to leave, overtaken by fears, doubts and anxieties, it is a singularly despairing experience. 

But I was also continually creating this experience for myself. It’s a vicious cycle, where you find yourself in a horrible situation, spend all your life force and effort to not-be-there, get so exhausted and find yourself in the same situation with added exhaustion.

A Healer I went to at this time suggested the practice of gratitude meditations.

It is rude to laugh in the face of someone trying to help you. So, I didn’t.
Instead I stifled my laughter and my intense eye-roll.

She offered that instead of lying in bed for hours in the morning cursing existence, I could take the following steps:

• Keep paper and a pencil next to the bed.

• In the morning reach over and make a list of things I am grateful for.

• Write down anything big or small, with a minimum of 10 things. 

Not only did I think this was stupid and pointless, but I was convinced that I wasn’t grateful for anything because everything sucked. As well, writing things down seemed like a way to reinforce my misery.

Resistance to things that make us better is a curious thing.

I absolutely wanted to get better.
Who would want to stay sick and miserable?

While that was true, I found creative ways to thwart my own betterment. Like finding all the reasons writing a gratitude list everyday was stupid and pointless and a waste of time.

But after weeks of staring at my stucco ceiling, I realized I wasn’t doing much else, so I started the stupid list.

I was intentionally irreverent with it.

I started with being thankful for indoor heating and the invention of pencil sharpeners, keeping the list about inanimate things. 

Eventually, birds and plants and names of friends who were kind to me made it in, followed by people and situations that were pleasant, despite my general sourness of being.

Uncomfortably, I started making it about me, being thankful for fingers and toes, organs and breath.

After a few weeks, on certain days, I would realize the list when on for pages.

Turned out that there were so many things I was grateful for!

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

Writing things down or drawing them out is a really exceptional activity, especially when we’re in our heads a lot.

I experienced - what the Healer knew I would - a shift in how I viewed life and the things in it.

It created a change in perspective as my focus was drawn out of my minds and the problems created there, into what was present when nib hit paper. At the pace of pages turning, I was able to awaken with less and less despair every morning.

Gratitude… It affects that moment, when you swing your legs off your bed and your feet touch the ground.
Maybe that’s why I resisted this practice for so long.
It is impossible to be unchanged by it.

Giving Thanks

During this time in my life I read one book - Braiding Sweetgrass - written by an environmental biologist who is of the Potawatomi First Nation.

It took me almost 3 years to read it as there was much I was unlearning, re-learning and integrating my place in the world. As such, it played a huge part in my re-making.

The understanding of gratitude expressed in the book through the First Nations understanding is relational; rather than what we are used to, which is transactional.
If you do something for me, I would thank you for that, because we are taught that it is polite to do so.

But here, gratitude is a way of “greeting all the natural world that sustains us”.

I understand that the actual First Nations Thanksgiving practices are meditative greetings and ‘of the heart’. Depending on how detailed you want to go, it can take hours. They include greetings to the Four Winds and the Four Directions, Trees, Food Plants, Medicine Plants, Animals, Waters, the Earth Mother, all Peoples from all Lands.
Some include ancestors and all who walked before us, others include naming parts of the body, and some add on the names of their relatives, living and deceased.

Imagine that?

Hours of your day spent in heartfelt gratitude for all you have in this current moment and every thing that came before you.

It may seem odd to most of us, because again, we are more familiar with the transactional economic structure stitched by social politeness.

But here, to experience gratitude as a greeting and to acknowledge ourselves as already abundant, whole, supported and sustained before we our feet even touch the ground in the morning, carries a quiet sacredness to it.

When I wasn’t well, I would wake up feeling so lost and my existence seemed pointless. I never knew my place in the world and I hid the pain of it.

But, when I started writing out my gratitude list and then eventually started seeing it as a relationship, things changed.
I never saw it before, because of how we take things for granted; but there is an actual relationship to be experienced; a friendship to start with the ground we walk on, the water we drink, the air we breath, the food that makes us, and the trees and pigeons we walk by.

It has been years since I ‘felt lost’, because we are never lost among friends.

And it started with a gratitude-greeting!

One that note, I want to thank you, the Reader of this publication.
Without the movement of your eyes upon these words, your clicks and opens, your likes and subscribes, Substack would be pretty boring!

There is a lot of opinion and information out there, and our inboxes and feeds are quite full with things to read. So, please accept my gratitude, for without you there would be no receiving or exchange of experiences and ideas.

And whether of not you like, agree or disagree with what you read here, please consider commenting, so that I may see you and know you better.

Warmly,