At Thanksgiving Time, Reflections On Gratitude and Giving

Photo by Molly

Reflections On Gratitude and Giving

My heart is full to the brim with the sweetness and power of gratitude. I am acutely aware on Thanksgiving and each and every day of how deeply I am blessed. No longer am I a stranger to abundance, love, beauty, and to the mystery and wonders and gifts of life. No longer. But this wasn't always true...

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It was 1984 when the counselor I was seeing at that time gave me a homework assignment. I was to write down everything that I felt guilty for. I resisted. I knew that this process could be deeply painful and overwhelming. And indeed, it was. Because so much that was beneath the level of my conscious awareness came spilling out onto those sheets of paper. My list went on and on. And I remember ending with "I feel guilty for breathing air."

It is not possible to soak in the joys and gifts of life when we feel guilty for being alive. It has taken me many years of support and risking vulnerability and allowing my heart to break open again and again before all that guilt gradually and increasingly came to be transformed into gratitude. And compassion and love. As much as I was starved for love, it has been an intensely scary experience for me to open my heart to love. For so long it hadn't felt safe to live without a defended heart. That was all I had ever known. A defended heart.

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For me, Thanksgiving is about much more than sharing festive and wonderful meals together. Being vegetarian for 18 years, it's also long not been about turkeys. That said, yes absolutely, I relate with the joy and love and gratitude of gathering with beloved family and friends over shared delicious food, smiles and hugs, laughter and stories, giving thanks and relishing in the loving bonds we share. Such gifts! So many reminders of what we have to be thankful for.

And, at the same time, right alongside my gratitude and love is my tender raw open heart. The heart of my of awareness and emotions also holds the grief that is related with this holiday and with this time of year. I hold the consciousness of the deeper history and how it is that Indigenous Peoples do not celebrate the arrival of the pilgrims and other European settlers. For them, Thanksgiving Day serves as a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the erasure of Native cultures.

There is that heartbreaking and tragic truth. And there are more personal memories...

The last time I spoke with my twin brother before his suicide two months later was on Thanksgiving of 1977. And circling back to the present time, today we have a family member who struggles with being alive and who has for over twenty years now been walking a path of prolonged suicide. Which recently has only grown more and more painful to witness. This person, very sadly, experienced Thanksgiving alone. As do so many people...

And, that said, don't we all have these kinds of struggles and sorrows and losses in our families in one form or another? I am hard pressed to think of someone I know whose family has been spared the impacts of addiction, of mental illness and other health issues, or of estrangement and painful ongoing conflicts, and on and on. On a continuum between little t trauma and big T trauma, we are all impacted.

This is the society we live in. Not a healthy one which nourishes connection rather than polarization, truth rather than delusions and disinformation, authenticity rather than image management, safe containers of trusted families and friends and communities for our hearts rather than the don't talk, don't trust, don't feel rules which too often permeate our culture and beyond. It is a courageous thing to simply embark on and sustain a path of heart in a world which too often harms rather than honors life.

All of which brings me back to gratitude.

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Today it is my list of gratitude which goes on and on. This is but a glimpse:

• I am grateful for all that has broken my heart open... for this journey of undefending my heart. 
• I am grateful for my nearly 40 years of sobriety 
• I am grateful for the courage of being deeply rooted in a spiritual path of healing, awakening. and recognizing and honoring the sacred. 
• I hold gratitude for the power of conscious and sacred intentions, such as a commitment to Alleviating the Suffering of Others, Do No Harm, and more. 
• I am grateful to see with the eyes of my heart. 
• Deepest bow of gratitude to my beloved family and friends.
• Deep bow to the power of kindness.
• Heartfelt bow to beauty.
• Thank you Mother Earth for all of your abundance and sacred life.
• I am grateful to have had many teachers who've taught and inspired me to learn the skills of the alchemist, discovering the buried treasures in the darkest times of my life and how it is that trauma can be transformed into compassion, humility, wisdom, and love. 
• I am grateful for those who courageously model a profound commitment to truth. 
• Deepest gratitude for the conscious awareness of continually expanding my circle of caring. 
• I bow to those who've offered me insights and empowerment into the gifts and practice of humility and humor and living wholeheartedly.
• I give deep thanks for each soul and every experience which has inspired me to be courageous, to care beyond measure, and to find my own unique and shared purpose and ways of acting on behalf of a higher good for us all. 
• I am grateful for healing my injured instincts, for discernment, and for a moral compass that is embodied in my heart and soul ― one which serves to protect me from harmful relationships, delusions, and belief systems and narratives which excuse and justify the many faces of violence (such as that it's okay under any circumstance to bomb hospitals or commit war crimes or crimes against humanity and our Earth Mother). 
• I give deep thanks for being capable today of seeing and holding both more and more of the beauty of our world and also its horrors and heartbreaks. 
• Deepest bow for this path of shedding layer upon layer of illusions, indoctrination, and ignorance.
• And there is this profound gratitude for my experience of the sacredness of life and how it is all beings, all of life is woven together and interconnected.
• I give deep and ever-present thanks for this sacred journey of dismantling the obstacles I've built against love.

My gratitude list very much also includes my many teachers. I also recognize and honor that no two lists will be the same. This is simply a glimpse into those who have in some way made a difference in my life over many years now:

Pema Chödrön, Riane Eisler, Joanna Macy, Jane Goodall, Mirabai Starr, Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman, Arundhati Roy, Isabel Wilkerson, Maria Ressa, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Toni Morrison, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Angeles Arrien, the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, Joanne Cacciatore, Joan Borysenko, Rachel Carson, Dorothy Day, Hannah Arendt, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Alexander, Jane Mayer, Rebecca Solnit, Marian Wright Edelman, Frances Moore Lappé, Terry Tempest Williams, Margaret Mead, Melissa Harris-Perry, Christiana Figueres, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Sir David Attenborough, Howard Zinn, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Cornel West, Bernie Sanders, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Dan Siegel, Henry Giroux, Jeff Sharlet, Jeffrey Sachs, Norman Solomon, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jeremy Scahill, David Sirota, Daniel Ellsberg, Father Daniel Berrigan, Michael Parenti, Paulo Freire, Chalmers Johnson, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, Bill Moyers, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Chris Jordan, Michael E. Mann, Dahr Jamail, David Korten, Bryan Stevenson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Jelani Cobb, Resmaa Menakem, Michael Meade, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Frank Ostaseski, Francis Weller, Johann Hari, Fred Rogers, David Bedrick, John Welwood, Jeff Brown, Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Dalai Lama, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Judith Duerk, Rachel Naomi Remen, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Sharon Salzberg, Brené Brown, Tara Brach, Kristin Neff, Charlotte Kasl, Mary Oliver, John O'Donohue, Rumi, Hafiz, William Stafford, Wendell Berry, Peter Levine, Kahlil Gibran, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Amanda Gorman, Chelan Harkin, Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Matthew Fox, Robert Beatty, Doug Pullin, my three sons, my loving husband Ron Matela, many beloved and wise friends, our Earth Mother, my mother and father and twin brother, and this list also goes on and on... 

And there is more, so much more to be grateful for. This is but a glimpse. 

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The measure of the gratitude that I experience in my daily life is also commensurate with the capacity that I have cultivated to hold sorrow. I have quoted Francis Weller many times from The Wild Edge of Sorrow (http://www.wisdombridge.net/the-wild-edge-of-sorrow.html) because this wisdom is so sacred, powerful, and deep: "The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them." So true. So true.

Many years ago I heard a quote of how we cannot draw from an empty well. Nourishing ourselves ― filling our well ― is deeply important and critical to our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. And it was reflected to me in those early years of my own healing journey that we will not go any deeper into our own hearts than the support we perceive is available to us. I also heard how it is that we cannot go any deeper with another human being than we have first gone within ourselves. Certainly I was not able to truly sit with an undefended heart and be with anyone in their time of deep grief until I had unlocked the doors into my own heart and gradually learned to embrace, befriend, heal and honor my own grief. 

And so I have sought out a diversity of teachers, wisdom-keepers, truth-tellers, visionaries, poets and authors, and courageous souls over many years to assist me in this amazing journey of healing and growing into more and more of the wholeness of who I am. Some helped save my life and have made all the difference. And some were ultimately not helpful, encouraging me to take a path of spiritual bypassing rather than embracing the authenticity, courage, truth, and journey of becoming a fully embodied human being. 

To my horror, I also eventually came to recognize that one therapist I had seen for years was a narcissist. But even he, ultimately and over time, came to be a teacher for me. Gradually, and having grown up with a narcissistic mother, I came to see the narcissistic injuries that even years into my journey still needed healing within myself. I also came to more clearly see the ways in which I gave my power away rather, a longtime pattern of mine which had been difficult to shift. 

Cultivating discernment after being so deeply instinct injured and the empowerment of standing in my own sacred wisdom is a gift beyond measure. It is truly an incredible journey to seek and increasingly claim the full power and beauty of who we truly are.

And it is from this place of open-heartedness that I believe we are able to embody giving and receiving, gratitude and grief, tenderness and compassion, and an ever widening circle of fierce caring. Gratitude and giving truly go hand in hand. As we humans grow to increasingly fill our individual and collective wells, as we experience the thread of the sacred heart which connects us all together as humans and other beings, we will no longer have any taste for the many faces of violence. 

And this is among my deepest places of gratitude ― that I can more easily today than ever before recognize violence for what it is. And I have no stomach for it. This is not easy to do in our American culture where so many different faces of violence are normalized. Yet it was in the earliest years of my sobriety that I remember hearing that this is among our great tasks in recovery ― to recognize and lower our tolerance for violence.

So why all this talk about grief and violence and open-heartedness and gratitude alongside this holiday we call Thanksgiving? Because I hold a vision where we humans experience an expanded meaning of what it means to celebrate and gather together on Thanksgiving and over the coming holidays. There is so much more that we could be bringing to the table than turkeys and what we might buy on Black Friday. So much more.

More caring. More love. More consciousness. More gratitude. More giving. More compassion for Indigenous Peoples and for all who are hungry and displaced and who've lost everything. There is suffering within us, our families, our world. And there is great beauty. And courageous love. Courageous love. May we all seek to embody more of that.

I fully recognize that so many of us are already living fiercely compassionate and loving lives of meaning, connection, and generosity. And my words certainly may not resonate with everyone. I never think they will. And, that said, and as I sit here in the full abundance of my life, I simply am struggling to express in some way my heartfelt consciousness of the great suffering that countless beings are experiencing on Earth today. And so, for me, I cannot simply say thanks. I also need to give... And in this small way, I am giving through acknowledging and honoring and blessing the beings across our beautiful hurting Earth Mother who are suffering. And, while I celebrate so much, my heart also aches.

And I need to give voice to both the gratitude and the grief that I hold. I need to honor all of life. Because we are all connected, all related, all family.

With love and blessings,

Molly