Life on the Learning Curve
Thanksgiving. A day set aside for thankfulness, nothing more. What a beautiful thing. A holiday not centered around ‘stuff’ as Christmas is, or a conflicting religious holiday, but one that is centered around family, friends, and food. A holiday for everyone. This year I was celebrating Thanksgiving at The Ranch (of my son and daughter-in-love) in New Mexico. With the smells of roasting turkey filling the house, the steamy windows and crackling fire of the cedar wood we’d gathered the day prior, I felt tremendously grateful. I hope to inspire your sense of gratitude in the following article.
Gratitude - High Frequency Emotion
Emotions differ in their energetic frequencies. The highest emotional frequencies are love, joy, and gratitude in that order. Sometimes emotions can sneak up and take over before we are aware of them, especially the lower frequency emotions like fear and anger. It’s intriguing to me that when it comes to the higher emotions we can choose any one of them at any given moment by a mere change of thinking. Gratitude is the key. I may be tempted to believe that my joy is dependent upon my circumstances but it really isn’t. It’s a choice…. like choosing to pick up my tea cup.
Discovering gratitude takes little more than a change of focus. To use photography terms it’s like using a macro lens instead of a telephoto. Developing gratitude takes little more than looking at circumstances through a different lens. In so doing we find that the most ordinary objects can inspire joy and gratitude. Take your hand for example. It has been with you your whole life, at your service for whatever you have requested of it, probably without complaint. Pause for a moment to look at it. Notice each finger perfectly proportioned for its particular task. Observe the way the fingers fold and open, and the nails, tools that they are, are perfectly placed. What does it feel like to touch your lips, your hair, your dog, a child’s face, a cold beer? Your hand is but one miracle in a world of miracles. One of the senses in a world of senses that help us explore our world on a macro level. Try looking in the face of a flower sometime.
The miracle of gratitude takes little more than slowing down, being aware, and noticing. It’s hard to find the perfection and simplicity that inspires gratefulness when going 90 miles an hour. Life is a hectic blur. A bother. Miracles are found in the small things: dew on the grass, the shape of a snowflake, a sunset, a child’s laugh. We will see the beautiful when we slow down, notice, and appreciate. I am convinced that slowing down is the key.
All emotions are rooted in the two polarities of either love or fear. Love and fear cannot occupy the same space just as light and darkness cannot occupy the same space. Perfect love casts out fear, just as turning on a light switch in a dark room chases the darkness away. By choosing gratitude, we choose love. By choosing love we eliminate the place for the fearful and the lowest frequency emotions of loneliness, emptiness and despair.
Will you join me in choosing love, joy, and gratitude for yourself through this holiday season? I encourage you to begin each day by writing for a few minutes about everything for which you are grateful. If morning isn’t a good time, try it at night before sleep. I believe that by focusing on gratitude, joy will blossom, and love for ourselves, our fellow wo/man, and the world, will then naturally emerge. What might be possible for us individually and collectively if we chose love for one another? I’d like to find out. Will you join me?
From the Bookshelf
"A Thousand Names for Joy"
By Byron Katie
‘A Thousand Names for Joy’ is my latest favorite book. Those who regularly read my newsletters know that I am a fan of looking at things differently and questioning the rules we live by. I am also a huge fan of living in the present moment. Taken one moment at a time life is pretty doable. Right now, in this moment, all is well. And in this moment it is too. And now, in this one, all is still fine. It’s only when we compound the present moment with past and future moments that life gets weighty and overwhelming.
Byron Katie brings all three of those concepts: looking at things differently, questioning the rules we live by, and the power of the present moment together in a way that is a little mind-bending. Pointing out that all suffering is created by believing our thoughts she asks such questions as, “Who would you be without that thought?” Well…. I would be somebody without a story. If I don’t have a story I don’t have anything I must defend or live up to. I’m just me. And Katie would say that that is a story too.
This is quite powerful for those going through divorce. Who could you be if you didn’t believe your own story? Instead of, “I am ________________” [a failure, unloved, unlovable, worthless, etc], you could instead proclaim, “I am anything I choose to be.” Enough said. When you’re ready to get beyond your story I suggest chewing on this book. For me at least, I am realizing how silly I am to cling so tightly to this story I call my own. It’s all made up anyway!