November 24, 2021
The Blessing of Being Grateful
By Amba Gale
Tomorrow gives us an “official” day for giving thanks… …for giving thanks for all the aspects and dimensions of our lives for which we are grateful.
In her book, Wake Up Grateful, based in Brother David Steindl-Rast’s teachings, Kristi Nelson suggests we bring gratefulness or “great fullness” to our everyday, ordinary, reality. What if we bring gratefulness to being alive, to waking up each morning, to taking our first breath of each day, to our family, to those who have passed, to those of us who are still present? What if we were to BRING our created gratefulness to all the events and circumstances, relationships that work, and, even, relationships that don’t currently work, to our lives? What would that open up?
Might it open up a sense of peace? A sense of harmony? A sense of our common humanity?
It is easy to be grateful for people and circumstances that are pleasing to us. What if we brought our generated gratefulness to areas that have been difficult, challenging for us? Obstacles, problems, difficulties, all come to us with gifts of their teaching. They are our core curriculum. If we look at them for their gifts, what has been their teaching? What new strengths, or new-found muscles, or insights, or new possibilities can we see out of resolving them, accepting them as gifts, attending to their teachings?
I don’t mean to be “pie in the sky”… I just mean to be REAL. To celebrate our humanity. After all, If you are reading this your are ALIVE! What does it mean to be alive?
We have all known people who are dead, though their hearts are beating.
We have also known people who are ALIVE while on their death beds.
Exuberance, it’s called…a taste for life.. or in my birth tradition, “L’Chaim” –“to life!”
My father celebrated life until his last breath. I know. I was there.
Perhaps being alive includes experiencing, versus avoiding, loss, heartache, fears, grief, betrayal, as well as compassion, joy, and trust. If we allow in, and allow our heart to soften, our wounds serve.
Last week, I completed leading The Heart of Leadership, my transformational foundational conversation, where we experienced being alive – masks and all – and entered into the depths of our own hearts. A new and profound appreciation of our common humanity, our one-ness, awakened. It was magnificent, extraordinary, beyond what any of us could have imagined could open for each of us.
The day after the first three days, this poem, The Healing, came through.
May reading it open up a new space of possibility for you.
And, may your own Thanks-Giving be real, a sacred day of moving into the Blessing of Being and the Blessing of being Grateful.
