Awakening, courage, gratitude, Joy

How gratitude rises out of the ashes of grief — every time.

Gratitude continues to show up in my life in unexpected and sustaining ways.  This is how it carried me through a difficult chapter of my life, and how it continues to hold me in all the dark moments that have followed.

My father passed away almost 5 years ago at the great age of 84. I think he would agree that he lived a beautiful life, to which he brought his immense energy, enthusiasm and heart.

At the hospital, where he slowly died over the course of nine days, I lived in a dream, like I was walking through water and drowning in tears.   It took time to accept what was actually happening.  And as it slowly dawned on us all that this was it, I would walk the grounds outside the hospital.

It was during those walks that I found something unexpected — a feeling of deep and compelling gratitude.

As my father lay dying, gratitude wrapped its arms around me and carried me through those dark days of his dying, as it still carries me now.

And I knew even then exactly what I was grateful for.

For all the love he gave me, for all the ways he encouraged and supported me, for all the time he spent with me, for all the things he taught me.

For the way he lived his life, for the way he was dying with love pouring out of his tired eyes, still my dad.

I was also grateful because we were blessed to have a room in that hospital with a view of the foothills and mountains, which he loved.  We were blessed to have access to competent and compassionate nurses and doctors, we were blessed to have family and friends around us.

His final days were filled with love and abundance – we were so blessed and so grateful.

Gratitude carries me now through moments when one of his favorite songs will play on the radio and I am blinded by tears – and I recognize that what pours through me is grief AND gratitude…and even joy.

And the gratitude always points the way to peace.

It calms me.

I am grateful for the song, and for the tears, as it reminds me of all that was — all that was so beautiful, and wonderful, and all that still remains, that is also wonderful – the memories, the qualities of his that I know I carry in me, that I see in my own children, his grandchildren. It reminds me that love goes on – in so many ways.

And this somehow gives me hope.

That maybe grief and loss and suffering have a larger meaning.

That in this liminal moment where the two meet and live side by side – grief and gratitude – is the passage through, is the doorway into a greater world, a bigger heart, a more compassionate journey.

Where you learn that your heart won’t break but finds the capacity to heal. 

Where you learn that your heart is wider and deeper than you ever thought, and can contain the grief and gratitude at once…to allow you to be overflowing with sadness and love and thankfulness at the same time…to know your heart truly is full in a way that only loss can show you.

My grief, when aligned with gratitude, brings me to joy.  One cannot exist without the other, and while I may have once understood this as a platitude for the bereaved, I have now truly felt the joy born of loss come alive in my heart.

That if I may say, as painful as it was to watch my strong father slowly diminish in a hospital bed in Calgary, I felt then and still do feel this great joy in having had him in my life.  This deep joy for all the moments when I knew I was a beloved daughter, that this terrible grief flowing through me can only exist because the joy and the love also exists.

Grief and loss are the price of that love and joy – and so with gratitude I pay the price over and over again.

And this is the truth and the gift of gratitude born of grief: it is all things, it is the twisting, rolling, wrapping up of every strong emotion, it wants to move through you like a wave, like a howl, like a dove – it is a song of love and loss as old as the earth.  It is the wound and the healing of the wound…it is the singer and the song…it is the meaning of why we are alive.

It is why our grief and suffering has a meaning.

It is the meaning.

It is strength broken by strength and still strong.

Shona

Authenticity, Awakening, courage, Joy, Mindfulness and Meditation, Women's Work

My struggle to be grateful and how it changed my life

Six years ago, as I was preparing to leave my corporate job and struggling to figure out how and when and why it was all going to work out, I was moved to rekindle my life- long love affair with meditation.

In my struggle to have it all, and do it all (you probably know this story: I tried to work full time at a demanding corporate job, commute into the city, enroll the girls in every evening activity going, and have the perfect home and the perfect outfit) I had become so detached from who I really was and what I really wanted that I felt almost numb.

I knew that one of the easiest ways to reconnect with myself was through the peace and presence of meditation and that when beginning a meditation practice, one of the best ways in is through cultivating genuine gratitude.  I knew that living in gratitude would open my heart and guide my thoughts through the challenges that lay ahead.

What I had not anticipated was how difficult it was going to be for me to feel grateful…for anything.

So, faced with a troubled marriage, mounting debt, numbing depression and a career crisis (so let’s say it felt like my life was literally teetering on the edge of destruction) I sat and tried to connect with what I was grateful for. And it was so unexpectedly hard.  For so long I had allowed myself to focus on what was wrong: wrong with the house, with my husband, with my children, with their school, with the town I lived in, with my work, with the car, with my life, with everything.

I had allowed myself to get into the habit of looking for flaws, and so my life was always full of problems and nothing was ever good enough just as it was.

I rarely experienced the joy of just resting in the life I had built and embracing it with all it’s beauty and cracks.   I can only guess how difficult I must have been to live with at this time, for I can certainly see now how miserable I was making myself and probably everyone around me in my carefully honed pursuit of all that was not just so.

As I sat on my meditation cushion, sometimes with tears streaming down my face, wondering how in the world I had gotten so off course, I kept reaching for gratitude, because I was determined that I was not going to live this way any longer.

I started with things that seemed obvious, but which I unquestionably took for granted. I started with simply being grateful that I had a place to call home.  That my children were healthy.  That we had great neighbors and lived in a safe community. That I had clean water to drink…and coffee.  These are things we can so easily take for granted, but for many they are luxuries to aspire to.

And I kept listing and repeating in my meditations: “I am grateful for this…I am grateful for that….”  And it took a long time, literally weeks, to actually feel what I could identify as genuine gratitude.  I had really gone to the dark side.

I could list the things I was grateful for but it wasn’t reaching my heart.

In truth, for a long time my meditations went like this: “I am grateful for my home…but it needs new flooring and the front door needs painted and my husband hasn’t fixed the railing on the porch yet and here’s another thing about him that frustrates me…”  Yes — it was ugly. But still, I was not willing to live in my self-created darkness anymore.  Only I could dig myself out of this hole.

So I would replace my thoughts with: “I am grateful for my home, with it’s big windows to let in the sun, with it’s old turn of the century charm, which was restored and renovated by my husband, who worked hard at it and did a good job, and I am grateful for that too.”

And then finally, after weeks, probably months, of working at it, I started to feel the energy of gratitude in my body.  It was a gentle hum.  It finally reached my heart and opened it to all the beauty in my life.  Gratitude slowly lifted me out of the black hole I was in, it loosened the crushing grip of my negative thoughts.

Finally, it was gratitude that gave me the power, the light, and the inspiration to find my way forward.

To realize I already had so much in my life that was so good, and I wanted to cherish every single bit of it.

I tell this story in the hope that it may inspire you, if you are in a dark place, to reach for gratitude.  And also to remind myself of the strength and courage it takes to change – to change our thoughts, to change long-standing habits that no longer (or perhaps never) served us, to change our lives.  And to assert that no matter how long you’ve traveled in the wrong direction, you can always turn around.

With gratitude,

Xo Shona