I am a regular meditator. Not daily, but at least weekly. Some weeks I sit for 20+ minutes three days in a row and others I show up once for 10 minutes. But I always return. The stillness that meditation gives me helps me beyond measure.
The folk artist Mon Rovia says it well in his song City on a Hill, “Can you be still? There’s a void only silence can fill.”
Lately I’ve been exploring what it feels like to be grateful when I don’t, in fact, feel grateful at all. When I feel decidedly ungrateful.
In his book “Becoming Superhuman”, Dr. Joe Dispenza lists gratitude alongside joy and love in his list of elevated emotions. He describes how sustaining states of elevated emotions during meditation can help your mental and physical health, encouraging the body to heal itself from the inside out.
But what happens when you can’t feel the elevation of deep gratitude? When your mental health and hormonal fluctuations conspire to send you into pits of despair and gratitude is the last thing on your mind?
Trying to feel gratitude when you don’t feel grateful is tricky. It can easily send me in the opposite direction, spiraling over all the things in my life that I could lose. If gratitude ushers in abundance, the other side of that is fear of loss. But I don’t want to meditate on fear; that will have the opposite effect.
Throughout his book, Dispenza repeatedly explains how the body cannot tell the difference between actual events and memories of events, and the same chemical combinations are released either way. Meditating on fear is akin to soaking your brain in negativity.
What to do instead? Meditation invites us time and time again into the role of the observer. I don’t mean this in the way Margaret Atwood or Ursula LeGuin describes, a woman always watching herself being watched moving through the world, but instead as an observer of our consciousness. Sitting in stillness (eventually) helps us detach from that ever-present stream of consciousness, thoughts appearing unbidden.
So I observe my lack of gratitude, but I do not sit in it. I do not stew in my feelings of frustration and exhaustion, but I acknowledge them. They are present and so am I. I name a few things that I am grateful for, always. These things may not elevate my heart and envelope me in a blanket of joy as they can do from time to time, but I name them all the same. My husband, my dog, my parents, my sisters, my friends – I am always grateful for them, even if I forget that from time to time. My life, surrounded in love and marked by adventure. 15 years ago I didn’t think a life like this was possible for me. I remember how scared and lost I was, and I am grateful for how far I have come.
Gratitude is a choice. Letting go of fear is a choice. Sitting in meditation is a choice. They are not easy or simple choices and the mind fights back – but it is an active choice we can all make.
