Lifeletter #154-Your Life As A Laboratory

We have access to so much good information these days, such depths of wisdom. How many precious teachings can we tap into for free? It’s amazing. Most of our parents and grandparents could not access such guidance and intelligence. How fortunate we are. And it’s also amazing how long all of what we hear, read and see can remain as candy for the mind, instead of living medicine. It might feel good when we read it or hear it, but it does not become something real and potent, something that moves us in a new direction.

I’ve noticed this lately in relation to the experience of gratitude. There’s a lot of talk about gratitude these days. This is probably a good thing-to be grateful is to live with an open-hearted, welcoming spirit. And true gratitude has an unconditional flavour to it-this way of being is not so easy to inhabit. When we are in a tough spot, gratitude can feel like a fantasy, sometimes even like an insult. I’ve been in that place plenty of times: please won’t someone show me how to be grateful when things seem to be falling apart? 

I’ve tried all sorts of things when I am struggling and lost and alone. What has worked for me in my exploration of gratitude is a genuine curiosity, a real need to see something new, beyond what I thought I already knew. I wanted to discover how gratitude really works. In order to do this, I had to step back and start looking at my life as a laboratory. No matter how difficult it feels, I can gather information and evidence about what is going on, if I am willing to pay attention. A few times recently, I got curious enough about the nature of gratitude to begin taking some of my old ideas apart.

I began asking myself, “What is my energetic connection with life when I am grateful? How does life respond to me then? What can I see about this, if I am really looking? And what happens to me, energetically, when I am not grateful? What is my relationship with life at those times? Can I look at all of this with a desire to discover, to explore, instead of needing to feel better?”

Staying with this inquiry, carrying it with me, tending to it as I move through the day, has given me a lot of valuable information. I might have read everything that I discovered for myself in a book. Or I might have heard someone else talk about it. But it didn’t make any difference until I decided to conduct my own experiment. Until then, it didn’t really penetrate.

I had to stumble around in my own laboratory, until I saw something for myself. I don’t think there is any way we can avoid this, in the end. Mother birds chew up their food and drop it in the beaks of their babies in the nest. But we are not babies-nobody else can chew our food for us. We can get all kinds of help, but no-one else can deliver to us the nourishment we need in this way. We need to chew on what life brings us, and keep chewing, until we can digest it, and really take it in. It might not be the flavour we would have ordered, but if we want a healthy relationship with the sacred power of life, we need to learn how to receive nourishment, deep nourishment, from what life brings us. This is one of the secrets of gratitude.

Even in the darkest experiences, there is food, there is nourishment, if I am willing to do what it takes to receive it. Sometimes that can take a long time. But when the deep gratitude arrives, it washes everything clean. I can rewrite my past in this way-this is actually possible. The depths of our intelligence and compassion are incredible-we are capable of so much more than we know.

 

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

 

-Antonio Machado

 

with love,

Shayla