Gratitude, that old topic. Really, I was thinking, there must be a new take.
I could talk about how grateful I am for the people I love, the land that supports us, my mini-labradoodle, Bleue, who just turned 14..., but it's the hard stuff that makes gratitude more interesting.
It's so much easier and in some ways, more natural, to complain about the hard stuff. Because it's hard.
But then again, maybe that's a missed opportunity. Maybe the big shift looks something like finding ways to be grateful for the difficult people, the hopeless institutions, our own tangled, impossible minds.
Maybe that's how the light gets through.
Gratitude, that old topic. Really, I was thinking, there must be a new take.
I could talk about how grateful I am for the people I love, the land that supports us, my mini-labradoodle, Bleue, who just turned 14..., but it's the hard stuff that makes gratitude more interesting.
It's so much easier and in some ways, more natural, to complain about the hard stuff. Because it's hard.
But then again, maybe that's a missed opportunity. Maybe the big shift looks something like finding ways to be grateful for the difficult people, the hopeless institutions, our own tangled, impossible minds.
Maybe that's how the light gets through.
Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call #325 on November 11th.
I always think of November as the start of the holidays: well after the Jewish high holidays, around Diwali, and heading into Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Day, pointing at Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanza, western New Year’s, the lunar new year, and other holidays, too.
It’s also pointing towards winter solstice, which is my wedding anniversary: the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, the lightest, in the southern. I’ve lived my whole life in the global north, and I love getting up early in the morning at this time of year, in the dark, walking across the land to my small office space that is also my practice space, and practicing. Often the owls are still hooting; often, the moon is still up. Closing my eyes on the cushion, and sometimes, opening them to the dawn, just beginning to break.
Sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? Like something out of a film. So much solitude. So quiet. Kind of perfect.
But not really. Because maybe just like you – just like everyone I’ve talked with, anyway – it’s not like I close my eyes and everything is serene, peaceful, joyful. Nothing like that!
Sure, there are those moments. And I’m grateful for those moments. They’re the treasure of practice: those moments when it’s possible to let go, observe the flow of the mind, observe the body as it breathes and also its aches & pains without being troubled, observe the emotions as they come and go.
But look, let’s face it, it’s called “practice” for a reason. For sure we’re practicing letting go into the moment. But we’re also practicing with the experience of not letting go. Or another way of saying it is, we’re practicing so we can see when we’re not letting go, and instead, doing the opposite: wishing, wanting, grasping, struggling for things to be different: this firm I work for, why aren’t they more supportive? My partner, why aren’t they more understanding? Why am I so easily triggered, knocked off course? Why is our country so racist? How can we not have the political will to truly address the ecological crisis?
Why, why, why?
In better moments, I have enough practice and you probably do, too, to see that beginning with “Why?” in relation to something or someone difficult, rarely leads to a good result. This is just the mind, arguing with reality. The firm is just what it is. The partner: same. Me – also just what I am. The U.S., the world: what we’re seeing is what’s true. And also in better moments, it’s easier to remember not to freeze anyone or anything. Each moment is like dipping a cup in a stream, as we say at the Law Jam: what’s in the cup is of the moment. It isn’t the stream.
Looking more deeply at the why, there’s something else, something more to be grateful for. It’s not only gratitude that sometimes I can see the moment-to-moment, changing, reality of life. It’s also that all of the things that are hard, all of the people who say and do things that hurt, the institutions that seem designed to infuriate, the racism – meaning what’s embedded in my own mind and which I find humiliatingly difficult to uproot, and deeply humbling, the almost unreachable sadness I feel when I see fewer geese flying south every winter: I’m grateful for all of that, too.
Pema Chodron, the great Shambhala teacher, often talks about being grateful for the difficulties. In When Things Fall Apart, she writes about a lecture she once heard, by a man who had gone to India to learn how to get rid of his negative emotions.
His teacher kept telling him to drop the struggle. The student kept struggling. Finally his teacher sent him away to meditate in a tiny hut in the foothills.
He got to the hut, closed the door, closed his eyes, and began his practice. When night fell, he opened his eyes, lit three candles, then closed his eyes. Then he heard a noise. He opened his eyes and there, in the corner of the tiny hut, swaying back and forth, was a giant cobra.
He froze. He was awash in fear. He stared at the cobra, and he stared, and he didn’t take his eyes off the cobra, all night long. All night long, it was just the cobra, him, and fear.
And then in the darkest time of the night, just before dawn, his last candle went out. And he began to weep. He wept not out of fear, but out of tenderness. According to Pema, “he felt the longing of all of the animals and people in the world; he felt their alienation and their struggle.” He saw how his entire practice had been about struggle and separation, trying to deny the truth of the moment, of his emotions, of his longings. And in that moment he accepted everything as a gift – his struggle, his alienation, and also that his own life and the lives of all beings are precious beyond measure. And then he stood up, walked towards the snake, and bowed. And fell fast asleep.
When he woke up the snake was gone. He never knew if it was real or imagined. He only knew that, as Pema put it, “that much intimacy with fear caused his dramas to collapse, and the world around him finally got through.”
You could look across the room right now and see: what or who is your cobra? What is it that deeply, intellectually, emotionally, mortally scares? Or angers you? Or saddens you beyond belief? Is it death? Ecological collapse? Losing your job? Losing someone you love? Being wrong?
Or is it the fear, the anger, the sorrow itself? Maybe FDR was right and we really don’t have anything to fear but fear itself. Maybe if we can face our difficult emotions and the difficulties of our lives, we’ll see that our practice is not about keeping them at bay, or getting over them, or healing them. It’s about allowing them.
And even one more step: our practice is about being grateful for the difficulties: grateful to be fully immersed in the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows, grateful to be alive to the difficult, heartbreaking, personal, interpersonal, and systemic work that lies in front of us, alive to the fact that our fears and sorrows are not different from anyone else’s, or from the fears and sorrows of all beings.
I feel like that gratitude, for the hard stuff, is what makes it possible to live our fullest and most connected life. What makes it possible for the world to finally get through.
Let’s sit.