Resistance and gratitude

We are back for season two, and for this first episode I'm exploring gratitude and my resistance to it. Stay tuned for more episodes soon! 

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This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
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Transcript

[00:00:00] Laure: Hello everyone and welcome to season two.

[00:00:04] Today I'm recording from one of my favorite rooms in the house of my British cousin.

[00:00:12] And it's a really old house. And I was raised pretty much all my life in very old houses with very old furniture that was really lived in. The houses that I lived in, they were grand, but they were not cold. You could sit on furniture without worrying or eat anywhere. And objects were beautiful and old and worn and loved.

[00:00:40] And this house reminds me of the houses that I was raised in.

[00:00:46] And in this house there is this living room. Which happens to be a perfect recording studio because it's carpeted and the walls have fabric on them and there's, you know, sofas and chairs and cushions everywhere that muffle the sound and the walls are this salmon pink, and it's just a very, very warm place. The sofas have growing vines printed on them, and there are two giant antique globes facing each other, and there are Mexican dolls here and there, and there are family portraits on the walls, and all the lamps have warm yellow light coming out of them, because they use old bulbs and lamb shades that are yellowed by age.

[00:01:45] And on one of the sofas, there is a bunch of beautifully wrapped up presents because one of my cousins hobbies is giving out presents to her many grandchildren. And so all those beautiful presents make it look like a Christmas morning. They're like presents "just in case" and my grandmother also used to do that. She used to have a cupboard full of potential presents that she could give people in a pinch. And my cousin here has a whole room of them.

[00:02:18] So this is the beginning of season two, and I think the podcast will evolve a little bit this season, and it will be a bit of a mix and match because some of the interviews that I will share, I recorded for last season, and so they're following kind of last season's template. And the new interviews that I'm gonna record for this season probably will be a little more free form.

[00:02:49] And also the themes are gonna evolve and widen because for me, everything can be brought back to story, but there are also many things that I want to talk about that are not technically exactly in the realm of story. Things like mystery and depth and soul in general. So this podcast might become a little more meandering. It was already pretty meandering, but become even more meandering. And for this first episode, I wanted to talk about gratitude. Now, this is a really, really, overused word and concept I feel. And I wanna tell you a little bit of my story with gratitude. 

[00:03:37] For years and years and years I was extremely reluctant to the idea of being grateful. Not to the idea in general, but you know, all the self-help advice that you get, like make a list every day. Make a gratitude list and try to be grateful for everything that you have. Blah, la la, la, la. That would really raise my hackles and I didn't necessarily know why, but part of me was very, very resistant to it. Which doesn't mean that I didn't experience gratitude but I didn't experience it until actually pretty recently.

[00:04:19] Like I didn't experience it as um, as a felt experience. And I think what can be confusing with it, is that if you haven't experienced it as a truly embodied experienced, then all this advice sounds very fake or superficial. And also very often gratitude is used as a bypassing tool and I think I have a lot of resistance to that in general. I'm not a big bypass or it's not my thing to override or to pretend that I'm well if I'm unwell. But you know, when I started training to be a therapist. And even before that, when I went through my grandmother's death, I was filled with gratitude, a really deeply felt gratitude for having been able to be present with her in that moment. And I guess for me, gratitude for the longest time was a very, very spiritual feeling. It was associated with spiritual experiences. And so it was difficult for me to imagine that I could bring it into the mundane in a way.

[00:05:26] But a few years ago I started having more of a felt experience of gratitude and more often because I started having more support and more people in my life and more capacity for intimacy, like deep, deep bonding with people and finally last year, I think it was from an Instagram post of someone that I don't remember but I finally understood why I had so much resistance to all the injunctions of being grateful, like, "Be Grateful". And part of it was of course, the bypassing aspect, but also part of it was that in my childhood, in my life, very often gratitude had been used as a way to deny my pain. And I'd heard countless times that I should be grateful for what I had when I was a child or a teenager and that thus I was not allowed to be in pain or to feel what I felt. And so that really clicked it, when I understood where my resistance came from. Which was that every time that I heard, you know, "make a gratitude list", or "you have to focus on gratitude for what you have", I heard "you're not allowed to be unhappy" or "you're not allowed to express pain because you should be grateful for what you have", which is true, obviously, but it's not incompatible. You can be grateful for what you have and also feel sad or bad, or want something else that what you have. When I was a child, I think materially I was very lucky, I had everything that a child could hope for, but emotionally, I wasn't. There was a lot that was lacking in terms of connection and attunement and ability to be with what I was feeling and to support me. I wasn't very supported as a child in my emotions. In other ways I was, but not in what I was going through. 

[00:07:26] And so when I understood that I could really dissociate the two and start actually practicing all that advice that I'd been so resistant about. And I started making gratitude lists and I started, you know, consciously focusing on gratitude. And what I found really interesting is, if you wanna use gratitude as a bypassing method, it will not work. Like it doesn't work. It might work if you're really good at denial, it might work in the short term, but it will not work in the long term. But on the other hand, if you practice making space for what you feel in general and being okay with what you feel in general and not denying or bypassing difficult feelings then gratitude really is salvation.

[00:08:22] It's really interesting cuz it's been becoming more and more present in my life. And also more and more intentional, you know, which could feel like manipulation, it could feel like, oh, I'm trying to manipulate my feelings. But I can tell that for me, it's really helpful in keeping me in my heart, and it helps me feel joy, which I have trouble feeling in general, but it only works because I make space for whatever I feel before that.

[00:08:53] So I'll give you an example and it's the most recent example, which is happening almost without me doing anything about it. It's intentional without being intentional, which is interesting. There is something that happens to me with people that I love and places like this place for instance, where I'm right now, it's like a recipe for nostalgia, this house. And every time I come to it I feel that it might be the last time that I'm here. And every time that I see my cousin, I feel like it might be last time that I see her. And I have that in general with pretty much everyone. Like, if I let myself feel how much I love people, I usually feel simultaneously the anticipated grief of losing them. And I just read a book by Susan Caine called Bittersweet that really spoke to me, to my disposition. I found a lot of myself in this book where I feel the poignancy of life really strongly, and it sometimes makes it really hard to be functional , because I will start if I really, if I'm really present, and if I'm really connected to people, then I will probably start crying at, you know, very random places and moment. And so very often I disconnect or I'm not really present. Not totally dissociated, but I, I avoid . I'm a really good avoidant. And so what's been happening lately, interestingly enough as I've been making more space to the idea that maybe that's just who I am and that it's okay to feel life in that way and that it's okay if I'm not that functional and that I can feel that poignancy and that I'm not gonna die from it. Cuz that's part of it, it's really painful and it's really intense. Well, strangely enough, or though I should be used to it, it's become much easier to connect to gratitude and to shift into gratitude, should I say.

[00:10:54] And instead of feeling , " Oh, this might be the last time I'm in this house", and this is the last place that kind of reminds me of my grandmother and the world that I grew up in. I feel, wow, I'm so grateful that I can be here again. And it shifts like that for everything. Like, I'm so grateful that I can spend time with this person still, that they're still there. And what's interesting is that people have been telling me that for years, right? Every time I say this is what I feel, when I fear my love for people, I feel the grief of losing them. And people have been telling me for years, "Well, you should be grateful for knowing them and being with them." And I'm like, "Yeah, thank you so much. That's so helpful. But it doesn't solve my problem." And. I find it really interesting that it's happening organically, kind of by itself because I'm making space. Not that I ever invalidated it, but I'm starting to feel like I might have the shoulders and the heart and the strength to bear and to live fully that aspect of myself, that constantly grieving for the impermanence of the world. Not just humans, but everything. And I'm just starting to make space for the idea that maybe I can live that way and as I'm making space for that, suddenly this grief that was almost unbearable and constant, and so present is shifting into joy, is really shifting into this feeling of gratitude for everything that I do get, which I never understood.

[00:12:35] You know, so many people will say, like, "Yes, I'm grateful for every day," and especially if they've had a brush with deaths or something like that. And I never understood that because I always felt such grief all the time, about everything, about the beauty of the world. I could not understand how you could see the beauty of the world and not feel the grief of losing it one day either because you know we're gonna die or because it's gonna disappear cuz we are killing the planet, whatever it is, or because people die in general and you lose them. And because life, you know, is made of changes and so we keep evolving and moving and we change life and we lose lives that we build and stuff like that. And now this story is evolving by itself, which is kind of magical and that's what working on yourself is about ideally. A good therapy will have you change without you noticing or doing anything. Like you'll do work on yourself, seemingly unrelated very often, you work on something that's seemingly unrelated, and then things will start evolving in yourself and in your life, and you don't even know how it's happening. But what I find interesting is this transforming narrative that is happening by itself, that's emerging by itself, that's going from " everything is gonna disappear", you know, "I'm gonna lose everything" to, " I am so lucky that I have so much", or "I am so joyful to be experiencing this right now". And nothing has changed, nothing in my circumstances have changed and I probably haven't changed either. The only difference is that I have more support now than I did before. More support to feel my grief partly and to very gently start shifting some of the narratives that have been my life for a long time. And again, part of it is intentional and a big part of it is not. It's really like very slow moving shift where suddenly , you don't have such a strong grasp on who you are anymore, or you don't have such a strong grasp of how you used to navigate life. And it's a transition period for me. I feel very suspended in time. But what's interesting is that I feel in limbo in a way, and that's not extremely comfortable, but I can feel how much space it's giving to my patterns to shift. I'm in the middle of shifting and all I can do is kind of trust the process and be grateful for the ride.

[00:15:21] I did wanna talk about this because part of that story about gratitude is how the same thing can have a very different impact or color, depending on how it's used. The same word or the same concept. And that there are some stories or some things that we have a certain experience of and we can't imagine that there's another experience of them and that we can shift into that other experience.

[00:15:49] Interesting to interrogate anything that you have resistance around. Because most likely there's many other ways to experience that thing that what you've been experiencing so far. And I know maybe that seems obvious what I'm saying and it might be obvious, but the fact is that very often we don't inquire around our own resistance. We don't ask " why am I so resistant to the idea of gratitude or gratitude lists? " We don't ask that. We just say like, "Oh, this is bullshit . This is bullshit. Oh, this is bypassing" and yeah that's not wrong in many ways, in self-help and spirituality environments, it's used a lot as spiritual bypassing, or shadow bypassing, I should say, like forced positivity.

[00:16:42] But if it was just that, I wouldn't have felt so reactive to it. I would've just looked at it and be like, "Oh, they're trying to bypass their shadow. Mm. Too bad." But I wouldn't have been like, "Eh, don't talk to me about gratitude. I don't wanna hear it." So it's always interesting and I wonder if you can maybe find something that you have resistance around right now. An idea, not necessarily like a person or a situation in your life, cause that's a little different, but an idea like gratitude or like relationship, being with someone for instance, or solitude or whatever it is that when you think about it or, or when people give you this advice, you're like grrrrr, you have smoke coming out of your ears. And just inquire, " Okay, what is my experience of this? Why do I have so much resistance to it? What does it remind me of? What does it speak to me about in my experience? Not as a concept, not in itself, but what is my interpretation of it?" Which is in this case, you know, for me, my interpretation of gratitude was basically denial of what I was feeling and rebuttal of my pain basically.

[00:17:57] And when you found that and when you have found some answers to that question, see if you can find around you in your life examples of other ways that this concept or idea is being embodied around you. Sometimes you need to look actively or you need to at least have the intention, like when you start having the intention, for instance, if you have resistance to being in a relationship for whatever reason, or to men in general, for instance. It happens a lot. After you found why you have that resistance. Like how is it related to your own experience? Have the intention of actively looking around you and seeing other ways that it's being embodied by others and other people's lives and stories. And sometimes you might have to look a bit. Speaking about relationships and the couples and stuff for instance, in fiction, there's not a lot to be had There's a lot of fake stuff, like illusion and like happily ever after, kind of love stories. But in terms of actively actually being in a healthy relationship, it doesn't make a really good story and so you will rarely see that in fiction. So you'll have to, you know, actively look elsewhere, in people, either friends or relatives or people around you that are together or have been together for a long time or, or even people on social media, you know. Sometimes I see a post from someone about their spouse or whatever, and I'm like, Oh, wow, I could never imagine that in a relationship. Like, this is new, this is a new image for me, this is a new information. And I kind of add it to my inventory of new ways of thinking about this. And you can do that with anything, you can do that with gratitude, can, you can do that with a solitude, you can, you can do that with many things. But first you need to identify why the resistance and what that needs, you know, what that part of you who is in resistance to it, what is that part afraid of? How does it need to be acknowledged in order to be open to a new idea or new vision?

[00:20:08] So that's it for the first episode of the second season of the Moonlit Path Podcast, and soon I will open registrations for the Moonlit Path 2023. If you want to know when registrations open for the course, you can sign up on the website at moonlitpath.space. You can sign up for the wait list to be notified when registrations open.

[00:20:38] And with that, I wish you a good day, a good night, and may the moon smile upon you.