HUMILITY AND GRATITUDE

Many times when I'm in turmoil I'm also in isolation. It's as if the turmoil entrances me and I forget that there are people around me who can offer help. Even more, some part of me wants to hold the turmoil close because it's so familiar. So I don't reach out because I don't remember to, because I compulsively cling to what feels familiar even though it's painful, and because the turmoil tells me nothing will help. I can't change. Why even try?
     There is another kind of remembering that helps me push past the wall. Through grace or luck or accident or effort, there have been times when I've reached out to people and tried to connect with spiritual principles. There are times when I've been comforted, allowed myself to feel the love of friends, and been given insight and hope. I have had direct experience of that letting go.  I know what it feels like and I know it's possible, possible for me. That makes it easier for me to want to do what I can to break out of isolation and let go of turmoil.
     There are two principles that most often help me remember and let go. Humility brings me back into the world; it allows me to feel how powerless I am; it makes me right-sized as I feel myself bow down before the universe. It helps me surrender the frantic need turmoil produces in me, the need to solve all my problems by myself, and with solutions that spring from a fearful, isolated self. Humility creates an ease and relaxation in me, I can begin to take deep breaths, I have space to reach beyond the terrible prison of my own making. In humility, other perspectives open themselves to me, ones from which I can risk showing myself to other people and I can connect with hope. Feeling that process, that opening, leads me to the other principle that moves me out of pain.  It's gratitude, which I think of as the aristocrat of emotions because when I am brimming over with it, I feel an unexpected grandeur, an expansiveness that fills me with love and acceptance. I breath in and out saying "thank you" and there is no room for turmoil or fear or pain. There is only a going out of myself, a desire to feel the world around me, to feel it with love.
     This is an endlessly recurring part of the path - to suffer, then to remember there are things that will relieve the suffering, then to allow humility and gratitude to lead me toward them.