CHERISH AND GRATITUDE

A friend and I were talking the other day about the difference between cherish and gratitude. Cherish is a verb, it's something you do, while gratitude is a noun; it's something you feel, a quality, something you can express or demonstrate.
     Cherish is a word I don't hear very often anymore. Maybe it's too intense for our cool culture. There's nothing ironic or cynical about it, no wink-wink. In fact, to cherish something or someone, to feel deeply, is the opposite of irony. It's the opposite of "whatever," which is another way of saying, I don't care. To cherish is to care deeply. When you say you cherish, you're  acknowledging that something is vital to you in a way that has nothing to do with dependence. Cherishing is a verb of pleasure and to cherish is to be enlarged.
     If I don't hear "cherish" much anymore, I can't get away from "gratitude." The word is used so much -"practice gratitude" - it's bordering on the cliche. I googled gratitude and clicked on images. Many came up and most of them looked like they'd be perfect on a greeting card. Maybe that's what always happens. Something that begins as heartfelt get co-opted, is used to make a profit and so stripped of real meaning.
     But here's the thing. I think of gratitude as the aristocrat of emotions because when I feel it deeply I have a sense of grandeur, a wide expansiveness, a going out from myself and touching the world. When that happens "gratitude" loses its meaning, all words loose their limiting meaning and become the doorway to the universal. The veil between me and everything else that exists is pulled away. I am totally connected.
     Here is some irony. We have only words to describe these transcendent experiences to ourselves and to each other. We have only words to take us to the place that's about the absence of words.

DEFINITIONS

Things I'm thinking about just now:

Endurance - the strength and determination to withstand whatever life brings.

Perseverance - to keep trying despite reversals, disappointments and difficulties.

Resilience - the ability to recover from the above: reversals, disappointments and difficulties.

The desire for hope - a willingness to search for a connection to a higher power, to a source of energy that can move me forward.

Memory - a conscious cultivation of what has helped me in the past, to call up the times in the past when doors have opened for me.

Courage - the willingness, the determination to move beyond old habits and ways of thinking, onto a road I can barely see, heading for a destination hidden in the unknown.

Gratitude - the elegant cousin of acceptance, the way to open up to the universe.

GRATITUDE, AGAIN

I've been feeling gratitude all day for how far away I've come from fear, what I call my terminal self-consciousness, second guessing my choices, being on my case so much more than off it, and many other things that were keeping me from feeling equanimity - at least from time to time. Fear made me a block of ice, unable to melt enough to learn something new. I didn't know it, but I was looking for faith, some hope that there was a benevolent force in the universe that wanted me, would help me, to be all right.
     My fear was an unchanging oppression but faith was not. Faith grew and for every inch it gained, fear lost an inch as well. Slowly, growing faith brought my fear down to size, until I was able to find the courage to soften, to become receptive, to take the risk of surrendering so that something else, aside from me, could come in and help me change. I began to experience for myself the power of spiritual principles - powerlessness and surrender, faith and courage, belief in something beyond myself, that benevolent power for change. 
     No wonder I'm often flooded with gratitude. I've found the path to peace and acceptance even though sometimes it takes me a while to get there. When I feel gratitude, I'm thinking about all I have, not what I don't have. Gratitude comes out of the deepest part of me and fills me with love for the world. It has the expansiveness, the grandeur of deep connection to the world. I call it the aristocrat of emotions.   

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.

GETTING OFF MY CASE

I don't know why it's so hard for me to get off my case. I know that the voice in my head that tells me I'm not enough, I don't do enough, is only attached to ephemeral thoughts floating through my mind. I know that I am not what that voice tells me. I know getting on my case is a very old habit - sometimes I think I was born with the on-my-case button already installed - and even the oldest of habits can change.
     God, I know a lot! And none of it helps me when the voice is on me. The reality of that voice in my head is stunning, powerful, all-consuming.  I think of Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show" - sometimes I'm encased in a world that feels absolutely real, that I completely believe, but when a chink appears, a sliver of light, I see that I can step through it and find myself in a new and expansive place, a place where I'm enough, I do enough and there's no reason to get on my case.
     I am my own chink in the sky, my own sliver of light. They are inside me and I know a few things to help me find them. When the voice has claimed me, I've learned to shake hands with it, to say you're smaller than I am and you're not all of reality. And repeat it until I really hear the words. Like an actor in a sense memory exercise, I work to summon up the feeling of fullness that tells me I'm enough. I remind myself I have some accomplishments and have done some good things. I picture the people in my life I care about the most. I especially think about how far I've come on this path of change. Then like Alice I step through the looking glass. In that new land, acceptance blossoms inside me, along with humility which allows me to be who I am, and gratitude for what I have and what I've done. I take a deep breath, come fully into the moment and find myself in that place where I and the world are enough. 

GRATITUDE

I've had a good day today and I feel grateful for it.  Gratitude, I think, is the aristocrat of emotions. When I open myself up to it, I feel a kind of grandeur, an expansion, a softening of boundaries so that I'm embracing my fullest self and connecting to everything that is in me and outside of me.  There is something exhilarating in that kind of gratitude, transcendent, and once I first experienced it, I found I wanted more.