Greetings fellow yogis! Thanksgiving is almost upon us and while I don’t know what your upcoming week may look like, I do hope you’ll join me in consciously cultivating gratitude despite external circumstances. Some of you may be doing the traditional Thanksgiving dinner thing. Maybe not. Maybe you might be a vegetarian activist that will fight to free the turkeys. Maybe you will go to your aunt’s house. Maybe you will gather with family and friends, celebrate togetherness, meditate on gratitude, and occasionally push each other’s buttons. Maybe you will skip family gatherings and hit up a thanksgiving yoga class! (Check out Yoga Tree’s thanksgiving schedule here). Regardless of what we actually do on Thursday, we must recognize that the experience of gratitude is really useful for the yogi to embody.
Perhaps this is the ideal: To have a consistent experience of appreciation for all that is. To feel it regardless of external circumstances. Like I said, I have no idea what your upcoming week looks like. I don’t know what your relationship with your family looks like, or what activities you will participate in over the holidays. But I do know, it isn’t really about external circumstance. Gratitude is an internally cultivated state, not a reaction to an given situation, or simply a response to good fortune. The yogin cultivates a genuine mood of gratitude, and resonates in the state of bliss and joy that spontaneously arises from it.
To get there, however, some contemplation on the blessings of your life might help. I was once instructed to make a “gratitude list”, a page or two full of all the things in my life that I am grateful for. It was a really beneficial practice, and it did put me in touch with the vibratory quality of gratefulness. You might find that you want to make one of your own, or even introduce it to your family as a group exercise. Simply remember that the list is but a mere doorway to an expansive heartfelt radiance. A key to love, openness, and unity. Make sure that you spend at least as much time meditating on your feeling about your list, as you did making your list. Allow your recognition of the beauty and blessings of our cosmos to grow within you, to soften you, to inspire a quiet and dynamic joy.
This is my Thanksgiving offering to you: Recognize gratitude as an inherent part of your true being and be happy.