Focusing on Gratitude when you don't feel grateful.....
Yes, I said it...there are days I don't feel particularly grateful.I think my clients and recent workshop attendees (Mind, Body, Spirit, & Service approach to finding inner peace) may be surprised to read those words. I've been called "Little Miss Mary Sunshine" (and honestly, I'm not even sure that is the correct name but I get the point) by clients before. I really, really try to look at life through a positive lens. I really, really try to see the glass as half full. I really, really try to focus on what's truly important in life. But somedays...I just don't feel like it.A few years ago I started the month of gratitude practice in November. Somedays, honestly, are really difficult. And as the season has progressed this year, albeit early, it dawned on me why I am struggling to write. It isn't in finding simple things to be grateful for every day that I find challenging: my family, my dog (oh wait, she is family), yoga, running.....chai tea at our local tea shop....I can think of something even in my darkest of days that I'm grateful for quite easily. Rather....it's the unsettling realization of issues left unsettled in my life that seem to take on more of a presence this time of year. The escalation of disappointments that have lingered, unresolved, unaddressed, but omnipresent that become almost too difficult to begin to address.I keep looking at the name of my blog (as I write today)...."Peace in the journey"....Peace. Is. In. The. Journey. Peace......is in the journey. Peace is in...the journey. What does that mean?I know what it doesn't mean....It doesn't mean....
- Answers to problems will come quickly.
- There is only one path.
- I have to go it alone.
- I have to rush things.
- I'm expected to know exactly where I am going, all the time.
Ahhh...freeing. Sorta. Really, I am not sure how freeing it is. I want the answers, I want the direction, I want to know that I can find it on my own, not just because I speak on ways to find inner peace and feel like I'm a fraud that I struggle with finding it some days (YES, I see the ridiculousness of my comment since I KNOW it's a journey and not a destination) but truth is the pain of the uncertainty of the path and where it is taking me somedays....is more than I want to do.I remember reading or hearing a story about Mother Teresa, one of the people I hold as the most Holy and spiritual in modern times, struggling with her faith and feeling as if she hadn't heard from God or felt His presence in years. Day after day, night after night, week and month and year after year...steadfast she held on to her faith. I think of my life sometimes like that.... feeling disconnected and unsure and an inner angst of sort but comforted in some ways that this is a "normal " human condition.Maybe it's guiding me to do something even more grand and purposeful in my life? Maybe my struggles are a lesson for someone else to grow and learn? Maybe it's just part of my journey? Maybe it's teaching me humility and patience? Maybe it's just part of this beautiful, confusing, wonderful, complicated thing called life?I wish I knew..Today....I found this quote and caused me to pause, and think..."Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." Marcel Proust.