Diving into the Depth of Gratitude

Last summer I made a commitment to gratitude.  It was around the time school was starting, and my friend gave me a beautiful journal. These two things came together to make gratitude the focus of my school year.  I created a bulletin board just for notes of gratitude from my students, and I dedicated the journal to gratitude for the daily blessings of my job.

It has gone well. Many students have responded quite positively to identifying daily gratitudes.  My journal started out strong, but became sporadic over time. Mostly because I started to feel like it was all the same.  Was I discovering anything new about gratitude?  It didn't feel like it.

So, as I tend to do, I decided to live the question: How can I bring depth to my gratitude practice?

This morning I listened to the Michael Meade podcast "The Origins of Gratitude." I've been following his series of podcasts on how we can deal with the current calamities of the world. In this podcast, Meade uses a Mayan creation myth to instruct how we can live with deeper gratitude in the world, mostly because we are charged with actually creating this world as we go along.  We have to be grateful for this fact, and take on the role of imagination and vision to make our world a better place.

I've also been participating on an e-course on the Gratefulness.org website called A Fierce and Enduring Gratitude with Dale Biron. Today it was the 4th lesson "The Poetry of Paradoxical Poetry." In this segment, Biron talked of the things that have happened in our life that were tragic, yet we cannot imagine who we would be without these events in our lives. He uses the poetry of Antonio Machado, Lisel Mueller, and Dante to teach how easily we can ignore the gifts we've been given, and how grief can take us to places that we never imagined.  Reasons to be grateful are always at our fingertips.

These two insightful podcasts/lessons took me closer to the answer I've been seeking. Afterwards, I wrote this:

Regarding gratitude: I feel I've barely scraped the surface of understanding its transformative power. I feel there is something I haven't reached yet. Michael talked about the core of imagination which leads us to seeing like the gods. Dale spoke of the paradox of grief, and how it leads us to places we would have never chosen to go. These are places to enter the depth of gratitude. 

So perhaps instead of just being "thankful," which is a lot of what I've been doing, I think of gratitude in terms of reaching into my imagination or healing some kind of grief. These will require thinking beyond the obvious. I'm not even 100% sure what I mean, but I am willing to begin the practice. For example, instead of being grateful my students responded well to the lesson, perhaps I need to think about the core of the lesson, what inspired it, and identify gratitude for that. Now I'm looking below the surface at what creates vision and the power of productive change. 

So I begin with gratitude for the Mayan myth of creation and the poetry of Machado and Mueller and Dante which have inspired me to take this step, and helped clarify the direction.  It's not the lessons themselves that inspire gratitude -- it is the deep roots they contain which caused their creation, as well as the positive actions of those who chose to make them available to me on this November day.

That is gratitude that goes beyond the surface.  I'm going to make my gratitude practice about diving in deeper, and see where it takes me.