The Blessings You Have Been Given
by John Welshons
Humility and gratitude go hand in
hand...
Awareness increases so that we
become grateful
for everything we are given. We
have to learn, literally learn,
to be grateful for what we receive
day by day, simply to balance
the criticism that day by day we
voice because of powerful emotions.
-- Swami Sivananda Radha,
Kundalini
Yoga for the West
There are certain critical turning points when grief and despair begin to transform
into acceptance, contentment, and Love. In my own life, and in the stories
people have shared with me over the years, I have seen three common ingredients
that seem to signal the moment when the weight of depression and disappointment
starts to lift:
1. When we begin to find a way to give
to others again.
2. When we begin to find a way to
connect with and love others again.
3. When we begin to find a way to feel
gratitude again.
Our cultural
tendency is to experience life from a standpoint of lack. We are the wealthiest
country in the world, yet much of our lifestyle is fueled by a desperate sense
that we don't have enough... we don't have enough money, we don't have enough
possessions, we don't know enough, we haven't achieved enough, we aren't safe
enough, we don't have enough time... we haven't received enough approval... we
aren't getting enough love.
We seldom stop to
reflect on the irrational, insatiable quality of that sense of not-enough-ness.
It carries over dramatically into the situations when we find ourselves
despairing over a disappointment, a loss, an unwanted change, or an unanswered
prayer.
In the experience
of grief, for instance, we generally find ourselves caught in despair and
outrage that a loved one has been "taken" from us. In those moments, we find it
difficult to be thankful that we had them for whatever period of time we did.
We forget to be thankful that they were a part of our life and that they made
extraordinary contributions to shaping our character and our life experience.
We are lost in loss. In those moments we tend to forget all we had, and still
have.
Finding our way
into that remembering and gratefulness can be a delicate dance.
On December 13,
2006, as I was nearing the completion of this book, one of my closest and
dearest friends died suddenly at the age of forty-five.
Richard Carlson,
author of the fabulously successful Don't Sweat the Small Stuff book series,
was on an airplane flying from San Francisco to New York City. We had been
looking forward to an opportunity to spend some time together. We were planning
to spend the following day visiting in New York City. The night he was
scheduled to arrive, I was out to dinner with some friends. When I left the
restaurant, I checked my cell phone for messages.
Rather than the
usual cheerful message from Richard announcing that he had arrived safely in
New York, there was an urgent message from his assistant, Susan. When I
returned her call, she took a deep breath and said, "John, Richard died on the
plane today."
I felt as if my
heart had stopped.
After a moment,
Susan asked if I would be able to drive over to the hospital near Kennedy
Airport in Jamaica, Queens, where the ambulance had taken Richard's body after
his flight landed. "John, would you be able to retrieve Richard's personal
effects and to identify his body?"
The assignment was
one I did not relish, but there was never a thought that I wouldn't do it. At
some point in life, most of us will have the opportunity to experience a moment
when reality changes so quickly and so dramatically that it feels as if the
entire universe has screeched to a halt and abruptly reversed course. We are
left confused, numb, and disoriented. Having to struggle to see and hear
through the fog of shattered expectation and disbelief, to focus on questions,
details, and information while our heart is broken and our mind is reeling, is
nearly an impossible task.
I've been teaching
people for years to be prepared for anything. Yet I was reminded, through Richard's
beneficent grace, that the greatest teachings often come from the things we
aren't prepared for. Richard was an apparently healthy, energetic
forty-five-year-old man, nearly twelve years younger than me. We had been
making plans to teach together, to write together, and to travel to Hawaii and
India together.
After two trips
out to Jamaica, Queens, on subsequent days, all of the logistics with the
hospital, the medical examiner's office, and Richard's family back in
California were taken care of. I returned to my home in New Jersey, walked
through the front door, kicked off my sandals, and stretched out on my living
room sofa. I stayed there for two full days, allowing myself to feel absolutely
miserable. I let my sadness have free expression. I wallowed in it.
In those moments
there is no way to understand, no way to make sense or order out of the chaos
of ever-changing emotion and unfathomable reality. I realized, with great
interest, that a part of me found a kind of reassuring vital energy in the
sadness. It was such an intensely human, exquisitely excruciating experience. I
would almost call it "delicious suffering." I kept reflecting on what it was
that was so compelling and so strangely pleasant about the emotional pain.
I realized that I
was experiencing a magnificent internal dance — the interplay of deep and
abiding love intersecting with attachment, expectation, and a temporary
inability to comprehend the events of my life. I was in terrible pain, but
something beautiful was happening. My heart was being torn open. It was as if
my love for Richard and my despair over his death were combining to perform a
kind of spiritual open-heart surgery on me. When I closed my eyes and quieted,
I had an overwhelming sense of Richard's presence. I saw him in ethereal form,
standing over me like a skilled surgeon hovering above a patient on an
operating table. He was smiling and gently laughing. I could almost feel his
skilled, compassionate hands burrowing deep into my chest, into my heart, into
the core of my being, deftly removing layer upon layer of the "rational"
thought forms and emotional armoring that so often enshroud our Love.
Richard was an
extraordinary friend. What I found, as I lay on my sofa, was that all of the
things I missed, and anticipated missing, about Richard were also pointing the
way to the places in me that were so very grateful to have had such a friend. I
just kept allowing the sadness to surface. Each turbulent wave of sorrow would
envelop my body and mind, heaving it this way and that, emotionally knocking
the wind out of me. I felt breathless, as if a twenty-ton elephant were sitting
on my chest. But I knew that if I just relaxed... if I just kept breathing... if
I just kept allowing everything to be exactly as it was... all of the confusion,
despair, disappointment, lack of understanding, and debilitating sadness... if I
just let it all be, I would float back up again.
By early evening
on the second day, I began to feel the weight starting to lift. Slowly it was
supplanted by a deep and inspiring joy. Not a giddy joy, just a serene,
reverent joy. I began to let go of the slightly self-indulgent suffering I had
been enjoying so much and began to think about Richard. I began to think about
what an extraordinary human being he was.
Because of his
example, because of the way he lived his life, there has been much more joy
than sadness surrounding his death. While we are all profoundly sad that we
won't have his radiant warmth and the inexpressible delight of his physical
presence anymore, it is impossible not to feel joy about having had the
opportunity to know him.
It was fascinating
to watch my own emotional and physical energy patterns shift as the thoughts in
my mind began to move from shock, sadness, and disbelief to appreciation, gratitude,
and love. I could see, quite clearly, the magnetic attraction and compelling
fascination the darker feelings contained. They offer such a palpable sense of
connection with the person we've lost. Our minds resist letting go of those
thoughts and feelings because they are so strong, so heavy and thick. They give
us a powerful, though somewhat illusory, sense of connection to the person who
has died.
Feelings of joy
have such a soft, ethereal lightness to them. For a mind compelled to taste
life in all its thickness and robustness, joy sometimes seems oddly boring.
Like many of the other tricks our mind plays on us, the fearful clinging to
sadness keeps us stuck in a place of isolation and disconnection. Grief is much
more often about our lack of connection during someone's life than it is about
our sadness that they are now physically gone. We get stuck in replaying our
guilt and remorse over lost opportunities. When we do that, we become caught in
the hollow emptiness of that place in us that, for whatever reason, resisted
opportunities to be together, to come closer, to develop more intimacy.
Our mind's attempt
to cling to the sadness results in our staying caught in our sense of
disconnection from that person. It keeps us emotionally paralyzed and incapable
of beginning the transition to a new relationship, a new connection with their
"new" form. One of the major problems with the way we manage sadness in this
culture is that we tend to keep the sadness frozen rather than allowing it to
freely flow through its entire life cycle. We get to a certain point and we get
frightened. The river of emotion is flowing near flood stage, like a raging
torrent of turbulent water. It seems that the pain just keeps getting worse. So
we run to a doctor and get a prescription for an antidepressant, or we grab a
drink, or we take some other drug... to numb ourselves.
What we are doing,
in effect, is causing the emotional body to calcify. We stop the flow of
emotion and freeze the stream of sadness where it is. When emotions are frozen,
like frozen water they begin to expand. They become hardened and immovable,
taking up more space than when they were liquid and flowing, causing their
container to stretch and expand beyond its limits until it cracks and breaks.
Like ice, frozen emotions contain the rigid, lifeless remains of ancient life
forms, forms that look like they did when they were alive but that are actually
preserved in a kind of freakish rigor mortis, morbid, motionless carcasses of
dead, immovable emotions.
When our emotions
are frozen, we can't find our way back to joy.
It turns out that
one of the most potent antidotes to frozen emotion is gratitude. Just feeling
thankful.
We don't have to
ignore the things that are causing our sadness; we just have to cultivate alongside
them the awareness of all of the blessings in our life. Every human life is a
combination of joy and sorrow, success and failure, progress and retreat. We
get stuck when we see, or try to see, only one side of the ledger. When we are
in deep despair, or profound regret, we often feel as if there is nothing good
at all in our lives. Simply stated, when we're not getting what we want, we
don't see what we've got. But if we are totally honest, most of us can find an
abundance of gifts and blessings that the universe has bestowed on us.
For one thing, we
are alive. We have life. We have consciousness. We are aware. That is a
miracle. Our parents may not have been perfect, but they made it possible for
us to be born, something for which we can cultivate gratitude every day.
We can breathe. We
can see. We can touch. We can hear. We can taste. We can feel. We can laugh. We
can love.
Even if one or
more of our basic senses is compromised as a result of illness or injury, we
can still feel... we can still laugh... we can still love. If you doubt that,
just study the lives of people like Helen Keller, Stephen Hawking, Stevie
Wonder, Mattie Stepanek, Christopher Reeve — great souls who lived, or are
living, in bodies that are not "normal," who learned how to dive deep into
their beings to unearth presence, creativity, joy... and love.
So make a list — right now — of all that you are thankful for. If your mind wants to focus on
all that you have lost, or all that you feel you have been denied, just keep
gently guiding it back to what you have been given.
If you have lost a
loved one, focus on the blessing of having had their presence in your life for
whatever time they were with you. Focus on the love their presence in your life
awakened in you. Notice that the love is still 100 percent alive within you.
If you have lost
your money, focus on the blessing of having experienced what it was like to
have it. If you feel you have never achieved the affluence you want, focus on
the ways you have been provided for. Notice how your circumstances make you
more mindful about spending and more compassionate toward others who experience
financial difficulties.
If you experience
health problems, focus on how they have given you compassion and understanding
for others with similar problems. Look for the blessings. Perhaps your physical
situation has brought you into contact with beautiful, caring people. Perhaps
it has given you the time, solitude, and impetus to focus on your spiritual
search.
If others have
treated you unkindly or unfairly, focus on the place within you that feels
compassion for their predicament. Focus on the awareness their unconscious
behavior has generated in you: how being treated unkindly can inspire you to be
kinder and fairer toward others. You have experienced the pain of feeling
disconnected. Make your life about creating less disconnection in the world.
In the song
"Constant Craving," K.D. Lang sang, "Maybe a great magnet pulls all souls
towards truth." Our difficult experiences, our disappointments, our unanswered
prayers can be the fulcrums that counteract our resistance to that magnet. The
experiences of life can either turn us inward toward greater disconnection or
inspire us to go toward the Light with clearer focus and greater determination.
The choice is ours.
We are, indeed,
the creators of our lives. That does not mean that we are in control of all the
events that happen to us, but we are in control of how we respond to those
events. Cultivating gratitude for what we have — and what we have had — is a
major route to taking control of our responses, and one of the primary routes
out of suffering... into joy.
This article was excerpted from the book:
 When Prayers Aren't Answered
by John Welshons.
Reprinted with permission of
the publisher, New World Library, Novato, CA. ©2007. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.
For More Info or to Order This Book (hardcover). or in the Kindle edition.
More books by this author.
About the Author
John Welshons is
the author of When Prayers Aren't Answered and Awakening from Grief. A
much sought after speaker who offers lectures and workshops on terminal
illness, grief, and other topics, he has been helping people deal with dramatic
life change and loss for over 35 years. He is the founder and president of Open
Heart Seminars and lives in New Jersey. Visit his website www.openheartseminars.com.
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