Gratitude: How To Have More Of It When We Aren't Feeling it

Today's talk is all about gratitude.

It came out of the question that said,

We know that gratitude is this high vibration,

That if we can live in a state of gratitude,

This is what we want.

But what if we don't feel it?

What if that's not our reality?

Then what?

Because it doesn't quite feel right to pretend we're grateful when we're not.

So what do we do?

The interesting thing about gratitude is I don't think it's natural.

I don't think it's a normal state to be in a state of gratitude.

Like if you were to look at children,

Children aren't walking around feeling grateful.

They're just happy or sad.

They're just living.

They're just in the moment.

They want the ball,

They want to pet the puppy,

They don't want to go to bed.

It's sort of a natural living in the present experience.

If you think of animals,

Animals don't go around feeling grateful.

They might be happy.

They might,

A dog might like their owner or not like their owner or something like that.

But gratitude isn't like happy or sad or warm or cold or inspired or anything like that.

It's not like that.

It's something that we have to actually create.

And that's interesting.

Just because it's not natural doesn't mean it's not something we should do.

It just,

If we don't feel it naturally,

Then that's okay.

It just might be something we have to cultivate because as humans and even as adults,

We actually do start accessing these higher centers,

These higher aspects of being human beyond sort of those first three chakras of survival and interaction and who am I and even love.

But to actually kind of come up into these other levels of being and almost be able to observe ourselves.

So let's imagine that gratitude comes from two things.

Observation,

That we observe our situation and we think,

Wow,

What a great situation I'm in.

Like what we have to be able to pop out of our reality and sit in that witness mind or neutral mind and be able to observe the situation almost from a bird's eye and say,

Wow,

When I look at the big picture here,

Am I ever grateful?

It's a secondary experience to what we are experiencing.

So it's sort of from this witness neutral mind.

And the other way we develop gratitude is through comparison.

It's one of those,

Sometimes you're going along in life and you think your life just sucks and everything's just going against you and then you meet someone who really has it worse than you.

It's kind of that story of the person that didn't like their shoes and then they met a person that didn't have any shoes and then they met a person that didn't have any feet and all of a sudden they were really grateful for the shoes they had.

And that's not necessarily the greatest example,

But when we really put our situation in perspective in the world,

On occasion,

That can bring us to a state of gratitude.

That we think,

Well,

This is hard,

But it's okay.

Or you might say,

You know,

I can't stand that I always have to do all these dishes,

But maybe I'm thankful that I have food to cook to make all these dishes.

Or maybe I'm angry that I don't have any,

That I'm so busy,

I have no time and the holidays are so crazy,

But maybe I'm grateful because I have so many people that are in my life or vice versa.

So comparison also can bring us to a state of gratitude.

And so why would we do that?

Why would we look at observation or comparison?

Well,

There's some basic,

Almost states of being that we want to be experiencing before gratitude feels natural.

And one of them is contentedness.

That I actually feel content in my life.

And it doesn't mean that my life is easy.

It doesn't mean that I'm sitting around eating bonbons,

Painting pictures.

It just means that I'm content.

This is my life.

This is where I am.

And I wake up every morning intrigued to see what the day is gonna bring.

Another aspect of gratitude is neutrality.

Where we're not super attached to one way or another.

We're not attached to whether our parents treat us this way or our partner acts or looks this way or whether our kids are this way.

We're not caught up in the dramas of all the interactions in life.

We have a neutral space inside.

It's not that we don't have opinions or anything,

But we generally live in a place of neutrality when we kind of say,

Well,

You know,

That's just who they are and it really has nothing to do with me.

When we can live in a state of neutrality,

Gratitude's way easier.

And we'll talk more about that in a minute.

Another thing is joy.

Like,

Am I experiencing joy in my life?

Am I doing things in my life that I love?

That's up to us.

Am I doing things in my life that bring me joy?

Because as soon as we feel happy,

Gratitude's like right,

Right behind there.

I am so thankful that I get to do this.

I'm so thankful I'm alive,

Because I love doing this so much.

And it's easy to say that.

It's easy to say,

Well,

You know,

As soon as you feel joy,

You'll be great.

As soon as you feel neutral,

You'll be great.

But we all know that that's not always so easy.

And having this talk as we enter the holiday season,

That's a whole new kettle of fish to play in.

And we don't want to have false gratitude.

A huge part of my upbringing,

And whether it began when I was young or whether this has been around for a long time,

I don't know.

I had some heavy training in finding the silver lining in things.

You always want to look at the good things.

Turn that frown upside down.

That kind of tortured me for a lot of my life,

Especially after I got married,

That no matter how bad things actually were,

Well,

I'm just gonna find the silver lining.

And I even prided myself on being able to be an optimist,

No matter what.

No matter what,

I can find the silver lining.

I'm not gonna focus on what's wrong.

I'm not gonna sit around and pity myself and just wallow in it.

I can find the silver lining because I'm just that kind of enlightened person or something like that.

And on the one hand,

That's okay.

It's healthy to be able to find a silver lining every so often.

It's okay to be optimistic that things can change.

But in my experience,

What it did is it's almost like I took all those silver linings and covered all the things that really needed attention in my life.

It's like I hid the dark things that needed to be fixed because I was so desperately trying to stay smiley and positive,

Which of course led right into my book,

What If You Could Skip the Cancer?

And my experience with the breast lumps and illness and cancer and all that kind of thing,

Because I had spent so much energy looking for the silver lining of things,

I wasn't even living the life I was actually living.

I was completely ignoring my emotions.

I was completely ignoring the fact that I was miserable on the farm.

I was so sad and disappointed in what was happening in my marriage.

And I'm not saying disappointed in my husband.

I was disappointed in what happened in my marriage.

I just had this fairy tale idea of what marriage was gonna be like.

My parents never fought,

Not in front of us anyway.

And so I had no experience of conflict resolution or anything like that.

So if something came up in the marriage,

I actually assumed it was my fault.

I assumed that there was something I needed to do to fix it,

But I wasn't actually addressing what was wrong.

I was just finding silver linings and trying to be positive.

But I wasn't actually getting to the bottom of it where I was like,

I am so lonely.

I didn't get married to just be someone's house frow.

I got married for the romance and the joy and the love.

What happened?

And I was so busy trying to feel grateful.

Well,

I've got a roof over my head and a good man,

And I've got two kids and I've got my health.

What more can a woman want?

And I'm telling you that mantra probably tortured me for 15 years,

Even long after the breast lumps,

Because that silver lining training runs so deep.

Because again,

I think it's a partial truth.

There are times that looking for the silver lining gives our spirit enough of a lift to not drown in the difficulty.

So it's okay to look for the silver lining,

As long as we also look at what needs to be addressed.

And that's where we have to be very careful of this false gratitude.

And this is where I sometimes get into issues with using positive,

And I'm gonna do air quotes there,

Positive affirmations.

Sometimes they're great,

Don't get me wrong.

But a lot of the times,

If I'm using an affirmation to distract myself from what's really going on,

Big trouble.

Because what happens is we're actually disconnecting inside.

We are putting a chasm inside of our soul.

Here is our reality.

Here are my feelings.

Here is the natural biofeedback mechanisms in my heart saying something's wrong,

Something's wrong,

Something's wrong,

Something's wrong.

This isn't okay,

This isn't okay,

This isn't okay.

And then I put this huge chasm down the center,

And then this side comes in with all of my positive affirmations and how I should be grateful,

And I should be happy,

And you shouldn't be so ungrateful,

And what's wrong with you,

And why are you always so negative?

And then this side starts fighting against my reality.

Now I have this separation inside of me,

And I have an inner battle where I am beating myself up.

And the part of me that was simply saying,

But something's not okay,

This isn't what we signed up for,

This isn't what I want,

Why would we fight against that?

Why is what we want not important?

So really dangerous to have this false gratitude almost pretending,

It's like pretending that,

Oh,

All those feelings you have,

You don't really have them.

You're more enlightened than that,

You're more intelligent than that,

You're more worldly than that,

What's wrong with you?

Don't be so silly.

Like what a horrible feeling.

We don't wanna feel like that.

And then the second step,

If we really internalize all of this false gratitude,

We start saying it to other people.

And not only,

Then nobody knows what's really going on.

It's like I saw this reel yesterday on Facebook,

And it was from some Turkish movie,

Where this woman,

A wife,

Was being abused,

Physically abused.

And I don't know what the context of the scene was,

But from what I could understand,

She'd been being physically abused for some time.

And of course,

She always put makeup on and wore long sleeves and wore dark glasses and all that kind of thing.

And then one day she'd had it,

And it was there as a family gathering at her house.

Everybody arrived,

And then she went into the bathroom,

And again,

I don't know what happened,

What the context was,

And she took off all the makeup.

You could see these huge bruises around her eyes and her cut lip and the bruising on her face.

And she returned to the party bruised.

And of course,

Then people stood up and I don't know what happened after that.

That was the whole reel.

It's important,

If things are going on,

To look at that.

And if we're always hiding our truth from other people,

Then no one around us knows we're suffering either.

And then we feel alone.

We feel like no one understands us.

We feel disconnected from people we love.

And humans are social creatures.

We are meant to connect.

But here we are,

No matter if someone says,

Katrina,

Are you sure everything's okay?

You know what?

I am fine.

I am just grateful for everything we have.

I know it could be so much worse.

And I'm really good,

Don't worry.

Well,

First of all,

I just lied to someone,

Probably someone I care about.

They went away going,

Well,

I guess I can't step in.

I can't help.

And they also know,

On a deep level,

That you don't trust them.

You don't trust them with your truth.

And that sucks.

It sucks when a friend or a family member can't tell you the truth or won't tell you the truth,

Or they're always telling you some nonsense story about how everything's okay.

And it's not okay.

But we're so busy trying to be the strong one full of gratitude and silver lining,

And silver linings,

That we ignore everything that's actually going on in our life.

So then,

This leads into,

Well,

Why don't I feel grateful?

Because the person saying all of those positive affirmations and denying their truth does not feel grateful.

If they felt grateful,

They wouldn't have to say all the positive affirmations.

We don't have to repeat things to ourselves if it's just reality.

You don't have to do a rain dance if it's already raining.

So why don't we feel grateful?

And there's a bunch of reasons.

One,

Unresolved anger,

Unresolved frustration,

Feeling like a victim in life,

Being lost in a poor me spiral.

If we have any of these issues,

We have nothing.

Like,

We don't have a chance at gratitude because we have unresolved issues.

And again,

This can be used to help us.

If we realize that,

Wow,

I don't have any gratitude in my life.

I am kind of pissed off every time I wake up in the morning because son of a bloody elk.

Bloody elk,

You know what I mean?

That's what I actually am thinking,

And oh God,

Another day bloody elk.

You know what I mean?

If that's actually our reality,

Then again,

We can step back into our witness mind,

You know,

Which is why we meditate,

Is to develop that witness mind.

And we step back and we say,

Okay,

This is a sign of something.

The lack of gratitude in my life is an important biofeedback mechanism.

This is an important thing for me to take note of.

Because if I was actually in this sort of neutral,

Content,

Joyful space,

I would easily have gratitude.

It just sort of swoops in with it.

So what is going on in my life that is unresolved?

And it's like the door that opens to the journey.

I don't like saying that,

But to the journey,

To the whatever the next step is,

Now we get to look at it.

Let's say we're angry.

So we ask ourselves,

Because again,

We're not throwing a bunch of false gratitude on top of our reality.

We're looking at what's real.

Is it raining?

You know,

Was that woman's partner beating her?

Yes.

You're not making it up.

You're not being negative.

You're saying,

It's raining.

I don't have enough money in my bank to pay the rent.

I'm not being negative.

I'm just saying this is the way it is.

So we look at it.

So what are we angry about?

Who are we angry at?

Are boundaries being crossed?

Is it something that I'm angry about from way back and I'm cycling the story and I'm repeating a past experience over and over and over again in my mind?

And if we are,

If that's what we're doing,

If we're repeating a story from a long time ago that we're angry at somebody,

One,

We should talk about it.

And if you've already talked about it till you're blue in the face and you can't stand to hear it one more time,

Then sit and imagine how you would act differently today.

If you were in that situation today,

What would you do now?

And there's something really healing about it if we allow ourselves to not be attached to it.

Because the problem is if we have anger towards someone,

We can get attached to being angry.

It's almost like,

Let's say you were abused as a child and that inner child wasn't heard.

It didn't matter.

It didn't matter.

Just shove it under the carpet.

Just don't think about it.

And we're angry at our mom or our dad or society or the church or whoever we're mad about,

Who covered it up,

Who did it.

Sometimes we're more angry at the people who covered it up than the actually who did it.

So the challenge is we can't just stop being angry because that inner child has to be heard.

That inner child has to come to the surface and everything has to be heard or else the anger isn't gonna go away.

Why is the anger not going away?

Because that child holds so much pain and that pain is inside of us like a festering wound.

It has to be healed.

It has to be released.

So that these layers of emotions that are coming down to this truth and maybe we need to sit down.

One great response to trauma or one way to heal is to write everything down in as much detail as you can possibly muster,

Which is hard,

Especially if it's really painful.

But you write down every smell,

Every thought,

Every feeling,

Every temperature,

Every touch,

Everything.

No matter how disgusting it is,

No matter how awful it is,

You write it all down and then you read it out to yourself once a day and you make sure that inner child,

That little girl or that little boy is heard and witnessed in every emotion,

Every feeling,

Everything they had.

And then once that is released,

Then we have a chance to be able to actually look at the people who abused us or hid it or told us to suck it up or hid it under the rug or whatever.

And we can look at them for the broken people they are.

Healthy,

Strong people don't do this.

But until that inner child is heard completely,

We have to keep the anger up or else we'll never get down to the wound.

Or what if there's people in your life right now that are pissing you off?

Right now,

Maybe it's an ex,

Maybe it's your parents,

Maybe it's your neighbor,

Maybe it's your partner,

Who knows who it is.

Well,

Then we have to look at that.

We'll have to look at what is our truth?

Where are our boundaries being crossed?

Why are they still in my life?

Maybe we're mad at ourselves that we just keep going back for another,

I don't wanna say another beating,

But sometimes that can be what it feels like.

Just going for Sunday coffee and you leave literally energetically bruised.

Well,

Why the hell do we keep going back for coffee?

Oh,

Well,

It's your parents,

And oh,

You should,

And oh,

It's important,

And they don't have a lot of time left,

And la la la,

All this stuff.

Or you know what,

It's my partner,

And we have a lot of history,

And I really understand where they're coming from,

And we have kids,

Or we have grandkids,

Or whatever.

It's so important.

So we just keep going back for it,

And then we get angry.

Well,

At some point,

We have to actually take action if we don't wanna be angry anymore.

We can't keep just doing the same thing,

And then saying,

Oh,

I'm so angry.

Well,

Then do something different.

Well,

I don't want to.

Well,

Then that's the choice.

You know,

On some level,

You actually are content with this situation,

And it's okay,

It's not a judgment.

Who knows why we stay in situations that are difficult?

Maybe we're working out deep karmic patterns.

You know,

We're just,

We're sorting something out,

And this is where we feel called to be,

And whatever.

And then we can feel grateful for that,

That well,

You know,

This sucks,

But I guess I'm working something out.

That's kind of a,

I don't know if I'd necessarily go there right away,

But that could look like a lot of false gratitude when we're really just avoiding conflict.

You know what I'm saying?

The victim,

Poor me,

Problem is a challenge,

And we're actually gonna do another talk on this in a couple weeks,

And we'll go much deeper into the victim.

But in the context of gratitude,

When we feel the victim of anything,

We're not gonna feel gratitude.

And there's a couple reasons for that.

One,

When we're in,

When we feel like a victim,

We feel like we have no power in our life.

We feel like we have no ability to make change,

Or else if we did,

We couldn't be a victim.

If I have choice,

And I have the power to make change,

Then I'm not a victim anymore.

I was once in a jury.

It was an assault case,

And this was about,

It was like 2003 or 2006,

I think.

It was a while ago.

And it was so curious,

Because it was really an obvious case.

There was this one guy who was kind of big and tough,

And this other guy was kind of this skinny,

Drunk guy.

They,

It was just,

I don't know why I'm using these.

That's just what my perception of them.

How the story went was they lived in kind of a difficult neighborhood,

And there was a lot of drinking and drugs and stuff like that,

And kind of gang warfare kind of stuff going on.

And basically,

The tough guy hated the drunk guy,

And the drunk guy would always get drunk and yell at the tough guy,

And you're just,

Your girlfriend's a slut,

And you're a loser,

And you know,

Just typical drunk,

Angry stuff.

So one day,

The tough guy heard of this guy yelling at him,

Walked up,

Flanked by like five of his friends,

And beat him up,

And he was charged with assault.

And it was really clear.

I mean,

It was really obvious.

I mean,

There were pictures,

And it was really gory.

The funny thing is,

Is his lawyer was,

His defense was that it was self-defense,

That the drunk guy had kind of attacked him verbally,

And this guy was defending himself.

It just happened to be physically.

Well,

The crazy thing is,

The law,

At least in Canada,

I don't know what it is anywhere else,

But the law in Canada is that you cannot claim self-defense if you can escape.

So if escape is possible,

But you stood and fought instead,

That's assault.

And what was really a mind bend for me was our jury got hung because there were three people on the jury that believed kind of the street idea that if you hit me and I hit you back,

That's self-defense.

And we ended up sequestered.

Like we had to stay overnight and do all this stuff because these guys refused to accept that this was the law.

And I'm not arguing whether one thing is right or the other,

But the kind of that street idea is you hit me,

I hit you back,

We're even kind of idea.

Whereas the law was if you can get away.

So the reason I bring this up is it's such a curious thing that when we get caught in this sort of victim place,

We actually could leave,

We could change the situation,

But we choose not to.

Isn't that curious?

And very often we're taught that being the victim is sort of the righteous space.

And again,

We're gonna talk more about this in our other talk about this sort of drama triangle that I am the victim,

You are the persecutor,

And this person is the savior.

And we're taught it in Walt Disney movies,

We're taught it often by our family,

That the hero of the movie is attacked,

And then this other hero comes in to save,

And we're vying for the person who got attacked for them to be okay.

And so we often become that victim in our life.

And everyone in our life is either a persecutor or a friend.

If we're in that space,

We really don't feel grateful,

Because we can't feel grateful by definition.

If we start feeling grateful for our life,

We lose our victim status.

We're not allowed to feel grateful.

Where then is our passion coming from?

Where is our story coming from?

And so it's very interesting,

And especially when we get into that space,

When we ask ourselves,

What are the stories I'm repeating?

And again,

This isn't so much about the victim mindset,

But in terms of what blocks us from gratitude,

What are the stories I'm repeating to myself and to everyone around me that says there's no way I could feel grateful because this happened?

What is that story?

And it has nothing to do with the value of the story or whether the story is right or wrong or anything like that.

But it's interesting,

If our goal is to genuinely feel gratitude in life,

We have to look at the stories that we're telling ourselves and the mantras that we're repeating,

The negative mantras,

The words we're repeating in our minds that are blocking any chance of gratitude.

When we are in this sort of poor me space,

It's a clue that,

Aha,

There's a story repeating in my mind,

And I'm very attached to it,

And I'm very attached to being the struggling victim.

Why?

Where is that coming from?

Did I witness this growing up?

Were one of my parents like this?

Did I watch too many sappy movies?

Why?

Why?

And it doesn't change whether we were victimized.

It doesn't change that.

But why are we attached to that story?

Why are we attached to telling the story that way?

It's just,

Again,

It's just a little breadcrumb for our path to say,

Aha,

I'd like to look at that.

And when we look at it and we get to the bottom of it,

And maybe that takes years,

And all of a sudden we stop telling that story,

Not because we're hiding it or burying it or anything,

But we actually are maybe seeing all the sides of it now,

And I'm not interested in being a victim.

We did a series of talks called From Courage to Enlightenment,

And they were based on the book Power Versus Force by David Hawken.

He had this amazing list of emotional states that we could live in.

And what was interesting is there was this middle row,

And the middle one was called courage.

And this resonated at 200,

For example.

Everything below courage is where we spin in all,

It's like everything we do,

Everything we think,

Everything we say lights another fire in our life,

Not a good fire of passion,

But a fire of destruction,

A fire of drama.

And the levels are like shame,

Guilt,

Fear,

Grief,

Desire,

Pride,

Anger,

Things like that.

And so today,

We chatted about anger or feeling like a victim or whatever.

But if we're locked in desire,

That no matter how much we have,

We want more.

No matter how kind our friends are,

We want more.

No matter how much money we have,

We want more.

We're never gonna feel gratitude.

If we're locked in guilt about something,

We're never gonna feel gratitude.

So there's many of these emotions that feed the victim mentality,

The frustrated,

All of this stuff,

It feeds that until we hit courage.

And as soon as we touch courage,

We now can make change in our life.

We can now look at things and say,

Okay,

That does suck,

And those people are very hard personalities.

That's a reality.

What can I do?

How can I act differently?

Do I leave?

Do I say something?

Do I pray for guidance?

What?

What can I do?

And as soon as you can feel courage,

As soon as you can step into that courageous space,

Something changes.

Something big changes.

Because then you take a different step.

We make a different move in life.

And what happens is,

It's like we have to rally the strength inside of us to take this step.

And in that rallying of things and releasing sort of dysfunctional things we've picked up along the way,

We consolidate who we are and we're different.

So then all of a sudden,

We start feeling grateful for this difficult opportunity.

Even though these people are really jerks or we've really had bad experiences with them.

For a long time,

The challenge of meeting them and speaking our truth and doing our,

Whatever it is we needed,

Getting our ducks in a row.

Holy mackerel,

Did I become stronger.

Wow,

Did I ever need that philosophical shift?

I am a brand new person now.

And then later,

It doesn't only happen in the moment,

But later we look back on it and we say,

What a powerful experience that was.

And we have gratitude for it.

We don't feel it in the moment because we need all the challenging negative emotions to fuel us to make change.

All of that pain fuels us to get our ducks in a row to find the courage to speak our truth.

To find the courage to make change.

That's when the victim mentality and the poor me,

This all disappears as soon as we can find this courage.

And then crazy things happen.

So then,

So if we circle back to our original question about how do we feel grateful when we don't feel grateful?

Well,

We can definitely look at the things in our life that we love.

And we can say,

Well,

I'm really grateful for,

Maybe my partner.

Maybe I'm really grateful for my health.

Maybe I'm grateful that I love my dog.

I'm grateful for my job.

I'm grateful for security.

I'm grateful that chocolate exists.

Who knows what we're grateful for?

And then we look at all the aspects in our lives that are difficult.

Because they exist.

They're not figments of our imagination.

They're not some character flaw that,

Oh,

I've attracted this into my life and I'm just a big loser.

I hate that stuff.

It's not true.

We just have,

This is the smorgasbord that is in front of us.

Some of the things are easy and some of them are hard.

But when we come to them with courage,

We look at them and we go,

Wow,

That's a tough one.

Okay,

I'm gonna have to figure some things out.

I'm gonna have to meditate more.

I'm gonna have to read some books.

I'm gonna have to talk to some people.

I'm gonna have to go for counseling.

I'm gonna have to find some new skills so that I can address this in a new way.

And then that becomes the journey.

And then again,

In hindsight,

We feel grateful.

And then as soon as we do that a few times,

The gratitude becomes genuine,

Even in the moment,

Even when things are hard.

Because that witness mind knows that I am blessed with whatever these things I'm blessed with,

And there are challenges before me that I'm going to meet.

And I'm grateful for all of them.

But we can't feel grateful for a challenge if we aren't going to meet it.

If we're just gonna stay angry,

We'll never have great gratitude.

If we're not gonna take action,

We're not gonna feel gratitude.

We have to have that courage space.

And again,

That's a journey into itself.

Going through all those levels and releasing shame and guilt and anger.

These are all really worthy.

I just keep saying journey,

But they're worthy journeys.

They're worthy experiences.

They're worthy countries to visit and to dive into whatever the experiences are and resolve them.

And then as soon as we resolve them,

We start to feel grateful.

And we start to realize,

Wow,

Maybe I can help other people with that.

So gratitude's a curious thing.

And I think a lot of it comes from us feeling empowered in our life no matter what.

And then we're blissfully,

Incredibly grateful for who is there and what's going on.

And whatever's a challenge,

We gird our loins and we're thankful that we have the opportunity to meet this opponent in the ring and discover who we are.

I'm gonna put my glasses on.

And if anyone has any questions,

I'd be happy to answer them.

Just dive in and resolve them.

You make it sound so easy.

I wish I could just flip that switch.

Been trying to resolve things for decades.

I hear you.

My stepmother used to say,

Sounds easy if you say it fast.

And I fully agree.

And I think one of the challenges,

At least in my life,

Is that I want resolution now and I'm afraid of things changing.

I remember,

I think it was in my book,

What If You Could Skip the Cancer?

There was this quote that I found.

It was something like,

We all want our lives to improve,

But we don't want anything to change.

That's a real challenge.

And very often,

It's very hard to resolve issues if we aren't willing to walk away from certain situations or habits or belief systems or philosophies or ancestral memories and stories that are told in the family.

And then bit by bit,

At least my experience is that something shifts in me and it has this ripple effect out.

And then suddenly I start making different choices.

So action is key.

My question is,

How do I know what action to take?

The million dollar question.

This all comes back to that discerning truth inside.

And truth is not,

Like when we talk about satya,

It's not,

Here's what I think,

Here's what I want.

It's the North Star in our soul that when I close my eyes,

And I say,

What about this?

Does my heart lift or drop?

What about this,

Lift or drop?

What do I feel drawn to?

What is the thing?

And then we just take this one little step and take one little step.

And it can be the smallest thing.

I was just at my family's for the last year and I was just at my family's for the weekend,

For Christmas,

And if all we do is change one tiny response to someone,

That's a big deal.

One tiny thing.

And again,

Then we try it and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't.

Sometimes things don't work the way we want them to.

And we go,

Aha,

Well that didn't work.

Sometimes we don't know what the right answer is and sometimes it's by doing what might be considered the wrong thing that we realize what the right thing was.

It's like we keep informing that mechanism inside of us that trusts more and more and more.

I find it tricky to be in gratitude when I'm caught in fear,

Including the fear of the unknown.

What are my thoughts on that?

So right now,

I'm writing a book called The Union of the Masculine and Feminine.

And what's intriguing about the dynamics of the masculine and feminine,

And this isn't male or female,

Is that all things in the feminine have been oppressed for millennia.

And one of the dynamics is the known and the unknown.

What I can see and touch and feel,

That's the masculine.

That's sort of like the sun energy.

And then the unknown,

The mystery of life,

The moon energy.

And we have been taught to distrust the mystery in the same way that we've been taught to distrust our feelings.

Instead,

We trust logic.

So it's an interesting paradigm shift inside of us to imagine what if unknown is mystery?

And what if we don't fear the unknown?

What if we don't fear the mystery?

What if mystery is the nature of life,

But we've been taught there's something wrong with it?

So instead,

Even reframing it and saying,

I am always stepping into mystery.

If I'm lucky,

I have no idea what's around the corner.

Think how exciting life is.

When you have no idea what's coming around the corner.

And again,

Maybe we've seen too many movies or we've had too much training or too much fear mongering in our life that we always think that around the corner is some like raging rhino coming at us.

But what if around the corner is a new coffee shop with new kinds of chocolate?

What if coming around the corner is a job I couldn't even fathom?

I didn't even know this job existed.

I didn't even know this job existed and it's perfect for me.

Or what if I get a job and I hate it,

But I met this one person who I was meant to meet.

This is the mystery of life.

We have been sold a story that everything in life has already been discovered.

And that everything we learned in school is all we're ever gonna learn.

And that whatever our parents thought somehow defines the world.

The world is predominantly mystery,

But we have a training inside us that says,

No,

No,

No,

I wanna cling to the known and that makes me safe.

But what if that isn't what makes us safe?

What if what makes us safe is that in every step of the adventure into the mystery,

I am going to be present and I will make a choice.

That no matter what comes,

I will make choices and I will embrace it,

I will get rid of it,

I will do whatever.

So I feel like there's something,

Because it's such an important question,

Because fear of the unknown has been trained into us.

Do you know?

So there was a time in my past that I studied the Bible.

I actually had a concordant Bible where they would look at the Greek original words of it.

Because I mean,

Once we get it translated into English or whatever language you speak,

There's a lot lost in translation,

Especially in deep metaphysical concepts.

And one of the things that I remember from that time was there is no actual word for Satan or the devil or anything.

That actually doesn't exist in the Bible.

But there's a Greek phrase that says,

That which lurks in the shadow.

And there's all these phrases that are all basically fear of the unknown.

And that's what got translated into whatever name you wanna call the devil,

Which is whatever it is that takes us off our path.

La la la la la la.

Like it's quite insidious.

So this idea of the fear of the unknown is deeply programmed into us.

But what if it's not true?

What if we really are these epic,

Infinite refractions of God?

What if we really are these galactic beings living in these interesting human shells and we get to explore the mystery of living here on earth?

What if that's the real training that we could have gotten that we can adopt now?

Thank you so much for being here.

And I hope you have a wonderful day.