Gratitude: The Uncarved Emotion

…in the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.

Less and less do you need to force things, until you finally arrive at non-action.

When nothing is done, nothing is left undone….

Tao Te Ching,Verse 48

Growing up, my concept of gratitude was superficial, at best. It wasn’t “authentic” without the utterance. The rote etiquette of saying please and thank you, of prefacing a meal with a blessing, the Thanksgiving litany of acknowledgments … all were proof positive of my benevolent appreciation for being alive and bearing witness to the bounty of polite, and I was good to go.

Later on, ensconced in a career of self-destruction, a deeper sense of gratitude took root, in the form of the foxhole prayer. Thankful to survive an onslaught, I would experience a fleeting sense of the soothing power of being grateful. It was a relief to sublimate the misguided ego, and simply wallow in raw acceptance. However sporadic, I knew it when I felt it.

And then I learned T’ai Chi Chih. I began to heal. Moreover, I began reading Justin’s lectures and books. I discovered that gratitude is not about what to say, or where to find emotional refuge from inexorable Karma, or the prescribed antidote for the “greed, anger, and delusion” that eclipse our desire to lead a happy life. Like Justin says about softness – it’s not something to try to be; it’s the absence of tension that allows softness to prevail. Or as Paul Reps said, “How grateful I am with no thing to be grateful for.”