Gratitude as Alchemy

Years ago, while living in Portland, OR, I biked to work at all times of day, no matter the weather. It was a long ride to the assisted living facility where I worked, and mysteriously uphill both ways.

At the time I was in a spiritual training program, trying desperately to heal the patterns of pain I’d inherited. I wanted to transform myself, so I could shift out of survival mode to thriving, though I really had no idea what that meant, nor was I ready, in hindsight. On the advice of teachers I dedicated myself to a Gratitude practice. In transforming my energetic and psychological patterns (the same thing in my most humble opinion) I hoped to access transformation in my outer life.

Each day I’d ride the same path, reciting all I was grateful for.

The ancestors, my friends, guides, my body, my bike, the road, the weather. Each day I’d have to get more specific as I ran through my list. I added my cells, the pavement, oxygen molecules, single pointed leaves, five pointed leaves, pinecones, pine cone seeds. Each day I’d push myself a little further. Could I be thankful for the fresh air, even though it was raining? How about for my bike even though my back hurt? Like really hurt. Could I be thankful for my raincoat, despite the puddle of water accruing in my left pocket? Or for my paycheck even though I was choosing between my sanity and paying my student loans (Guess which I chose).

I certainly tried.

I think of these rides every once in a while. Do I have the life I desired then, I wonder? Was all that gratitude worth it? Did it work?

Absolutely. I’ve got proof! And also not very well. Not because I wasn’t grateful, or an effective alchemist. But because I was actually just trying to trick the universe into guaranteeing me freedom from pain, impermanence, and change.

Whoops.

“I’ll be a good girl and say thank you, if you’ll please grant me amnesty from all the ickier parts of myself and life, please and thank you! Thank you for my shitty job, my chronic pain, my abusive community, my toxic environment, now make them disappear, thank youuuuuu.”

Why is gratitude part of a spiritual life and a key to manifestation? Why do I still encourage people to practice it, even now? And why have our ancestors gathered to express it for millenia at exactly the point of the natural cycle where abundance is disappearing?

Let me tell you, I am not at my most grateful when the trees are naked and the cold sets in. I was born at the first of the celtic harvest ceremonies, Lughnasadh. I think most humans find it easier to say thank you when things are luscious and green, easy and bountiful.

Wait, not you? Congratulations, oh enlightened one. Your chariot to heaven awaits.

For the rest of us, there is the wisdom of sabbaths, the wisdom in starting to say thank you when it is easy, and continuing till it's hard. That's the only way to learn to say thank you even though everything is dying, and the beautiful things we loved are only memories, and now we are cold, and counting our canned jars. Will this be enough for winter?

But why? Why is gratitude so important to feel even when everything is dying or dead?

In part, so we can remember that all this death is compost for next season's seeds. As my guides always say, change is the law of the universe, and it is a loving law.

Gratitude places us in alignment with and surrender to the greater wisdom of cyclic reality.

But what is gratitude?

Gratitude is the alchemical process of desiring what you already have. 

In desiring what we already have, the already existing manifestations of our co-creation with the universe, we deepen that relationship and our power within it.

Wait. What?

We are all co-creators, dreaming the great dream together. Spirituality, in whatever form it comes, is the process of waking up to that relationship. In waking up, we become conscious, and are able to co-create intentionally.

No matter what, we are in the process of co-creating, but when we are asleep we experience our co-creations as events happening to us. We experience it as victims. 

Our culture is designed to keep you asleep. That way others have control of your desires, your consumption, your values, your decisions, how you spend your resources, who you allow yourself to love. To keep you powerless. 

But none of us are powerless. We are god knowing themself. Where is the powerlessness in that?

Gratitude CAN be a road to honoring our co-creations, honoring our contributions, and those of all other beings. But mostly I see gratitude used to keep people asleep instead of empowering or connecting them.

You hate your life? Instead of going out and yelling in the streets, creating change through community action or personal decision, feel grateful!

Hate your job? People in [insert country in racist way here] make 3 cents a day! Feel grateful!!

Don’t pay attention to your rage, your resentfulness, your pain, the ways you’ve been betrayed, your wishes for a different life, for met needs, to be wild. Feel Grateful!

UGH. Our old friend, spiritual bypassing.

We are incarnated beings. Not all of our experience is ease, love, or light. In fact, most experiences here on earth aren't easy, have you noticed yet?

When we focus only on the light, and ignore the darkness, the darkness creeps up and begins to act through us, and for us, without us even realizing it.

Like I said. Gratitude practices can be a way of trying to trick the universe. That was certainly part of it for me. Pretending to be only “good”, “smart”, “strong”, or “responsible”, when we are so much weirder, so much more. I thought if I can just repress and hide and polish up all the sad, hungry, unsatisfied parts of me, then I’ll get what I want. 

But we get what we want through honoring all that longing, that hunger, that desire.

Practicing gratitude isn’t a way to trick the universe into giving you what you want. Its magic is in bringing you into good relationship with what you already have. 

It sounds boring, but that's actually what life is all about. Learning to be here. With this world, this body, this family, this lover, this job, this culture, this moment, this breath.

Thats why its a spiritual practice.And thats why its hard.

But pretending to be other than what we are is how most of us survived in this culture and our families.

Whether it was getting good grades when we wanted to sculpt or scream or run wild, or not admitting Uncle Joe is an addict, or saying sorry when we really enjoyed the supposed wrongdoing. 

We cut ourselves into pieces, hide some away, make others smaller, sacrificing our wholeness for acceptance and a place in this world. If the family and school doesn’t push you into the box, the doctor, the psychiatrist, the employer, or the taxman will do it. Even the most wild of us tend to end up pretty conformed adults. Those of us who can’t conform tend to end up institutionalized or disenfranchised, with a host of diagnoses trailing in our wake.

We pretend to be the ‘good girl’, the ‘humble servant’, the one who is doing it right. God serves us hospital food, and we say thank you soooooo much God, yum yum yum yum, when actually we feel disgust, disappointment, dissatisfaction.

God is not fooled. She’s waiting for us to throw the tacky mashed potatoes against the wall, walk down to the kitchen and make ourselves some real damn food.

She’s waiting for us to show our real self.

Because in making ourselves real, we make God real. We are the ever spinning chaos of God becoming conscious.

I can’t tell you how many beautiful, wise souls tell me things like “If I feel my anger, I’m afraid bad things will happen to me” or “If I feel how sad I am I will create a bad reality.”

No wonder we are all so miserable. 

Those statements are the equivalent of “If I’m human I will be punished!!” or “I am inherently bad!” 

Maybe you are. Maybe we all are. How terribly exciting. If God made us this way, God must like a bad girl. She certainly likes to break rules. All the rules of nature change from a different perspective. The rules of Newtonian physics fall apart on a Quantum level. And what the hell is Dark Matter!? Science learns the rules of nature so that they can eventually be proven wrong.

We structure our lives by trying to be good, grateful children, whether it's as a child of a parent, a job, a culture, a deity. We deny who we are and repress our life force. The consequences are catastrophic. Insert modern life statistics here. Income disparities, divorce rates, illness on the rise, climate change, on and on.

Catastrophic and tragic. 

Here we are, gorgeous flea covered animals pretending to be cold marble statues. Clinging to our prison bars like they give us life, when the waters of change offer to sweep us somewhere ultimately more nourishing and beautiful.

Me too. I do it too. None of us are exempt. However we can begin to catch ourselves in it a little sooner, and make a new choice. Or we can show compassion to ourselves within the process. Of such little things is happiness made.

We are addicted as a culture to a vision of a vast angry GOD who will punish us if we do wrong. Who will get angry if we don’t say “thank you for this thing which makes me feel…invisible…sick…hopeless…unworthy.”

Even in the pagan/animist/eco-spirituality/holistic communities I run in, I come up against this all the time, in clients, community members. I come up against this in myself. 

In astrology, we call that figure, the big bad angry god, Saturn. The first time anyone explained a Saturn return to me (the moment when Saturn returns in the sky to the same place it was when you were born) they said “It's the equivalent of Daddy coming home--if you’ve been bad, you're going to get what's coming to you.”

Damn.

No wonder people are afraid to get astrology readings!

Now, in this patriarchal context, there is some truth to that. Saturn is life, it represents our relationship to the life process, the process of experiencing reality, limits, pain, restriction. In this patriarchal supremacist culture we fear death, avoid pain, and thus never embrace life. Instead we cut down forests, live in ugly square boxes, work 60 hours a week till our hearts gives out, destroy whatever is beautiful, and tamp down anything too wild. We elect fascists and reward control and cruelty.

We experience Saturn as the big mean punishment wielding patriarch. But it is our nature, our illusions, not Saturns that is revealed in this dynamic. 

We experience life as a punishment.

We deny our toxicity and density, and pretend to the universe that we are exactly who we are ‘supposed to be’, who the big mean daddy god says we should be, forgetting that the universe doesn’t want some monotone sanded down version of our beingness, but US! Wild, raw, too much, splinter inducing us.

But we, inheritors of puritanism, keep our heads low, try to make everyone happy and wait for our rewards. In the case of my Pilgrim ancestors, those rewards were eternal paradise. In the contemporary spiritual community we expect those rewards to be successful manifestations of the things we want, all the things that fit into our clean, very well behaved version of reality, where there are no messes. Where we accept things like oppressive sorcery as they are, and just try to get the best life we can within it.

A good job that gets me a good reputation, instead of burning down a system that says your only value is in what you produce.

A reliable loving husband instead of a con-conspirator in dismantling patriarchal sorcery.

A big house instead of abolishing private property and honoring our needs for community.

A lot of ease instead of a vibrant earth.

Ya catch my drift?

But come a little closer. Here is a secret.

Creating a ‘bad future’ for yourself doesn’t come from honoring our darkest, wildest, most untidy thoughts and feelings (Notice I said honoring, not acting upon! That's a whole other blog post, lol).

A ‘bad future’ comes from pretending those raw, messy parts of you aren’t there.

I believe that the root of suffering is our denial of this realm, our bodies, the incarnate. It is also in taking this realm too seriously. Two extremes of the same thing. 

In our culture we believe that being in a body is a curse, or a punishment.

I hold that it is a gift. The only way consciousness can be raised.

My puritan, christian ancestors come from a tradition that was once embodied, connected to the deep wild musings of the earth. But it lost its soul the day it became about transcending the flesh.

Jesus didn’t transcend the flesh. He surrendered to it. Only then could he remember what we become flesh to know. Our oneness with the divine. Matter isn’t what blocks us from god. It is the only way to experience god. To experience ourselves we require the other. We only become who we are in relationship. God had to create other to learn who they were.

We are god knowing themself. What a terrifying, gorgeous honor.

As the visionary Octavia Butler wrote in her sacred text disguised as the novel Parable of the Sower, “Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the Universe.”

And so, what does this all have to do with Gratitude?

Gratitude is desiring what we already have.  Its acknowledging that desire. Formalizing it.

When we truly desire something, we are touched with the energy of the universe, our life force.

Accessing our desire, this energy, is incredibly powerful, and often very destructive, especially when we are asleep. But when we are awake? And powerful? It can create or flatten universes. 

That's why fascists pathologize and punish desire, because they want to be the only creators of reality. That's why spiritual teachers give you tools to learn how to hold and use that desire creatively. Because working with desire can lead us to god- false or otherwise. Desire holds no objective truth. But learning to honor, channel, and wield (notice I didn’t say control) our desire is a path of spiritual growth.

Desire is a base material of alchemy, the process of coming into a co-creative relationship with the world through integrating the shadow self, the process of becoming a maker of the dream, instead of a victim of it.

When we express gratitude, when we desire what we already have, we are doing alchemy. Instead of placing your desire into the endless void of possibility, where it can be hard for it to get any traction, we give it form to work with immediately. 

Gratitude allows us to transform the matter of our lives into new forms, instead of starting from scratch. Hopefully those new forms are more aligned with our wholeness.

Gratitude helps us to focus our energy and desire towards what we’ve already attained, giving ourselves and the universe we co-create with a model and form to work with.

This has many benefits. It gives all that raw, terrifying desire a form, a container, some limits. The desire becomes fuel, instead of raw power. Gas in a car is an adventure. Gas spilling into the ocean is a crime and a tragedy. And its fucking deadly. Not that cars aren’t dangerous. There is always danger in honoring what you want. Even when you already have it.

Desiring what you want gives all that aching longing that humans are composed of some direction. But I’ve noticed us humans can be afraid– will desiring what I have make it so that I never have anything else?

No. But it does create a vibration of joy and satisfaction in your life that the rest of your life can attune to.

Loving your home doesn’t mean you’ll never have the space for all your books. Loving your job doesn’t mean you won’t get the promotion. Rather, desiring what you have is like a sign post, pointing your creative life force in the right direction.

Not that we shouldn’t also want what we don’t have. But that's also another blog post.

Desiring what we already have turns us into a beacon of co-creation. “Hello!” the beacon says. “I want to create a magical weird sexy reality with you, oh magnificent devouring universe!!”

That's why spiritual teachers (like me) say ridiculous shit like this…

Want to move? Love the city you live in!

Want another job? Love the one you have!

Even saying it I feel annoyed, and yet I know the deep truth of it.

But we can’t trick the universe.

Don’t pretend to be grateful for the hospital food you hate. Honor your empty sad longing places. And find little spaces of relief, of grace, of equanimity.

Gratitude can be small.

The light to read the book.

The faucet to quench your thirst.

The wind to cool your face.

The unexpected smile.

I like to start small. Simple. With the breath. Meditation teaches us how to do this. How to be with the present moment, and to honor what is. Not to transcend what is in inflated ecstasy (isn’t THIS AMAZING!!) or to become bogged down in it (Fuckkkk I hate my life), but to love just this breath. Just this moment.

Don’t pretend to feel grateful for what you don’t want. Instead, welcome in curiosity. Understand through your body, your soul saying no, exactly what it is they will say yes to.

But for those things you can honestly feel grateful for, even (especially) when it's not everything you want…

That's you doing magic.

Congratulations sweetie.