One of the biggest challenges in this arena is that we confuse procedures and outcomes. Certain procedures can only be experienced as an outcome of other works.
Similarly, the experiences of gratitude, joy, and forgiveness cannot be manufactured or in any way forced into existence. Not because they are not available, but because they are our natural state—they cannot be efforted into being.
If we are not experiencing them, it is because they are obscured. Techniques such as writing gratitude lists, positive thinking, or forgiving people are akin to placing beautiful drawings on top of a landfill, when the true energy lies beneath the landfill. Eventually, those drawings become part of the landfill, and we wonder why working so hard brings us further from, not closer to, these dispositions.
We would do better to deliberately hate someone, to consciously feel our furor, and take a comfortable seat right in the middle of our joylessness. One of the best ways to dissolve the thick layer between us and the natural and spontaneous emotions that confer meaning is unbridled truth and its honest and accurate expression.
We indicate that our lives and our emotions, exactly as they are, are not enough and that we are entitled to something more. The truth is, we are entitled to something far, far more. We are entitled to relating directly with this life. The outcome is an earthy and grounded sense of not needing to forgive or be forgiven. Of not needing to cultivate joy. Of not needing to pump positive thinking or fake our gratitude.
Because when we trust our lives and let our lives trust us, each of the natural and grounded versions of those feelings, versions rooted deep in the truth, effortlessly emerge.
