Some reflections on gratitude and love

Reblogging a post from Love’s Illusion a moment ago made me aware of how an attitude of gratitude opens my heart to deeper acceptance.  Finding that deeper connection to our sense of gratitude is something we can only do from our own soul.  If we are told to be grateful it often feels like a form of emotional abuse as we are not always in that mindset of acceptance and gratitude.  To me finding my own gratitude is about a revelation that comes after a lot of deeper, harder work at the end of a process where I may have had to suffer through. At the outcome I see things far differently.  Whereas before a sense of love and acceptance was obscured behind a gritty film of resentment or anger or struggle.

Ideally an attitude of gratitude enables us to open up our lungs and breath to fresh air, where as before we may have been holding on tightly as so much had not yet been aerated or processed.   Gratitude only opens once we see a wider vista before us and realise how seeing things from that perspective required an alteration of mindset contingent on other things occurring that we outside of our conscious control.  And often gratitude can be blocked by resistance towards something occurring that is requiring of us a letting go that we may never be fully prepared for. There are always a number of different perspectives we can see from, but to me the real wisdom of altered perspective rests upon me seeing things and understanding things I could not understand before rather than being forced or coerced by someone else to see them in a certain way which is why being told platitudes or fed philosophies from others isn’t really all that helpful and may even make things worse.

At any time we have the choice as to where we place our vision but we also carry deeper truths and knowing in our souls which we can tap into via a spontaneous arising of “ah ha” moments which often come unbidden opening up wells of feeling previously buried that clear the landscape.

For myself today I have been shedding a lot of tears.  I took Jasper out to the park after working most of the morning in the garden.  On our way home we passed past a property being auctioned.  There were a mass of cars and people everywhere.  I stood for a little while listening to the bids before moving on.  By the time I got to the car I was feeling so emotional.  I had a flashback to being about 7 years of age and standing on the lawn in front of our Endeavour Street house while my sister’s piano and other items were being auctioned.  It was a sad event as my mother sold my sister piano without her permission.  When the man came to take the piano, apparently I confronted him and told him it wasn’t his to take.  “That’s my sister’s piano!” I said.  This image and the associated feelings all came to me after I had driven past the auction and it made sense to me of how just two weeks earlier I had been shaking all over as I fronted into the auction for the town house a few suburbs away.

I then came home and put a call into my Mum which was so emotional as well.  Yesterday my sister had taken her to get a mobility walker and she hadn’t been shown much care by the person working at the place, at first they ignored her and then they didn’t give her the required help.  While she was relaying this to me I just had tears streaming down my face.  She then asked me where the contract was for the town house.  “I gave it to your solicitor last week, Mum” I said.  This made me even sadder.  “These patches the doctor has me on make me so confused”, she said.  I am aware that my mother is aging but I was also well aware of my Mum’s young history of emotional neglect too while the entire conversation was going on.  My heart went out to my mother in compassion at the same time as my heart was hurting from feeling deeply and so much certain themes that have carried through.  I was aware of a huge void opening up inside me and of the dark overcast day making my house feel just for an instant lonely and cold.  I was overcome with feelings that if I could just go forward into the new house I could leave the painful history behind me in some way and reach for more connection as I feel my Mum is going to need me more and more as she ages more.

I know these are all just feelings.  And I am not sure how a post that first started on gratitude is related to what I have just written, but on some level I am grateful to be able to open my heart to it all and feel, hard as that is at times.  The soul in me is alive and living and I see that more and more as life goes on.  There is always a lot more going on under the surface than is apparent at times, there are hidden depths to things and in some way with my strong Scorpio Neptune I feel this most particularly around my Mum’s Sun Mercury Saturn Scorpio energy.  I see how I am her evolution living on in time still revisiting so many issues that are both personal and ancestral.  I am grateful that my vision is wide enough to encompass this understanding.   At the base of it all is love and in some way love and gratitude seem to be so closely linked.  Its hard to feel grateful when we are not being loving and loved it is hard to be loving when we don’t feel grateful.  For today I am seeing how deeply these two are so deeply and intrinsically interconnected and how wonderful it feels to be in that open space where real connection is possible.