The Humiliation of Gratitude
Let’s be honest, our prevailing culture of non-stop busy-ness and mental stimulation seldom allows for a slow, full-bodied, receptive “yes” to the helpless vulnerability of raw gratitude. Instead, gratitude has generally become a “life-hack”, a “doing-to-get” exercise, where the discomfort of embodied, heart-based surrender is generally absent.
Well, so what? Why does it matter - this not being in full, open embrace to vulnerable gratitude? We’re busy, with lists of important things to do. And besides, slowing down to make space and feel the icky vulnerability of gratitude would get in the way of precious phone scrolling time, where we get to literally lower our heads, hunch our necks and shoulders, and numb out of irl-life altogether - all for the fleeting and addictive dopamine hit of feeling externally validated.
I’m guessing though, that as you’re on this list, you have beyond a subtle sense that there’s more to you and your life than the paltry emotional-energetic ping-pong of screen-time, way, way more to you and your life than you feel safe admitting to in “polite” society.
I’m guessing that you’re on this list because you want to feel safe, supported - and when necessary, guided - in your journey of embodying your unique expression of Mystery moving through you.
If you feel a friendly pinch of affirmation there, welcome! This list is definitely not for subscribers to the dogmatic materialism of polite society, where your wild and innate divinity is denied as “irrational” and “unscientific”. I mean, they’re welcome to join - all are welcome, after all - but I’m pretty sure that sooner or later, they’ll find it distasteful, absurd and downright cancel-worthy.
Which is why I have so much appreciation for the unsubscribe/unfollow button, something that serves an important alchemical function for all concerned.
So to be clear, this list and everything else that I create and offer to the world has one fundamental purpose:
To open you up to the embodied gnosis that you and all humans - both as sinner and saint - the Earth, the cosmos and all phenomenal reality is not separate from the Divine; and the Divine is not separate from the human and from all Earthly, cosmic life.
This is the essence of almost all esoteric wisdom traditions, Goddess + Mystery cults, and earth-based, shamanic, animist and Indigenous ways.
An enforced forgetting of the macrocosm being in the microcosm, and vice versa is the modus operandi of monotheistic patriarchal, coloniser paradigms the world over.
There are many roads to this embodied re-membering of the true nature of the Divine Paradox that we are, and that is what I have spent the last 15ish years of my life exploring and learning, and in recent years teaching, mentoring and guiding folks towards. From this space, my work has more specifically coalesced into the ontology - which is to say the (embodied) beingness - of soul decolonisation and the subsequent courage to live our unique truth through the freedom of making our own soul-aligned meanings, and exercising the dignity of our own sovereign choices.
(This (bio)diversity is paradoxically what governs the health of true community- as Nature will testify. Not an unquestioning, soul-destroying conformity to GMO dogma and propaganda from an external authority - thanks, but no thanks, patriarchy. My soul came here to express her own meaning(s)).
So - if you were under any misperceptions that my work is suitable for the authoritarian mandates of old paradigm materialist science’s polite society, then you’ll probably want to hit the proverbial unsubscribe button now.
From a dualistic perspective, if you’re a fan of Richard Dawkins, you won’t be digging my “everything is alive and ensouled, we are all the play-dance of Divinity experiencing Herself” approach.
From a non-dual perspective, Richard Dawkins and his divinity-soul-spirit denial is also part of the vast Divine play of opposites that is the Goddess- wheel of Samsara, so if you jive with that, you’re in the right place.
Both/and. Yes please.
Richard Dawkins is a good segue back to the intended subject of this essay, namely, Grace.
I would hazard that grumpy Dawkins would snort with derision at the use of the word Grace beyond a nice name for a girl.
And the very fact that he is able to have that opinion, write and talk about it, make a living from it, is proof of the existence of Grace - that unconditionally loving, receptively alive spaciousness that allows us humans to play in this earthly realm of duality in whatever manner we choose, in our ignorance and our wisdom.
So to be clear, the absence of Grace is the censorious oppression of systems founded on the monoculture of either/or - the supremacy of only One Way. This is the tap-root of patriarchy and its grim effluence of colonialism.
The most efficient and meaningful way to invoke the transformational current of Grace into our lives is through a full-bodied "Yes" to the humiliation of true Gratitude and the raw discomfort of Grief.
Wait, what? Humiliation of Gratitude?
Correct.
Indulge me briefly while I nerd out on the roots of the word humiliation, which come from the Latin origins of humilis, or humble, which has literal earthy roots back to the word humus, or earth, soil, ground - this dating hack even further to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots of the word dghem, meaning “earth”, from which words such as chthonic, human, humble and humiliate - among others - arose.
For me, humiliation, that horribly painful experience - akin to the feeling of shame but fundamentally different - comes and bitch-slaps us when we’ve repeatedly ignored truly opening up to the vulnerability of gratitude.
These days, we all talk up a big, showy game when it comes to gratitude.
A beautiful sunset - so grateful! Let’s take a photo and post it immediately while talking about gratitude. Which is all fine and dandy but we’re robbing ourselves of the true pleasure-pain aliveness of an undefended heart - which is the most direct way to access the in-flow of Grace. It usually takes days to fully integrate such an experience, so any posting + sharing would be done with a completely different frequency + intention.
Granted, it’s not easy to rest in the humiliation of true gratitude.
Even if we’re seemingly the ones responsible for the exertion of effort and action in order to make a thing happen, to truly open up to gratitude is the acknowledgment that the dynamic flow of life moving through us is not us, not ours - in the sense of the small, unintegrated ego-self who exists in the madness of grasping and aversion. If we can, even just for a moment, move out of identifying with that part of us, we enter a field of exquisitely uncomfortable and humbling wonder.
This can take a minute. It can’t be hurried and rushed through.
When we begin to touch it, we can know it as the embodied understanding that little me, with all my labels and identities, is not “doing” anything. Much like i am not consciously breathing but am being breathed through - what i am seemingly doing is being done through me.
The extent to which i can get out of my own way, and surrender to the embodied presence of doing from this larger place of being, surrender to the truth that i am simply an instrument of something vast and mysterious, that is paradoxically also not separate from me, is the extent that i make space for Grace to flow in and through me.
(This is direct experience of the macrocosm being in the microcosm. This is also how creative inspiration and the muse works through us).
If I’m not overly attached to my achievements and accolades, this is humbling. And if I am, the arrival at this place is humiliating.
And when i get out of my own way - however briefly - through accepting the invitation of this opening, Grace flows in with a loving sigh of “Finally!”
Recently, I was brought to this place of complete surrender through the humiliating nakedness of apparent “defeat” that once upon a time would have sent me spiralling into old, wounded trauma responses, of “I am bad and wrong” and its particular army of soul-sucking orks.
Mercifully, being with - and not identifying with - that very same trauma response in my body allowed me to commune with the experience and what it needed from me.
It became clear that I needed to acknowledge that something way bigger than me was breathing through me; and that this apparent humiliation and defeat was an invitation to surrender to the fertile, subterranean, yin or negative space, so that Grace, in all Her living, loving dynamism could flow through me.
And then, full bodied, wonder-filled Gratitude for the horrid experience(s), and more in-flow of Grace.
In all honesty, this was indistinguishable from a transformative, non-dual psychedelic experience without actually ingesting a psychedelic.
Is this not why we’re here? To allow the Grace of Divinity to experience HerSelf through our divine-human bodies as we are cracked open and kiss the earth? To enter the space from where all of our doing, feeling and experiencing is being breathed through us from this field of being?
The more I step into this place and absolve myself from both victory and defeat, the more clearly I receive Grace-filled inspiration and intuition.
And thrillingly, all the things that my little ego feels so afraid of because of potential failure and rejection, can slowly be approached as gentle invitations into humiliating gratitude through which the current of Grace can expand into Life.
So - I invite you to consider all the places in your life that feel broken. When you feel well rested and have eaten a nourishing, grounding meal go and be there awhile, with gentle, open curiosity and compassion, free of agenda.