Meditation and Thanksgiving

I grew up in a family that was never particularly spiritual, and so it followed that Thanksgiving meals were never preceded by the traditional giving of thanks. This year, for the first time, though, in all the 25 Thanksgivings I've ever had, I gave thanks for the first time. There was nothing special about this though. It's not like I became a more grateful person by uttering a few words of thanks; I didn't feel touched or moved by my words; there was no transformative shift in my presence, being, or soul. But after all, why would I expect such a thing from mere concatenations of tongue, palate, lips, and breath?

A couple years ago in India I was introduced to meditation. The word for "meditation" in Tibetan in fact means habituation. If meditation is to be transformative as it is intended to be, it simply means to train the mind - habituating it to more positive forms of thinking while weeding out negative forms. Of all the meditation exercises I was led through in the 10 days that I spent at a retreat center in Bodh Gaya, there was one particular "loving-kindness" meditation that had a profound affect on me.

My mind felt calm and still that night - receptive to my environment as if I could open the door to welcome the universe. Venerable Lobsang Namgyal led us in the meditation. He had me meditating about my mother. How she spent so much time and energy in me from my very conception, how painstaking it was to carry me in her womb day in and day out, for months, causing her all sorts of discomfort. I let this sink in to my mind. I thought about the pain and sacrifice in giving birth to me, in clothing, feeding, and caring for me, care which any infant would surely die without. Her unconditional patience. Her unconditional love. I let this sink in to my mind. And then a very visceral memory came to me: of my mother rubbing vapor-rub on my back and chest as a child, under the incandescent glow of my night-stand lamp when I was sick and coughing in the middle of the night. It was this act of compassion of my mother, which I always thought to be medically useless but comforting nonetheless, which I always took for granted, that I suddenly (decades after the fact) felt profound gratitude for. Suddenly, and very unexpectedly, tears streamed like rivers down my face. They were tears of great sorrow and pain at first - the great shame I felt towards myself after realizing how incredibly selfish I have lived life. A feeling that I never at all deserved any of my mother's love, but she offered it anyway, time and again. And because I was witness to such an amazing act of love, I suddenly was overcome with immense joy, to finally open my eyes and see such a thing as true loving-kindness and compassion. To finally realize what the word "love" was intended to mean, and the immense sense of joy that followed. It felt as if a hundred hardened walls inside me had burst apart and let in a flood of compassion. And I felt different, so very different...as if a totally different person. It was the most liberating thing I've ever felt in my life. I continued the meditation exercise, thinking of how everyone and everything is like a mother to me, from the farmers who care for the food, to the sun giving such brilliance and life to this planet and its delicate ecosystem, to everyone and everything in this universe. I felt so energized with compassion in that moment that I instantly forgave those in my life whom I never thought possible to forgive; and I felt sudden pangs of pain for those whom I had unashamedly hurt, whom I never thought possible to feel sympathy for. I felt such a sudden and strong urge to genuinely apologize to them (which I ended up doing as soon as I finished retreat).

While Thanksgiving, or giving thanks, can never be a substitute for meditation, it does remind me though that there are many things and people that we all-too-often take for granted, that command deep gratitude from all of us. A passing "thank you" in the end remains mere words, and at most an intellectual tip of the hat towards those that sustain us. Meditation, on the other hand, is necessary to bring our essential core in line with living gratitude that goes so deep that even your cells are humbled with joy. But such an event, like the one I describe above, is but a mere moment stacked up against years and years of negative habituation. It may take a lifetime of meditation and there'll still be plenty of work for me to do to habituate myself to positive forms of thinking, and weeding out negative forms.