I recently read about something that resonated with me: the idea of conscious gratitude (thank you author Danielle LaPorte). I often speak of the benefit and power of practicing gratitude, especially in times of challenge and duress. However, simply giving thanks for everything in a general sense runs the risk of glossing over why (and whether) we are thankful, as well as what lessons we learned and/or benefits we reaped from it.
The term ‘spiritual bypass’ was coined in the 1980s by Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood. Spiritual bypassing occurs when we use spiritual practices to avoid facing unresolved issues, emotions, or situations. An example of this would be to say that because you like who you are today and where you are on your path, you must be thankful for all that has come before. At first glance this sounds perfectly okay, and it is in line with what any number of self-help books and articles might recommend, but what happens when we dig below the surface? What happens when we sit with our experience in mindful meditation and physical or emotional pain from a past event returns?
In our mindfulness practice we seek to rest our awareness in the present moment and experience all that arises with a sense of equanimity. We cultivate the ability to become comfortable with the uncomfortable; we build our inner strength and resilience to weather storms that arise within, be they physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. However, is weathering a storm the same as being grateful for it? Do we really need to give thanks for the lightning strike that cripples us, or do we instead use the tools of our practice to simply accept the strike and its effects? We learn many lessons from the challenges in our life, and we can certainly be grateful for those lessons, but we must also acknowledge and accept where they came from – glossing over a painful experience with a blanket ‘thank-you’ does not necessarily address the havoc it may have wrought upon us physically or emotionally, and that havoc might resurface again and again in different ways if we do not acknowledge the root cause.
The example of spiritual bypass I offered above – if I am content with where my path has taken me thus far, I must give thanks for all that brought me here – is one I have used myself, and it may be a familiar refrain for you as well. However, my practice has taught me that I do not need to be grateful for something to accept it as part of my experience. I do not believe that a loyal employee must give thanks to the employer who lays them off, just as I would never suggest that a shooting victim must give thanks for being shot. To me, this kind of giving thanks indiscriminately is practicing gratitude on auto-pilot, without any mindful awareness, disconnected from our intuition. That being said, even in the midst of challenge and suffering, there will always remain things in our life for which we can give thanks, including the teachings we uncovered through our suffering. This is conscious gratitude. We pay attention to our experience and use the tools of our practice to discern what we have lost, what we have gained, what we have learned; we acknowledge and accept all of it, the full catastrophe, as part of our experience, and then we decide what we are truly grateful for and we give thanks.