Forgiveness Practice (and some more of my story)

Maybe it's because I teach yoga and I'm a mother of small children, but when I am on social media, memes with affirmations and insights from gratitude journals are floating everywhere.

Keeping a gratitude journal is a way to help anyone feeling depressed. You cannot be grateful and depressed at the same time. I know this to be true. I have tried it.

Many years ago I lived in a mill village and worked in a factory where I had to report to a low-wage 10 hour shift at 6:30am five days a week, sometimes weekends. It was the best job that I could find in the area given my liberal arts degree and wisp of work experience in New York. It was the first time I had ever lived alone. I was in complete misery and completely stuck. Saddled with student loans, I was barely getting by while all around me the economy was booming and people my age were buying houses and boats. I had trouble making friends and making rent.

It was at the beginnings of my meditation practice, at the height of my martial arts practice, and at the point in my life where I was still figuring out how to live a good life. I knew a few things at that point but still did not have much skill in handling obstacles that I faced. This was about seven years before Facebook began and a time when emails were just beginning to be adopted by the business world. So in my disconnected misery one morning driving to work, I thought, what if I find three things I am grateful for right now. I still remember what they were.

1. I am driving a car that I love. 
2. Dawn is just breaking, and it is a beautiful sight particular to the foothills and lake that border the village where I live.
3. I have three friends who understand me, one close by, one I write to, and the other I can call anytime. 

I felt better immediately. I even smiled. Did it pull me out of the unhappiness? For some time that day, yes. For several months after that morning, every day, first thing, I thought of three things for which I am grateful. I slowly felt better about my situation, more hopeful. I slowly realized that I had a new navigation tool that would help me in my pursuit of a self-fulfilled life.

When I see gratitude journals and memes now, I am suspicious.  Is the part-time self administered therapy market taking away the substance of what practicing gratitude actually does? It's too easy to be inspired for a moment by someone's insight about gratitude and then scroll on to what all your friends did without you last night and all day today. Then another rabbit hole opens up because of an opinion piece and terrible news and how we want to just huddle in the world of cat antics, delicious recipes and taking meds. After a full day of screens, routines, and documenting your life on social media accounts, who has it in them to even remember to list three things they are thankful for?

What do we do about the problems we face and the problems in the world that we cannot escape? We can be grateful 1,000 times over and convince all of our friends and loved ones to keep a gratitude journal. Indeed, it helps us all to put our problems in perspective, and that can be a relief and is very reassuring. Absolutely. A gratitude practice is a boon that opens us to deeper experience of life.

But still, young black men are being shot point blank by policemen with no good reason. Elementary school kids know first hand what lockdown means. There is a mass of garbage floating in the ocean that is as big as the United States, and every minute 13 tons of trash is dumped into the ocean. We can be grateful to help ourselves feel better, but the world is going to shit, and we all know it. We are on a sinking ship, and most people using their power are either not clear on what to do about it or are in such denial that they are willing to sabotage the basic mechanism of government while devaluing life itself. It's heartbreaking, deeply disturbing, and to an immense degree we are powerless to the destruction that we are witnessing.

Life is made of struggle. There is no escape, no matter what we believe, hope, or wish. We all know this is true. Gratitude will only carry us so far. 

Pass the whiskey. 

While there is struggle, life also turns on the wheels of joy, happiness, and ease. Everything has a companion. Joy and grief. Sound and silence. Action and stillness. Nothing stands alone. None of us stands alone. Everything is in a dynamic. We are a dynamic. So, what is the companion to gratitude? What's the dynamic?

How about forgiveness? How about getting into the mess and finding your way through it and helping other people find their way through it? Forgiveness. Maybe in that place we can find the strength to live our lives with a realistic heart and a clear mind. And from this place we can better help others find the basics and the balance they need. Maybe a forgiveness and gratitude practice is what gets us to the ground that we can truly walk, where we can find our purpose and what we can do in times of difficulty, no matter how big or small. Maybe this forges a key that we can use to unlock the chains that bind us, whether they be passed to us from family and loved ones or are the very chains we created for ourselves.

Chelsey Tyler Wood Untitled Box Series 1, 2010

Recently, I started a forgiveness journal, and so far, I am able to rattle off five things each day. I'm finding the low hanging fruit though. As time goes on, it will be interesting to see how this will develop. If you are considering this, I suggest that you dig deep in yourself to find what really needs to be forgiven. Don't make it pretty. Even be basic about the journal itself. Write without all the doodling that could go with it, or if you doodle, then get real with it. Don't make it pretty. Keep the images in the weeds and out of the clouds. Go beyond the daily blunders that we all make. Go to the broken relationships, the addictions, the pain or chain of terrible events in which you played a part. Go to those places and forgive yourself like no one else ever has. Whenever you feel the urge to reach out, reach into yourself more for the forgiveness. And perhaps, once a week or even just once a season, forgive someone else. Want to try?

When I Stumbled Upon Mindfulness: A Story

In 1993, I moved to New York City from South Carolina. After graduating from college the spring before, I was considering a move to Asheville, but then a friend of mine decided to live in New York after a summer internship there. She returned for a visit wearing a baby doll dress and 70s thrift store boots telling us about thai food, sushi, and how beautiful Haitians are. With her new edge and obscure used books in hand, I watched her float out of my apartment to go back to the city, and I realized then that I needed to live in New York.

So, I got two jobs, saved up $2000, rented a Chevy Caprice, loaded it up with as much stuff as I possibly could along with two other people. They dropped me off at my friend's apartment in February, and I had never been there in my life. I'm from South Carolina, and at that point I had been to Atlanta a couple of times, to Florida, and to just outside Long Beach, CA for about two weeks. I had in my mind living a 60s renaissance of jazz clubs, bohemian life, berets, and poetry. I was going to be a poet in New York. That would be my job.


Needless to say, that lasted about a year and a half. During that time, I did go to jazz clubs and to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe where I read my poetry during open mic. I fell in deep, unrequited love with an architect, and worked temp jobs all over the city. I met Merce Cunningham without knowing who he was, but I did know I was being introduced to someone very important. I was in culture shock. I was overwhelmed by everything in the city all the time. I fell in love with the city and still love it now. I went to MoMA on the free nights and looked at a lot of the world's greatest artworks. I was broke and got my heart broken. I was in a stampede, got rejected resumes one too many times, fell on my butt every day in the two winters that I was there; I got lost and knew it was time to leave. I tried hanging in there anyway, but it got even worse. I had to leave.

In December of 1994, I was back at my mother's place in Tamassee, SC out in the woods. I had FAILED, and I had fallen one too many times. Right before I left the city, one day I could not get up from the couch where I was sitting. For a few panicked minutes, I could not move my legs. Once I did get up, the pain was excruciating, and I could barely walk. It took everything I had to walk into my room, which was not very far away. In my room in my mother's house everything I had envisioned for myself was gone along with being able to walk out my apartment and walk the streets of one of the greatest cities on earth. I had to start over, and I had to heal my hips. In my mind, it was like I was flailing on an open, stormy sea with no raft, and I had to do something.


While I was in the city, someone at one of my jobs invited me to the Shambhala Center, but I didn't go because I thought it might be a cult. Still, I was exposed to eastern thought. I picked up books by Alan Watts from the guys who sold used books on blankets on the sidewalks. I came home with a Taoist primer on meditation, yoga, and healthy living and began practicing yoga from that and meditation soon after.


I left South Carolina for New York with the intention of never going back, especially to the boonies of the upstate. But there I was where even if I told someone that I met Merce Cunningham, they wouldn't know who he was or would really care. There I was where people looked askance at the idea of a poetry reading or would cheekily suggest that I become a teacher. There I was returned to my mother sick, depleted, and broken, and it was obvious to anyone who looked at me. I refused to let anyone give me suggestions on what to do about my state. I was determined to find my own way because what I saw in many adult lives thus far was very little fulfillment let alone happiness. I knew how vulnerable I was, and that I could possibly be even more vulnerable to someone or to people who shared some sliver of a spiritual view with me. I knew that at this time I could only trust myself for guidance through this, and I knew that there was a way through.

Side note: Just in case you forgot or didn't know, in late 1994 the internet might have been mentioned amongst people in the know, but it was something out there. All computers at home were desktops with the latest ones that took the hard floppy disks. A modem was an actual phone connected to the computer, and like the internet, it was something only smart, rich people had.


I knew I needed to do something to settle the storms in my mind and taking in information from people was not the way to do it. So, I decided for two weeks to go without reading, music, or television, and I even limited my interactions with my mother and any visitors who came to her house. The people around me at the time were standing back anyway, so that was not too difficult. Plus, where I was, there were not very many people. In this two weeks, I meditated for the first time, and it was a candle meditation.

What happened? I found a flash of relief, a moment of clarity, and I knew it was something that was there the whole time. I just needed to learn how to recognize it. Just recently I discovered words for what I found. I found the moment between thought and action, whether that be word or action. I found that there is a place where there is always freedom to choose, and even when I get caught up in the whirl of my mind or in the course of events that result from acting or speaking, I can get back to this space between mind and doing. This place is mindfulness. I stumbled upon mindfulness, and that was what brought me home to myself and still does to this day.