Sekhem: Manifestation, Healing, and Spiritual Integration

Gratitude and the Larger View

A participant spoke about having lived with her grandparents until she was seven. She had wished she could have stayed with her parents, yet she also knew that life with them would probably have been more difficult. Her parents were more troubled than her grandparents, so the very thing she had longed for might have caused her more pain. She asked how to deal with the sadness, anger and frustration around this.

The first thing is gratitude. The key with trauma and painful experience is to recognize that it has also been a lesson. Everything is an experience, and part of your purpose is to feel it fully. As an infinite being, you do not experience loneliness. To know loneliness, you cut yourself off from the universe and experience separation. Then you can also come here to experience oneness.

When you really understand this, gratitude begins to arise. It is like going to your fiftieth high school reunion and meeting the person you once had a huge crush on. At the time, not ending up together may have been heartbreaking. You felt rejected. Fifty years later, you may look back and feel deeply grateful that it did not work out.

As you grow older, you can look back at these experiences without taking them quite so seriously. This comes close to enlightenment because you begin to see the much bigger picture. It is still working with the mind, but it is a more awakened mind, one that does not become completely focused on every small thing that causes upset.

Without that larger view, old triggers can sometimes guide the whole course of a life.