Giving Thanks in the Real World

Every November, my inbox and social feeds flood with quaint reflections on gratitude. The newsletter for a business I follow tells its customers how much they mean to the owners and employees. A cousin waxes poetic about the value of family. A dear friend honors the first responders who saved her father's life when he had a heart attack earlier in the year. Another discusses the importance of ritual to mark the season, and the joy of gathering in communion.

This is not that post. Like many of us, I am aware that the origin of Thanksgiving was a gift of bounty that was reciprocated with destruction.

Now, I don't say this to cause us to devolve into self-flagellation or guilt. My reflection this year is about how we approach the duality inherent in this holiday and use that consciousness for good.

In 2011, I embarked on 200 hours of yoga teacher training. My cohort and I studied asana, or the postures and movements of yoga practice. We learned to give verbal cues that help people adapt and deepen their physical expression of yoga. We nerded out hard on anatomy and physiology. But the most profound part of the training, at least for me, was the philosophical journey.

Yoga is actually made up of eight aspects, or limbs, of which asana is only one. The other limbs are the yamas (ethical restraints), niyamas (ethical observances), pranyama (breath control), pratyahara (withdrawing the senses), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (liberation). The goal of yoga is that by working within these eight areas, a practitioner comes to know non-duality, or a state of oneness with all the universe.

We humans are wired toward connection and endlessly curious about the nature of reality. It's their opposites - disconnection and closed-mindedness - that create so many problems in the world. So this Thanksgiving, I invite each of us to consider the dualities inherent in our holiday, and meditate on how to bring those closer to wholeness. Even if it's as simple as considering where our Thanksgiving meals come from and what they cost at the same time that we hold gratitude for the bounty on our tables. In this way, we might bring consciousness to the ways we can affect change and become forces for good.