The Willingness to Remember Beauty & Love

"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is -Thank You- it will be enough."

-Meister Eckhart

There are few quotes that touch me as deeply as the previous one by Meister Eckhart. In many ways, it feels like in these simple words, we can find one of the most direct spiritual instructions to be found. But then, what would it mean to make “Thank you” our only prayer?

The word in itself may carry a beautiful symbolism, but whether you say; thank you, gracias, merci, obrigado, danke, धन्यवाद, or whichever word expresses this sentiment in your own language, the real prayer happens beyond its phonetic composition, the prayer is carried by the recognition of the Heart.

Now, for the sake of it, embark on a little moment with me. Wherever you are, if it's available to you, close your eyes and take a moment to notice your current inner state. Once you have a clear picture of what that is right now, open your eyes and keep reading.

Guess what? It’s time to close your eyes again! Well, not just yet, just read until the end of the paragraph… And what I want to invite you to do now, is to begin to internally utter whatever variation of the word “Thank you”, from the most intimate place available to you. To begin with, you can start connecting with a concrete feeling of gratitude, perhaps you want to say thank you for your family, for your home or the yummy chilaquiles you just had for breakfast. After you allow this recognition of what you are grateful for, now take away the object or reason for that gratitude, and just bask in the experience of an objectless heartfelt thank you, and stay there for as long as you want.

If you are feeling Meister Eckhart’s wisdom now, you might as well stop reading this words, as there is nothing else you need. But for the sake of it, I will continue sharing a bit more.

Perhaps some of you felt the power of thank you to its full extent, maybe not. But I would be ready to put some money into the fact that through this short practice something changed in you, something softened.

In Spanish the word used to express the feeling of gratitude gives us a powerful hint to why a heart felt thank you can change everything. The word “gracias”, refers to grace in its plurality of expressions. So every time we are saying thank you we are embarking on the most profound act of recognition and remembrance, we are fundamentally opening up to the background of stillness, to the eternal embrace of Love.

As we cultivate gratitude, we are priming ourselves for willingness, the willingness to remember beauty & love even in the ever painful and heartbreaking life happenings.

Gratitude as the Place of Intersection Between Life & Death

A few years ago, my mom got strangely sick out of the blue. From a “harmless swollen tonsil” things quickly escalated to “spending the night at the hospital with the chance of going into septic shock and dying”. Doctors like to keep it brutal, right?

The point is, without previous warning, my entire family and I were suddenly asked to face the possibility of my mother dying. But in all fairness, saying that this happened without a warning could never be truly accurate, as the only certainty any of us had right after birth, is that eventually, we will die. All of us know that we will not get to escape death, but still we get very good at escaping the thought of if. 

Well, now I was being asked to look at death’s face with a so far unknown closeness, and what came from this encounter went beyond the fear of death. What I arouse in me, was the heartbreaking truth that so far, I had not been grateful enough in life.

I was feeling bewildered by the thought of losing my mother, and I knew whether she got to stay or to leave, was in no way under my control, and there was acceptance in that. But as I reflected on the things that were under my control I came to realize that I had been failing at a fundamental one: appreciating her and experiencing and expressing gratitude every single day. Perhaps I was about to lose “something”, and it that moment it hit me how little conscious appreciation I had given to it/her throughout my life. 

As we take things for granted we feel so entitled to focus on the bad and annoying. But as the gift of death appears in our periphery, we wish with all our hearts that we had not focused on that, since in that biased lens of perception, we are killing love in life. Now, when it comes to gratitude, please understand that it doesn’t need to hold the opposite bias in which everything is “peachy”. When we allow our gratitude to move from the area of the concrete to the all encompassing, we experience that gratitude is strong enough to hold the conflicting experiences of being alive & navigating this human experience. In heartfelt gratitude, we move beyond duality.

If you allow it, nothing will quite awaken your gratitude as the certainty of death, and no practice will bring acceptance of death the way gratitude does. Hafiz explains this in the most exquisite way as he says:

“If this world

Was not held in God’s bucket

How could an ocean stand upside down

On it’s head and never lose a drop?

If your life was not contained in God’s cup

How could you be so brave and laugh,

Dance in the face of death?”

That grace that we praise as we say “gracias”, is God’s bucket, and it is what propels our life into Divine Remembrance, appreciation & Bliss.

Allow your prayer of gratitude to be the place of intersection between life & death, the place where you celebrate the beauty of the know and the unknown, the space where you reconcile the bliss & the pain. And dedicate this prayer to all of humanity.

Thank you, gracias, merci.