Happy November, yoga friends!
This month tends to bring with it a reminder to “be grateful”. But how do we suddenly just muster up a feeling so powerful as gratitude? As someone who has so much to be thankful for, I must admit that gratitude was, embarrassingly, an elusive emotion for me for a long time. I could easily concentrate my thoughts and feel thankful for, and to, a litany of people, things, etc., but as far as living in a state of gratitude… that was much harder. I encountered this reading by David Whyte on a trip to Yosemite this past spring, and I feel as though it jolted me awake in regards to living gratefully. I love it, I reference it often, and I hope you enjoy it – scroll down to the very bottom to read. Feel free to share it if it speaks to you.
Bring a Friend Week is Back!
For the week before Thanksgiving – November 17th through the 23rd – all Stone Turtle Yoga students with active packages or memberships are invited to participate in Bring a Friend to Yoga Week!
How it works:
- Bring your friends, family, and coworkers to any yoga class, at either studio, all week long
- Bring as many friends as you want to as many classes as you want
- Friends may be new to Stone Turtle Yoga OR may have previously attended STY classes – there is no restriction on who can attend as a friend!
We look forward to meeting your friends and family during this extra fun week of community.
Speaking of community, SAVE THE DATE for our Holiday Community Class and Potluck, Sunday, December 15th at 5:00pm! There will be a yoga class at our Grayling studio to benefit the AuSable Animal Shelter, followed by a potluck at Rolling Oak Brewery. More details to come.
Finally, here is David Whyte on Gratitude. Thank you all for being YOU. With so much love,
-Mariah and the STY crew
GRATITUDE
David Whyte
Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.
To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face in the mountains, of a son’s outline against the sky, is to be fully grateful without having to seek anyone or thing to thank. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.
Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.
