Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost — challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for the true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks.
Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now — in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.
Parker Palmer
Welcome to Day Three of Live Your Life As a Sacred Pilgrimage
No matter how well someone prepares for a pilgrimage, there will be days when the journey holds more challenge than ease, more loss than gain, more grief than joy. Even on a sacred path, the pilgrim must pause in the face of bad weather, injury, or difficult news received on the trail. The same, we know, is true of our lives. As much as we want to delight in life’s gifts, there are times when our burdens make for a heavy load or we feel we’ve lost our way.
If life is a sacred pilgrimage, then you are a sacred traveler through it — deserving of care and tending, deserving of the opportunity to rest and reorient when weary. In what ways is slowing down an honoring of life? What do you need for nourishment and healing? How might gratefulness help you step back onto the path with greater capacity to carry life’s sorrows and joys side by side?
Become Present
Begin today’s practice by listening to Re-Centering in Times of Uncertainty, an 8-minute guided meditation with Alex Elle. Alex invites us to rest, allow space for healing, and return to our breath in times of difficulty. Br. David Steindl-Rast has often said, “it is enough to be grateful for the next breath.” When the path you’re traveling becomes unexpectedly difficult, you can begin by doing what a traveler on a long journey must do: stop, rest, and breathe.
Practice and Reflect
For today’s practice, we invite you to reflect and act in response to the invitations in Nadine Pinede’s poem, On Safety. Take a few minutes to read the poem; you might read it once silently and once aloud. If possible, print it out so that you can mark the words or phrases that resonate with you.
Once you’re familiar with the poem, explore the following prompts, which serve as reminders to rest and reorient when weary:
- Seek Shelter: What is one specific way that you “seek shelter” when life is difficult? Is there a form of shelter that you need right now? Time with a friend, time outdoors, time in meditation or prayer? Whether seeking nourishment or in acute need, take one action today to give your heart and spirit the shelter they deserve.
- Light a Honeycomb Candle: Choose one simple action, akin to the poet’s candle lighting, that you can do today and that helps you “heal your own sun.” Whatever you decide to do, spend a little time considering what the poet means by healing our own sun. What inner resources are available to you for healing?
- Braid a Rope of Gratitude: The last lines of the poem suggest that a bridge between sorrow and joy can be made by braiding a rope of gratitude. Living gratefully means learning to carry life’s sorrows alongside the joys, not relinquishing one for the other. If you were to create a braid of gratitude to bridge your sorrows and joys, what would constitute the three strands of the braid? You might consider experiences in your life when you’ve been able to feel sorrow and joy in the same moment. In what ways did gratefulness support or even allow this experience?
Share
We invite you to share your responses to any of the above prompts. In particular, how does gratefulness allow you to rest and reorient when weary?
Deepening Resources
- Enjoy and be inspired by community responses to one of our recent Daily Questions: How Does Grateful Living Help Me Navigate Life’s Ups and Downs?
- In this 4-Minute conversation between Br. David Steindl-Rast and Jack Kornfield, Facing Difficulty with Gratitude, Buddhist and beloved meditation teacher Jack Kornfield reminds us that we all carry “10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.” Br. David then offers the important distinction that, of course, we cannot be grateful for everything that happens to us, but we can be grateful for the opportunity that exists in every moment. Living gratefully is not about casting our losses and griefs in a falsely positive light. It’s not about saying, “it could have been worse.” Instead, it’s about building our spiritual musculature to be present to what is — all the joys and all the sorrows — and, with tenderness toward ourselves, finding our way forward.
Photo by Nik Demidko
Gratefulness allows me to see the whole picture instead of what just my perception provides. It opens up my heart to all the wonderful opportunities of life. It allows me to rest and admire the beauty of the world that surrounds me. This rest provides me with the energy to go on.
I too am behind but as others have said. In large part it is because this day’s topic is one I found difficult to work through. I continue to struggle to permit myself to rest and re-orient myself. Intellectually I recognize this is fundamental to a “balanced-life.” but it is something which I treat as negotiable rather than essential. In other words, rest is permissible only after x/y/x tasks/responsibilities are completed and that sorrows and joys embody eternal regrets. For the former — Life being life — this isn’t attainable. So instead of rest along the way I stubbornly persevered (mistakenly interpreting as resiliency) until a collapse then continue on. For the latter — my mantra has been guilt is the gift that never goes away- sorrows morph into regrets e.g. “should-haves” and joys morph into undeserved experiences/gifts/moments e.g. “not worthy-of”.
Ms. Elle’s meditation, Ms. Pinede’s poem, prompting questions and fellow traveler responses revealed how skewed my “life operating system” has been and needs to be re-oriented. So moving forward on my journey, I will allow myself to seek shelter, to nourish and heal through quiet-time/solitude/meditation/reading/journaling, listening to music, being out doors, swimming/yoga, and spending “real” time with my husband and friends. I will embrace the sorrows and joys of life – as the gifts they are – moments in time of connections to be experienced fully in the present and with gratitude. I will be thankful for the past challenges (internal and external) that life brought as I now realize that these were/are opportunities — it is truly all based on your perspective.
I am struggling to define my three strands of the braid of gratitude, a work in progress as they say… really not sure if this is even close but at moment thinking— my husband/soul mate, a twisted sense of humor/laughter (sounds irreverent I realize), and a genuine appreciation for all peoples/experiences that life shares with me.
I seek shelter in a small room in my home. There, I keep a few pictures of people and places that bring me joy, some books, a cozy seat and blanket, a salt lamp and my art supplies. This is my quiet haven, where I meditate and pray.
I heal my own sun by enjoying a warm bath or staring at a beautiful flower or petting my sweet dog.
The braid connecting my joy to sorrow has been so often used lately. As I watched my mother in her final hours, barely breathing while my nearly grown, daughter lay next to her, cuddling her and whispering a precious goodbye, I realized for sure, sorrow and joy can most definitely coexist. Also, as my husband battles a malignant brain tumor, his infectious smile and positive attitude keeps me hopeful and joyful. If we watch closely, I believe we will find joy and sorrow hand-in-hand more often than not.
Beautiful meditation I was able to share with my niece . The poem calls me back. I am a day behind our schedule here, yet so much has landed for me and is with me on my daily rounds…so I let go of my sense of timeline and rest into what is here now for me to see and feel.
Me too. Time is of no matter. I’m practicing being in this moment, even if others have already left. It’s worth it.
Firstly, I wrote out “On Safety” in longhand, mulling the words slowly, and then set them aside. Secondly, It was the day that I go to a drawing class for seniors and I looked forward to being with like-minded people, persevering in their comfort. As I drove to it, beautiful billowing, white clouds covered the richly blue sky above and I felt grateful to be outdoors. The drawing class, once a week, is my entrance back into social culture not only after the pandemic and covid-19, but a fall in which my left hip and femur were broken and I had laid flat on my back for 8 weeks in a nursing facility. Upon release, I had 6 months of therapy to walk again. During that time, the urge to draw subtly came to mind and finally, a reality. It has been a tremendous blessing. Thirdly, I came home, ate a light meal and upon recalling today’s assignment, “Rest and Reorient”, I went to bed. Breathe, and tomorrow I will recall healing my sun and what a good day it was.
As my pilgrimage for this day is almost over, I felt peace in the meditation by Alex Elle. The day began with anxiety. On this pilgrimage, it was good to walk, be with people, have success on some projects at work and the do an early evening walk in my town. My braid of gratitude is filled with relationships. Every thread of the braid is a person i treasure. My dream is to have the braid come alive.
My shelter is a familiar DVD, or Netflix series I’ve watched before, where I can feel part of a “family” in a world where folks treat each other kindly. I love beautiful videos to feel part of a magical world when I need escape from “hardness”/ unkindness/ ugliness.
I light a stick of vanilla incense as an “intentional action” to heal my own sun – which, to me, means a shift of focus. Instead of letting negatives fill my thoughts, I’m reminded to re-focus – remembering that “Life is what we are alive to” — to stop being alive to those who cause pain – and be alive to The Helpers and healers of the world – be they persons, animal companions, favorite books… the Uplifters.
The 3 strands of my Braid of Gratitude would be: Clouds, Trees, and Flying Birds (the most beautiful things in the world to me) – the things that most uplift my Heart on days that are filled with “more challenge than ease, more loss than gain, more grief than joy.”
Thank you for this timely and important reminder. My default mode is one of work and accomplishment; although I am retired, my default mode continues! The quote by Parker Palmer, the meditation by Alex Elle, and the poem by Nadine Pinede were all exquisite and compelling. I was drawn by their beauty, truth, and invitation. My shelter today was savoring each one with deep gratitude. Throughout the day I would circle back and recall a feeling, a tone, a pause. Abundance!
How do I access previous days?
Hi Janet,
If you just return to the emails you received on the previous days, you’ll be able to access each day’s practice. If you have any trouble, reach out to us directly at [email protected]. Thank you!
This is a perfect 3rd day of pilgrimage to Joy. I was suppose to have a procedure which would have given me more capability to be on my new path. However, that did not happen, and instead I will have a cat scan on the fifth and final day of our pilgrimage. We got thrown a curve ball as more symptoms have developed which must be attended to. The braid of gratitude will be made up of my thankfulness for an excellent doctor, a beautiful drive to the hospital, and my husband’s patience as he waited for me, a yummy salad which I devoured greedily, and my body for letting me know it needs attending to.
Gratefulness has been an essential element of resting and reorienting for me since the time of my husband’s terminal illness and death 14 years ago. Knowing he was dying I felt such gratitude for the love and time we had had over the decades, and knew how important it was to strengthen that awareness. I began every evening turning toward a beloved tree outside our bedroom and “telling “the tree what I had been grateful for during the day. Yes of course there had been pain and loss but I found myself intuitively nourishing awareness of gratitude . Fourteen years later I continue that practice every night– new tree but same practice! This lets me sleep in a way that helps me truly rest and renew
One way I think of shelter is “bunny slippers”, a term coined by my wise therapist to describe taking care of myself during hard times. Comfy slippers, a cup of favorite tea, smuggling under a blanket with a good book – whatever I feel I need for shelter. Nature is another shelter for me. I can rely on a walk in nature to shift my mindset from loneliness, sadness, upset, frustration or whatever to a more peaceful place. Being surrounded by creation, I find it hard to avoid being grateful for at least one small thing – and usually much more. Finally, meditation brings me to the peaceful, still center within me where I feel safe and know that in the moment, all is well.
What a beautiful poem. I find shelter in my family, my friends, and my dog . Each has “saved” me in the middle of a storm.
I chose music for my candle. I recently read the benefits of listening to 5-10 songs a day. I believe in the healing of silence, but music is the perfect salve for many occasions.
The strands of my braid are made up of my gratefulness journal, this website and community, and yoga. I have found they have made traversing this world much more joyful, and peaceful. Even in times of sorrow, stress, and chaos, I find I am stronger and equipped to continue on any path.