Yoga Pathways

I have a story for you today. It’s the story of when I first became conscious of the power of gratitude. WAIT!  Please don’t stop reading just because the mere mention of the word has instantly put you in a terrible mood!I I DO understand, I can be sensitive to language myself.  I promise not to use the word glibly, or tell you to start a gratitude journal (you can wait until tomorrow for that). I confess, I am a fan of gratitude journals. I’m a yoga teacher.

I can very clearly remember the first time I felt consciously grateful.  Here’s the story. 

It was 1996, and I was a young and carefree traveller backpacking in Asia, and I was robbed in a club in Vietnam called “Apocalypse Now’. The irony of the name escaped me at the time.  I was relieved of my money belt,  which contained US$1000 dollars cash, £1000 in travellers cheques, and my passport. I was instantly penniless and marooned. That’s not the moment when I felt gratitude.  The gratitude began amidst the waves of fear and shame that immediately followed.  It began when the traveling world rallied to my support. People helped me.  I was fed.  I was sheltered and someone even took me to the British Embassy.  The necessary money was borrowed to fly me home on a temporary passport.

So I made a new plan.  It wasn’t nearly as nice as the old plan, the one where I was heading to India to hang out in the Himalayas.  Instead, I went home to apply for a new passport to let me return to Seoul in South Korea where I had worked to earn the money to go travelling with. I needed to earn back all the money I now owed to my saviours in the traveling world. I returned home feeling as if my life was over.

Back in London, I took my next steps on my gratitude journey. Two of my closest friends had just been pitched into situations much less fortunate than my own.  I had only lost my worldly possessions. My friends were both in hospital, lost in deep spiritual and physical jungles of pain and suffering.  I hadn’t known. It seems inconceivable today, but remember, this was in 1996. We were still in the Dark Ages before mobile phones and email and Facebook.

My friend Wendy, (the most stable person you could ever hope to meet) was in a psychiatric unit under one-to-one surveillance after having drunk bleach and jumped in front of a train.  I knew things were bad because she made no sense whatsoever when we spoke, and I even beat her at Scrabble.  That has never happened before or since. By the way, I’m actually good at Scrabble, it’s just that she’s better at almost everything.

My friend Caroline, on the other hand, had been in a high-speed car accident, at absolutely no fault of her own, and was in a wheelchair paralysed from the neck down with a gloomy prognosis.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that in some perverse way a higher power was at work here.  I was back in London for a reason.  I was here to be with my friends. I was here to share their trials. I was here to spend time with then,  to love them, to try to make them laugh, and to be part of a hugely transformational moment in their lives that would be part of the glue that would keep us friends forever. I was here to assess the meaning of loss.

Happily, their stories have good endings. Caroline beat the odds and, after years of surgery and physio, regained all mobility. Wendy recovered and resolved in future to treat trains as things to travel inside rather than jump under. She remains one of the most stable, resilient beautiful human beings that I know. 

What happened to Caroline reminded me that sometimes we are simply unlucky – in the space of a second, a random chance can turn your life completely upside down.

And what happened to Wendy made me realise that even the most robust, stable, emotionally resilient amongst us have our breaking point  – none of us are infallible.

Their experiences showed me we should be grateful for every day we wake up, and then be even more grateful if we can climb out of bed.

The gratitude I found for Wendy and Caroline still being alive when I got back to London, and for me being able to be there for them, helped me enormously.  It helped me to find purpose for my 6-week stay in London while I waited for my new passport to return to Korea.  It helped me to be useful to people more in need than I.  It helped to remind me that no matter what’s happening to you, it can nearly always be worse.  It helped me to appreciate all the days that I was home and it helped me feel as if there was some higher purpose directing the way.

So that’s the story of the first moment in my life where I became consciously grateful.