by  Swami Nirmalanada

Yoga has no teachings on gratitude.  What yoga understands about the way your mind works, and the way that your mind and heart work together, is that you will very naturally experience a quality that we call gratitude when you receive something.  Gratitude suffuses mind and heart and body simultaneously.  It is called a bhav, which means it’s a quality that suffuses mind and heart and body simultaneously. That quality of gratitude very naturally arises when you receive something.  So, yoga doesn’t give teachings on gratitude; yoga gives teachings on how to receive.  Gratitude is a natural response, like a knee jerk reflex that arises spontaneously when you receive something that is deeply meaningful to you.  If you’re not feeling gratitude, then you’re not receiving something that has deep meaning to you.

Everybody has had the experience of opening a Christmas present that the giver was excited about giving to you, yet you opened it but it meant nothing to you.  How much gratitude did you experience?  You can see that they are waiting for your joy.  They are waiting for you to receive their great gift.  They are waiting for your gratitude.  All these go together.  Yet you’re not experiencing any.  Thus, everyone knows how to pretend to be grateful.  The key that triggers gratitude is receiving something that is deeply meaningful to you.  It has nothing to do with the size or the expense of what you are receiving; it has to do with whether it fits you, whether it is something that is meaningful TO YOU.  When you begin to explore what yoga offers you, which is your Self, this is the thing that is most meaningful to you.  It’s the loss of Self that is the most painful and it’s the finding of Self that is the greatest gift you can receive.  

Gratitude will naturally arise if you receive.  Therein lies the problem, because you see, you already know how to live with your guard up.   You know how to resist, you know how to withdraw, you know how to hide from others, you know how to hide from yourself.  You even know how to hide from God.  

It’s like going out in the rain with not just an umbrella but with a raincoat, a hood, rain boots and gloves, so you come back in and you didn’t even get wet.  You might consider that it was a successful trip to the market, but where’s the fun?  Here are the little kids stomping across the parking lot getting muddy up to their waists!  And you’re running in and out without getting a drop on you.

You can approach the Guru that way.  Then how much gratitude are you going to have?  Yoga’s teachings are about surrender. You can give up your self-defense mechanisms because what you’re defending against is your Self.  Yoga has lots and lots of teachings about how to melt, about how to dissolve your resistances, about how to give in, give over and, if necessary, even how to give up.   Sometimes life demands that of you.  Sometimes yoga demands that of you.  All of yoga’s teachings are ultimately about surrender and every Svaroopa® yoga class starts with that.  We teach you to surrender to the floor.  We walk you through toe by toe, body-part by body-part so that you begin cultivating the ‘letting go’.   It’s technically the art of surrender.  It is an art, and it’s a skill.  Even great artists still had to master the canvas and the paints or the musical instrument. There is skill involved in every art.  You have to take off your raincoat and put down your umbrella.  Opening is partial surrender. Surrender is 365-24/7 opening.
It is the Guru’s responsibility to make your Self accessible but it’s your responsibility to step into it.  When you experience the experience of your own Self, then very naturally you’ll feel gratitude.  Gratitude is such a glorious experience.  It’s ever expanding, as I’m finding out.  The longer I’m in the process of discovering what my Guru gave me, including before I physically met him, the more my gratitude just keeps growing.   

So what do you do with all that gratitude?  How do you express it?  How do you act on it?  Everybody makes a different decision in that regard.  In India the understanding is that gratitude will make you want to support the Guru who gave you that gift, so that the Guru can continue giving that gift, not only to you, but to others.  In America, such a tradition has not been so well established.  But the gratitude remains, so what do you do with it?