A Personal Experience of Gratitude by Gabe Hopp

As a wife and a mother of two young boys and small business owner and full time yogi and collector of hobbies and committed reader in two book clubs, my free time is very limited and precious. I am currently taking a 300-hour teacher training, as well as leading a 300-hour teacher training, and that eats up two full weekends of my month. I have a pretty non-traditional schedule, but my husband has a traditional schedule, as do my school-aged children, so weekends are really the ideal hang time for the whole fam.

Things will shift in December when one of my programs ends, but for now, we try to soak up as much family fun time in two weekends as ideally we would in four. Sometimes it’s not great and there’s whining and fighting and sadness. And sometimes, like this past weekend, it is pure magic and I am filled with gratitude. And that’s what I’m here to write about.

Our weekend included a trip to the LEGO store, since our youngest had a big success in his life, a delicious dinner out, a Creighton game, swimming lessons and we capped it off with a trip to the Holy Family Shrine outside of Gretna. We live in Ashland and so we pass the church every time we drive into Omaha. This past week, my youngest, Teddy, noticed it and asked if we could go sometime. So we did.

I was raised Catholic, so I have an inherent reverence for sacred spaces. Places and experiences intended to make you feel something typically work for me. I think it’s been so natural for me to adopt reverence for yoga because of this early life preparation. I was taught to appreciate silent spaces and sacred experiences and I have kept that with me, despite no longer having a religious affiliation.

If you haven’t been to the shrine, it’s really something to behold and I recommend it, regardless of your religious practices. The design, building and grounds are welcoming and feel like a space that you want to spend time in contemplation and awe and gratitude. At the end of our weekend of family fun, to be together in such a majestic space was moving and soothing for my soul.

With Thanksgiving upon us, the obvious yoga lesson is gratitude. But, in the Yoga Sutras, there isn’t really a “be grateful” directive. Rather, the suggestion from Patanjali is to practice contentment with whatever is. This lesson is the second of the niyamas, the inner observances of ethics and it’s called santosha. Rather than vacillating between high highs and low lows, practice the middle path of being generally pretty good. Part of contentment in any given moment, may include feelings of gratitude or even just an awareness of all of the gifts that you have in your life.

I have long-considered santosha to be the most important of the personal practices for me in my life. If I can TRY to be okay with things as they are (not always easy or comfortable), at least that gives me an active practice to do instead of wallowing or despairing. And, part of my personal contentment is to acknowledge when a really good weekend just hits.