Gratitude, Joy, and Intuition – Rev. Linda Jackson
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
This week, we’ll explore Guidepost 4, cultivating a practice of gratitude for sustainable joy, regardless of circumstances. And Guidepost 5, trusting and honing intuition as a crucial tool for decision-making and authentic living. Join us this Sunday to continue our exploration of The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown.
SUMMARY
In this transcript, Rev. Linda Jackson discusses the topics of gratitude, joy, and intuition as part of a two-month series on the book “The Gifts of Imperfection” by Brene Brown. She emphasizes the importance of practicing gratitude and cultivating joy in everyday life, as well as the role of intuition in making authentic and fulfilling choices. Rev. Jackson also mentions the workshop on releasing trauma from the body and the concept of co-regulation. She concludes with a prayer affirming the willingness to embrace uncertainty and expand one’s container for good.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Linda Jackson (00:03):
Thank the band one more time. How blessed we are. I mean, really it just doesn’t get any better than this. I’m jumping way ahead in my talk, but there’s a workshop today about releasing trauma from the body and part of the idea is co-regulation. And it occurred to me that what we do when we come together here is we co-regulate. So anyway, I am Reverend Linda Jackson and I use she her pronouns. And we are in a two month series on the book by Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, and our series is Being Resilient. We’ve been covering things like worthiness, fear, vulnerability, and the shame cycle, and developing what she calls shame resilience. And three of the gifts that she says come from being willing to be imperfect are courage, compassion, and connection. And her invitation is that we are living and loving with our whole hearts, our whole lives.
Not that sort of – what I want you to see of me – way of presenting myself. But really being present to you and allowing you to know me so that I can really feel when you love me, that it’s me that you love and not that artificial front that I’ve put up. And in this process we are learning to love despite the risks of the risk and uncertainty, and I’m having trouble getting my, Hmm. Did it go Alright. All right. My talk is on gratitude, joy, and intuition. And these are the fourth and the fifth of her guideposts. I showed this the last time I spoke that this is available on brene brown.com. There’s lots of resources there. And this is a list of all of the guideposts that are covered in her book. And on the left side, it’s all about what we’re letting go of.
(02:22):
And on the right side, it’s what we’re cultivating. So the ones that we’ve covered so far are letting go of what people think to cultivate authenticity, letting go of perfectionism to cultivate self-compassion. Reverend Darryl spoke last week, letting go of numbing and powerlessness to cultivate a resilient spirit. And today I’m covering letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark to cultivate gratitude and joy and letting go of the need for certainty, cultivating intuition and trusting faith. So it’s interesting because as you hear the different speakers speak, you hear all these concepts keep weaving throughout all of the guideposts. So each guidepost contains the other information as well. And it’s really a big process of letting go, right? Letting go of all of that stuff that gets in the way of us being who we really are and loving ourselves in the process. And so I digress for just a moment, as I often do when I get a microphone in my hands, my mentor Reverend Dr.
(03:39):
Kathy Hearn, had me go through a process to create a sacred covenant around my ministry, who I’m being, how I’m being, what I’m bringing to the world. And it took us a while. We went, we had monthly meetings, we went through several months of different parts and pieces of this process. But the gist of it is that I would find my life of service and what that meant. And so what came up for me was the word freedom. My life of service is to reveal God as freedom. And the idea there is that this word will sort of formulate itself in my being and somehow bless the people that I’m working with greater later.
(06:42):
And as soon as I said yes to letting go, man, it was just a whirl. And I’m still in it. I mean, we just closed last week. And so here we are in this whirlwind of what my mentor has said, sounds like an accelerated experience, but it felt like flow. It was divinely orchestrated. I don’t know how many people I know who’ve been looking for properties and not found any. And all of a sudden I’m just in this vortex and it’s happening not to be too woo, but that’s who I am. So because I am me, I had to choose a second quote for my higher power that something within that guides you, that supports you. And so we’ve been in this accelerated experience with this house and is sort of like, wow, I can’t believe this is happening. And we suddenly came upon this very unpleasant discovery in the backyard.
(07:55):
And if you live in Chicago, rats can be a thing. And I’ve lived here for 40 years and I’ve experienced rats to various degrees, but this is not acceptable. And immediately I’m contracting and in fear and like, oh my God, what are we going to do? How are we going to take care of this? It’s going to cost a fortune and oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But because we do this work, I noticed what was happening and I turned to the God within. I checked in with myself and I thought, if this was really in flow, if this really felt like this divinely orchestrated experience, then why am I so quick to want to go to fear, to want to go to, oh my God, it’s horrifying. What are we going to do? So I did my work, and that day my son called me and someone at work had offered him extra truckload of the very supplies that we were wanting to use to clear out the backyard, and he was only going to be there for those two days.
(09:05):
And it just so happened like if we had not noticed what we noticed, when we noticed it, put our attention on it, decided to focus on that. In that timing, we might not have gotten that truckload of supplies. So my flow was restored actually. The flow was always there. My agreement with my awareness of flow was what was renewed. And it all requires awareness and being willing to do our inner work, which is the basis for what Brene describes in all of the guideposts. So my guideposts today, I’m doing four and five and guidepost four, letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark and cultivating gratitude and joy. Now, she says that gratitude is the anecdote to scarcity and fear, and that sometimes we’re so afraid of the dark or the rats in the yard or whatever it is that we don’t allow ourselves to enjoy the light.
(10:12):
And they spoke about it in the reading. Krista Red, this idea of foreboding joy, and I’ll mention a little bit more about that in a minute, but how easy it would be for me to go into scarcity around this house experience. And it reminds me of this idea from Gay and Katie Hendricks of the upper limit. When things are going well, when we’re expanding our container for good, when we’re experiencing more good at a higher vibration than what we’re accustomed to, that we sort of reach a limit for how much we can handle. And that we have a tendency to whoosh, bring ourselves back down. Anybody, anybody. Things are good and it’s too good.
(10:58):
So we pull ourselves back to that familiar level. And one thing that Gay and Katie Hendricks suggest is that there are grounding practices that you can do so that when you’re in that expanded vibration of good, you breathe, you go for walks, you integrate, you allow yourself to embody the goodness and to get used to feeling a greater degree of good in your life so that you don’t have to shrink back to that other familiar level. So our anxiety and fear shows up as scarcity, thinking what she calls foreboding joy, the fear that if we let ourselves feel joy, we will invite disaster. This is good stuff.
(11:57):
She says, we think to ourselves, I’m not going to allow myself to feel this joy because I know it won’t last. Acknowledging how grateful I am is an invitation for disaster. It might not be this obvious, it might be a little more subtle in your mind, but this is the gist of it. I’d rather not be joyful than have to wait for the other shoe to drop. And in the reading that Krista shared, it’s this idea that when you’re feeling joy, there’s a vulnerability that comes with it that we’re not accustomed to. And when we can’t tolerate that level of vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding and we sort of deny ourselves that ability to have joy. Anybody else got that? What about the starving children thing? I was literally raised with somebody else would need that. Food was like, talk about scarcity. If you don’t do it, if you don’t eat it all, if you don’t take it all, you’re going to lose it. What if there’s enough? What if there’s always enough off?
(13:12):
And Renee Brown says that she always thought that joyful people were grateful people because joy lends itself to gratitude. But it’s the other way around. They practice gratitude and they cultivate joy and they live a more joyful life. So sometimes we’re missing joy because we’re looking for some extraordinary experience. But joy comes in the ordinary. And I love that it’s those moments that you have with a friend where you’re experiencing connection. It’s that moment of seeing something beautiful in the nature that’s joy. It doesn’t need to be something extraordinary. And in our culture, aren’t so many of us out there looking for the extraordinary and then we miss the joy.
(14:13):
So through her research, and that’s one of the things that I love about Brene Brown, she’s a scientist. She does research, but she is so aware of her own quirky nature and shares it so openly and really looks at things through the lens of science, but is willing to consider spirituality as a way to get grounded to move through life. So in her research, she discovered three powerful patterns of joy and gratitude. In this one without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful, actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. Every single person that called themselves joyful, practiced gratitude. That’s something.
(15:17):
Another thing that emerged was that both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices by these folks who say they lived joyful lives and they are bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us. And the third pattern that emerged is they were equipped to point out the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness as a human condition, a human emotion that’s connected to circumstances. So happiness is dependent on what’s going on out here. And joy is a spiritual way of engaging with the world that is directly related to practicing gratitude. How simple? Why aren’t we all just practicing gratitude all the time?
(16:16):
But the important thing to notice here is that it is a practice. It is a practice. It’s not just something that happens and it’s not an idea or something that we think about, something we have to actually put into practice. So we have to cultivate joy and gratitude. And there are spiritual practices and there are gratitude practices specifically that will lead us to joy. And she suggests these keeping gratitude journals, doing daily gratitude meditations or prayers, creating gratitude, art, and the old affirmations, I am grateful for whatever it’s so joy comes in ordinary moments. And sometimes we miss it because we’re looking for the extraordinary. But practicing gratitude for ordinary everyday things lifts us into joy. Gratitude promotes a perspective of abundance and sufficiency. We often are doing gratitude work when we’re talking about abundance. And she says that not only do grateful people have more positive outlook on life, they also have fewer symptoms of physical disease and they have better coping strategies. I mean, what are doing? Why aren’t we all just practicing gratitude daily? So gratitude, enjoy, increase our resilience, which is an essential component of this wholehearted living and now guide post five, letting go of the need for certainty and cultivating intuition and trusting faith.
(18:15):
Now, this one kind of goes against our cultural norms. We tend to prioritize logic and rational thinking over intuition. And this can lead us to sort of dismiss or downplay our intuition. How many of you have heard that follow your head and not your heart? Right? I was told that over and over again when I was young. What’s wrong with my heart? What about the wisdom in my heart, right? And Brene Brown says, our fear of the unknown and our fear of being wrong, and boy, that one is like rings the bells for me. Our fear of the unknown and our fear of being wrong create most of our conflict and anxiety. So we override our intuition because of fear and vulnerability. We go for this perceived safety like staying in my place instead of buying a new place. Our reluctance to rely on intuition could also be from negative past experiences or trauma. It diminishes our trust. If we have a bad experience or trauma, we can sort of not trust ourselves. How did I miss those cues? My intuition must not be right, not going to do that again. And that’s that fear of being wrong.
(20:02):
But Brene Brown describes intuition as the intersection of our cognitive and emotional processes. She doesn’t separate them. They’re not two separate things. It’s an intersection. We have an internal sense of knowing without the need for conscious reasoning.
(20:24):
So, in this quote, intuition is not a single way of knowing. It’s our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith, and reason. And again, I’m going to reference Kathleen Hendricks. They have a concept that they call the full body. Yes. And this is where you check in with the head, the heart, and the gut. So it’s not a full body. Yes, they say it’s a hell no. And you can listen a big yes feels like the way you feel when you’re experiencing love and connection. That’s what a yes feels like. And a big no feels like never doing that again.
(21:30):
And she calls anything in between a little. No, it’s still a no. We need to listen for that big yes that and comes in all different ways in our knowingness, right? So Brene says, we need both faith and reason to make meaning in an uncertain world intuitive decision-making according to Brene leads to more authentic and fulfilling choices because it’s aligned with our values and our previous experiences and our instincts. So when we listen to our intuition, we are making more fulfilling choices. And it is a powerful tool for navigating uncertainty and providing insights that we might not get through rational analysis alone.
(22:24):
And she says to say that I’m going to engage wholeheartedly in my life requires believing without seeing. So this whole topic, this two month series requires that we’re practicing faith, intuition, believing without seeing. So how do we do this? Not knowing or uncertainty often causes fear and anxiety. So we practice cultivating faith and intuition by getting still and quiet to hear your inner wisdom however it comes. It could come through as a, I resonate with this, or it could come through as a, I need more information. It’s not always just an, oh, I’ve got this. Sometimes it’s like, oh, I better get a little more information on this. That’s still your intuition. And she recommends getting inspiration and she lists a number of books and a couple of quotes that she’s shared. I’m going to share with you this Anne Lamont quote. The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.
(23:36):
Interesting, huh? So when we think we’re certain about something, that’s the opposite of having faith because we feel like we have to have this intellectual certainty. And she shares this quote by theologian Richard Rohr. He was talking about fundamentalism and extremism and how religion often is that certainty. He says, my scientist friends have come up with things like principles of uncertainty and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories, but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure resolution and clarity while thinking that we are people of faith. How strange that the very word faith has come to mean its exact opposite, right? So we’re talking about faith as believing in the unseen, not in having to follow a certain set of dogma, right?
(24:45):
And another inspiration that Brene offers, and I’m sorry Connie, I’m a few minutes long I know offers this quote from Paulo Coello from the Alchemist. Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life where the histories of all people are connected and we are able to know everything because it’s all written there. That sounds to me like tapping into universal mind, how we think of the infinite, how we think of God, the one mind. And we are all inlets and outlets for its expression. So if we can tap into that and we can know, we tell our practitioner students who are just taking their final exams, the mind that wrote the test is the mind that takes the test.
(25:37):
And joy and gratitude are spiritual practices bound to a belief in human connection. And we’ve learned that trauma and past experiences directly impact our ability to rely on our intuition, to listen to our bodies. And what these guideposts are offering from Brene are really support for our emotional and physical regulation. So I’m just going to say a word about the workshop this afternoon, this trauma release exercise workshop that Alice is presenting. It’s based on the adaptive responses of our nervous system. And David Pelli developed this process and it’s based on polyvagal theory. And he says, we are a united species. We are not about self-regulation, we are about co-regulation. And mammals are functionally defined by their need to co-regulate with one another. And we are mammals. Once we define ourselves as an organism whose survival is dependent on opportunities to successfully co-regulate, then we have moved into the life space of others. I mean, this is deep stuff folks. So we’re talking about oneness, right? And this takes us beyond culture, beyond race, beyond neighborhoods, beyond religion. And we’re talking about doing our own work in service of the collective. So before I pray, I’m just going to invite you to do a little bit of inner looking. So if you’re comfortable closing your eyes, getting connected in whatever way you connect yourself
(27:48):
And see if there’s an area of life where you have discomfort with uncertainty, and just allow something to rise up. And let’s lean into that uncertainty. What if you can let go of needing to be in control? You can let go of needing to know the answers, lean into the uncertainty, letting go, and moving into the expansion of not knowing, feeling the opening. And if you can’t quite get there, that’s okay. Just take a breath. You could try saying, I’m willing to be uncertain. I’m willing to let go of the fear. I am willing to be a little more vulnerable. And as this expands, you could begin to move into even being grateful for the uncertainty, grateful for the uncertainty, expanding us into new areas of life, being alive, experiencing life newly, and let us practice gratitude, cultivating gratitude for that uncertainty. I like to draw on a past experience of gratitude, an experience of love and joy where I felt that high vibration. Bring that to mind and draw on that experience. Wrap that vibration, wrap that love, that joy around this uncertainty. Expand your upper limit.
(30:20):
And in this inner space where we are connected with the infinite intelligence, the unlimited potential, the generative creative nature of all life, I just affirm for each of us that we are expanding our container for good, that we are releasing the fear of uncertainty, that we are letting go of the need for certainty. Releasing scarcity, fear of the dark. That we are saying yes to joy, yes to living in freedom. Yes to moving through life based on intuition and faith, following the flow, following our guidance. And we are saying yes to co-regulating, creating the experiences of felt experiences of our oneness. When we do our work within ourselves, it is not only for us, it is for the world. Let us say yes to this. Can I hear you say yes to this? I say yes to freedom, yes to joy, yes to faith, yes to expansion. Yes. To more and more good. I am grateful knowing it is done in God and that we are saying yes right now and lined up with it. I let it go. I let it be so and so. It is.