Gratitude and Reverence: How to Lead a Sacred, Soulful Life

Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. In The United States, today is Thanksgiving. It's a day that Americans pause and reflect about what they are thankful for. So we thought it would be appropriate to take a Jungian look at gratitude. We know there's a lot of science about a gratitude practice and how that can be helpful. It can help mental health resilience, physical health, even. So we'll just visit that science briefly, but then we want to, of course, bring a Jungian perspective to it. So Deb and I are gonna do our best to do that today. So I thought maybe I would share some of the lovely, beautiful things totally in keeping with our theme that that people have said about gratitude, as the moral memory of mankind, the memory of the heart, the queen of the virtues. I liked those little quotes because they had such a lovely feeling tone. And that is very important because gratitude is not about just doing routine social thanks for, you know, acknowledging something that we just do because we were taught to do that. And neither is it about tit for tat. You did this for me. You did me a favor, so now I have to do favor for you, and we need to make it reciprocal. And neither is it something that we do out of obligation that, you know, because I I owe you or I should. We are I hope in expressing gratitude, recognizing that we are part of the great round of giving and receiving. We're given all kinds of things. We receive them. We give back. And we're participating in the great dance of the cosmos in some way that we feel and know that we're part of something larger, and it comes from a sense of abundance. I can see your your face, Lisa. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I have to say that all the years that we've celebrated Thanksgiving as many of you have too, this year and doing this podcast totally got me. Yeah. You know, I was I was thinking, Deb, I think the reason I'm getting teary, and I I just I can't. I'm not gonna be able to not get teary. So I'm just gonna I'm just gonna own it. That's all to the good. Yeah. Is, you were talking about this sort of, like, social niceties, and I was thinking about how we teach kids to say please and thank you. And, you know, you you teach your kids to say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And, …