Gratitude is a Fierce Surrender by Karin Carlson

gratitude is fierce surrender


a Fierce Surrender



I did not say this was easy.

It is hard to let go of conditions, blame, coping skills, excuses, competition, entitlement, and control. It is terrifying to let those go and accept, instead and suddenly, that the path has to do with self and reality. It goes right down the line of our sternum to our soft spots. Self-responsibility, self-mastery, self-soothing, self-determination, self-motivation, self-control, self-expression, self-knowing. Not selfishness — but letting the self break open and seeing what is there.

To linger, attentively, gratefully, in any moment will strip away our arrogance. Those things for which we may be grateful — children, family, safety, food, the age we are and the health we have — show themselves for what they are: conditions, frailties, current expressions of constant change. Little breaths of grace for which we have no real authorship and no end control. They are given us, but might not have been. They are not ours. Those things for which we might be grateful but aren’t swell and burgeon in their mystery: wheeling snow, the way a highway is empty on a holiday morning and you are on it. The sunlight, the bare trees, the deafening quiet. A moment, alone.


the Teachings


I taught Anjayeasana. The deep version, where it is hard to breath, where your heart pounds hard enough to drown you. You try to lift that heart, up. The word, Anjayeasana, I forgot to say out loud as I taught, means offering. Not perfect, not pretty, but a ripped heart, the hard to take breath, offered.

It is hard, at times, to be grateful. To practice self-compassion, self-determination, self-motivation, self-knowing means surrendering without knowing where it goes. To willingly slide into vulnerability and uncertainty. To take reality, whole, and swallow.





Which may be the final meaning of reverence.

What I have found isn’t answer. I want to tell you how beautiful, how quiet, a highway gone empty can be. The reverence, the ground, holds. Your heart breaks, snow falls. The sacred is this way; humane, snotty, captivated by snow and highways and the smell of an infant’s thin and many veined skin. Her breath, I tell you, is sweet. My breath is sharp with longing. We are creatures who breathe, until we can’t.


Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 10.46.17Karin Carlson (formerly Karin Burke) was an anthropologist, a barmaid, and a journalist before she bottomed out. Yoga saved her; she figures it might help others. Karin’s teaching in jails, crisis centers, and church basements became a non-profit in 2007. Based in Minneapolis, MN, discover and practice with Karin online in her Collections for Gather Yoga or at

Photos by Karin Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

