What is Thanksgiving?
by Kelvin Chin
Life After Life Expert & Meditation Teacher
As many of you know, I like to reflect, and I have memories, old memories.
So what’s Thanksgiving NOT?
It’s not the mythical celebration of the Pilgrims thanking the Native Indians at some “we’re all One” dinner party with turkey and all the fixins’. The truth which our children should be taught is that when the local Indians helped the clueless Pilgrims survive their first winter, the Pilgrims later reciprocated by sending smallpox blankets to kill the Indians. Just like I remember the U.S. government doing again 200 years later to the Lakota (Sioux) and other Native tribes.
Yes. Genocide.
So that’s not Thanksgiving.
Then what is it?
I think for many of us it is a time to reflect and thank those who are in our lives.
To thank them and “love” them in the way Jesus taught us. Jesus the teacher, not Jesus the religious idol. To love them and “accept them for who they are, not who we wish they would be.” That’s what he taught love is.
Now…accepting their strengths is easy. But what about their weaknesses?
That means we see their shortcomings. And we accept them — not by abiding or supporting their cruelties let’s say, but instead — by seeing clearly those weaknesses yet, at the same time, not trying to change who that person is at their core. Because only they can do that. That’s acceptance of that person. Loving that person.
And loving that person in that sense of “acceptance without trying to change” him does not mean we need to keep him or her in our close orbit. It could mean we separate and move away figuratively or literally. Yet that still constitutes “love” in the way Jesus taught.
These nuances of love have been lost over the past 2,000 years. Perhaps it’s time we recalibrate our understanding of love so we can begin to “give” more fully. And be truly thankful in our gifts to each other of living life. Especially today...but every day.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life” and “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within Meditation and coaching others in their self-growth for 40 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.