12.26.2025 Ending the Year With Gratitude   While the world has been focused on the December holiday season this month — the rush, the lists, the year-end buzziness — we here at Lion’s Roar find ourselves lingering in the spirit of Thanksgiving as the New Year approaches. Perhaps you’d like to join us? We remain in “Thanksgiving mode” not out of stubbornness, but because gratitude isn’t meant to end when the calendar page turns. It’s a practice, one the wisdom of Buddhism and mindfulness would have us carry through all the seasons, and all our days. So we wanted to write to you today from that place of gratitude. To pause and acknowledge what we’re thankful for, and share three teachings on gratitude in that same spirit.  We’re grateful for all our contributors — the voices of wisdom who share so skillfully and generously from their practice and understanding, week after week, across all the Buddhist traditions and in the language of secular mindfulness too. We’re grateful for our Resident Teachers thus far — Mary Stancavage, Karen Maezen Miller, and Pamela Ayo Yetunde — and the practitioners who gather online with us each week for meditation — proving that real community can form anywhere people commit to practice together, including online. And of course, we’re grateful for you. For your attention in a world that demands it constantly. For the time you spend with these teachings. For the compassion and wisdom you manifest through your practice, your relationships, and your communities. Together, we coexist in a circle of generosity and benefit. We offer teachings; you receive and practice with them. Your practice changes you, and through you, touches others. Your support allows us to continue offering, to reach more people, to make the benefit of the dharma available to, ultimately, all. So as this year draws to close, if you find yourself moved to support this work — or to deepen your support — we invite you to make a gift to Lion’s Roar. Now, your generosity will have twice the impact. A group of kindhearted and generous donors have created a Challenge Fund to inspire and match all gifts under $1,000 to Lion’s Roar until the end of the year, to help us meet our budget for 2025. Will you help us reach this goal? Your gift — whatever amount feels right — joins this circle of generosity and keeps these teachings flowing. And your gift today will have double the impact. Thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for your practice, your attention, your generosity. —Lilly Greenblatt, Rod Meade Sperry, and Andrea Miller, Senior Editors, Lion’s Roar Just to Be Alive Is Enough There is no greater gift than to be grateful for our lives, says the late Zen teacher Blanche Hartman, and gratitude leads naturally to generosity, because we want to share this gift with others. Not only is life a gift, and practice a gift, everything we have, without exception, has come to us through the kindness of others. Years ago Tara Tulku Rinpoche, a wonderful Vajrayana teacher, visited us at Green Gulch Farm, where I then lived. He taught us a traditional meditation to cultivate gratitude. He asked us to think of everything that we thought was ours and consider how it came to us. Our food, clothing, houses, books, tools, toys, health: anything we can think of comes to us through the kindness of others. Even something we have made with our own hands depends on the tools and materials we used to make it. And we, through the activities of our life, are also offering gifts to others. This dance of offering and receiving is going on continually. Gratitude and generosity generate each other. ADVERTISEMENT The Path of Gratitude The goal of Shin Buddhism’s central practice, nembutsu, is not to attain buddhahood for ourselves, says Jeff Wilson, but to express gratitude for all we have received. Shinran taught that we must give up attachment to our ego-laden efforts to become enlightened and relax back into the embrace of inconceivable wisdom and never-abandoning compassion. In this way, we are freed from our anxieties and pettiness. Our practice, then, stops being about attaining buddhahood for ourselves and instead becomes about expressing gratitude for all that we have received. This is a way of life that deep­ens as the years pass; as Shinran put it, “My joy grows even fuller, my gratitude and indebted­ness ever more compelling.” Buddhist practice is transformed into an act of pure expressiveness that puts our inner feelings into word and deed through the utterance of the nembutsu and other acts of gratitude. Healing Begins With Gratitude The late Joanna Macy on “the great open secret of gratitude.” The great open secret of gratitude is that it is not dependent on external circumstance. It’s like a setting or channel that we can switch to at any moment, no matter what’s going on around us. It helps us connect to our basic right to be here, like the breath does. It’s a stance of the soul. In systems theory, each part contains the whole. Gratitude is the kernel that can flower into everything we need to know. Thankfulness loosens the grip of the industrial growth society by contradicting its predominant message: that we are insufficient and inadequate. The forces of late capitalism continually tell us that we need more—more stuff, more money, more approval, more comfort, more entertainment. The dissatisfaction it breeds is profound. It infects people with a compulsion to acquire that delivers them into the cruel, humiliating bondage of debt. So gratitude is liberating.