Gratitude: Recognizing The Blessings Of Life

Gratitude is our natural response to the blessings of life. We are meant for joy, and with practice, we can open to the wonder of life. The more we experience this truth, the more gratitude can spontaneously arise.

Transcript

Can begin by finding a comfortable way to sit,

Sweeping the awareness through the body,

Letting it rest in any place where you still experience tension,

Breathing into that space,

Feeling it soften,

Release,

Bringing your attention to your heart center,

Allowing a few relaxed breaths to enter the heart center,

Aware of the gentle rhythm of the breath,

The way it can help to slow things down,

A sense of ease,

The way the breath can calm and center the heart,

Aware of the state of your heart right now and ascending into whatever might give rise for you to a sense of gratitude.

You can scan through your heart,

Get in touch for you.

What is a sense of giftedness,

Something freely given to you,

Some goodness,

Some blessing that you feel right now with your paper and your pen,

If you have one,

You can write whatever comes to mind.

And to help you,

You can start by whispering softly to yourself,

I am grateful for and see what arises in the mind and try it a few times just softly whispering to yourself,

I am grateful for and then write down what comes to mind that person,

That experience,

Quality,

Or place,

Whatever it is,

I am grateful for and see if you can collect a few of these for yourself.

With a few of these in mind,

You can pause over them and,

And just notice as you bring them to mind the quality of your heart,

What happens inside your heart when you remember these things,

When you pause with them,

You can pick one from those that you found one thing that really lights you up,

Just let it shine brightly within you.

So that radiate that love and thankfulness and the blessing that's there.

The delight in the gratitude without you having to do anything,

Allow it to be as big as it wants to be and just follow it wherever it goes.

I'd sense a smile coming across your face,

The the doors and the windows of your heart open and let this light just shine through you.

Now as you pair to come back,

Don't feel that you have to put this thing away.

This object of gratitude,

See whether you can get it to sit with you during this talk,

Take a seat beside you.

And when you're ready,

You can open your eyes.

If you wish you can turn your camera on to so it's nice to see each other during the talk.

If you have to.

For me,

When I first started to meditate,

I started to experiment with this mindfulness that I was learning.

And at different moments with some curiosity,

I would just ask myself a simple question of what's going on in my heart and my mind right now.

And I remember doing this,

In particular,

At the very beginning of the day.

And if this is maybe the same for you too,

When,

When you're just starting to become conscious again,

And your brain is booting up again,

And you're starting to remember who you are and where you are.

And in that drowsiness,

I found that my brain was scanning for things that I needed to worry about that day.

And that through the mindfulness,

I just I recognize this is actually a very long standing practice of mine.

And finally,

I would,

You know,

Sort of be coming out of sleep,

And then I would kind of try to set the stage for my day,

Feeling that I really couldn't go out into the world without a full complement of things to worry about.

And if I couldn't find any,

I would keep looking,

Because I knew they must be there somewhere.

It could be,

You know,

Big things,

Or it could be just little things I had to remember during the day.

I can remember sometimes if I would suddenly realize like,

Oh,

I think I had had a disagreement,

Or an argument with my wife,

I would try to try to remember like,

Well,

Who was at fault?

And do I need to be mad at her still like I was trying to,

You know,

Kind of reorient myself almost as if I had stopped reading a book at the end of the prior day.

And now I was picking up the book,

And I want to come back to the exact place that I was that without somehow this protective coding of,

You know,

All of these worries and concerns that I would be kind of lost in the world.

And you know,

One of the wonderful things about mindfulness is it has this ability of uncovering these patterns of thought,

These habitual patterns of thought,

And allowing you to say,

This is crazy.

It's like,

Why am I doing this?

That there's a feeling like,

Look,

If there's something really important,

I'm going to remember it,

Or it's going to be on a list of things to do or whatever.

It's this is completely unnecessary.

And what's more is that it creates this mind state that then carries us so so then the question becomes,

Well,

Okay,

Well,

What are my other options?

Do I need to start the day with a list of worries?

And better?

Can I start the day with a sense of what and then what?

And the neuroscientists teach us that,

You know,

This is not our all our fault,

If we discussed before,

It's,

You know,

Part of our evolutionary heritage,

This survival mechanism that we're hyper alert and sensitive to danger,

This negativity bias that we all have.

But the same science tells us that,

You know,

The brain is being reformed every day by our habits of thought.

So the question then is,

Well,

Do we care to make a choice about what's what the content is?

And all you need to do that is intention.

There's habit and inertia,

And then there's intention.

And this is like a wonderful revelation that that default is up to you,

Really.

Or as the Buddha says,

In the last of the Four Noble Truths,

There actually is a path that leads to the end of suffering.

It's like we all know experience suffering in life.

But guess what?

I mean,

There is actually a path that that leads out of suffering.

So if so,

Then one question is,

If you have to pick,

Right,

Why not set gratitude as the default for the brain?

And you know,

That startup activity,

Even at the beginning of the day,

Importantly,

And I don't think this is wishful thinking.

I don't think this is just sort of creating some fake reality or just wearing this kind of awkward smile.

It's not being a Pollyanna.

And I this came to mind,

And I actually looked it up on Wikipedia.

So Pollyanna,

If you're familiar with this term,

Was a 1913 children's book by the same name.

And it was about this orphan girl who had to go live with a very stern and unfeeling and but she remained just always buoyant.

And the dictionary says that Pollyanna syndrome refers to an excessively or blindly optimistic person,

Which I love.

So I would suggest that it's not that,

That it's actually a realistic assessment of what life offers in any moment,

You can pause to just think of the things that are freely given to us to all of us,

Whether,

You know,

It's electric lights or drinkable water,

Or what have you,

Or you can just think of all of those other things,

Starting with the sunrise in the morning,

Or the miracle of opening your eyes and seeing or hearing or tasting or smelling the billions of years of evolution that have brought us these amazing experiences.

Thich Nhat Hanh,

The Vietnamese,

Recently deceased monk,

Commented,

When I have a toothache,

I discover that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing.

I had to have a toothache in order to be enlightened to know that not having one is wonderful.

My non toothache is peace is joy.

But when I do not have a toothache,

I did not seem to be happy.

Therefore,

I look deeply in the present moment and see that I have a non toothache that can make me very happy already.

So in some way,

You know,

Far from this being a kind of a fake put on emotion,

It can be actually the reality of our experience,

As Desmond Tutu said,

We are meant to live in joy,

Or as Rumi said,

Find the real world,

Give it endlessly away,

Grow rich,

Flinging gold to all who ask,

Live at the empty heart of paradox,

I'll dance there with you cheek to cheek.

So we look for reminders of this abundance.

Monks and nuns starting their day offer thanks traditionally for the requisites,

Starting by saying Thanksgiving for life,

Shelter,

Medicine,

Meister Eckhart,

The 14th century mystic said,

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you,

It will be enough,

Or for me,

The gift of life itself.

And as I grow older,

You know,

I have this experience of knowing people my age who have died,

Even people I've been close to,

And everyone is just a reminder of that this day that I have is,

Is a gift.

It's not to be taken for granted.

There in many religious traditions,

The practice of encouraging meditation on death,

Which sounds terrible,

But really,

It's a meant to awaken this sense in all of us that we just have these few precious days to walk this earth,

We can fill them with gratitude for what we have.

And you know,

You might feel like you're kind of too far along in this process to get there.

Or that the patterns are too deep.

And I have a little story to tell you.

It comes from James Barrett,

The meditation teacher,

One of the founding meditation teachers out at Spirit Rock in California.

And his visit to his 89 year old mother,

Who and he,

He showed her an article he had just written on the benefits of gratitude.

And she responded,

I know I'm very fortunate.

But I'm used to first seeing what's going wrong.

So he suggested to her an experiment,

Which was when something was bothering her,

And she would say this is annoying,

Then she would have to follow that by saying,

And my life is very blessed.

She liked this idea.

But she didn't think she was going to remember to do it.

So he was there for a few days.

So he would remind her consistently that every time she complained about something,

He would wait till she was done and then say,

And she would have to say,

And my life is very blessed.

And she started to get into it.

So he left and then he started to call her regularly and asked her,

You know,

How is it going?

She said,

I'm still doing it.

I'm still I'm doing it.

Just like you said,

I'm doing it.

And it began to have this revolutionary effect on her to the point where his sister when he went to visit her some weeks later,

Called him on the phone and said,

What did you do to mom?

And then he writes,

And this is actually from a book called Awakening Joy.

I'll put this link also.

He said,

Seven months after my visit,

My mother sent me a card for my birthday.

As is our family tradition,

It contained a poem she wrote for the occasion.

Even though she had started losing her sight during those months,

The effects of the gratitude practice were still evident.

Here is an excerpt from the poem.

90 is just fine with me.

I no longer rant where the world is heading and my exclusive job to save awakening to the happier ever been thoughts that cause the worries.

Rhythm,

As you bring experience again to to foot is easy.

This is your best or your highest self reaching into that that most genuine true self and how good that feels.

So offering some final words of thanks,

The room.