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Gratitude Doesn’t Have To Be Hard Work – It Can Just Be

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To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kindness that stands behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude. — Albert Schweitzer

Here we are in the holiday season, a time of year which – for  many people celebrating many different holidays – involves some exchanging or giving of gifts.  And, that means saying, “thank you,” and hopefully meaning it.  Saying thank you for a gift isn’t so difficult — well, it can be for some people; I’ve had to give more than one child a talking-to about how important it is to say thank you for a present received, even if it isn’t the one you had in mind.   But really meaning that thank you, and being openly grateful for all of the other gifts we receive that don’t come in box with a ribbon, those can be more of a challenge sometimes.

Deep down, I think that most people know that life is a gift.  Opening your eyes in the morning is something for which to feel gratitude.  Having loved ones, even when they are a little annoying, is a blessing.  Clean(ish) air to breath, safe water to drink, enough food on the table, shelter to live in, and adequate medical care are not things to take for granted and so many people do not have them.  I like to think we know we should feel thankful for fulfillment of our basic needs.  Yet, maybe we don’t always remember to express that gratitude – to get it out of the back of our minds and into our actions.

Beyond basic needs, most of exist, in some way, in positions of privilege which are a gift.  Different people experience different privilege, which can be based on age, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, occupation, country/area of residence, family connections, religious status, political affiliation, educational status, appearance, and so on.  Sometimes we may feel a certain guilt about our privileged status (because it often is a result of how/when/where we were born and the opportunities thus presented to us and not to others), which may stand in the way of being able to really express gratitude for the possibilities that it offers.

There are also all the things that those around us do, on a daily basis, to care for and support us.  It could be picking up the groceries, making dinner every night, cleaning the toilet, a hand on the small of the back, opening a door, adding paper to the printer, filling the cups on the water cooler, bringing candy for the bowl on the counter, folding the yoga blankets neatly, and so much more.  It’s easy enough to overlook things like this when someone does them regularly, because the person begins to fade into the background and the benefit becomes an expectation, making us perhaps more likely to be annoyed by non-performance than we are grateful for performance.

Even the troubles of our lives are something that deserve gratitude.  How can we know happiness without sorrow?  What would help us to grow and develop as beings if there were  no adversity?  How can self-confidence really be cultivated with nothing to overcome?  It’s not necessarily something that we think of – saying “thanks” for the bad things – and yet…

So, yeah, there is a whole lot to be grateful for – all of it, actually.  It’s a bit difficult to imagine how we could adequately begin to express thankfulness for all of it.  But, perhaps it is possible.  We can begin by being more mindful.  Really paying attention to the full experience in any given moment would go a long way.  This would help us to not just see the things that are hard or disappointing in every minute of life (my head hurts), but also the part that is fine or good or great in every moment (my toe feels fine!).

Such awareness of the things for which we should be grateful opens up the opportunity to express that gratitude.  Perhaps sometimes that involves saying thank you to someone you don’t usually thank, or doing something nice for him/her.  But expressing gratitude doesn’t have to be about saying thanks for a specific gift we have been given.  It can also be in our every action.  Working at the soup kitchen, dropping off clothes at goodwill, volunteering time for the community animal shelter, donating to a charity, all of these can be acts of thanks for the many privileges we have been given.  Even slicing an onion with awareness we can be thinking, “This is a beautiful onion that is making my eyes water.  I am so glad to have this onion and these eyes.”  That sense of wonder and gratitude is then going to be translated into the simple act of cutting the onion.  A yoga practice, a hymn sung, a garden planted, a floor vacuumed – done with a whole heart and with a sense of thankfulness, whether or not that is directed toward any specific  being, is gratitude in action.

Considered in this way, showing gratitude is not just about something “extra” we have to do (though we should still keep volunteering and donating and giving to others), it becomes an aspect of everything that we do already.  Eating a peanut butter sandwich or brushing teeth can become an act of thanks.  How easy is that?  Our whole being can be an act of gratitude.

But, teach your kids to say “thank you” anyway.  And thank you for reading this blog post!

You are Awareness

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In my yoga class today, the wonderful Micki quoted from Ramana Maharishi to start and end the class.  I found the quote very moving and have been contemplating it (between some stressful work tasks) today.  So, I thought I would share…

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self. ~ From Be As You Are: The Teachings of  Ramana Maharishi

What does this quote mean?  Many people think that meditating or doing yoga is about attaining a state of awareness.   Awareness then becomes a goal, a state of being that we work and effort toward.  Ramana Maharishi tells us here that this is a faulty and limiting way of thinking about awareness.  Awareness is our natural state of being.  It is only because we have limited ourselves (through what we learn as we grow up) that we do not experience this awareness.  If we can let go of these limits, awareness is there.  We don’t have to “do” something to reach it; we have to stop “doing” something.

So, what is it that we need to let go of?  I think, and this seems correspondent with the teachings of R.M., that what we need to let go of is our tendency to evaluate/categorize/separate/individualize.  When we are tiny babies, we experience the self only in the sense of being the self.  As we grow and learn the expectations of the culture, we start to assign labels to the self.  We go beyond the “I am” to the “I am a woman,”  “I am smart,”  “I am fat,” and so on.  In doing this, we also create the false dichotomy between self and other, “I am not you.”  Now, here is where it gets fun.

One of my favorite communication theorists is Gregory Bateson.  Bateson (and others) make the argument that, in Westernized thought, we tend toward dichotomy in our understandings.  This means we think in terms of opposition (as a nice example, consider how few words we have for the states between too opposites – if it is not dark nor light, it is?  – if one is not tall nor short, one is?  – if one is not fat nor thin, one is? – if the food is not great nor horrible, it is?).  We do this in our understanding of self as well.  What is not self is other.  What is other is not self.  And, we tend to think of the skin as the boundary line for self and other (anything in is me… anything out is not).  Small children, before they learn this dichotomy, do not see the skin as the boundary of self.  A toddler is not disturbed at the notion of drooling into his cup and then drinking it, but an adult would be (you can think of all the other examples of this…. I won’t disgust you by writing them here).  This bifurcation of self and other causes us to see our own experiences as “my successes,” “my failures,” “my problems,” rather than understanding the fully systemic nature of being.

Ok, I’m going to depart from Ramana Maharishi here (because there is a lot to be said about his ideas – much of which I only loosely grasp – and I’m too “pragmatic” to be able to fully embrace the theoretical idea that reality and suffering only exist in the mind and that the only reality is the self… when I start to go there, I want to curl up in a ball in the corner)  and talk about what all of this means to me, rather than in terms of his particular teaching.

  • I need to stop continually evaluating myself – I am.  I am.  I do not need to label myself as good or bad or smart or stupid or thin or fat.  I need to just be as I am.  This is particularly good news and a difficult task for me, because I am a constant self-critic.  Even after hearing this beautiful quote and thinking how right it was, I found myself thinking (during yoga) – “boy, I am a crappy yogi… I am never going to do Pincha Mayurasana, I should give up now.”  How nice, very yogic of me, huh?  Let go… Let go. I am not the body. I am not the body. I am. But, this doesn’t mean that I get to just selfishly ignore everyone else to be whatever I want, because of the next point.
  • I am other, other is me, there is no division.  This is a way of thinking and not a physical state, because clearly the things that happen to the physical bodies of each of us do not happen to all of us (though RM would say they do not happen to any of us, really, but our experience of them is what it is, so let’s just go with that for now).  But, if I stop thinking about myself as something separate from others, individual, distinct, it pushes me to more carefully and fully appreciate and consider the world community, and to realize that what is good for others is good for me (because it’s not “someone else’s problem”).  When people all over the U.S. have adequate healthcare, this is good for me as part of the universal community.  So, why would I not want that?  If I treat others with disrespect, I disrespect myself.  Why would I want to do that?  When I help others, I should not do so as a way of being proud of myself (“Look at me, I donated money and I built a house for someone in poverty.”).  I should do so in the understanding that I am the other, and the other is me, and I act to help the self, which is both of us.  It is not something to feel egotistical and proud about; it is just a responsible part of being the universal self.

Whew. There is certainly much more that can be said about this, and I haven’t even been able to fully explain what I’m thinking here, but it’s a nice start.  I am. You are.

LBA