Gratitude Practices
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Gratitude Practices
When we are grateful we become suddenly beautiful
The biological tilt is toward noticing what’s wrong. On the savannah, this is what kept us alive. At the end of the day, do you remember the ten things that went fine, or the one thing that went wrong? And yet, to counter this tendency, we must exercise our gratitude muscles. What went right? One of my mentors is a man who has, as much as anyone I’ve ever met, put everything on the line to defend the sacred. After spending time with him for many years, I observed that whenever someone asked him how he was doing, he responded: Gratefully well. I realized this at a moment in my life where I could not honestly say I was grateful for every experience I was having, but I noticed there was a teaching in it. If words are always calling things to us—they are—he was calling gratitude and well-being each time he said this. How do most of us answer this question?
Ugh...
Alright.
Hanging in there.
A gratitude practice is the practice of focusing on what we are grateful for. Our friend Solar Law reminds us, When the heart is focused on gratitude, it stills the chaos of the mind. The folks at HeartMath have measured this, and it is confirmed physiologically by what we know from the Polyvagal Theory. To practice gratitude, we don’t necessarily need to already feel grateful. Sometimes the best time to practice gratitude is when we don’t feel grateful, because the practice itself reminds us…
What are some things we might feel grateful for? A body, air to breathe, food, clothing, shelter, wildflowers, the Sun, the Moon, stars, water, friends, electric light, blankets, art, our parents, children, companions, the breath, health (should we have it), silence, our voices, beauty, our lives, this moment, difficulty (it helps us grow), a cup of coffee, a kind word, teachers of all kinds, our ancestors, colors, crafts, our senses, being able to walk (should we be so fortunate), being able to quiet our minds (should we be so able), our lineage, having faces, smiles, being able to hear (should we be so able), or see (should we be so able), having enough (should we be so fortunate), love, forgiveness, second chances (should we receive them), and the possibility of growth and change. Just a few things that come to mind. Make a list. Write down all the things that you are grateful for in this moment. Make a practice of enumerating these things. At the end of the day, intentionally bring your attention to this. This practice of creating a Gratitude Journal can change your life, by changing your habits of what you focus on.
John Stokes and the Tracking Project, together with The Tree of Peace Society, the Six Nations Indian Museum, and the Native Self-Sufficiency Center have published a slim volume called The Thanksgiving Address: Greeting to the Natural World. It costs five dollars, and it has been printed in eleven languages. Buy it and keep it in your pocket or your backpack. From their website:
These traditional Native American words of thanksgiving come from the people of the Six Nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora— also known as the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee, who live in upstate New York, Wisconsin and Canada. Spoken as a spiritual address to the powers of the natural world, these words are used to open gatherings in order to bring the minds of the people together as one and align the gathered minds with Nature. The roots of these words reach back thousands of years to the very origins of the Haudenosaunee as a people.
Every gathering of the Haudenosaunee people began with this gratitude practice. And now our minds are One.
Some other simple gratitude related practices:
At dinner, or before bed, share out loud or review in your mind all the things from your day that you are grateful for.
Share with those you love the things about them that you are grateful for.
Learn to attend to the feeling of gratitude in your heart and in your body: to cultivate it. We'll talk about this more in other places, but Dr. David Mars in his film on Healthy Relationships talks about creating an atmosphere of love. Creating an atmosphere. We have to change the weather inside of ourselves. Does that make sense to you? We have to actively cultivate these energies of coherence, love, gratitude, and care. In buddhist practice, the word boddhichitta is the yearning to awaken for the benefit of all beings. As John explains in the video above, when we do this, our physiological systems become coherent. This is Turning on the Connection System. This is Heartfulness. It is revealed by a mystery in the Hawaiian language. In Hawaiian, the word malama means "to care for." Malamalama is enlightenment.
Related Practices:
Related to The Thanksgiving Address, Tracking as Metativity, Heartfulness, Smile, Smile Inwardly, Self-Compassion, Turning on the Connection System, Becoming a Real Human Being, Study the Pattern Language of Nature, Moon Phases, Star Gaze, Stand Outside in a Storm, Watch the Sunrise, and many others. Related to The Science of Safety (Polyvagal Theory), our film about Heartfulness, and our film An Unfinished Conversation about Race.Photography: Stein Egil Liland | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.