Gratitude and abundance: two sides of the same coin

November 5, 6:24 PMLA Religion & Spirituality ExaminerKurt Barstow

Previous Next

4 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the LA Religion & Spirituality Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

IAn eCard from Gratefulness.org

The simplest and most effective way of seeing how abundance is working in your life is through the practice of gratitude. Like meditation or prayer, this involves a shift in perspective that can radically transform your reality. I have not been going through the easiest of times economically in recent months and have had to go on food stamps as I am seeking employment. This new dependency started out as an occasion of dread and humiliation, an opportunity to reflect on life's disappointments and my failures. Looked at through the lens of gratefulness, however, it became something to receive with great thanks, thinking about the taxpayers I will never know who contributed to my sustenance, the massive bureaucracy and workers in place to keep the food stamps program running, and the politicians that passed legislation for this kind of thing in the first place. Besides that, of course, there is everything else involved in eating—the earth, the sun, the rain, the animals and/or vegetables that give their lives, the farmers, the factory workers, the truckers, the grocery stores, and the check-out person. All this and more is behind a simple meal that I prepare. And this is not even to mention, in terms of my current economic conditions, the assistance I have received from family and friends. From the point of view of gratitude, no matter what my passing feelings about my circumstances might be, I am always living in abundance and I am always living a life that is interconnected to everything else. It might be said that gratitude is the awareness of that interconnectedness and of the Universe's extraordinary ability always to provide.
 

I have found two resources for gratitude practice especially useful. The first is the book Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection (Stone Bridge Press, 2002) by Gregg Krech. Naikan means "looking inside." It is a simple process of self-reflection that was invented in the 1940s by Ishin Yoshimoto in order to make more widely available a more complex method of meditation and self-reflection known as mishirabe. The heart of Naikan is to be found in three questions:

            •What have I received from ______?
            •What have I given to ______?
            •What troubles and difficulties have I caused _______?

These questions can be posed of people, groups, institutions, life-forms, body parts, inanimate objects, and a period of time, among other things. Rather than deriving from mere sentimentalism or false humility, Naikan is a reality-based practice. It gets one out of one's head and emotions and into what really happened. To take the first question, for example, Krech discusses his wife: "My wife made me fresh-squeezed orange juice this morning. She washed my breakfast dishes. She gave me the watch I'm wearing. These are all simple, clear descriptions of reality. Her attitude or motivation does not change the fact that I benefited from her effort. Often we take such things for granted. We hurry through our day giving little attention to all the 'little' things we are receiving. But are these things really little? They only seem so because, while we are being supported, our attention is elsewhere. But when there is no hot water for a shower  or we lose our glasses, these little things grab our attention." Furthermore, when something really big goes wrong we forget the vast majority of things that are going right. The battery in my car may have died but the rent was paid, all of my internal organs are working perfectly, and there is food for dinner. To see only the dead battery is actually to be unrealistic. By means of a thorough and regular reflection on what we are given, however, our attention broadens to the larger reality that we are living.
 

The book by Gregg Krech

In the second question we are asked what we have given. It seems to almost always be the case that this list ends up being disappointingly short compared to that of what we have received. This only makes sense since we are but one individual and there is a whole world out there that conspires for our benefit and that includes, besides other people, nature, technology, commerce, and thousands of years of culture. Even if you're doing something as altruistic as heading up The Clinton Global Initiative, its hard to compete with the sun, oxygen, gravity, water, the internet, all the engineering and construction that goes into making a city, plane travel, the collections of business people and government officials that collaborate on projects, all the people that work for your institution, and the ideas and theories that made any of it possible in the first place. The point is, for all of us, that in the ledger of what the world owes us and what we owe the world, it is always going to be we who are in debt to the world. Again, this is just realism. Krech says,"As we reflect on our life we begin to see the reality of our life. What is more appropriate: to go through life with the mission of collecting what is owed us, or to go through life trying to repay our debt to others?"
.

The third question involves even more soul searching. To reflect regularly on the problems we have caused others once again involves a shift of attention. We are more usually preoccupied with the wrongs that have been done to us, so much so that we don't give much thought to the difficulties we cause others. My unemployment, for example, has put tremendous pressures on my partner, family members, and friends, who have helped out with money. With this question we are forced to move beyond a victim mentality or our own justifications about our life and actions in order to take care of our own side of the street. This question is so important because of our propensity to judge others and our natural inclination to want to preserve a virtuous self-image. In order to change behavior, however, we must first see the reality, tarnished as it might be.
 

A number of exercises are offered in this book, including Naikan for various holidays or for relationships. The basic daily practice consists of going through the three questions for each day, allowing about thirty minutes for reflection before bedtime. One can also go on Naikan retreats in which one spends a week doing nothing but reflecting on their life through relationships, traditionally beginning with the mother. The results of this are often life-transforming. While there are several institutions in Japan that offer retreats, they take place much less frequently in the United States. For retreats in the U.S. consult the website of The ToDo Institute (http://www.todoinstitute.org/).
 

The second useful resource for the practice of gratitude is the website for Gratefulness.org (http://gratefulness.org/). This is the site of A Network for Grateful Living (ANG*L), "a non-profit organization dedicated to gratefulness, a universal principle that serves as the core inspiration for personal growth, cross-cultural understanding, interfaith dialogue, intergenerational respect, and ecological sustainability." A key figure in this organization is Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who has written several books on prayer and gratefulness. Pointing to the need for regular practice, Steindl-Rast says, "Our feelings are not under our control, so we cannot feel grateful simply by commanding it. Besides, it is not wise to wait for a time of grief or crisis before one starts the process of practicing gratitude. In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy."
 

The website contains a number of useful features for which one can be grateful. There is a section of topics, including a kind of primer for gratefulness that extensively lists essential reading, Caring for the Earth, Creativity, Grief/Joy, Loneliness/Belonging, and Simple Living. These often link to a section of sixteen practices that are multi-paged guided exercises. For example, there is a kind of meditation on Gratefulness for Water that begins by pointing out the same stuff we brush our teeth with is also "sustaining every cell of our bodies." It then moves on to a visualization of being in the woods and attending to all the watery things: snow, a waterfall, a stream, clouds from exhalation. You are then asked to take a quiz on the world water crisis, which points out things like 1 in 6 people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water. The next page has a link to a water conservation website. The final page suggests you leave an intention for protecting water on the message board and cites Psalm 24: "Those...who have let go of selfish concerns/and see the whole earth as sacred/refusing to exploit her creatures/or to foul her waters and lands." Other practices include Harvesting the Past Gratefully, How do Animals Teach Gratefulness, and Being Grateful for Your Uniqueness. In addition to this, there are community forums, features such as free ecards, a newsletter, an digital labyrinth, grateful news, a directory of local gratefulness groups, audio and video clips featuring Brother David, and a calendar of events and workshops.

Brother David Steindl-Rast

Both of these resources point to the primacy of experience in gratitude practice as a common element that transcends or unites diverse organized religions but also does not necessarily have to be religious in any way. Gregg Krech says in his book, "Christians speak of God's love and Pure Land Buddhists refer to the 'grace' or vow of Amida Buddha. The practice of Naikan does not deny or assert the existence of such omnipotent beings. It focuses on the actual manifestations of compassion, love, and grace. To that extent it provides a concrete foundation for the devoted Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, and Hindu, as well as the agnostic." Likewise, the Gratefulness.org website discusses grateful living as a universal ethic for the following, among other reasons:

•The universal sentiment of gratefulness is shared by all  cultures and religious traditions

•Gratefulness lies at the mystical core of all religions, and  can provide a point of agreement between people from different traditions that transcends the divisive  dogma of each religion or sect.

•In the same way, it provides a common language for  dialogue between religious people and non-religious people, since both groups share this sentiment fully.

In our current world, where harsh, even violent divisiveness is often still the rule and so many people are still intolerant of others who might deviate in any way from their narrowly-prescribed beliefs, perhaps gratitude can provide a common link through which we can soften some of our rougher edges. As a widespread practice it would certainly have implications for all our relationships, including the one most threatened right now--our relationship to the earth. If we want to lead a richer, more positive, less self-obsessed, less conflict-ridden, more environmentally sound, more loving life, the personal practice of gratitude seems a good place to start.