A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Each
of us may be nothing more than a moving wave of change, but we are
waves able to know this fact. We rise and fall in an infinitely deep and
timeless sea, upright and undisturbed.
Learning
to let thinking come and go, we can eventually understand a thought as a
thought and a word as a word, and with this understanding we can find a
measure of freedom from thoughts and words.
I would say that most of us stay locked in our separateness and we are very frightened of coming out of it, we feel very vulnerable. In truth you’re not vulnerable at all. Who you think you are is vulnerable. Who you are is not vulnerable. This is the truth of it.
In mystical traditions, it is one's own readiness that makes experiences
exoteric or esoteric. The secret isn't that you're not being told. The
secret is that you're not able to hear.
How bad am I? I’m so bad at gratitude that most days, I don’t notice the sunlight on the leaves of the Berkeley oaks as I ride my bike down the street. I forget to be thankful for the guy who hand-brews that delicious cup of coffee I drink mid-way through every weekday morning. I don’t even know the dude’s name!
I usually take for granted that I have legs to walk on, eyes to see with, arms I can use to hug my son. I forget my son! Well, I don’t actually forget about him, at least as a physical presence; I generally remember to pick him up from school and feed him dinner. But as I face the quotidian slings and arrows of parenthood, I forget all the time how much he’s changed my life for the better.
Gratitude (and its sibling, appreciation) is the mental tool we use to remind ourselves of the good stuff. It’s a lens that helps us to see the things that don’t make it onto our lists of problems to be solved.
It’s a spotlight that we shine on the people who give us the good things in life. It’s a bright red paintbrush we apply to otherwise-invisible blessings, like clean streets or health or enough food to eat.
Gratitude doesn’t make problems and threats disappear. We can lose jobs, we can be attacked on the street, we can get sick. I’ve experienced all of those things. I remember those harrowing times at unexpected moments: My heart beats faster, my throat constricts.
My body wants to hit something or run away, one or the other. But there’s nothing to hit, nowhere to run. The threats are indeed real, but at that moment, they exist only in memory or imagination. I am the threat; it is me who is wearing myself out with worry.
That’s when I need to turn on the gratitude. If I do that enough, suggests the psychological research, gratitude might just become a habit. What will that mean for me? It means, says the research, that I increase my chances of psychologically surviving hard times, that I stand a chance to be happier in the good times. I’m not ignoring the threats; I’m appreciating the resources and people that might help me face those threats.
If you’re already one of those highly grateful people, stop reading this essay—you don’t need it. Instead you should read Amie Gordon’s “Five Ways Giving Thanks Can Backfire.” But if you’re more like me, then here are some tips for how you and I can become one of those fantastically grateful people.
1. Once in a while, they think about death and loss
Didn’t see that one coming, did you? I’m not just being perverse—contemplating endings really does make you more grateful for the life you currently have, according to several studies.
For example, when Araceli Friasa and colleagues asked people to visualize their own deaths, their gratitude measurably increased.
Similarly, when Minkyung Koo and colleagues asked people to envision the sudden disappearance of their romantic partners from their lives, they became more grateful to their partners. The same goes for imagining that some positive event, like a job promotion, never happened.
This isn’t just theoretical: When you find yourself taking a good thing for granted, try giving it up for a little while. Researchers Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth Dunn had 55 people eat a piece of chocolate—and then the researchers told some of those people to resist chocolate for a week and others to binge on chocolate if they wanted. They left a third group to their own devices.
Guess who ended up happiest, according to self-reports? The people who abstained from chocolate. And who were the least happy? The people who binged. That’s the power of gratitude!
2. They take the time to smell the roses
And they also smell the coffee, the bread baking in the oven, the aroma of a new car—whatever gives them pleasure.
Loyola University psychologist Fred Bryant finds that savoring positive experiences makes them stickier in your brain, and increases their benefits to your psyche—and the key, he argues, is expressing gratitude for the experience. That’s one of the ways appreciation and gratitude go hand in hand.
You might also consider adding some little ritual to how you experience the pleasures of the body: A study published this year in Psychological Science finds that rituals like prayer or even just shaking a sugar packet “make people pay more attention to food, and paying attention makes food taste better,” as Emily Nauman reports in her Greater Good article about the research.
This brand of mindfulness makes intuitive sense—but how does it work with the first habit above?
Well, we humans are astoundingly adaptive creatures, and we will adapt even to the good things. When we do, their subjective value starts to drop; we start to take them for granted. That’s the point at which we might give them up for a while—be it chocolate, sex, or even something like sunlight—and then take the time to really savor them when we allow them back into our lives.
That goes for people, too, and that goes back to the first habit: If you’re taking someone for granted, take a step back—and imagine your life without them. Then try savoring their presence, just like you would a rose. Or a new car. Whatever! The point is, absence may just make the heart grow grateful.
3. They take the good things as gifts, not birthrights
What’s the opposite of gratitude? Entitlement—the attitude that people owe you something just because you’re so very special.
“In all its manifestations, a preoccupation with the self can cause us to forget our benefits and our benefactors or to feel that we are owed things from others and therefore have no reason to feel thankful,”writes Robert Emmons, co-director of the GGSC’s Gratitude project. “Counting blessings will be ineffective because grievances will always outnumber gifts.”
The antidote to entitlement, argues Emmons, is to see that we did not create ourselves—we were created, if not by evolution, then by God; or if not by God, then by our parents. Likewise, we are never truly self-sufficient. Humans need other people to grow our food and heal our injuries; we need love, and for that we need family, partners, friends, and pets.
“Seeing with grateful eyes requires that we see the web of interconnection in which we alternate between being givers and receivers,” writes Emmons. “The humble person says that life is a gift to be grateful for, not a right to be claimed.”
4. They’re grateful to people, not just things
At the start of this piece, I mentioned gratitude for sunlight and trees. That’s great for me—and it may have good effects, like leading me to think about my impact on the environment—but the trees just don’t care. Likewise, the sun doesn’t know I exist; that big ball of flaming gas isn’t even aware of its own existence, as far as we know. My gratitude doesn’t make it burn any brighter.
That’s not true of people—people will glow in gratitude. Saying thanks to my son might make him happier and it can strengthen our emotional bond. Thanking the guy who makes my coffee can strengthen social bonds—in part by deepening our understanding of how we’re interconnected with other people.
My colleague Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the GGSC’s science director and another co-director of our Expanding Gratitude project, puts it this way:
Experiences that heighten meaningful connections with others—like noticing how another person has helped you, acknowledging the effort it took, and savoring how you benefitted from it—engage biological systems for trust and affection, alongside circuits for pleasure and reward. This provides a synergistic and enduring boost to the positive experience. Saying ‘thank you’ to a person, your brain registers that something good has happened and that you are more richly enmeshed in a meaningful social community.
5. They mention the pancakes
Grateful people are habitually specific. They don’t say, “I love you because you’re just so wonderfully wonderful, you!” Instead, the really skilled grateful person will say: “I love you for the pancakes you make when you see I’m hungry and the way you massage my feet after work even when you’re really tired and how you give me hugs when I’m sad so that I’ll feel better!”
The reason for this is pretty simple: It makes the expression of gratitude feel more authentic, for it reveals that the thanker was genuinely paying attention and isn’t just going through the motions.
The richest thank you’s will acknowledge intentions (“the pancakes you make when you see I’m hungry”) and costs (“you massage my feet after work even when you’re really tired”), and they’ll describe the value of benefits received (“you give me hugs when I’m sad so that I’ll feel better”).
When Amie Gordon and colleagues studied gratitude in couples, they found that spouses signal grateful feelings through more caring and attentive behavior. They ask clarifying questions; they respond to trouble with hugs and to good news with smiles. “These gestures,” Gordon writes, “can have profound effects: Participants who were better listeners during those conversations in the lab had partners who reported feeling more appreciated by them.”
Remember: Gratitude thrives on specificity!
6. They thank outside the box
But let’s get real: Pancakes, massages, hugs? Boring! Most of my examples so far are easy and clichéd. But here’s who the really tough-minded grateful person thanks: the boyfriend who dumped her, the homeless person who asked for change, the boss who laid him off.
We’re graduating from Basic to Advanced Gratitude, so pay attention. And since I myself am still working on Basic, I’ll turn once again to Dr. Emmons for guidance: “It’s easy to feel grateful for the good things. No one ‘feels’ grateful that he or she has lost a job or a home or good health or has taken a devastating hit on his or her retirement portfolio.”
In such moments, he says, gratitude becomes a critical cognitive process—a way of thinking about the world that can help us turn disaster into a stepping stone. If we’re willing and able to look, he argues, we can find a reason to feel grateful even to people who have harmed us. We can thank that boyfriend for being brave enough to end a relationship that wasn’t working; the homeless person for reminding us of our advantages and vulnerability; the boss, for forcing us to face new challenges.
“Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth,” writes Emmons in his Greater Good article “How Gratitude Can Help You Through Hard Times.” He continues:
So telling people simply to buck up, count their blessings, and remember how much they still have to be grateful for can certainly do much harm. Processing a life experience through a grateful lens does not mean denying negativity. It is not a form of superficial happiology. Instead, it means realizing the power you have to transform an obstacle into an opportunity. It means reframing a loss into a potential gain, recasting negativity into positive channels for gratitude.
That’s what truly, fantastically grateful people do. Can you?
Jeremy Adam Smith is Producer and Editor of the Greater Good Science Center ‘s website and a 2013 fellow with the Institute for Justice and Journalism. He is also the author or coeditor of four books, including The Daddy Shift, Rad Dad, and The Compassionate Instinct. Before joining the GGSC, he was a 2010-11 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. You can follow him on Twitter.
When
we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are
purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything.
Without air, we cannot breathe. Each one of us is in the midst of
myriads of worlds.
Buddha Statue, Temple of the Tooth, Kandy, Sri Lanka
A monk asked Xinghua Cunjiang,“What should one do when things come from every direction?”
The master said, “Hold to the center.” The monk bowed. The master then said, “Yesterday, as I was on my wayto a dinner in the village, I was caught in a sudden storm with heavy rain and violent wind, so I headed for an old shrine and found shelter.”
Ying’an Tanhua commented:
“The assembly considered the matter and said, ‘Taking shelter in an old mausoleum refers to the self that precedes the Kalpa of Emptiness, or to the place where Xinghua attained peace of mind and fully realized his original nature.’”
–Entangling Vines: A Classic Collection of Zen Koans, trans.Thomas Yuho Kirchner
The exact reasons that caused the monk to ask his question in this koan are unknown, but whatever the particulars were, we can all relate to circumstances that make us feel as if we’ve lost our center. The point of this koan is simple: when heavy rain and violent winds assault you, you know to seek the nearest shelter. How is it that you know what to do in a storm, and yet in other situations, you feel as if you have lost any sense of what to do?
As a member of the Zen Peacemaker Order, I have come to rely on what we refer to as the Three Tenets, which are Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action, as an effective way to hold to the center in any given situation. With regular application, the practice of the Three Tenets can become a way of living from the center at all times. Although the tenets are taken in order when you study them, the practice is not necessarily linear. Each tenet reflects the others; they are seamlessly embedded in each other, owing as center, circumstance, and action in an ever-unfolding and endlessly varied circle of life.
The first of the Three Tenets, Not-Knowing, can be described as the letting go of fixed ideas about yourself, others, and the universe. Difficult circumstances—political upheaval, the sudden loss of a loved one, or the unexpected termination of your job—can make life feel suddenly unstable. But actually, according to the Buddha, things are always unstable. It’s just that we have a tendency to live life from a set of unquestioned beliefs that make our lives feel solid: we believe that politics will always operate along the status quo, for instance, or that our children will outlive us, or that our plans for the future will come to fruition. The truth is, once you start to pay careful attention to the nature of life, you will begin to question all of your beliefs. How can you know what will happen next? You can’t—because the universe, from its tiniest particles to its largest forms, is continually in flux.
In Three Tenets practice, not-knowing trains you to continually set aside fixed points of view. I describe not-knowing as a flash of openness or a sudden shift to being present in the moment. This dropping away of the things you have relied upon for a sense of stability may lead you to examine what you believe is your center. A student told me of a time, for example, when he was pruning his climbing rose, which he had painstakingly trained to grow up the drain pipe along the front of his house. He was standing on tiptoe on an old tree stump snipping away when suddenly the stump collapsed under him and he fell into the rose vine. As the thorns and entangled vines wrapped themselves around him, he realized that what he had thought was a stable center was actually a rotted stump. You may have had this exact same experience of realizing not-knowing when the ground you stood on has dropped out from under you.
Recent times in particular have thrust many people into a state of not-knowing. I received this email after the Fall 2016 U.S. election from a student: “These days things are so destabilized that it is hard to even find the center. . . . So many of my mental yardsticks of how the world works have been called into question, or have just unraveled in front of my eyes, [that] it is hard to get my bearings in this ‘new world order.’ . . . All frames of perspective seem unstable to me.”
In a world of instability, where is shelter to be found? The answer is what Ying’an Tanhua was pointing to when he said in his commentary that not-knowing is like that which precedes the kalpa of emptiness. The kalpa of emptiness is “the kalpa that lies between the destruction of one universe and the formation of the next.” In other words, to hold to the center in this view is to take shelter in the place before anything arises, a place of emptiness and profound silence, a place of the deepest rest where self-interest has not yet entered. This is not a void, but rather a darkness where things are not yet differentiated or seen. You yourself can go to the darkness and become like an empty vessel, empty of points of view and preferences. An empty vessel refuses nothing and receives everything that is coming at it from all directions. By practicing in this way, you can create more space to accommodate your own reactivity and the points of view of others.
It should be said that the not-favoring-of-viewpoints that arises when one practices not-knowing does not demonstrate a lack of caring. Rather, not favoring any one thing over another allows you to center yourself within a boundless net of interconnection and to expand your circle of caring. My root teacher Maezumi Roshi would often say to me, “I don’t ask you to give up your ideas, but at least set them aside for a while. You can pick them up again later.” In this way, the practice of not-knowing can align you with the ever-changing interconnected reality called Life. Practicing not-knowing may seem impossible to do, and yet, when you realize that life itself excludes nothing, practicing not-knowing over time will enable you to become more aware of what you choose to let in and open to what you had previously excluded.
Bearing Witness to the joy and suffering of the world is the second tenet. The practice of bearing witness is to see all of the aspects of a situation including your attachments and judgments. You cannot live solely in a state of not- knowing, because life also asks that you face the conditions that are coming at you by being present to them. When you bear witness you open to the uniqueness of whatever is arising and meet it just as it is. When combined with not-knowing, bearing witness can strengthen your capacity for spaciousness, thus enabling you to be present to the very things that make you feel as if you have lost your center. It can strengthen your capacity to listen to other points of view, thus allowing a more nuanced picture of a situation to emerge.
In the koan, the monk is bearing witness to all the things coming at him from all directions, and Master Xinghua himself bears witness to the storm. In translating Xinghua’s direction to “hold to the center,” the word “hold” is the Chinese word da. Da, an emphatic, can also be translated as “aim,” “hit,” or “strike.” So “hold to the center” can also be rendered as “strike the center,” “aim to the center,” or “hit the center.” The phrase “hold to” can seem passive, but consider that Xinghua is directing you to actively engage the center of not-knowing and from there to bear witness to all that is coming at you.
Buddhist meditation trains you to bear witness by strengthening your awareness of thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise and pass. As your awareness strengthens, you begin to experience spaciousness and stability and see that you have a choice in your response to what is arising. Over time, you learn to bear witness to all the elements that are arising with a curious and compassionate attitude. This does not mean repressing the strong emotions that arise or stopping the escape into story drama, but rather being aware of what you are choosing to feed. A wise old tale often attributed to the Cherokee warns that when many demons are struggling inside you, the one that you feed is the one that will become the strongest. You alone are responsible for what you feed. Will you keep feeding the poisons, such as greed and hatred, or will you develop the spiritual strength through your spiritual practice that will help you to bear witness in the midst of strong reactivity and to hold to the center?
When I recently conducted a public face-to-face in my Zen community, a longtime spiritual practitioner, wearing a yarmulke over his silver hair, came forward and took the seat beside me. He began by saying, “Hitler is my teacher. He has been my teacher for all of my life.” He then shared with the group for the first time the harrowing account of his childhood. From the ages of 7 to 9, this young boy and his family members were hidden by a Polish family in a small covered-dirt pit on their farm. They lived in this darkness for two years until World War II ended. Since then, he has been wrestling with the effects of those years in the pit: bearing witness has indeed been the practice of a lifetime for him.
On this Sunday when we were bearing witness together to his story, his shining eyes and glowing face exuded an unshakeable peace. Although the account was difficult to absorb, the act of witnessing together formed a collective center. The group itself became an empty vessel of stillness and silence into which he poured the suffering of his lifetime. When he stood up and returned to his seat, he said softly, as if to himself, “I guess I have come to accept all of it.” He had experienced a sense of wholeness by bearing witness to the parts of his life that were previously present but not fully accepted. With the passage of years spent struggling with all of the particulars of his situation, which led to a new understanding of it, this man who survived the horrors of his youth is now at peace with himself.
Bearing witness can allow you to eventually come to terms with the most difficult life circumstances. The practice is always available to you regardless of the time, place, situation, or people involved.
There is nothing that you cannot bear witness to, from dusting the lint off your sweater to living in a pit for two years.
In bearing witness, you are actively engaged and embodied, even struggling, with whatever is arising. Sometimes spiritual practices can have a neutralizing effect, flattening feelings rather than stimulating them. To hold to the center is not about becoming a spiritual zombie; it is about living the fullness of your own humanity. You are alive, so be fully alive. The third tenet is Taking Action. It is impossible to predict what the action in any situation will be, or the timetable for when it will arise or what might result from it. The underlying intention is that the action that arises be a caring action, which serves everyone and everything, including yourself, in the whole situation.
Sometimes the action is as simple as continuing on with the practice of the first two tenets of not-knowing and bearing witness; the very practice of the Three Tenets is itself a caring action. You could say that Master Xinghua took action by seeking shelter in an old shrine.
Or that the public sharing of the story of two years in the pit was an action taken after decades spent bearing witness. And though the action that arises from the engagement of not-knowing and bearing witness is spontaneous and often surprising, it always fits the situation perfectly. One student told me that when her landlord delivered a notice of a rent increase, she was overcome by despair as memories were triggered of her being left alone on the street with her clothes as a child. During the days following the rent increase, she bore witness to her painful feelings of abandonment. After a few days, she decided to go to one of her favorite places for lunch. When she entered the eatery, she saw a dirty, disheveled man incoherently mumbling and turning his pockets inside out for money. To her, this man embodied all the despair she had been bearing witness to over the past few days. Without hesitation and unnoticed by the man, she told the cashier to give him what he wanted and that she would pay for it. In that moment of spontaneous action, she returned to herself and a sense of her center for the first time since receiving the rent increase notice.
Training with the tenets is a matter of taking a backward step again and again and continually discerning your internal processes in the midst of acknowledging what is happening around you. When you hold to the center by engaging these tenets, you let go of preconceived agendas about what needs to happen and your need to make it happen.
The practice of the Three Tenets can become a way of living at the center at all times. An effect of ongoing and consistent practice of the Three Tenets is that when you lose your sense of center and fall into reactivity, you also regain your center more quickly. And when you continually perform this practice in the midst of all the activities of your daily life, the practice will be readily accessible to you during the most challenging circumstances.
Training with the tenets brings about resiliency of the spiritual muscles and an ever-deepening sense of reality. As life unfolds around you, the Three Tenets are active inside of you, always directing you back to the center, so that you carry out Xinghua’s directive.
When things come at you from all directions, hold to the center!
I love to sit and watch the tall ships that sail up the Hudson on Independence Day... I see the river as a metaphor for our lives: We ebb and flow, ebb and flow, and then we are carried out to merge with the sea.
Kenneth Kraft is professor emeritus of Buddhist Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His books include Eloquent Zen: Daito and Early Japanese Zen and The Wheel of Engaged Buddhism.
I would say that when the fear dissipates you are feeling at home in the universe; meaning your identity with your separateness isn’t overriding your feeling of connection with everything to the point that you’re feeling cut off and vulnerable - which is where the root of the fear is.
So as you cultivate that unitive quality, the fear dissipates. The relation is one between love and fear, but it’s not the love in the sense of ‘I love you’, its the sense that we are together in the space of love.
Just
as meditation requires an understanding of the practice as well as
determination to carry it out, likewise it requires a sense of balance
to determine when to push ourselves harder and when to step back and
relax where we are . . .
When
we speak of just sitting, we are not limiting ourselves to describing a
particular posture or practice. We are describing a way of being in the
world in which everything we encounter is fully and completely itself.
