Post by Blu on Mar 17, 2008 1:44:51 GMT -5
Chapter 3 – Part 2 of 3 ~~ THE ATTITUDES of GRATITUDE by M.R. Ryan –
LET GRATITUDE FLOW NATURALLY ~~ One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. ~~ Henry Miller
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ~~ The secret to life is to know when enough is enough. ~~ R.. Vincent Ryan
This was my father’s favorite saying in his final years, and one of the last things he said to me before he died. I was contemplating selling my house and moving to a smaller one, and that was his pronouncement on the subject.
It was kind of ironic, since there he was, a family doctor for forty years, gasping and wheezing over the phone, barely able to speak, dying from smoking too much. But the fact that he learned the lesson late doesn’t negate its truth. And it goes straight to the heart of the issue of gratitude: namely that gratitude makes us feel like we have enough, whereas ingratitude leaves us in a state of deprivation in which we are always looking for something else.
That’s why the idea of cultivating ‘the gratitude attitude’ is so popular among twelve-step programs. As Emmet Miller notes in Gratitude: A Way of Life. “Gratitude has to do with feeling full, complete, adequate ~~ we have everything we need and deserve; we approach the world with a sense of value.” Addictions of all sorts come from a sense of deprivation, a feeling of lack that the user believes can be filled with a substance or activity, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, or food. Caught up in lack, we feed the need but never feel truly satisfied because of course our substance of choice can’t fill the lack. Consequently we continue to want more, more, more.
As many people have pointed out, our consumer society owes its very existence to its ability to fuel a sense of never being satisfied. If we were happy about the way we looked, for example, why would we spend billions on cosmetics and plastic surgery? Or on expensive cars that supposedly convey a certain image that we don’t have?
An attitude of gratitude gets us off the treadmill and out of the rat race. As we cultivate a true and deep appreciation for what we do have, we realize that our sense of lack is, for the most part, an illusion. No matter our material circumstances, the richness of our soul is ultimately what brings us happiness, not another Martini, bigger breasts, or the latest video game. As Lao Tzu proclaimed, “He who knows enough is enough will always have enough.”
ALWAYS the FIRST TIME ~~ Make it new. ~~ Ezra Pound
I once went to a conference on relationships. Most of the presenters were therapists who had all kinds of elaborate theories about what made good relationships. Then a Buddhist Lama got up and said, “I know the secret to keeping love alive. It’s simple. All you have to do is act as if you have just met this person and are falling in love. When you meet someone you are interested in, everything they do is wonderful. You love looking at them, hearing what they have to say. Even when they play you country western music, which you hate, you think, ‘Well, maybe Tammy Wynette isn’t so bad after all.’ As time goes on, however, you take the person for granted and fight over Tammy Wynette. So the solution is to see your loved one new again.” The therapists were up in arms, proclaiming that such a task was too hard. “Oh, said the lama, “I said it was simple. I didn’t say it was easy.”
I believe the Lama is right. The secret to love ~~ and a sense of joy and gratitude toward all of life ~~ is to see, feel, and hear as if for the First Time. Before the scales of the habitual clouded the brilliant blue sky outside your office window, the tangy juiciness of an orange, or the softness of your loved one’s hands. Before you got so used to her kind words, his musical laughter, that they became invisible.
Recently my husband Don had vividly brought home to him the truth of how easy it is to get blinded to the miracles around us. When we first adopted Ana, we couldn’t sleep; we were too busy looking into her peaceful face and crying tears of gratitude. Now, a mere four months later, Don, who is home all day with her, finds himself taking her presence for granted, already losing that overwhelming sense of appreciation for her being sent to us. “I get bored,” he says, “because it is so much the same, day after day. But her spirit, her presence, is no less a miracle today than it was four months ago, or will be four or forty-years from now. And when I can remember that, I catch myself ‘falling asleep’ to the miracle, and the awareness wakes me again and my heart once again fills with joy.”
When we can live our lives as if it is always the first time ~~ the first time we made love, the first time we gazed upon the face of our beloved, the first time we tasted ice cream, the first time we saw a bird ~~ we won’t have to try to experience a sense of gratitude. It will be there automatically, as a natural response to the beauty and the bounty.
IT’S OK to HAVE GOOD FORTUNE ~~ There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. ~~ Albert Einstein
Recently someone told me that evolutionary biologist Jerod Diamond wrote the current best-selling book, ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’, in answer to an aborigine’s question, “Why do you guys have all the stuff?” Diamond set out to understand the historical reasons why, but the moral and spiritual issue is what haunts me.
Why do we in the West have so much of the stuff? We didn’t do anything necessarily to deserve it (and those who think they do deserve it find themselves on a moral slippery slope, which leads to the assumption that those who are suffering from poverty, illness, or plagues did something to deserve that). Yes, we may have worked hard to get what we have but at birth, we just woke up in our lives and found ourselves here in easier material circumstances than the vast majority of people in the world. Perhaps one of the reasons so many of us in this culture find it hard to experience an attitude of gratitude is that subconsciously we feel guilty for having so much when others have so little, so we want to ignore the truth of our good fortune.
I remember the first time I realized this personally. I was about twelve and writing an essay for Sunday school. I can’t remember the question I was supposed to be answering, but I ended up writing about how lucky I was to be living in the affluent United States instead of on the streets of India.
I don’t know about you, but that childish realization now makes me pretty uncomfortable. First, it smacks of cultural imperialism, after all, who am I to say that my life is truly better? Just because we in the West have more stuff doesn’t mean we are necessarily happier.
On another level, it makes me feel that I must do something important to continue to deserve my good fortune, and nothing can be important enough. At yet another level, it makes me want to ignore and deny my good fortune so that I don’t have to feel guilty.
The issues are complex, and ultimately every person born into relative affluence has to define for themselves what their responsibility is. Here, I simply want to ask the question: Is it possible for us in this culture to truly and fully appreciate what we have been given without feeling guilty? If not, perhaps it is our responsibility to acknowledge our guilt, so that it doesn’t block our willingness to be grateful.
YOU ARE WORTHY ~~ You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. ~~ Desiderata
My stepdaughter invited a college friend to our house for a week during winter vacation. I did the usual things hosts do for guests: put out clean sheets and towels, made a bouquet of fresh flowers for the bedside table, found out what she liked and didn’t like for meals. I stocked up on bagels and made no food with onions. At dinner, I made polite conversation, inquiring about her interests, her family, her hopes and dreams. At the end of the week, she left, giving no indication of thanks in either word or deed. No note, no present, no phone call.
Now, I didn’t entertain her to be thanked, and I wasn’t even upset. Rather, I was fascinated about where such a lack of gratitude came from. In talking to my stepdaughter about it, she revealed that she has a hard time with this friend because the young woman has a hard time with this friend because the young woman has such a low sense of self-esteem. “I spent half my day reassuring her that she looks OK, that she said the right thing, that she is smart and interesting,” my stepdaughter complained.
Suddenly I got it ~~ this young woman thinks so poorly of herself that it doesn’t even register that other people find her worthy of flowers and good dinners. What I did was invisible to her because she is invisible to herself!
To experience gratitude, you have to be aware that you’ve been given something ~~ whether it’s a beautiful head of hair, a trip to Tahiti, or a great new job ~~ because gratitude is the response of the receiver of a gift. It cannot exist if you don’t recognize that you have received a gift, and it can’t exist if you don’t feel worthy of getting the gift. A lack of self-esteem robs you of the joys of gratitude, because you have nowhere to put all that is being given.
By virtue of simply being alive, we receive gifts all the time ~~ if only a new day, a second (or one-hundredth second) chance ~~ and we are also worthy simply by virtue of being alive. If you have trouble seeing the gifts in your life, perhaps your self-concept needs strengthening.
Take inspiration from Maya Angelou. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, she was once asked why, despite the hardships she faced, she never doubted herself. Her answer was that she came to realize that God loved her, and from that point on, she no longer had doubts. Because if God loves, her, how could she doubt herself.
You are worthy of all that you receive.
YOUR SOUL HAS a PURPOSE ~~ It is up to you to illumine the earth. ~~ Philippe Vensier
Tom Chappell, along with his wife, is the owner of Tom’s of Maine, the natural personal care products company. In his audiotape, The Soul of Business, he describes how, despite his incredible material success (a big house, a huge boat, a very successful business), he woke up one day at age forty-three and realized that he felt disconnected from the company and himself. He considered retiring. Then he decided to be to divinity school to become a minister. There he re-found his purpose, coming to see that his ministry was to incorporate into the business practices of Tom’s of Maine the values that he believed in deeply, and to help other business people bring soulful-ness into their workplaces as well.
If you want the habit of gratitude to grace your life, it is essential that you, like Tom Chappell, develop the belief that you are here on Earth to fulfill some purpose that only you can offer to the world. You are an amazingly rare, totally nonreplicable individual with talents and gifts that the world anxiously needs. The more that you experience the truth of your uniqueness and beauty, the more you will feel gratitude for your particular gifts, and the more you will be able to deliver those gifts.
Unfortunately, not many of us were born to parents who nurtured our individuality, honored our gifts, or helped us recognize our purpose. So as adults we may find it difficult to love ourselves in a wholehearted way that fosters a deep and quiet sense of gratitude for ourselves. In The Woman’s Book of Spirit, Sue Patton Thoele offers the following meditation:
“It may help to realize the value of gratitude toward ourselves if we were to visualize our heart as a delicate treasure, hand-blown from the rarest ethereal glass. A treasure valuable beyond imagining ~~ fragile, irreplaceable, priceless, and ancient. There is no other like it ~~ infinitely precious, existing before time and after infinity. ‘In reality, we were entrusted with such an inexplicable treasure when we were given the gift of life.’
“With your eyes closed, very gently put your hands over your heart and allow your breath to tenderly flow in and out of it. When you feel ready, ask to be given a symbol for your heart. Hold that symbol that you see or sense as carefully as you would a priceless Faberge egg. Beholding the wonder of your symbol, allow gratitude to flow through you, permeating the very cells of your being. Make a commitment with yourself to cherish and appreciate your heart-self.”
THE SOLUTION in the PROBLEM ~~ People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them. ~~ George Bernard Shaw
A therapist I know was treating a woman who’d had a serious stroke and was suffering from aphasia, difficulty in speaking. She didn’t seem too troubled by it, but her family considered it a great tragedy. As a young Jewish woman, her verbal ability was a great gift ~~ it had even saved her life. She spoke five languages and survived the Holocaust by becoming a translator for the Nazis in a concentration camp. After the war, she moved to the United States and supported her family teaching foreign languages. Now she struggled for words and her adult children were constantly jumping in to ‘help’ her by filling in her words.
The stroke had changed her in other ways too. Cold and distant as a mother, the stroke had left her very physically affectionate, and she constantly touched her children. However, they were so caught up in the loss of her speaking ability that they didn’t recognize that what they were now receiving from her was the kind of affection that they had longed for all their lives.
The therapist taught them that whenever they found themselves frustrated by her lack of verbal acuity, instead of trying to fill in her words, to take a breath and really notice her loving them through her touch. This allowed the woman to have the space she needed to speak, and the children to appreciate the love that was coming from their mother.
The point of this ‘trick’ is to use a source of frustration as a trigger to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Is there something in your life that you find terribly annoying or difficult? Is there some hidden gift in the annoying situation that you, like the children in this story, can focus on to create an opportunity for gratitude?
For me it’s standing in line. I absolutely hate to ‘waste’ time, I live my life at a frenetic pace and don’t want anything to get in my way of doing all I have to get done in a day. Until recently, I was the person in the line huffing and rolling my eyes at the wait, haggling and looking at my watch every few second. And when I finally made it to the counter, I was too aggravated from having to wait to be pleasant to the person on the other side of the counter. But since life is full of time, I finally decided to change my approach. Instead of being annoyed, I decided to see waiting in line as a wonderful opportunity to slow down, to take a few conscious breaths, become aware of my body, and release as much muscle tension as I could. The waits are a long as ever ~~ but now I am grateful for the chance to stop.
LET GRATITUDE FLOW NATURALLY ~~ One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. ~~ Henry Miller
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ~~ The secret to life is to know when enough is enough. ~~ R.. Vincent Ryan
This was my father’s favorite saying in his final years, and one of the last things he said to me before he died. I was contemplating selling my house and moving to a smaller one, and that was his pronouncement on the subject.
It was kind of ironic, since there he was, a family doctor for forty years, gasping and wheezing over the phone, barely able to speak, dying from smoking too much. But the fact that he learned the lesson late doesn’t negate its truth. And it goes straight to the heart of the issue of gratitude: namely that gratitude makes us feel like we have enough, whereas ingratitude leaves us in a state of deprivation in which we are always looking for something else.
That’s why the idea of cultivating ‘the gratitude attitude’ is so popular among twelve-step programs. As Emmet Miller notes in Gratitude: A Way of Life. “Gratitude has to do with feeling full, complete, adequate ~~ we have everything we need and deserve; we approach the world with a sense of value.” Addictions of all sorts come from a sense of deprivation, a feeling of lack that the user believes can be filled with a substance or activity, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, or food. Caught up in lack, we feed the need but never feel truly satisfied because of course our substance of choice can’t fill the lack. Consequently we continue to want more, more, more.
As many people have pointed out, our consumer society owes its very existence to its ability to fuel a sense of never being satisfied. If we were happy about the way we looked, for example, why would we spend billions on cosmetics and plastic surgery? Or on expensive cars that supposedly convey a certain image that we don’t have?
An attitude of gratitude gets us off the treadmill and out of the rat race. As we cultivate a true and deep appreciation for what we do have, we realize that our sense of lack is, for the most part, an illusion. No matter our material circumstances, the richness of our soul is ultimately what brings us happiness, not another Martini, bigger breasts, or the latest video game. As Lao Tzu proclaimed, “He who knows enough is enough will always have enough.”
ALWAYS the FIRST TIME ~~ Make it new. ~~ Ezra Pound
I once went to a conference on relationships. Most of the presenters were therapists who had all kinds of elaborate theories about what made good relationships. Then a Buddhist Lama got up and said, “I know the secret to keeping love alive. It’s simple. All you have to do is act as if you have just met this person and are falling in love. When you meet someone you are interested in, everything they do is wonderful. You love looking at them, hearing what they have to say. Even when they play you country western music, which you hate, you think, ‘Well, maybe Tammy Wynette isn’t so bad after all.’ As time goes on, however, you take the person for granted and fight over Tammy Wynette. So the solution is to see your loved one new again.” The therapists were up in arms, proclaiming that such a task was too hard. “Oh, said the lama, “I said it was simple. I didn’t say it was easy.”
I believe the Lama is right. The secret to love ~~ and a sense of joy and gratitude toward all of life ~~ is to see, feel, and hear as if for the First Time. Before the scales of the habitual clouded the brilliant blue sky outside your office window, the tangy juiciness of an orange, or the softness of your loved one’s hands. Before you got so used to her kind words, his musical laughter, that they became invisible.
Recently my husband Don had vividly brought home to him the truth of how easy it is to get blinded to the miracles around us. When we first adopted Ana, we couldn’t sleep; we were too busy looking into her peaceful face and crying tears of gratitude. Now, a mere four months later, Don, who is home all day with her, finds himself taking her presence for granted, already losing that overwhelming sense of appreciation for her being sent to us. “I get bored,” he says, “because it is so much the same, day after day. But her spirit, her presence, is no less a miracle today than it was four months ago, or will be four or forty-years from now. And when I can remember that, I catch myself ‘falling asleep’ to the miracle, and the awareness wakes me again and my heart once again fills with joy.”
When we can live our lives as if it is always the first time ~~ the first time we made love, the first time we gazed upon the face of our beloved, the first time we tasted ice cream, the first time we saw a bird ~~ we won’t have to try to experience a sense of gratitude. It will be there automatically, as a natural response to the beauty and the bounty.
IT’S OK to HAVE GOOD FORTUNE ~~ There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. ~~ Albert Einstein
Recently someone told me that evolutionary biologist Jerod Diamond wrote the current best-selling book, ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’, in answer to an aborigine’s question, “Why do you guys have all the stuff?” Diamond set out to understand the historical reasons why, but the moral and spiritual issue is what haunts me.
Why do we in the West have so much of the stuff? We didn’t do anything necessarily to deserve it (and those who think they do deserve it find themselves on a moral slippery slope, which leads to the assumption that those who are suffering from poverty, illness, or plagues did something to deserve that). Yes, we may have worked hard to get what we have but at birth, we just woke up in our lives and found ourselves here in easier material circumstances than the vast majority of people in the world. Perhaps one of the reasons so many of us in this culture find it hard to experience an attitude of gratitude is that subconsciously we feel guilty for having so much when others have so little, so we want to ignore the truth of our good fortune.
I remember the first time I realized this personally. I was about twelve and writing an essay for Sunday school. I can’t remember the question I was supposed to be answering, but I ended up writing about how lucky I was to be living in the affluent United States instead of on the streets of India.
I don’t know about you, but that childish realization now makes me pretty uncomfortable. First, it smacks of cultural imperialism, after all, who am I to say that my life is truly better? Just because we in the West have more stuff doesn’t mean we are necessarily happier.
On another level, it makes me feel that I must do something important to continue to deserve my good fortune, and nothing can be important enough. At yet another level, it makes me want to ignore and deny my good fortune so that I don’t have to feel guilty.
The issues are complex, and ultimately every person born into relative affluence has to define for themselves what their responsibility is. Here, I simply want to ask the question: Is it possible for us in this culture to truly and fully appreciate what we have been given without feeling guilty? If not, perhaps it is our responsibility to acknowledge our guilt, so that it doesn’t block our willingness to be grateful.
YOU ARE WORTHY ~~ You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. ~~ Desiderata
My stepdaughter invited a college friend to our house for a week during winter vacation. I did the usual things hosts do for guests: put out clean sheets and towels, made a bouquet of fresh flowers for the bedside table, found out what she liked and didn’t like for meals. I stocked up on bagels and made no food with onions. At dinner, I made polite conversation, inquiring about her interests, her family, her hopes and dreams. At the end of the week, she left, giving no indication of thanks in either word or deed. No note, no present, no phone call.
Now, I didn’t entertain her to be thanked, and I wasn’t even upset. Rather, I was fascinated about where such a lack of gratitude came from. In talking to my stepdaughter about it, she revealed that she has a hard time with this friend because the young woman has a hard time with this friend because the young woman has such a low sense of self-esteem. “I spent half my day reassuring her that she looks OK, that she said the right thing, that she is smart and interesting,” my stepdaughter complained.
Suddenly I got it ~~ this young woman thinks so poorly of herself that it doesn’t even register that other people find her worthy of flowers and good dinners. What I did was invisible to her because she is invisible to herself!
To experience gratitude, you have to be aware that you’ve been given something ~~ whether it’s a beautiful head of hair, a trip to Tahiti, or a great new job ~~ because gratitude is the response of the receiver of a gift. It cannot exist if you don’t recognize that you have received a gift, and it can’t exist if you don’t feel worthy of getting the gift. A lack of self-esteem robs you of the joys of gratitude, because you have nowhere to put all that is being given.
By virtue of simply being alive, we receive gifts all the time ~~ if only a new day, a second (or one-hundredth second) chance ~~ and we are also worthy simply by virtue of being alive. If you have trouble seeing the gifts in your life, perhaps your self-concept needs strengthening.
Take inspiration from Maya Angelou. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, she was once asked why, despite the hardships she faced, she never doubted herself. Her answer was that she came to realize that God loved her, and from that point on, she no longer had doubts. Because if God loves, her, how could she doubt herself.
You are worthy of all that you receive.
YOUR SOUL HAS a PURPOSE ~~ It is up to you to illumine the earth. ~~ Philippe Vensier
Tom Chappell, along with his wife, is the owner of Tom’s of Maine, the natural personal care products company. In his audiotape, The Soul of Business, he describes how, despite his incredible material success (a big house, a huge boat, a very successful business), he woke up one day at age forty-three and realized that he felt disconnected from the company and himself. He considered retiring. Then he decided to be to divinity school to become a minister. There he re-found his purpose, coming to see that his ministry was to incorporate into the business practices of Tom’s of Maine the values that he believed in deeply, and to help other business people bring soulful-ness into their workplaces as well.
If you want the habit of gratitude to grace your life, it is essential that you, like Tom Chappell, develop the belief that you are here on Earth to fulfill some purpose that only you can offer to the world. You are an amazingly rare, totally nonreplicable individual with talents and gifts that the world anxiously needs. The more that you experience the truth of your uniqueness and beauty, the more you will feel gratitude for your particular gifts, and the more you will be able to deliver those gifts.
Unfortunately, not many of us were born to parents who nurtured our individuality, honored our gifts, or helped us recognize our purpose. So as adults we may find it difficult to love ourselves in a wholehearted way that fosters a deep and quiet sense of gratitude for ourselves. In The Woman’s Book of Spirit, Sue Patton Thoele offers the following meditation:
“It may help to realize the value of gratitude toward ourselves if we were to visualize our heart as a delicate treasure, hand-blown from the rarest ethereal glass. A treasure valuable beyond imagining ~~ fragile, irreplaceable, priceless, and ancient. There is no other like it ~~ infinitely precious, existing before time and after infinity. ‘In reality, we were entrusted with such an inexplicable treasure when we were given the gift of life.’
“With your eyes closed, very gently put your hands over your heart and allow your breath to tenderly flow in and out of it. When you feel ready, ask to be given a symbol for your heart. Hold that symbol that you see or sense as carefully as you would a priceless Faberge egg. Beholding the wonder of your symbol, allow gratitude to flow through you, permeating the very cells of your being. Make a commitment with yourself to cherish and appreciate your heart-self.”
THE SOLUTION in the PROBLEM ~~ People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them. ~~ George Bernard Shaw
A therapist I know was treating a woman who’d had a serious stroke and was suffering from aphasia, difficulty in speaking. She didn’t seem too troubled by it, but her family considered it a great tragedy. As a young Jewish woman, her verbal ability was a great gift ~~ it had even saved her life. She spoke five languages and survived the Holocaust by becoming a translator for the Nazis in a concentration camp. After the war, she moved to the United States and supported her family teaching foreign languages. Now she struggled for words and her adult children were constantly jumping in to ‘help’ her by filling in her words.
The stroke had changed her in other ways too. Cold and distant as a mother, the stroke had left her very physically affectionate, and she constantly touched her children. However, they were so caught up in the loss of her speaking ability that they didn’t recognize that what they were now receiving from her was the kind of affection that they had longed for all their lives.
The therapist taught them that whenever they found themselves frustrated by her lack of verbal acuity, instead of trying to fill in her words, to take a breath and really notice her loving them through her touch. This allowed the woman to have the space she needed to speak, and the children to appreciate the love that was coming from their mother.
The point of this ‘trick’ is to use a source of frustration as a trigger to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Is there something in your life that you find terribly annoying or difficult? Is there some hidden gift in the annoying situation that you, like the children in this story, can focus on to create an opportunity for gratitude?
For me it’s standing in line. I absolutely hate to ‘waste’ time, I live my life at a frenetic pace and don’t want anything to get in my way of doing all I have to get done in a day. Until recently, I was the person in the line huffing and rolling my eyes at the wait, haggling and looking at my watch every few second. And when I finally made it to the counter, I was too aggravated from having to wait to be pleasant to the person on the other side of the counter. But since life is full of time, I finally decided to change my approach. Instead of being annoyed, I decided to see waiting in line as a wonderful opportunity to slow down, to take a few conscious breaths, become aware of my body, and release as much muscle tension as I could. The waits are a long as ever ~~ but now I am grateful for the chance to stop.