Live Session Summary, Sunday, May 21, 2023: It was good to be with you today for our Live session on gratitude. Here is a summary of the key points, quotes and poems from today’s session:
Robert Emmons, a leading writer and researcher on gratitude speaks of gratitude as ‘a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life.’ It is strongly associated with happiness. Grateful people tend to be happier people. The more we incorporate gratitude into our lives, the more benefits we experience. Scientific studies indicate the benefits of practicing gratitude, including its role in:
• Helping people deal with stress and trauma
• Encouraging moral behavior
• Strengthening relationships
• Limiting the effect of negative emotions
• Supporting generosity and helpfulness
• Improving cardiac health
• Gratitude made participants in one study lastingly less depressed and happier than any other positive psychology intervention.
A study also showed that people who kept a gratitude journal were on average 25 percent happier, slept one-half hour more per evening, and exercised 33 percent more each week compared to those not keeping a journal.
Some other key themes on gratitude we covered include:
• Gratitude opens us to all of life, connects us with all beings, and helps us move out of narrow, contracted view of ourselves and of life.
• Cultivating gratitude is taking refuge in the truth, in the dharma—and is not wishful thinking. It is a ‘foundational’ practice that helps creates the conditions for the arising of compassion, generosity, and other wholesome states.
• Gratitude is immeasurable, potentially infinite—there are no limits to who and what we can be grateful for. We can keep expanding our gratitude further, just as we can when we develop loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity.
• It neutralizes painful, afflictive states, like greed, hatred, and fear. We can’t be grateful and angry or craving at the same time.
• Gratitude can arise spontaneously—and it is important to consciously cultivate it as a practice in order to make it an ongoing trait or attitude in our life. The more we practice gratitude, the more it tends to arise spontaneously out of the conditions of our life.
• It is important to include difficulties in our gratitude practice as they are what help create the conditions for us to wake up: I shared quotes from a prayer offered by Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns, ‘Grant that I might have enough suffering to awaken in me the deepest possible compassion and wisdom’; Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘The Uses of Sorrow’: ‘Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift’; and Rilke’s statement that we should ‘always trust in the difficult.’
If you would like to explore gratitude as a practice, here are two specific practices that you might work with this coming week:
• Reflect daily on three things you are grateful for and why you are grateful to this person, or for this experience.... Let yourself take in for 30-60 seconds how gratitude feels. You might put it in words—'Thank you, X, for…’ or ‘I’m grateful for…’ Notice any changes over time as you practice gratitude…
• When you find yourself caught up in a difficult or painful mind state—anger, fear, craving, confusion, doubt…—consciously pause and shift your focus towards something you are grateful for. Allow yourself to take in and experience the feelings of gratitude. Notice if this practice, over time, has any effect in helping you let go of, or loosen identification with, the difficult mind state.
We’ll take some time next week to check in on how these practices have gone. Also, we’ve uploaded the recording of last week’s Live session that Laurie Cameron and I did together. This should be available in the next few days. I hope you have a lovely week and look forward to seeing you next Sunday, May 28, at 9am Eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🌻 💜 🙏🏻
