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Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. – David Whyte
Coincidentally, I encountered this quote shortly after hearing a lecture on happiness in which the speaker asserted that when we truly recognize our privilege, we readily feel enthusiastic and grateful about whatever we’re engaged in, work included.
It’s easy to forget to be grateful though, just as it’s natural to expect life to continue in roughly the way it always has, with ample clean air, water, food, electricity, safety, and everything else that supports us. Sometimes it’s not until we experience contrast that we recognize our privilege.
Having a period of sickness makes us appreciate our health. Smoky air makes us appreciate fresh air – and firefighters and rain. Traveling in an area with mediocre food options makes us appreciate farmers’ markets and well-stocked grocery stores. All of our adversity, including even our day-to-day micro-adversities, can become prompts to recognize what’s still working and good in our life. You can even try making a rule for yourself that every time you complain about something – even just to yourself – you follow it with a statement of gratitude.
When traffic is bad, what’s good? When there’s pain in your back, what parts of your body still work well and feel okay?
Of course, we don’t need to wait for suffering in order to pay attention to our gifts. It’s just that suffering – especially when it’s really painful – has a way of capturing our attention. The key is the paying attention, and we’re in the habit of letting our attention go to whatever’s loudest or most dramatic, like media, interpersonal conflict, and worry.
Sometimes we need to grab our attention and put it on something else. And when I say “sometimes” I mean virtually all the time – choosing intentionally what we’re putting our attention on. Might I recommend a good place to put it: on the total experience that is happening right here, right now. Your breath and the air entering and exiting your lungs. What it feels like in your body. What you’re currently engaged in. The land you’re sitting on. The beating of your heart. The sun illuminating the world. The soft clothes on your skin. The feeling of the earth’s gravity acting on you.
We want to feel spontaneous gratitude, the exalted kind that comes to us with strong emotion, rather than needing to prompt ourselves to think of something to be grateful for. But the chosen form isn’t any less real. And it has the same benefits of promoting happiness, broadening our perspective, and focusing our energy on good things.
I am grateful for you.
Love,
Peter & Everyone at the Dragontree
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Previously I wrote about how community is like medicine. Our circle of fellow humans goes through this amazing journey with us . . . encouraging us, witnessing us, screaming with us on the roller coasters, and holding our hand when we take our last breath. My orientation in that article was toward what community can do for us, but it’s at least as important to look at what we can do for our community.
I was reading about a Native American grief ritual described by Black Elk, and while the ritual itself was interesting, what stuck with me was his assertion that long-held grief isn’t good for a person or the community to which that person belongs. That is, when someone is mired in suffering, this can have a negative impact on their community.
You can probably think of plenty of examples where a glaring state of imbalance, such as rage or terror, could result in behaviors that are detrimental to others. But the effects of less dramatic, often chronic negative states are subtler. What happens – besides their own discomfort – when a person is trapped in depression, anxiety, or grief for years? One repercussion is that they have a diminished capacity to fully show up in their community. We might think, “Well, the community doesn’t really need me to be at my best,” but imagine going to a place where almost everyone was depressed, afraid, or angry. Such places do exist, of course, and you can feel it as a palpable mass degradation of the human spirit.
These days we may feel that we don’t have any real obligation to our community, which is so different from how humans have operated for most of our history. Today community may be seen as an entirely optional part of life. We can live in near isolation while anonymous members of our community manage the utilities that provide us with power, water, and internet, take away our garbage, maintain our roads, even deliver our groceries. It feels like independence, but in truth we’re more dependent than ever on an infrastructure other humans maintain – we just don’t know who those humans are.
We’ve lost our sense of responsibility to our community. It’s due in part to the feeling that our government is huge, remote, and corrupt. But if our response is to disengage, the situation can only get worse. If anything, the sense of disconnection from our elected representatives and neighbors should magnify the need to do what we can to make a positive difference. It’s not just an obligation, it’s also an opportunity. If we can recognize and accept that our quality of presence affects others, this may inspire us to be our best selves. And it’s not just a matter of what we do but also who we are and how we are. Becoming fundamentally well inside helps heal the community. Imagine how healthily a community of fundamentally well people manages challenges.
If you’ve been struggling, I don’t mean to make you feel guilty as well; that won’t help you or your community. Rather than focusing on the negative impact your unwellness might have on your community, consider that getting well is good for you and it’s good for your community. Sometimes it’s easier to do it for others than for yourself.
Years ago, I read A Course in Miracles with friends. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a book on spiritual awakening with a section of scripture and a year-long workbook of daily lessons. It’s not for everyone, but I gained some valuable insights from going through it. One of those insights occurred when I encountered this passage: “Lesson 66: My happiness and my function are one.”
Whereas I had tended to think of my happiness as a personal thing – sometimes even a selfish thing – this spiritual book was telling me that being happy (true, causeless happiness) is one of the greatest things I can do for the world. As I meditated on it, I saw clearly that the happy people I’ve known were like lights in every setting they entered. Without even intending it, they had a therapeutic effect on everyone they encountered. Not only did they tend to uplift those around them, in an unspoken way they communicated that this is a possibility for you, too. Happiness is a perspective, a choice. If I can choose it, you can choose it.
Being happy makes us more peaceful, compassionate, and creative. It gives us the freedom to see a bigger picture, rather than focusing on what’s wrong or bad. Even just one happy person in a room full of scared people can change the whole atmosphere – and the choices that community makes.
So I encourage you to consider this week:
- Who am I and what role do I play in my various communities?
- How have I been affected by the genuinely happy people I’ve known?
- What do I believe stands between me and being one of those happy people?
- What happens when I make a conscious choice of how I’m going to show up in a given setting?
- When I give, what do I receive?
- How do I feel when I put myself in service to others?
- Where could I dedicate myself to more actively resolve any unhealthy patterns of thought, communication, or behavior?
- How will I be different as I heal, and how will I affect my community differently as I release my baggage?
- When will I choose happiness?
Be well,
Peter
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Last week I shared a quote from spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti: “Do you want to know my secret? I don’t mind what happens.” Then we looked at the differences between an absolute spiritual truth and the relative perspective of most humans. When we encounter an absolute view that we haven’t personally realized and experienced, sometimes it doesn’t make sense or it even has the opposite effect of what was intended.
If we imagine “I don’t mind what happens” to mean “nothing bothers me,” this contradicts most people’s daily experience. But it fits right in with a common perception when we’re evolved or enlightened we’ll be imperturbable. So, without having realized the absolute truth, we might apply it to our relative experience in a way that amounts to denying our humanity.
Buddhist psychologist and author, John Welwood, who coined the term “spiritual bypass,” explained that we have a tendency to use absolute truths of spirituality to dismiss “relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits.” He believed we need to recognize “two different tracks of human development— which we might call growing up and waking up, healing and awakening, or becoming a genuine human person and going beyond the person altogether.”1 Thus, it’s possible to resolve all our psychological problems without achieving a spiritual awakening, and it’s possible to wake up spiritually and still have a highly dysfunctional personality.
So, what is the place of such statements of absolute spiritual truth? In my opinion it’s still useful to expose ourselves to them. We shouldn’t confuse the destination with the path, and we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be able to embody them at will. But they can still serve as a messenger to the soul. When we encounter a statement like, “I don’t mind what happens,” perhaps it’s like a key that unlocks something within us. Maybe it stirs a place in us that remembers this, beneath the slumbering mind, and begins to initiate an unraveling of what has caused us to forget. Perhaps it inspires us to understand what this means, to experience it directly for ourselves. Perhaps it makes us ask, “What would my life be like if this were true for me?”
Meanwhile, what can you do when you find ourselves minding what happens? You’re in good company. Virtually everyone in the world has times when they mind what’s happening. People in pain, people who are afraid, people who are lonely or grieving, people who can’t fall asleep, people witnessing violence or injustice . . . most of them mind what’s happening. So here are some options.
Option one is to suffer. Highly unpleasant but very popular.
Option two is to change something external. Sometimes this is possible and useful, other times it isn’t. If you mind that you’re getting bitten by mosquitos, you could put on bug spray. If, on the other hand, you mind that your government is corrupt, you may not be in a position to significantly improve it, especially if you have a busy life and don’t plant to change careers.
This is where the famous Serenity Prayer by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is useful – “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” If you can recognize what cannot be changed by you, it may be easier to let go of the belief that they are your business. If you’re not currently engaged with it, don’t mind it. That is, don’t give your mind to it.
Option three is to change something internal. There are several sub-options here. The first is to deny that you mind what you mind. The main way we do this is through willful ignorance. We often employ willful ignorance as a coping mechanism simply because we can’t take care of all the things that concern us in the world.
For instance, I have a 60-year-old truck that I take out occasionally to get bales of hay for our alpacas, and the exhaust stinks. I know I’m putting carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and I haven’t yet found a way to fix it. So I have to put it out of my mind (i.e., willfully become ignorant of how I am contributing to climate change) in order to lessen the amount of guilt I feel about it. It’s a mediocre way of dealing with minding what happens.
Another way to deny that you mind what’s happening is through spiritual bypass. That is, you employ a spiritual ideal you haven’t actually achieved as a way of falsely transcending your issues. Welwood explained it as using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
I think we can agree that denial isn’t the best answer. As a band-aid, it never truly resolves the unsettled feeling that erodes your peace and infringes on your presence.
Another way of changing something internal is to consciously, sincerely explore your relationship with what you mind. Don’t say “I don’t mind” when you do mind. Be honest with yourself. And don’t say, “I shouldn’t mind” when you do mind. Consider this alternative: I do mind, but I am determined not to argue with or depart from reality.
Here we come to what I believe Krishnamurti actually meant by “I don’t mind what happens.” I don’t believe he meant that nothing could bother him. I think he meant that, regardless of what happens, he doesn’t see reality as wrong or feel it should be different. If someone were to come at him with a knife, perhaps he would have found himself knocking the knife out of their hand. This wouldn’t mean that he “minds what happens,” only that he chose to act. Whether he acted or remained entirely passive to an attack, either one would affect the course of events, so neither constitutes “minding” more than the other.
But let’s bring this back to an application for someone who hasn’t yet realized the absolute truth of not minding what happens. First, there is a difference between minding what is currently occurring here and now versus minding something that is neither. The latter is what I mean by “departing from reality.” If it’s not currently happening, see if you can bring yourself back into the present experience.
There is also a difference between minding something but accepting it versus minding something and insisting that it shouldn’t be happening. “Shouldn’t be happening” is an exercise in futility. It’s an argument against reality. Removing your resistance from the equation (to something that cannot be changed by resisting it!) reduces your suffering; and it doesn’t mean you don’t care or that you’re giving up.
Jesuit priest and author Anthony de Mello defined enlightenment as absolute cooperation with the inevitable. This is the opposite of resistance and a necessary first step before diving deeper into your relationship with what you mind.
Diving in is acceptance in action. Generally, you must set aside time and space for this. It entails meeting the inner discord with sincerity, being willing to see, hear, feel, and understand it in its entirety. It also entails a willingness to recognize how the conflict degrades you and limits your freedom. Try to maintain an attitude of openness and innocence throughout the process. This work can unravel long-held beliefs and patterns of constraint. It can enable you to move forward with constructive action, if that’s what you choose. And it can facilitate an expansion from your relativistic thinking about the issue to a more transpersonal perspective. This may not always get you to a place where you can honestly say, “I don’t mind what’s happening,” but it will bring greater clarity and peace to your experience of it.
Be well,
Peter
1Fossella, T., 2011. Human Nature, Buddha Nature: An Interview with John Welwood. [online] Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Available at: <https://tricycle.org/magazine/human-nature-buddha-nature/> [Accessed 27 April 2022]. Welwood cautioned, “When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it.”
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Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. – David Whyte
Coincidentally, I encountered this quote shortly after hearing a lecture on happiness in which the speaker asserted that when we truly recognize our privilege, we readily feel enthusiastic and grateful about whatever we’re engaged in, work included.
It’s easy to forget to be grateful though, just as it’s natural to expect life to continue in roughly the way it always has, with ample clean air, water, food, electricity, safety, and everything else that supports us. Sometimes it’s not until we experience contrast that we recognize our privilege.
Having a period of sickness makes us appreciate our health. Smoky air makes us appreciate fresh air – and firefighters and rain. Traveling in an area with mediocre food options makes us appreciate farmers’ markets and well-stocked grocery stores. All of our adversity, including even our day-to-day micro-adversities, can become prompts to recognize what’s still working and good in our life. You can even try making a rule for yourself that every time you complain about something – even just to yourself – you follow it with a statement of gratitude.
When traffic is bad, what’s good? When there’s pain in your back, what parts of your body still work well and feel okay?
Of course, we don’t need to wait for suffering in order to pay attention to our gifts. It’s just that suffering – especially when it’s really painful – has a way of capturing our attention. The key is the paying attention, and we’re in the habit of letting our attention go to whatever’s loudest or most dramatic, like media, interpersonal conflict, and worry.
Sometimes we need to grab our attention and put it on something else. And when I say “sometimes” I mean virtually all the time – choosing intentionally what we’re putting our attention on. Might I recommend a good place to put it: on the total experience that is happening right here, right now. Your breath and the air entering and exiting your lungs. What it feels like in your body. What you’re currently engaged in. The land you’re sitting on. The beating of your heart. The sun illuminating the world. The soft clothes on your skin. The feeling of the earth’s gravity acting on you.
We want to feel spontaneous gratitude, the exalted kind that comes to us with strong emotion, rather than needing to prompt ourselves to think of something to be grateful for. But the chosen form isn’t any less real. And it has the same benefits of promoting happiness, broadening our perspective, and focusing our energy on good things.
I am grateful for you.
Love,
Peter & Everyone at the Dragontree
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