Making Mindfulness and Gratitude A Powerful Daily Practice
By WITHIN teacher Jonathan Borella
Oh autumn - my favorite time of year. Well, it’s tied with spring, and summer, and winter but there is something I love about the low morning light on the changing leaves and the first feeling of nip in the air.
For a friend of mine, though, the beginning of fall is an announcement of the holiday season and forebodes the onset of stress, hurry, and worry. I affirmed that the holidays can be stressful, and then asked her how she’s managed the stress in the past. She said, “I’ve noticed that gratitude and paying attention always bring my mind back to center.” I thought that was a deep teaching.
That gratitude and paying attention tend to bring the mind back to center gives me a helpful clue into how I become uncentered. Things like disgruntledness, discontent, and a habit of noticing what’s wrong more than noticing what’s right are symptoms of a mind deficient in gratitude and paying the wrong kind of attention.
Evolutionary psychology describes an adaptation called the Zargonic effect, which predisposes the human mind to notice what’s wrong more easily than what is right.
It might have served our ancestors well who had to survive in the wild and build a society from the ground up. But for people like us who have time and space and safety to come and sit in meditation together and not have to worry about anything (at least for the moment), an unmindfulness of this habit tends to lead us to worry about things when there is nothing to worry about.
So a mindful practice of cultivating gratitude can help to correct for this habit and bring our mind back to center where there is peace and a more holistic and balanced view of the way things actually are.
A monastic teacher from the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism taught me that the word used for gratitude in the scriptures that the Buddha’s teachings were first recorded in actually means “recognizing what has been done.” That’s why I’ve been so benefited by the Plum Village tradition; it is all about dwelling in the present moment and paying attention.
One concrete practice that we can use in our lives to pay more attention and cultivate gratitude is gathas. Gathas are short little mindfulness verses that we memorize or compose to remember and contemplate throughout our everyday lives for generating mindfulness, and awakened aspiration.
For turning on the water, there is a verse that we can remember to help bring us back to that moment of having water come out of a faucet, run over our hands, and be with the sensations of cool water splashing on our face. It is a miracle that with the turn of a knob water comes down from a mountain or deep underground reservoir to our fingertips.
Without mindfulness, it's so easy to miss those ordinary moments. Life is just one ordinary moment after another, and we drift through it without paying attention, we become sick with lack of gratitude. Mindfulness is medicine.
The moment I wake up, I have the chance to set a tone of gratitude for the day by breathing with full awareness, reflecting on the treasure of 24 hours ahead, and remembering my deepest aspiration. I practice a gatha by remembering a phrase as I breathe in and another phrase as I breathe out. That way my mind and body are totally together and I can be present and connect with the meaning and intention that these words are trying to plant in me as seeds. The words aren’t actually as important as being there with the breath and being open and receptive for the moment.
The gatha my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, suggests we remember when waking up in the morning is:
Waking up this morning
Twenty four brand new hours are before
I vow to live each moment fully
And look at all beings with the eyes of compassion
I silently recite the first line while mindfully breathing in and feeling my body laying in bed. With an out breath, I silently recite the second line, and then another in breath and the third line, and an out breath and the fourth line. It only takes two in and out breaths and I’m ready to start the day as my best self.
In that moment I turn what is an ordinary, mundane, twenty four hours into a precious opportunity to be alive and to cultivate a practice. And there are moments all throughout the day for practicing like this. Opening a door can be a moment to stop, calm my body and mind, and set an intention.
Just through coming back to this present moment and paying attention there are so many opportunities for gratitude.
One practice Thich Nhat Hanh suggests is to sit down with a piece of paper and write down all the things you have to be grateful for and before long you’ll fill up that whole piece of paper. You might try it and be surprised at what comes up.
When I was doing that exercise I didn’t have to get far down the list before I realized I was actually writing a list of my attachments. One of the things that came up was my car. Cultivating gratitude for my car naturally led me to contemplate what life would be like without my car. So much anxiety came up. I was living in LA at the time, and I definitely needed that car. And then all the troubles of owning a car also came up - insurance, maintenance, parking. I thought owning a car is actually kind of a pain in the butt. I realized I was only scratching the surface of gratitude. To go deeper, I turned to the teachings of my root teacher, the Buddha.
The Buddha recommends four objects of gratitude: parents, teachers, spiritual friends, and all beings. That has been a deep practice for me.
My, like most people’s, relationship with my parents is complicated. I’ve heard teachers say even if you didn’t have great parents, you can always be grateful for them having given birth to you. At the time, I thought that was kind of a cop out. But as I’ve reflected more and more, and slowly recognized how lucky I am to be a human and to be here, I have a lot of gratitude for my parents.
Actually, I’m very lucky and have much more than that to be grateful to my parents for, but just being here and having the opportunity to reach the highest potential a human can realize - freedom of mind and transformation of suffering - I couldn’t do that without my parents.
There is a vivid image that the Buddha shares: Even if you were to carry your parents around on your back for a thousand years and never put them down, and they were to defecate down your back, you would not have repaid your debt of gratitude to them. I remember reading that and feeling a tremendous burden and guilt. I owe my parents so much and here I am living eight hundred miles away. My dad had a stroke and I’ve only visited him a few times. I’m not repaying my debt of gratitude.
And then I looked more deeply at the discourse and realized I can’t repay my debt of gratitude no matter how hard I try. The burden of guilt lifted and I knew what my parents wanted most from me was to make the best use of what they passed on to me for freedom from suffering and to cultivate kindness, compassion, joy, and peace in my daily life.
There is no burden of debt in true gratitude because there is no separation between the giver and the receiver. Gratitude is an insight into the way things are.
One gatha that Thich Nhat recommends that we practice in the shower is:
Unborn and indestructible
Beyond time and space
Both inheritance and transmission
Are empty of giver and receiver
If I look at my body as an object of transmission, then I think of it as inherited from my parents and from their parents, and from thousands of generations of ancestors going all the way back to single celled organisms, and atoms fused together by an exploding star billions of years before that. But before my body was transmitted to me, where was I to inherit a body? Without a body, how could there be a me to inherit one?
The very ideas of transmission and inheritance, of giving and receiving, are false ones based on objectifying and reifying what is actually an unborn and indestructible flow of energy, beyond time and space. There is a natural flow of energy in life cycling from one being to another. We are truly in harmony with that when we are able to blend and receive with grace and give with generosity. With the knowledge that we are participating in life, we let go of all complexes about who is giving and who is receiving.
I step out of the shower and into the present moment. What a miracle. What a wonder. What isn’t there to be grateful for?
Jonathan has taught regularly in WITHIN’s online meditation studio. He is currently on an extended retreat.