To mark the day, Guest columnist Peter Vajda returns to discuss gratitude and being mindful of what’s good in our lives.

Gratitude -
And Why It’s Healthy to Remember What You’re Thankful For
By Peter Vajda, Ph.D, C.P.C.

This week many of us in North America are gathering with friends, family and loved ones to celebrate Thanksgiving. This is always a time of emotions – the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly. This year, especially, many folks are struggling emotionally, dealing with issues around finances, losing their job or their home or feeling threatened, scared or pessimistic about the economy.

Regardless of how you’re feeling there are some very good reasons to be thankful – regardless of what your personal circumstances may be.

First, being thankful is the first step to a better life. Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California Davis, and colleagues have been conducting studies into the benefits of gratitude. Here is just a sampling of the benefits being thankful can have:

• Greater Optimism and Physical Fitness: People who kept weekly gratitude journals exercised on a more regular basis, felt better physically and about their lives in general, and had a more optimistic attitude about the upcoming week than people who recorded negative or neutral things in a journal.
• Achieve Your Goals: Those who kept gratitude lists were closer to attaining their personal goals after a two-month period than those who did not.
• Stress Relief: Being grateful is also an effective way to release stress, according to Emmons. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, he said in a WebMD article.
• Greater Sense of Well-being and Positive Emotions: People who are grateful report higher levels of positive emotions, vitality and life satisfaction, and lower levels of depression and stress.
• Helps You Cope With Illness: Among people with a neuromuscular disease, Emmons found that a 21-day gratitude intervention produced more high-energy positive moods, a greater sense of feeling connected to others, more optimistic ratings of one’s life, and better sleep duration and sleep quality, relative to a control group.

Gratitude and thankfulness are extremely healthy emotions and ones that can be cultivated if we are open to it. Positive emotions also tend to open us to even more to be grateful. Gratitude attracts the positive in our experience.

Sincere gratitude seems to unlock abundance in our lives. Numerous scientific studies indicate people who are thankful and grateful for what they have are happier, have better relationships and enjoy better health — a few reasons it helps to have an attitude of gratitude. But there are practical reasons too. In one study the participants who had been in the gratitude condition reported having made more progress toward their goals.

What do You Have to be Thankful For?

Ideally, some of you already have a running list of why you’re grateful in your head or in a journal by your bedside. I highly recommend you start a gratitude journal of your own and add to it each and every day.

One way of cultivating gratitude is to simply look toward what you already have in your life that you either are or can be thankful for, and then allow yourself to fully welcome the feeling of gratefulness as best you can.

Another way to open to being thankful is to release your dissatisfaction with what is. The more you let go of wanting to change what is, the more you feel grateful for what you already have without any additional effort.

Regardless of how you’re feeling about your life in this moment, and perhaps to give you a bit of inspiration for your own gratitude list, remember these four things that you definitely have to be thankful for:

You have the gift of life.

You have the ability to make choices.

You are in control of your life.

You are able to enjoy all the little things (sun rises, sunsets, clouds… ), if you choose to.

The following vignettes, which have been widely circulated around the Internet, help to put things into perspective and remind us all of what we have to be truly thankful for:

• If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75 percent of the people in the world.
• If you can attend a church or synagogue meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death you are more blessed than 3 billion people in the world.
• If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are more blessed than 500 million people in the world.
• If you have money in the bank, in your wallet and spare change in a dish, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.
• If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

Sharing your blessings

Finally, gratitude and thanksgiving aren’t just once-a-year or even once-a-month things. Spending time each day giving thanks for the blessings in your life (and everyone has blessings they can count) is a great habit to develop.

Jeff Keller, author of “Attitude is Everything“, says, “It costs you nothing to be grateful and appreciative, yet it has a considerable impact on the quality of your life. Openly share your gratitude with others. And, the next time somebody asks if anything great happened to you today, you’ll have plenty to say!”

Finally, perhaps come up with a way to thank or acknowledge people in your life who are often overlooked; some possibilities:

1. Send a bouquet of flowers to a busy mom, a teacher, a mentor, a colleague, a friend.
2. Write a thank you post-it note to a co-worker and paste it on their computer or desk; bring a co-worker a cup of coffee, hot chocolate, or tea; invite a co-worker to lunch.
3. Offer support to a military family in your community. You could send a note of comfort, help out with work around the house, or offer to take someone to lunch. Some of these folks have been away from their loved ones for months and could really use your loving kindness.
4. Speak to the boss of an administrative assistant or other support person who has provided you with exceptional service and let him or her know how great you were treated.
5. Send a thank you card to someone who would least expect it, like your auto mechanic, lawyer, accountant, dental hygienist, or doctor.
6. Bring a box of goodies to the office, or to your post office, your local fire department or police station, and let the employees know that you appreciate them. They rarely get this kind of acknowledgment, and the surprised look on their faces is heart-warming.
7. Leave a larger than normal tip hidden under a cup for your favorite restaurant server, or in a card to your newspaper delivery person.
8. Write the words “thank you” on the bills you pay this month
9. Bring some homemade cookies to a local Veteran’s or Nursing home.
10. Send a note of thanks to the teacher who takes good care of your son or daughter.
11. Give freely of your special talents, skills, knowledge or time to support someone who could use some help right now.
12. Perform a random act of workplace or community kindness out of gratitude that you can.
13. Stop for a moment and browse through your address book to identify the people who serve you, keep you safe, or help make your life easier in some way. Then, consider the people in your place of work, your neighborhood, community, family or friends. Who could use a special acknowledgment, a word of thanks, this or next week? Make a list of maybe five people and thank one special person every day.

Generally, appreciation means some blend of thankfulness, admiration, approval, and gratitude. In the financial world, something that appreciates grows in value. With the power tool of gratitude, you get the benefit of both perspectives: as you learn to be consistently thankful and approving, your life will grow in value.

Happy Thanksgiving!

So, our $10 food for thought questions are:

• For whom and for what are you grateful?
• Do you take time every day to express gratitude for what you have?
• Do you know you are truly a work of art, a masterpiece, in your own right?
• Who do you know who could use a supportive word or act of loving kindness right now, this minute, today, this week? What would it take for you to offer that word or act right now, today, this week? Will you?

SpiritHeart – Coaching for Essential Well-BE-ing
— at the intersection of body, mind, emotion and spirit
Values-Based Coaching, Counseling and Training
Phone: 770.804.9125 (Atlanta, GA, USA)
E-mail: pvajda [AT] spiritheart [DOT] net
www.spiritheart.net and www.ahchiyo.com
“What makes you think work and meditation are two different things?”
— Buddha at Work

Gratitude is a skill. It’s one we build over time, just like any other. And today is as good a time as any to start strengthening this skill. Regardless of where in the world you live, this is a good idea.

So repeat with me:

“I pause right this moment to look around at what I have. And just for today I recognize what’s right with the things in my life, rather than what is lacking in them. My health – as much of it as I have, my family – no matter what our past differences, my knowledge – because everything I know is a treasure, my emotions – for I can learn to direct them and power my dreams. Everything I have is good, and for today, for this brief moment, I deliberately choose to rejoice for myself. I dare to be glad that I am alive.”

And if you haven’t said these words yet – out loud – then open your mouth right now and do it. And do it again.

That’s the way you change your life into one that’s overflowing with joy. You consciously build it the way you want it to be. Starting now.

Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles

Yesterday her phone rang and when she picked it up, a voice she didn’t recognize asked if her name was Susan Minarik. When she admitted that indeed it was, the voice further asked if she had once been Susan ——- (her maiden name). Again, Susan allowed as how that was her.

“Well Susan, the reason I’m calling is that we went to high school together. My name is Mike ——-, and I just wanted to tell you my story.”

Totally unable to recall who this Mike person was, and unsure what might come next, Susan gave a noncommittal OK and waited. After all, this guy could be a newly awakened stalker from 45 years in her past, or could be carrying a decades-long secret crush, neither of which would be very welcome. So she decided to wait and simply let Mike have his say.

“I realize that you may not even remember me, but since graduating from high school, I went on to get married, have a career, and live life pretty much like everybody else. But then five years ago I got cancer. And that just wiped me out. I was devastated. It knocked me down and I couldn’t seem to get back up, no matter what I did. I went through deep depression.

“Then one day, I was looking back through my old things from school days. As I was leafing through the yearbook, I came across the place where you signed it. You wrote ‘Thank you for what you have done for our family and all the help you’ve given us.’ And I sat and began wondering whatever happened to that old Mike. Somebody who had been thanked for what he’d done.”

Meanwhile, Susan was still trying to remember who this person was that she had thanked.

“Right then and there,” Mike went on, “I decided to go back to being my old self again. Confident and thankful and looking forward to what life was going to bring.

“And I just wanted to call and thank you for writing that in my yearbook. It helped me get my life back. I started working out and running. In the past five years my wife and I have run five marathons. I still have bone cancer, and it’s still incurable, and I know that eventually it’ll get me, but I’m not going to voluntarily give it an inch. I’m going to keep living life and enjoying it as long as I have breath in me.

“So thank you Susan,” he concluded.

And that was all Mike had called to say. Just thank you. They quickly exchanged details of their respective lives in the intervening years, then Mike hung up and was gone, leaving Susan to think about the power of a simple remark she’d casually scribbled in somebody’s yearbook 45 years ago.

Now, Mike didn’t have to call her. In fact, he hadn’t even known her married name, but he did remember that 29 years earlier his mother and Susan’s father had died in the same week, so their obituaries had appeared in the same issue of the newspaper. He now lives in a different state, so going and looking up that back issue, getting her name and then searching the Internet for a way to contact her involved some effort. In other words, Mike had to go fairly far out of his way and expend some real time simply to call and say thanks. He was that grateful.

Susan briefly tells about the experience in her blog High on Happiness, but truth be told, I think she still doesn’t “get” just how many seeds she’s been planting every single day of her life. That’s just the kind of person she is.

But to you, my question is this: Do all your casual, unthinking little throwaway comments and interactions with those who have passed your way help them remember you as somebody who did something FOR them, or somebody who did something TO them?

What’s your net contribution to the lives of the people you’ve passed casually along the way? The truth is, you probably won’t ever know because people are enormously unlikely to call you up 45 years later just to tell you what effect you’ve had.

You won’t know, but you could venture a guess, based on your overriding attitude to the passersby through your life. Do you wish for them the very best that life can possibly bring them? Do you hope that they have lives of joy, fulfillment, love and happiness? Do you wish these things for no reason except that it feels good to do so? If you do, then you’re probably leaving gentle and kind remarks of goodwill for others.

But if not, if you often find yourself jealously begrudging others the good things, wishing it was you and not them enjoying good fortune, hoping the guy in front of you will fall and get the hell out of your way, seeing no one around you but fools, dunces and idiots, then you can rest assured you’ve spent your years so far planting thorns and not flowers.

The scriptures say, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,” so whatever is abundant in your heart is what passes through your lips and lodges in the hearts and spirits of others. Whether you’re even aware of it happening.

These are the seeds you’ve been strewing about as you you’ve passed along the paths life has laid in front of you.

And why should you even care? I mean, if nobody is ever going to call you up and let you know anyway, what’s the use of bothering with it?

Frankly, if you have to ask for this to be explained to you, then no explanation ever invented will help you understand. The simplest I can put it is this – you do it because it feels good doing it. Only that. And that’s enough.

Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles