I took it to heart and have worked with that challenge two-thirds of my life. I've found it astoundingly trustworthy. I 'love' it when 'love' swells in me and seems to just overflow. But life is full of so many other moments when love is needed and I 'feel' no love at all.
The same is true for gratitude. It's wonderful when gratefulness wells up. But for most of us humans, those times are rather rare.
I'm so grateful that the Buddhists are teaching us Christians systematic ways to practice what we preach! They have 2500 years of learning how to make a habit of the qualities we value most.
Here's an example. It's from Jack Kornfield's The Wise Heart:
In Japan there is a form of Buddhist therapy called naikan that emphasizes gratitude as a way to heal depression, anxiety, and neurosis. In this approach we are asked to slowly and systematically review our whole life and offer gratitude for each thing that was given to us. A similar approach worked for a man named Bob, a practitioner who had been homeless for a year and was now living at a nearby mountain Zen center. Because of his memory of sleeping in the park, lying half awake every night in fear that someone would try to rob him or stab him, Bob was afraid to sleep. He had a history of family trauma: he had left his addicted father and stepmother for the streets at age fifteen and had used drugs himself. In his life he had been a carpenter and a mechanic.
When Bob went to the Buddhist center, he was trying to put his life together. The Zen teacher could feel his anxiety and mistrust. To help him soften this state, the teacher instructed him in a simple practice of gratitude. Bob began offering thanks for whatever food, clothing, and shelter he had for the moment, living, as they say in AA, one day at a time. He was taught to stop and surreptitiously bow in gratitude ten times a day, wherever he found himself. Bob took to bowing. He bowed to his kitchen mates and to their shared breakfast. He bowed to his morning depression and to his feelings of unworthiness. He bowed to the carpentry tools he used in the shop, to his anxiety, to the afternoon sun, and to the noisy tractor in the nearby field.
A second instruction was given to Bob as well: to look beyond his suffering. Bob slowly began to notice moments of well-being, surprising breaks in his inner struggles, small periods of blessing. He loved being in the temple garden. He walked among the live oaks and mulch piles by the garden path, framed by sturdy redwood posts and delicate fortget-me-nots and orange daisies. Bob described how his mind became quiet for the first time in years. The suffering he carried was still like a weight, but the vast silence was bigger. One day the temple bell rang for dinner and his heart was pierced. His pain and longing were swept over by a sublime wave of gratitude for just being alive. Bob was returning to life.
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Love. Gratitude. Peace. Kindness. These 'things' are too precious to leave to the randomness of our feelings. Especially when it's possible to cultivate them.
Cultivation starts with trusting the possibility of cultivation. It continues through a commitment to practice doing it. Mercifully, the doing confirms the trust. It 'works.' Gratitude practice opens us up to many, many more experiences of being grateful.
Etcetera. Etcetera. ALLELUIA, Etcetera.
