I remember meeting the author Tim Sanders and learning of his unforgettable morning routine. It started with, “don’t pick up the phone.”
Then, “think about all that you’re grateful for.” Simple.
As a veteran phone-picker-upper, I ignored his advice for many months, until one day, for some reason or another, I was feeling a bit of despair and I tried it. Boom. It did something. It reconfigured a few of the puzzle pieces that make up the image I have of my own mind.
My hunch is that I learned gratitude as a social convention. You get a pair of socks from dear old grandma, and you’re to send her a thank you card. Never mind that perhaps you weren’t so excited about the socks. We were encouraged to engage in a bit of theater.
Later in life I had a neighbor, Alan Barbier – now he was a fellow who wielded Thank You, in a way I’d never seen. Impressive. It wasn’t just a social convention, but was truly heartfelt. It’s possible that some folks really do learn a good habit of gratitude when they’re younger, but I confess, as much as I admired Alan, no matter how much I tried to change the habit of gratitude, it didn’t come naturally.
Sanders said that gratitude is a muscle – meaning the more you practice, the stronger and more easily accessible the practice becomes. So, I persevered, and practiced flexing the muscle. And after a while, this thing happens in which you might find yourself thanking just about everything around you; the rocks, the sky, the water, even perhaps that difficult person, because, after all, without them, you wouldn’t be exactly here, in this very spot. And this is incredible.
The magic, I think, in Sander’s morning routine is one of changing perspective. Perspective is the point at which you see something. In art, we have the perspective of the picture plane – and how from a certain point of view, everything emanates, or recedes to a point on the horizon. In gratitude, the picture plane is reconfigured, taking yourself and your woes out of the center.
Consider the classic story of a person who complains about the traffic jam, forgetting that they are in a car, and perhaps a pretty nice one at that – on their way home to their lovely home and family! Imagine how stopping and practicing a bit of gratitude diminishes the frustration of the moment, and amplifies those other elements.
Let’s play a game with the gratitude exercise. What if, after considering all that you’re grateful for, you conclude with doing the Self-Acknowledgement Hug™? The Hug also has the power of changing perspective. It’s so easy, with our thoughts in our brains, to feel alone. Instead, here, “we’ll always be together.” Our mind, in that incessant inner dialogue doesn’t feel like it’s enough, so we tell it, “we’re enough!”
The wonderful author and Buddhist psychologist, Mark Epstein, suggested that in practicing meditation, we’re often giving ourselves the focused attention that a mother would give their child. I have a feeling that this is what we’re doing in the Self-acknowledgement Hug, too. We’re stepping in and being the parent to ourselves. How many of us are seeking something out there to complete our own reality? What if we could cultivate some wonderful inner genie-abuela-nona who would come out and say, “oh, no, sweetheart, you really are enough.”
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