Every day, think as you wake up, ‘I am fortunate to be alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it,’” the Dalai Lama has often said. The topic was gratitude, and it was fascinating to see how often the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama stopped to express their gratitude for each other, for all who were making their time together possible, and for each and every thing that they were witnessing. I had noticed how the Archbishop greets almost every new experience with the word wonderful, and it is indeed that ability to see wonder, surprise, possibility in each experience and each encounter that is a core aspect of joy.
“You can be helped to look at the world and see a different perspective,” the Archbishop said. “Where some people see a half-empty cup, you can see it as half-full. Perhaps people will be moved to see that there are very, very, very many people in the world today who will not have had the kind of breakfast that you had. Many, many millions in the world today are hungry. It’s not your fault, but you woke up from a warm bed, you were able to have a shower, you put on clean clothes, and you were in a home that is warm in the winter. Now just think of the many who are refugees who wake up in the morning, and there’s not very much protection for them against the rain that is pelting down. Perhaps there is no warmth or food or even just water. It is to say in a way, yes, it is to say really, you do want to count your blessings.”
Neither the Archbishop nor the Dalai Lama spent a great deal of time talking about enjoyment, perhaps because both of their traditions are skeptical of finding lasting happiness through sensual indulgence, but I had been happy to find that neither of them was opposed to the pleasures permitted in their spiritual lives, whether Tibetan rice pudding or rum raisin ice cream. Gratitude is the elevation of enjoyment, the ennobling of enjoyment. Gratitude is one of the key dimensions that Ekman lists in his definition of joy.
Gratitude is the recognition of all that holds us in the web of life and all that has made it possible to have the life that we have and the moment that we are experiencing. Thanksgiving is a natural response to life and may be the only way to savor it. Both Christian and Buddhist traditions, perhaps all spiritual traditions, recognize the importance of gratefulness. It allows us to shift our perspective, as the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop counseled, toward all we have been given and all that we have. It moves us away from the narrow-minded focus on fault and lack and to the wider perspective of benefit and abundance.
Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic Benedictine monk and scholar who spent a great deal of time in Christian–Buddhist interfaith dialogue, has explained, “It is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy. Every moment is a gift. There is no certainty that you will have another moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. The gift within every gift is the opportunity it offers us. Most often it is the opportunity to enjoy it, but sometimes a difficult gift is given to us and that can be an opportunity to rise to the challenge.”
The Dalai Lama’s ability to be grateful for the opportunities that exist even in exile was a profound shift in perspective, allowing him not only to accept the reality of his circumstances but also to see the opportunity in every experience. Acceptance means not fighting reality. Gratitude means embracing reality. It means moving from counting your burdens to counting your blessings, as the Archbishop had recommended, both as an antidote to envy and a recipe for appreciating our own lives.
“I have been able to meet many spiritual leaders like you,” the Dalai Lama said, when the Archbishop had been awed by his ability to find gratitude even in fifty years of loss for himself and his people. “It is much more enriching, much more useful. Even suffering helps you to develop empathy and compassion for others.
“Exile really has brought me closer to reality. When you are in difficult situations, there is no room for pretense. In adversity or tragedy, you must confront reality as it is. When you are refugee, when you have lost your land, you cannot pretend or hide behind your role. When you are confronted with the reality of suffering, all of life is laid bare. Even a king when he is suffering cannot pretend to be something special. He is just one human being, suffering, like all other people.”
In Buddhism, one can be grateful even for one’s enemies, “our most precious spiritual teachers,” as they are often called, because they help us develop our spiritual practice and to cultivate equanimity even in the face of adversity. The Dalai Lama’s story about his friend who feared losing his compassion for his torturers in the Chinese gulag was a poignant example.
The Archbishop had described earlier in the week how Nelson Mandela had been transformed while he was in prison. Mandela and his fellow political prisoners had used their time to develop their mind and their character so that they would someday be ready to rule the country. They had seen it as an informal university. These prison stories reminded me of a former inmate I’ve had the privilege of knowing.
Anthony Ray Hinton spent thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit. He was working in a locked factory at the time of the crime that he was being accused of. When he was arrested in the state of Alabama in the United States, he was told by the police officers that he would be going to jail because he was black. He spent thirty years in a five-by-seven-foot cell in solitary confinement, allowed out only one hour a day. During his time on death row, Hinton became a counselor and friend not only to the other inmates, fifty-four of whom were put to death, but to the death row guards, many of whom begged Hinton’s attorney to get him out.
When a unanimous Supreme Court ruling ordered his release, he was finally able to walk free. “One does not know the value of freedom until one has it taken away,” he told me. “People run out of the rain. I run into the rain. How can anything that falls from heaven not be precious? Having missed the rain for so many years, I am so grateful for every drop. Just to feel it on my face.”
When Hinton was interviewed on the American television show 60 Minutes, the interviewer asked whether he was angry at those who had put him in jail. He responded that he had forgiven all the people who had sent him to jail. The interviewer incredulously asked, “But they took thirty years of your life—how can you not be angry?”
Hinton responded, “If I’m angry and unforgiving, they will have taken the rest of my life.”
Unforgiveness robs us of our ability to enjoy and appreciate our life, because we are trapped in a past filled with anger and bitterness. Forgiveness allows us to move beyond the past and appreciate the present, including the drops of rain falling on our face.
“Whatever life gives to you,” Brother Steindl-Rast explains, “you can respond with joy. Joy is the happiness that does not depend on what happens. It is the grateful response to the opportunity that life offers you at this moment.”
Hinton is a powerful example of the ability to respond with joy despite the most horrendous circumstances. As we were driving in a taxi in New York, he told me, “The world didn’t give you your joy, and the world can’t take it away. You can let people come into your life and destroy it, but I refused to let anyone take my joy. I get up in the morning, and I don’t need anyone to make me laugh. I am going to laugh on my own, because I have been blessed to see another day, and when you are blessed to see another day that should automatically give you joy.
“I don’t walk around saying, ‘Man, I ain’t got a dollar in my pocket.’ I don’t care about having a dollar in my pocket, what I care about is that I have been blessed to see the sun rise. Do you know how many people had money but didn’t get up this morning? So, which is better—to have a billion dollars and not wake up, or to be broke and wake up? I’ll take being broke and waking up any day of the week. I told the CNN interviewer in June that I had three dollars and fifty cents in my pocket and for some reason that day I was just the happiest I have ever been. She said, ‘With three dollars and fifty cents?’ I said, ‘You know, my mom never raised us to get out there and make as much money as we can. My mom told us about true happiness. She told us that when you are happy, then when folks hang around you they become happy.’
“I just look at all the people who have so much but they are not happy. Yes, I did thirty long years, day for day, in a five by seven, and you have got some people that have never been to prison, never spent one day or one hour or one minute, but they are not happy. I ask myself, ‘Why is that?’ I can’t tell you why they are not happy, but I can tell you that I’m happy because I choose to be happy.”
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When you are grateful,” Brother Steindl-Rast explained, “you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and respectful to all people. A grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people. A grateful world is a happy world.”
Gratitude connects us all. When we are grateful for a meal, we can be grateful for the food that we are eating and for all of those who have made the meal possible—the farmers, the grocers, and the cooks. When the Archbishop gives thanks, we are often taken on a journey of Ubuntu, acknowledging all of the connections that bind us together and on which we are all dependent. The Eucharist that the Archbishop gave to the Dalai Lama literally comes from the Greek word thanksgiving, and saying grace or giving thanks for what we have been given is an important practice in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
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Rejoicing is one of the “seven limbs” that are part of the daily spiritual practice in the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. When we rejoice, we celebrate our good fortune and the good fortune of others. We celebrate our good deeds and the good deeds of others. By rejoicing, you are much less likely to take life for granted and can affirm and appreciate all that you have and have done. Jinpa told me there is a famous passage from Tsongkhapa, the fourteenth-century Tibetan master whose thoughts and writings were an important part of the Dalai Lama’s formal education. “It’s taught that the best way to create good karma with the least amount of effort is to rejoice in your good deeds and those of others.” Rejoicing predisposes us to repeat those good deeds in the future.
Scientists have long known that our brains have evolved with a negative bias. It was no doubt advantageous for our survival to focus on what was wrong or dangerous. Gratitude cuts across this default mode of the mind. It allows us to see what is good and right and not just what is bad and wrong.
Perhaps because of this bias, people are often skeptical of gratitude and wonder if it is a naive point of view or will lead to complacency or even injustice. If we are grateful for what is, will we be less likely to work for what still needs to be? If the Dalai Lama is able to find things in his exile that he is grateful for, will he be less willing to stand up to the Chinese occupation of Tibet?
UC Davis Professor Robert Emmons has been studying gratitude for over a decade. In one study with his colleagues Michael McCullough and Jo-Ann Tsang, they found that grateful people do not seem to ignore or deny the negative aspects of life; they simply choose to appreciate what is positive as well: “People with a strong disposition toward gratitude have the capacity to be empathic and to take the perspective of others. They are rated as more generous and more helpful by people in their social networks.” They are also more likely to have helped someone with a personal problem or to have offered emotional support to others.
Emmons and McCullough have also found that people who focus on gratitude, by keeping a list of what they were grateful for, exercised more often, had fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives, and were more positive about the week ahead compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events. Similarly, those who focused on gratitude were more likely to have made progress toward their important personal goals. So it seems gratitude is motivating, not demotivating. Grateful people report more positive emotions, more vitality and optimism, and greater life satisfaction as well as lower levels of stress and depression.
Gratitude may stimulate the hypothalamus, which is involved in regulating stress in the brain, as well as the ventral tegmental region, which is part of the reward circuits that produce pleasure in the brain. Research has shown that the simple act of smiling for as little as twenty seconds can trigger positive emotions, jump-starting joy and happiness. Smiling stimulates the release of neuropeptides that work toward fighting off stress and unleashes a feel-good cocktail of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins. Serotonin acts as a natural antidepressant, dopamine stimulates the reward centers of the brain, and endorphins are natural painkillers. Smiling also seems to reward the brains of those who see us smiling making them feel better, too. Smiling is contagious, stimulating unconscious smiling in others, which in turn spreads the positive effects. Did the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop smile because they were happy, or were they happy because they smiled? It sounded a little like a Zen koan. Likely, both were true. Whether we frown in displeasure or smile in appreciation, we have enormous power over our emotions and our experience of life.
Impermanence, the Dalai Lama reminds us, is the nature of life. All things are slipping away, and there is a real danger of wasting our precious human life. Gratitude helps us catalog, celebrate, and rejoice in each day and each moment before they slip through the vanishing hourglass of experience.
Perhaps it was no surprise to Sonja Lyubomirsky that gratitude is a factor that seems to influence happiness along with our ability to reframe negative events into positive ones. The final factor she found was our ability to be kind and generous toward others, which the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop saw as two separate but related pillars: compassion and generosity. When we recognize all that we have been given, it is our natural response to want to care for and give to others.