The Inner Gym
Page 4
In these next five days, you’re going to stop reserving the feeling of gratitude for meals and start mining for reasons to be grateful when it matters most: during those times when you feel least grateful. We want to build a quick-reflex gratitude muscle that automatically kicks in regardless of whether outward circumstances appear favorable or not. Gratitude is too powerful a feeling with restorative properties for our inner muscles, so we ideally want to experience it as often as possible. It also contains the key to liberating us from our acquisitive-approach-to-happiness mentality, which is the undisputed heavyweight champion of misery.
Like the previous meditation inner exercise, your inner exercise of gratitude will be easy enough to do, no matter how busy you are. It should only take a minute or two each morning. Continue reading for your instructions.
GRATITUDE INSTRUCTIONS
Recommended Equipment:
A writing utensil
An empty jar or container
Assume the attitude of gratitude. Right after your morning meditation, with your eyes still closed, begin to place your attention on a handful of people, places, circumstances, or recent life lessons you’re grateful for.
Write five gratitude statements. Slowly open your eyes, grab your book, and in your inner exercise log at the end of this chapter, write down your five statements of gratitude. The following is an example:
What am I grateful for today?
My health
Having delicious food to eat
My job
Walks in the park
Learning to say ‘no’
Keep them with you. After your fifth day you’ll begin writing your list on a slip of paper and keeping it with you, ideally in a place where you may stumble upon it hours later, such as in your pocket or purse. It’s encouraged that you pull out your list from time to time to reflect on your blessings throughout your day.
Save them. After you fill your exercise log with your gratitude lists, and begin writing them on separate slips of paper, start saving them up. When you get home or at some point near the end of your day, place your list into your “gratitude” jar. The next morning, start again. Continue listing new statements of gratitude on a daily basis.
Record your happiness. Continue to track your happiness level based on your cumulative feelings over the previous 24 hours.
Helpful tips:
• It’s good to limit your gratitude list to only five statements so you’re not racking your brain by the end of the program.
• In order to keep this inner exercise easy, it’s also recommended to stick with simple statements for each item on your list.
• If you forget to write your morning gratitude statements, write it down later, or send it to yourself in an email, or write it in a text message, or say it to yourself and jot it down later. Just make sure you get it into your jar at some point soon. When traveling, keep your daily lists in a safe place and deposit them into your jar when you return home.
Now you will begin five days of inner gratitude exercises. Resist the urge to start the next chapter until you’ve completed all five days of writing out your gratitude lists, following your daily meditation practice, which is ongoing.
OUTER GYM EQUIVALENT
EXPRESSING GRATITUDE = HIP OPENERS
Expressing gratitude is like doing a set of hip openers for your happiness. Hip openers are helpful for unlocking tension and negativity stored up from years and decades of stiffness, emotional stubbornness, and inaction. Similarly, this daily gratitude practice will prevent the atrophying of your natural sense of optimism by dissolving negativity that may be stored in your cells. Once your body is free from negativity, it will be far easier to perceive the goodness in every moment. Each time you write your five statements of gratitude, your ability to recognize the beauty surrounding you at all times will strengthen and grow, ultimately becoming impossible to ignore, even on your grumpiest days.
EXERCISE LOG: WRITE 5 STATEMENTS OF GRATITUDE
Day 6
Meditate for five to ten minutes in the morning
What am I grateful for today?
1. _________________________________________
2. _________________________________________
3. _________________________________________
4. _________________________________________
5. _________________________________________
Rate my post-gratitude happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 7
Meditate for five to ten minutes in the morning
What am I grateful for today?
1. _________________________________________
2. _________________________________________
3. _________________________________________
4. _________________________________________
5. _________________________________________
Rate my post-gratitude happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 8
Meditate for five to ten minutes in the morning
What am I grateful for today?
1. _________________________________________
2. _________________________________________
3. _________________________________________
4. _________________________________________
5. _________________________________________
Rate my post-gratitude happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 9
Meditate for five to ten minutes in the morning
What am I grateful for today?
1. _________________________________________
2. _________________________________________
3. _________________________________________
4. _________________________________________
5. _________________________________________
Rate my post-gratitude happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 10
Meditate for five to ten minutes in the morning
What am I grateful for today?
1. _________________________________________
2. _________________________________________
3. _________________________________________
4. _________________________________________
5. _________________________________________
Rate my post-gratitude happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Continue on to your next inner exercise only after completing day 10.
It is one of the most beautiful compensations
of life that no man can sincerely try to help
another without helping himself.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
INNER EXERCISE 3
RECEIVE FREELY
(Days 11 to 15)
For about three years in California, my primary mode of transportation was a 2-door Fiat. Here I was, 6’3, 210 lbs, driving a car that was slightly bigger than a matchbox. My friends teased me about it, and I must admit, there were occasions when zipping around Los Angeles in the “Ultimate Parking Machine,” as I liked to call it, felt a bit like I was borrowing my girlfriend’s car.
This feeling was accentuated one Saturday afternoon when I pulled into a coin-operated car wash for an overdue cleaning. While frantically washing and rinsing the exterior of my Fiat before the allotted four minutes of soap and water expired, I noticed a Ferrari easing out of the washing stall next to mine. Although I never cared much for luxury cars, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sleek lines, the craftsmanship, and the feral purr of this matte black Ferrari.
The driver was a burly man, obviously no stranger to the gym. He wore designer sweats and appeared well groomed. Even the towels he was using to dry his car were sparkly white and high quality, the kind you might see poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Comparing his car to mine, I began to feel a bit emasculated. “What kind of man drives a Fiat?” I asked myself, while drying the windshield with my yellow reusable towel. In the next moment, I wondered, “Wait, if he can afford a car like that, why was he at the coin-operated car wash? Why not have his car detailed somewhere?”
I took out my bottle of tire polish and began spray-shining my little Fiat tires, careful not to rub the polish onto the tires with my yellow towel so it wouldn’t get soiled. I then glanced over at the Ferrari’s tires. They were dull, and the thought occurred to offer the Ferrari guy my polish to use on his tires, as a gesture of appreciation and admiration for his well-designed luxury car.
“Hey, I really love your car,” I said, walking towards the Ferrari guy as he was drying his windows. He paused and met my compliment with a friendly smile.
“I was wondering if you wanted to use my tire polish, because it would be a shame for you to take this beautiful car back on the road without sparkling tires.”
With a nod, he happily accepted the tire polish, and I was delighted that I could contribute to making his Ferrari even more spectacular. I walked back over to the Ultimate Parking Machine to finish drying it while he sprayed each of his tires and rubbed the polish in with his white towel.
Then the Ferrari guy did something completely unexpected: he grabbed an unused white towel from his trunk, walked over to my car, knelt down, and began rubbing the polish into my tires. I stood there dumbstruck. Watching this brawny man leave his quarter of a million dollar car to come rub polish into the tires on my tiny eighteen thousand dollar car was such an odd sight. My first instinct was to stop him. I mean, surely he had better things to do than to shine up my Fiat tires. Instead, I decided to receive his kind gesture, and thanked him profusely for helping me. He thanked me for offering him the tire polish in the first place, and began to share his story. He came to the United States as an immigrant with nothing, and worked his way up from drying cars at a carwash to becoming the owner of a Ferrari dealership. He told me he used to own a Fiat back in Europe. Then he started asking me about how it drove. “Probably nothing like your Ferrari,” I chuckled to myself.
For about ten minutes, we chatted about all kinds of things: cars, meditation, and even deeper subjects like the importance of finding your life’s purpose and the fragility of existence. In the end, he extended an invitation for me to teach his wife and his staff meditation. Then we parted ways.
I couldn’t help but wonder what would’ve happened had I stopped him from rubbing the polish into my tires. Maybe he would’ve felt indebted to me, or perhaps we both would’ve gone about our day and forgotten about it. I knew that if I had stopped him, I would’ve missed out on a wonderfully inspiring interaction, in which I got to feel good by helping someone, and he got to reciprocate. As a result, we both seemed to leave the car wash in brighter spirits.
There’s a place where this kind of unconditional receiving is expected: Burning Man. It is a festival that takes place in Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada every summer just before Labor Day. It’s billed as an experimental community, where art, radical self-expression and self-reliance are heralded. Attendees regularly boast that Burning Man is a place where anything can happen at any time. This is largely due to Burning Man’s “gifting” culture. During the festival, there is no money exchanged, with the small exception of coffee and ice. Anything else you receive from another participant or “camp” must be gifted unconditionally. In fact, one of the popular to-do’s when preparing to attend Burning Man is to plan what you will gift to the other participants.
In a place where unconditional giving is so prevalent, you are sure to find one of the most radical cultures of receiving. Many participants have reported that nowhere else on Earth is the principle of reciprocity and the circulation of resources being demonstrated so thoroughly. “It’s not unusual,” I heard from someone who attended, “to be standing in the middle of an art installation, contemplating how wonderful it would be to have ice cream—and then seconds later to have a stranger ride up on a bicycle and hand you an ice cream cone, and then disappear into the desert.”
Burning Man takes place for only one week out of the year. But could it be possible to create that same level of unconditional reciprocity in daily life? That’s what we’ll be exploring in this next inner exercise. In anticipation of any skepticism you may have concerning this idea, that receiving ultimately leads to sustained happiness, let’s be clear about what we’re referring to. There are unconditional gifts, which are offered from the heart, and there are conditional gifts, which are expectation-laden loans disguised as gifts.
Unconditional gifts have no strings attached. They are usually accompanied by an innate feeling of compassion, generosity and spontaneity that is not only detectable, but contagious. It reinforces the beauty of the interdependence of humans when we participate in shared experiences. On the other hand, loans masking as gifts are usually pre-meditated, and accompanied by a detectable underlying expectation for repayment. These gifts detract authentic interaction and activate our defense mechanisms.
Your intuition will tell you which is which. This is why it’s important to continue dusting off the body’s internal “receiving sensors” through daily meditation. More than anything else, daily meditation will assist you in distinguishing between conditional and unconditional giving. Otherwise, you may accidentally reject what you should have openly received, or vice versa.
For instance, I will never forget when my grandfather, in his final days, called me over one afternoon and offered me one of his fine writing pens. I was 18, and not mature enough to appreciate the appeal of having a keepsake from my grandfather that I could one day pass down to my grandson. Instead, I politely declined his gift. My naïve rationale was that I didn’t want the responsibility of caring for his important pen for the rest of my life. He died shortly after. Now, twenty years later, I would give anything to be able to go back and graciously receive his pen. I failed to realize at the time how receiving the pen was more for him than it was for me. The quiet disappointment I saw in his eyes when I rejected his gift still lingers in my memory when I think about my grandfather.
WHY RECEIVING?
In the car wash example, the Ferrari guy’s help was unconditional, as was mine. He knew I was capable of shining my tires and I knew he was more than capable of purchasing his own tire dressing. But we were both following an internal, spontaneous prompt to graciously receive—emphasis on spontaneous. Unconditional gifts are for the giver. Reception completes the circulation of resources.
To illustrate how receiving works, imagine that buckets of water are being passed down a line from one person to the next, in a group effort to douse a fire. When the bucket gets to you, you don’t see it as your possession. Instead, you are the caretaker of that bucket for the brief time it is in your hands, and your job is to accept it, pass it along, and then reach back for the next bucket. This is the essence of circulation. In other words, we are stewards, not the owners, of our resources, whatever they may happen to be. Our job is to receive graciously and care for whatever we’ve received until the time and inclination comes for us to pass it along to help the next person.
The more you can adopt this attitude towards everything you have, the more freely you will experience the flow of abundance. This is true even with our first gift, the gift of life. The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, one of the famous Indian Shankaracharyas (King of the Yogis) in the 1940s regarding the gift of life:xii
To get a human body is a rare thing; make use of it. There are four million kinds of lives which a soul can gather. After that, one gets a chance to be human, to get a human body. Therefore, one should not waste this chance.
Every second in human life is very valuable. If you don’t value this, then you will have nothing in hand, and you will weep in the end.
Because you are human, God has given you power to think and decide what is go
od and bad. Therefore, you can do the best possible action.
You should never consider yourself as weak or a fallen creature. Whatever may have happened up to now may be because you didn’t know, but now be careful. After getting a human body, if you don’t reach God, then you have sold a diamond at the price of spinach.
As Swami Brahmananda Saraswati’s quote implies, a gift doesn’t have to be material. Therefore, we have ample opportunities to practice mindful receiving in just about every aspect our lives. Each morning, we get another day of life, another sunrise, another sunset, another moonlit night, another chance to correct mistakes. As we listen, we may hear the birds sing or leaves blowing in the wind, or we may smell the flowers with their sweet aroma as we pass by them. People may smile at us. These are all precious gifts.
I once witnessed a tailor charge a woman $40 for altering a garment, and then hand her $40 that he found in the pocket of her garment. It was a gift to see something like that—a wonderful reminder of the many good-natured people in the world who go out of their way to do the right thing. Consciously recognizing the gifts bestowed upon us throughout our days will undoubtedly lighten our mood and enhance our interaction with others. The ripple effects of these actions are incalculable.
To take the idea of receiving in another direction, think back to the many moments when it was difficult to appreciate someone for giving you constructive criticism about your job, or about meeting your stated goals more efficiently. If you’re like me, at times, you grew defensive, and you didn’t express much gratitude. Or you responded with sarcasm, or silence, or by saying something that indicated you were anything but grateful. With practice, those moments of feeling rejected will hopefully become fewer and farther in between.
During these next five days, your inner exercise will be to respond by saying “thank you,” both in person and through writing. Additionally, you’re going to show appreciation for the giver’s time, effort, and good intentions. This is a corrective exercise that may expose some weaknesses in your inner receiving muscle. But don’t fret, with practice comes supreme strength, and with a brawny receiving muscle, you can never be denied true happiness.