Before Thanksgiving, I had posted this photo of an ordinary fruit jar with slips of paper in it on my Facebook page. The caption read: “This January, why not start the year with an empty jar and fill it with notes about good things that happen. Then on New Years Eve, empty it and see what awesome stuff happened that year.” While it may be in vogue to think about gratitude around Thanksgiving, the health and well-being benefits of experiencing gratefulness are welcome 365 days of the year.
It may be that some Common Metaprograms are operational making it easier for individuals to develop a genuine attitude of gratitude. Metaprograms (See Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication, by Bowman and Basham, p. 62-63) are behavioral tendencies, polarities from which an individual chooses, including:
- Action—Initiate or Respond
- Direction—Toward or Away From
- Source—Internal or External
- Conduct—Rule Follower or Breaker
- Response—Match or Mismatch
- Scope—Global or Specific
- Attention—Self or Other
- Cognitive Style—Thinking or Feeling
- Confirmation—Representational System and Number of Times
Because these common metaprograms tend to quite predictably be active in a variety of situations, it can appear that they are fixed and unchanging. However, they are actually dynamic (rather than static), simultaneous (rather than sequential), and interrelated (rather than isolated).
If my habit pattern had been to be externally motivated by rules, what happens when the rules change? One does not have to think long to see problems with this. We have gluten-free fads, fat-free fads, and take something like eggs: certainly a food that had fallen out of (and is now back in to) favor as a good nutritional choice. A rule follower who is more focused globally with attention on others can easily become a zealot at best or a dictator at the most destructive extreme.
Buddhism does not have metaprograms per se, yet it clearly identifies similar problematic behavior tendencies and speaks of them as eight worldly preoccupations:
- pleasure and pain
- loss and gain
- praise and blame
- fame and disgrace
All humans prefer pleasure and want to avoid pain. Most hope for happiness and fear suffering. The stock market is driven by our aversion to loss and our desire for gain. Essentially our entire social structure is built around praise and blame. The striving for fame (and the dread of insignificance) can undermine our health, our happiness, and even our sanity. Addictions are an attempt to end pain, but the result is a cycle of increased suffering. We simply cannot get happy by trying to avoid loss, pain, disgrace. Basically these are all about clinging (attachment) and aversion.
It occurs to me, and I think you will agree, that we might benefit by becoming aware how these tendencies operate in our personalities and support our understanding of the link between joy and gratefulness. Science has shown that we have greater well-being (regardless of circumstances) when we are focused more on the blessings. While the goal is not to change the tendency, by becoming aware of the tendency, you lessen the influence and learn to think and act with greater gratitude.
Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology at UC Davis, has researched and written widely on the subject of gratitude. The findings: “Gratitude is one of the few things that can measurably heal, energize and change people’s lives. It is a turning of the mind, not what I don’t have, but what I have already.” (Counting Blessings Verses Burdens: An Experiential Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-being in Daily Life) If the science behind his findings interests you, check out his book: Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. (2007, Houghton Mifflin)
December 2, 2014, my “Yellow Brick Road: Your Path to Heart & Health” blog post Finding Joy in the Journey was about gratitude, and opened with the following:
“It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”
I heard this pithy quotation attributed to Brené Brown, but it actually came from Gratefulfness, The Heart of Prayer by Brother David Steindl-Rast, and it is part of a larger commentary:
Ordinary happiness depends on happenstance.
Joy is that extraordinary happiness that is independent of what happens to us.
Good luck can make us happy, but it cannot give us lasting joy. The root of joy is gratefulness. We tend to misunderstand the link between joy and gratefulness. We notice that joyful people are grateful and suppose that they are grateful for their joy.
But the reverse is true: their joy springs from gratefulness. If one has all the good luck in the world, but takes it for granted, it will not give one joy. Yet even bad luck will give joy to those who manage to be grateful for it.
We hold the key to lasting happiness in our own hands. For it is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
This is a new year! Whatever happened is over. It is 2015—we all get a brand new start now. It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful. In the second century, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Take full account of what excellencies you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not.” If someone in a far-away land, long, long ago, could recognize how much he had to be grateful for, surely we better get a bigger jar….