Here it is, thrust on us again.  Thanksgiving is coming up for all of us in the United States and it urges us to consider all the things in life that we are grateful for. The mind may resist this for all its mysterious reason, but the fact is, practicing gratitude has been found to have enormous benefits to our mental health.

Meister Eckhart said,

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”

So here we are in this moment, reading this post, and I’m inviting you to do a 1-minute practice of the things in life you are grateful for.

In the past post Feeling Disconnected from Life: 9 Steps to Reconnect Today I quoted Abraham Joshua Heschel saying:

“Life is routine and routine is resistance to wonder.”

The purpose of this was to bring awareness to the fact that our brains are inclined toward automaticity and the thing we do in life and the ways we are tend to become habit. What was once interesting or what we used to put heartfelt attention into tends to become rote.

Six months before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967 in a talk titled “What is Your Life’s Blueprint.”  In this talk he said:

“And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

Whether you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, addiction, ADHD, complex trauma or any myriad of life’s challenges, there seems to be a prevalent underlying voice of self-hatred that perks its head up at times more than others. I think the Dalai Lama has a good take on this.

Jack Kornfield shares the Dalai Lama’s story in a recent edited book The Buddha Is Still Teaching. The Dalai Lama said when he first heard the word self-hatred he was confused. He said that self-hatred was a very dangerous attitude and he and his fellow Buddhists work quite hard to overcome their self-centered attitudes.

The antidote to this was to understand that all people (and beings) have what he calls “Buddha Nature.” In other words, everyone inherently has the capacity to wake up to a sense of clarity about what helps and hinders them in their lives. Everyone has the innate capacity for compassion, empathy and wisdom.

This is very counter to some other views.

There is a tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog. Every Monday, I cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding. So for today, here is a quote by  Thich Nhat Hanh:

“There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.”

Here’s the thing. Going on retreats, vacations, taking time away from the daily grind is important and can help us deepen our connection to what is truly important. However, most of our hours are spent here (well, all of our hours are spent here, but you know what I mean). So here is where we seek the power of now.

Here are 10 ways to gain freedom from suffering in daily life

In an earlier interview, Christopher Germer, Ph.D. explored with us why compassion is getting so much attention lately and how it might heal the prevalence of unworthiness in our culture. Christopher Germer, PhD is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Arlington, Massachusetts and author of the recent book The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions. He is a founding member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School, and co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. Christopher also conducts workshops internationally on the art and science of mindful self-compassion.

Today Christopher shares with us the radical notion of accepting our difficult emotions, some neuroscience behind it, and a bit of advice for the rest of us.

Elisha: You suggest something radical in your book, which is the practice of accepting our difficult emotions and even responding to them with compassion. Can you give us a practical example on how someone might go about this?

There is a tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog. Every Monday, I cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding. So for today, here is a quote by Shantideva:

“All joy in this world comes from wanting others to be happy, and all suffering in this world comes from wanting only oneself to be happy.”

Somewhere along the way many of us develop this notion that the goal above all else in life is for us, individually, to be happy. We begin to focus on ourselves to the exclusion of others. One major problem in depression is this painful self-focus as the ruminations just go on and on. And if our goal is to be happy, but others get hurt or ignored in the process, I promise there will be no happiness.

The fact is, we are not islands.

Albert Einstein said it well in a letter published in the New York Post (1972):

My life can often appear to be hectic. At times it feels like I overload myself with more things than I could possibly ever accomplish. As I’m going to sleep, my mind wanders with all the things I need to get done, and when I’m awake during the day I catch my mind thinking about all the things that need to get done. Take a shower, make coffee, eat breakfast, brush my teeth, write, go see clients, etc. … When I’m not mindful, at the end of the day I can truly ask myself, “Where did the day go?” Enough of these, and I can ask myself the same questions in weeks, months, or even years! Can you relate to this?

So when I feel like these questions are coming up, I do some brief exercises that help bring me to the present moment and remind myself that I’m living.

Here’s a question to consider (and this isn’t one of the two): When the mind pops up with the statement “I am such a failure,” what is the underlying value that it is in cahoots with?

We all have values in life, some we’re aware of and some we’re not. Values are the road signs that guide us in the direction we want our life to go. Maybe we value good physical or mental health or perhaps being a good friend or politically active member of society. But values aren’t always pointing us in healthy directions and sometimes we’re not even aware of what our values are.

Perhaps we value never failing or never being vulnerable. Or maybe it is a hidden value that we must always be right. Where do these values get us?

I promise you that you care about where you are going in life. The simple fact that you are reading this post right now tells me that you care about your health and well-being.

Thanks to pioneers like Robert Emmons and Michael McCollough, we now know that gratitude can have an enormously positive effect on our mental health. Not only that, thanks to the advent of neuroplasticity, practicing gratitude can even help shape your brain in ways that promote resilience and well-being.

If you need a boost on ways to practice gratitude, check out my post on 5 Steps to Gratitude and Lovingkindness: Mondays Mindful Quote with Hafiz.

But this post isn’t just about gratitude, it’s about taking it a step further which moves into another stage called altruism. Altruistic behavior is all about acting selflessly to help serve or benefit another. Altruistic behavior has been found to be a predictor of happiness and life satisfaction (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Altruism is also tied to another hot topic in our culture today and that is compassion and kindness. In this blog I have written a number of posts about compassion and kindness because they are such good nutrition for our health and well-being. Compassion has been called an antidote to anger and kindness has been called and antidote to fear.  

Now, it could be argued that because I brought up all the personal benefits you may experience from engaging with kindness, compassion and altruism that these endeavors are not pure because you know they will serve your mental health. In other words, they’re ego-driven. Try and set this argument aside for now as we move into the social implication of kindness, compassion and altruism.

While the brain takes longer to register compassion for social pain than individual pain, the effect is longer lasting when awareness around social pain settles in. There are certain tragedies in this world that are so apparent that a compassion trigger gets set off in the brain and we feel called to action. We have an unselfish drive to help other people and this is what altruism is all about.

Whether it’s 9/11, the tragedy of Darfur or the recent devastation in Haiti, …