In honor of Heart Chakra Day(a.k.a. Valentine’s Day), I want to talk about gratitude. No matter where you’re at in your wellness journey I’m sure you’ve heard all about the benefits of a gratitude practice. But where did gratitude practices originate? Let’s look at how gratitude has shown up in texts like The Vedas and The Bhagavad Gita AND how you can approach your gratitude practice from a somatic lens.
I’m going to answer questions like:
🔹How does a gratitude practice relate to your yoga practice?
🔹Is there more we can be doing than just writing things down?
🔹How can we actually cultivate the feeling of gratitude?
PLUS I’m going to give you a new kind of gratitude practice to try at home!
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🎧 Also Listen to:
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#351 – Unlocking the Secrets of Chakras: Lower Chakra Symbols Explained
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Transcript:
Brett:
Hello, my friends. I’m super happy to be here with you today reflecting on this idea of gratitude. And there’s so much in pop culture about like writing gratitude lists. And I know that this is something that I used to do and actually encourage students to do. But I wanted to take a little bit of time to nerd out on first, you what are the actual origins of this idea of a gratitude practice? Do we see any of this?
in the Vedas, in the Bhagavad Gita, how far does this idea go back of sort of like an attitude of gratitude being a good thing? And then also how we can, how you can, if you want to, approach your gratitude practice from a somatic lens, practicing gratitude in a very different way than you might be practicing it right now. So I’m excited to share this idea with you and see if it’s something that you decide you want to try.
Those of you who have owned in the past, perhaps my chakra journal or my abundance yoga journal, there are these journals where you track your yoga, meditation and journaling practice each day. And there’s actually a part of every single page where you write, I think it’s three things that you’re grateful for. So this idea of forcing your brain, because we all know that the brain naturally is always going to think about everything going wrong, to take a moment and just jot down what’s going right.
is a really good idea. But as I’ve continued in my own studies, it’s like, is there more we can be doing than just writing something down? Because especially if you’re someone who does gratitude lists regularly, it can start to feel really rote and mechanical. We’re just kind of listing all the same stuff. Like, I’m grateful for my kids, I’m grateful for my house, I’m just writing it down. But it’s not an embodied actual feeling of gratitude. So I started to get really interested in like, well, how can we cultivate that?
And this is where an embodied or somatic practice can be extremely powerful. So I’m going to walk you through that. But before, you know, let’s do a little wind down history road all the way back to the time of the Upanishads and the Vedas. I wanted to point out that these books, these ancient books, like especially the Rig Veda, is literally a book of hymns expressing thankfulness for the bounty of the earth, for the blessings of life.
There are basically instruction manuals that have mantras and rituals that are directed towards the gods, directed towards nature. And it’s all about gratitude, like literally singing praise, similarly to how if you went into a church, right, there might be a hymn book and that hymn book is, know, hallelujah and, you know, thanking the fact that Christ came and that he rose again and all those types of things. So.
At a meta level, a lot of the ancient scriptures, especially from the time of the Rig Veda, are very, very much like how to practice gratitude through rites and rituals. Now, I think this is a little different than, you know, a modern gratitude practice that we’re doing today.
But I thought that was important to point out. If we look at Taoism, for example, there’s not really explicitly this idea of gratitude or an attitude of gratitude, but there’s a lot about contentment and harmony with the Tao. So contentment being this very important idea. And I think we can all agree that contentment can be understood as a form of gratitude. If I’m content with what I have,
If I’m content with what I’m eating, if I’m content with where I live, you know, there’s an element of gratitude wrapped up in that.
In order to be content, I need the wisdom and the strength to actually recognize life’s gifts.
And then in Buddhism, see gratitude is more tied to this recognition that everything is interdependent on one another.
So the Buddha emphasized that we should be grateful for our parents, for our teachers, for our benefactors, for nature, and that this was really key to living an ethical life. And from the Buddhist tradition, we also get this idea or word that I bet a lot of you may have heard of, which is this word metta, often translated as meaning loving kindness.
And I think if we just said to the average yogi in the studio, right, like do a gratitude meditation, they would probably default to doing something like this, a loving kindness meditation or meta meditation.
And if you need a refresher, how that works is that you find a comfortable position, right? You sit, focus on your breath and you, I would pair this definitely with like an actual meditation physically on the heart space. In 200 hour teacher training, there’s a Sat Yam meditation that we talk about and we teach. I even looked it up in the 200 hour manual. It’s on page E28 for any of you who want to check it out.
How it works is you bring the awareness of your breath to the expansion and contraction of your heart center with each inhale and exhale. So you start by feeling a pinpoint of light vibrating at the center of your heart. And then on the in-breath, you silently chant the mantra Sat. You feel the light in the heart expand. And then as you breathe out, you silently vibrate or chant internally the mantra Yam. And you draw this light back into your heart center.
The idea is that you then grow this light. And when I’ve taught this meditation, it’s this idea that this light grows to get bigger and bigger till it encompasses the room you’re in and then it encompasses the town you’re in. it, you know, in yoga teacher training, I’ve often taught it’s like it’s encompassing our whole yoga teacher training class from all over the globe. And then you, you know, always want to budget time to, you know, draw that light back into the heart.
So always just as important to leave time to ground out of a meditation as into a meditation. So that would be the Sat Yam heart meditation, but back to the Metta meditation, which I think you could combo. The idea with a Metta loving kindness meditation from the Buddhist tradition is that you begin with yourself. So you start by directing loving kindness towards yourself and you could do that with the Sat Yam mantra if you wanted to, or you could do that just by focusing on your heart space.
But you’d silently repeat phrases such as, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe, may I live with ease. And maybe you’d recall a moment of self-love. And then as you continued the meditation, you’d extend to someone you love. So you’d bring to mind someone you deeply care about, a friend, a family member, a teacher, and you’d repeat those same phrases, but you’d adapt them, right? May you be healthy, may you be happy.
And you imagine that other person smiling or thriving. And then the next step is that, you know, expanding the circle, you think of someone neutral. So not someone you like, not someone you dislike, but perhaps a stranger, someone who maybe you order coffee from each morning, or you see at the grocery store checkout line regularly, or a parent of one of your kids friends who you don’t know that well, but you just offer the same
loving kindness to them, recognizing the shared humanity that all of you have. And then the next step would be to actually include difficult people, someone that you dislike or someone that you’ve had a challenge with or a conflict with, and you work with the same phrases with them. they be happy, may they be healthy. So maybe this is a political figure that you don’t like or a family member or friend that you’ve had a rift or
fight with. And then the last step would be encompassing all beings everywhere. And that’s where you get this kind of classic phrase that I think we hear a lot associated with the Buddhist tradition, right? May all beings everywhere be happy and free from suffering. And you’d imagine your goodwill kind of spreading outward and encompassing the entire world.
And this practice of a meta loving kindness meditation dates back to around the fifth or fourth century BCE in ancient India. And the idea is that you use this to overcome anger and hatred and create harmony with yourself and the community. And it’s a really beautiful idea.
And if we want to look at the Gita next, the Bhagavad Gita, gratitude is implied through the teachings on devotion or bhakti, yoga.
in the Gita, Krishna, the charioteer, who’s actually a god in disguise, explains to Arjuna, the warrior, that all actions should be performed as a sacrifice to the divine.
So this alludes to this sense of underlying gratitude towards the cosmic order, towards divine providence.
Krishna also says things like, you know, those people who surrender to me and focus on me, their needs will be provided. So there is this idea that if you’re just grateful, you will be taken care of by the divine.
Krishna also talks a lot about non-attachment to our actions. So taking action from a place of non-attachment, we see that in the Yoga Sutras as well. And in order to do this, we need to cultivate contentment and acceptance for whatever outcomes arise. And I think we could also link this to the idea of gratitude for the larger cosmic plan instead of me being very focused on my little plan, my agenda that’s right in front of me.
One of the complex aspects of reading the Gita is that Lord Krishna is called so many different things in the book. I mean, he’s called Vishnu, he’s called Hari, he’s called Govinda. There’s this joke on YouTube where someone says the Bhagavad Gita is like the book of Indian baby boy names because there’s so many different names of what Krishna is called. But one of the names that’s relevant for today’s topic is he’s called the Lord of Love and
Arjuna addresses him that way.
To me, this ties back to Krishna’s teaching on bhakti, right, devotion.
He’s called the Lord of Love because he’s inviting Arjuna and us to transcend our selfish desires and instead experience a love and a trust that leads to liberation. Also called moksha. Some of you may be familiar with that word.
I went hunting for some particular quotes about this in the Gita and actually came across something kind of unexpected. First of all, book three or chapter three, one of the translations that I have of the Gita calls this chapter selfless service, while another translation calls the third teaching or the third book the discipline of action.
So just so interesting to always look at and read multiple translations simultaneously. It’ll make your desk very messy like mine. But I just thought it was really interesting that one translator actually saw the whole third book of the Gita as being about selfless service and named the chapter thus. While other translators or scholars think that this chapter is more about the discipline of how we take action.
Originally I was going to share a line or a quote about selfless service.
But what really caught my eye was actually the second line of this book three.
So the book starts with Arjuna saying, you have said that knowledge is greater than action. Why then do you ask me to wage this terrible war? Question mark. So for those of you who don’t know the context of the Gita, Arjuna is a warrior. He’s fighting a battle that he does not want to be fighting against his beloved cousins.
He’s kind of in what we’d call a lose-lose situation where if he doesn’t fight his cousins, evil is going to rule the world slash galaxy. If he does fight his cousins, he has to kill some of his beloved family members, including one of his beloved uncles and mentors. So he’s what we’d call stuck between a rock and a hard place. And in this moment on the battlefield, he originally is like, I’m not going to fight and puts down his weapons. And then Arjuna.
And then his charioteer starts talking to him and his charioteer is actually in disguise Arjuna.
And then his charioteer starts kind of coaching and talking him through this dilemma. And the big reveal is that his charioteer is actually secretly the god Krishna in disguise on the battlefield as his charioteer. And what proceeds is sort of a Q &A session between Arjuna the warrior and this god Krishna. So at the opening of chapter three, you know, it’s a classic Q &A pupil teacher type of response. So Krishna…
said that knowledge is greater than action. And then Arjuna opens book three being like, okay, if that’s true, why are you asking me to wage this terrible war? And then this was the line that caught my eye. And I think it’s funny because sometimes we’re reading texts or we’re reading philosophy or reading the sutras and there’s these lines we just kind of skip over because they seem uninteresting. But often if we dive into them, there’s this beautiful nugget of truth. And this is what hit me.
with this passage. So Arjuna goes on to say, your advice seems inconsistent. Krishna, give me one path to follow to the supreme good. So he’s basically Arjuna saying, tell me what to do, right? You’re, you’re contradicting yourself in these answers you’re giving to me about, you know, why I need to wage this war. I don’t want to kill my family members.
And I found some interesting commentary on this, second verse, your advice seems inconsistent, give me one path to follow to the supreme good. And I thought this was so interesting. The commentary was saying that in this line, what Arjuna is trying to do, which so many of us try to do is trying to judge a situation with our intellect. And the intellect believes in classification. What the intellect does well is this reductionist
mind activity where we divide and categorize information, right? And that’s kind of like the binary brain when we’re not enlightened, when we’re not in that non-dual state. We see things as very black and white and our brain is kind of just like a supercomputer that’s just like good, bad, good, bad, right? So we should value the intellect, of course, but we need to realize its limitations because the intellect can only see parts, not the whole picture.
And I think this is so beautifully illustrated in the Yantra, which we’ve been talking about here on the podcast, the Yantras for the different chakras, if you missed any of those episodes, but the Yantra, the graphical image for the sixth chakra is the dual-pedaled lotus. And I think it’s, you know, the two petals of the lotus represent the two flower petals are representing polarity, right? Like kind of good, bad. And we’re trying to come into the center, that third eye space, that sixth chakra.
where we see beyond polarity, we’re transcending polarity. And that’s something that the intellect can’t do. And this is why the intellect can often lead us into problematic situations on the spiritual path.
So Arjuna is saying to the God Krishna, like your logic isn’t right. Your advice is inconsistent, right? And that’s not allowed.
I want you to just show me one line of action, one thing to do. I just want a step, like tell me the right thing.
So while Arjuna and us often crave this clarity, I think the lesson in this phrase is that we can’t approach deeper problems from the intellect. That we must resolve certain problems in the heart space.
We need compassion and again, we need this non-dual awareness. Think of this non-dual awareness as like the ability for two opposite things to be true at the same time, which is basically the pickle that Arjuna is in, right? Like this war has to be fought for the greater good of the world. And it means he’s going to have to kill his family members, which is terrible. Like both of those things are true simultaneously. One doesn’t get to win out over the other.
An example I often give of this kind of non-dual awareness would also be like, say you’re very in love with someone, you know it’s a true love, you know it’s a pure love, but you also know this person is not the right long-term partner for you, that your love is true, but it’s true for a moment in time that’s precious right now. If you need permanence in the love story, which your brain and your logic is going to want, you’re going to have a huge problem. You’re going to be in conflict and you’re going to be tormented just like
Arjuna is here on this battlefield. But if you can have this elevated awareness of two opposite truths being true simultaneously and that not being a problem, thinking of the third eye, or again, I think a lot of that has to also happen from the heart.
That’s the elevated paradox or the elevated state of mind that yoga is actually asking you to step into.
And I thought it was such a, I don’t know, nice reminder that this idea of the…
intellect often letting us down and especially this time of year, this moment, right, where we’re maybe more focused on gratitude this month or the heart, that there’s this power and the heart has this unique electromagnetic field of its own, which we talk about in Kundalini training.
where the heart can hold everything, right? The heart can hold multiple things that seem to be in conflict, being true at the same time. And that’s this bhakti, right? This devotional path that Krishna is inviting Arjuna onto to join him in.
And before we close, I want to share with you the somatic approach to a gratitude practice. Definitely you can explore the, the metal loving kindness, the satyam meditation, some of the things we talked about earlier this month, if you really want to focus on the heart and this concept of gratitude. But the practice that I have been playing with and I’ll invite or walk us through now is
Basically that in order to truly feel grateful for something we need to first imagine our life with that thing absent. So from a somatic perspective what this would mean is think of something you’re grateful for and instead of just so let’s say your spouse or your house or your children right so instead of just writing that thing down on a list which is better than nothing or instead of just
thinking about holding that in your heart space and trying to cultivate gratitude. Instead, I want you to actually kind of be mean to yourself and truly think about and saturate in what would it be like if that person or that thing did not exist and to imagine a different reality in which you never met your partner. You don’t own a car.
You don’t have your house. You don’t have your kids. It’s kind of like the, it’s a wonderful life movie, right? He’s not appreciating anything about his life. And then he wakes up and it’s all, it’s all gone. Right. And that movie, he, it’s like his wife’s gone, his family’s gone, his job’s gone. And he’s in this horrible, stark reality of like, this is terrible. And it’s
in living that reality that he realizes how much he actually appreciates these things. So something I’ve been doing is focusing on one particular thing, let’s say my husband, and thinking about if he and I had never met and allowing my body to actually have a physical experience of that loss. Like what if he and I had never crossed paths? Who would I be now?
Where would I be? I definitely wouldn’t have my beautiful children. I wouldn’t be living where I am now. And then I actually think about in the years leading up to my meeting my husband, how much anxiety I had about how my life was going to turn out. Who was I going to marry? You know, what was going to happen? And I actually take myself kind of emotionally back. try to remember that heightened anxious state when I didn’t have a partner.
and how frightening that was and really actually let myself feel it. And now I’m saying like, this is a two minute exercise, okay. But it’s really saturating in the bleakness and the loss and like the what if just as if you’re living your own, it’s a wonderful life type of scenario. And then after feeling some of those sensations in my body, I allow myself to feel grateful and
put the thing back in. So in this example, I would say then, okay, but I did meet him and allow my body to then feel the flood of relief and the goodness of all those different feelings and saturating and like, yeah, I met him and then this happened and then this happened and I don’t feel anxious about so many aspects of my future now because he and I are each other’s rock.
and I got my children and I got this house and I ended up here and I’m living this happy ending and all of a sudden you’re, for me it’s like I’m seeing all these things. Usually it’s like I start with just being grateful for one thing like him. I start seeing all these blessings. Like he is a blessing at work in my life because of all the different things that have unfolded from that point. The kids are a blessing, the house is like.
And I’m allowing myself to really feel it because I let myself really feel the opposite.
So as weird as an analogy as it is, those of you who’ve done like the progressive muscle relaxation video I have, you where you tense the muscle and then relax and oddly enough, like the more you tense and squeeze before you release, the more that that muscle then actually releases. Like if you contract before you let go, it’s almost like an emotional version of that where you feel the loss deeply and then you add the thing back in and are like, phew.
And there’s something about this that has been extremely powerful for me. I find that it feels like I’m practicing gratitude in a whole body way. And instead of just quickly writing a list or doing a quickie like heart chakra meditation or whatever, it makes it more…
personal, more profound. And for you, it’s like you really need to let yourself play out the scenario, right? It’s like maybe you’re grateful for your car. Well, imagine your life without the car and then let yourself really soak in and imagine that reality. You’re cold and you’re waiting for the bus and it’s raining. You don’t have a place to get from point A to point B. To get to your university classes, you’d need to leave like three hours earlier than you do now.
and you’d have to get your book bag and everything organized. You know, like really let yourself go there and envision the path not taken. And then put the thing that you’re grateful for back in.
And if you do want to keep or add a journaling aspect to this.
I would invite you to do it and then journal on all the blessings that are in your life, all the blessings that you feel after, you know, it’s the end of the wonderful life movie and he wakes up or whatever and he’s back and he has his family back and he has his kids back and that kind of euphoria, it’s creating that for yourself.
this idea that you can’t just feel grateful on top of, you know, normal life. You actually have to feel the depletion and the loss and then the gratitude hits so much deeper. So I’m curious for you to try this if you’re, if you’re game.
And if you prefer to stick with a loving kindness, like our meta meditation for this month, that’s totally fine too.
I hope you got some value out of this episode, some ideas of things to practice or to teach. Thank you so much for being here all the way to the very end. And from my heart to yours, Namaste.
