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Happy Hour: To Be Grateful for Everything

Hello and welcome to Happy Hour, everyone. Lovely to be with you wherever you are in the world, practicing together. A couple of words, and then we'll practice and meditate together.

For tonight, I'd like to invite us to bring to our hearts and minds a beautiful practice of gratitude. And it's really important not to approach this practice of gratitude as a "should"—like, "I should be grateful. Oh God, I should be grateful." No, no, no, please don't. Actually, it's not a practice to have any issues about. It's an invitation: "Can I be grateful for this? Can I be grateful for this?" And if the answer comes back no, I don't feel great, then don't push it. Don't push it. But it's a gentle invitation. And yet it's such an important practice.

In this very gentle way of not "shoulding"—as someone said, "not shoulding all over ourselves"—because we usually look for problems in our lives. It's just the way human beings work. It's our evolutionary heritage, because those who survived, those who passed on their genes, they were looking for threats in their environment. Those ancestor human beings, they were looking for threats in their environments. Those who were looking for berries did not survive; they were out-survived by those who were looking for threats. And so, we are looking for threats. We're looking for what's not going right, what's problematic. So we need to balance the tendency that we all have as human beings for what's difficult.

I've heard this before, that our minds are like Velcro for what's challenging and difficult, and they're like Teflon for good things, for things that are good in our lives. They just don't stick to our minds. Like, "Oh yeah, yeah, we get a compliment. Oh yeah, thank you." Maybe the goodness doesn't quite stick. But oh yes, what's challenging, what's wrong, what's problematic, we just go through it again and again and again. So Velcro and Teflon.

In order to balance our hearts and minds, it's helpful to turn to what is good. And when we intentionally, just ever so gently, turn towards good, what's good could be outside, what's good could be inside. "Oh, the goodness of my intention. I'm showing up. Yeah, maybe I find meditation challenging. Maybe I'm a beginner. Maybe I fall asleep, and yet I keep showing up. This is good. This is good." So, a sense of, "Oh yeah, can I appreciate..." maybe not even use the word gratitude, maybe that's too heavy for some people. "Can I appreciate that I'm showing up?" And maybe, "Yes, yeah, I guess I can. If I step out of myself, I can appreciate that this person who's me is showing up, even though they fall asleep all the time or judge themselves for not doing it right yet. Oh yeah, there is goodness here."

So internally, externally, as a way to turn our minds to so much good. Not to take it for granted, so much good really. And when we notice the good in our lives, then it feels like more good shows up. Because we're noticing the good, we're open for more goodness to appreciate, to befriend, to support, to give, to be generous. We join, we become part of a virtuous cycle.

All right, I've said plenty. Let's practice together.

Guided Meditation

Arriving... arriving. Each moment a new arrival. Arriving in this body, moment.

Moving our attention to connect our awareness. Know that we are sitting and breathing.

Letting our awareness connect with the breath, the sensations of the breath in the abdomen, the lower part of the body. Receiving... receiving each breath. Letting go... letting go, letting go of plans, thoughts, entanglements for a moment to connect with this being who is me in this moment. The goodness of just sitting and being breathed. The goodness of being here.

And can you invite a sense of appreciation to imbue this breath as you're breathing it, as it's breathing you? If the answer is no, it's okay. Just stay with the breath.

Noticing the sensations of the breath, of your sit bones on the chair, your hands touching your lap, your feet or your legs on the earth. Feeling grounded and embodied here. Just here. Wonderful to just be here, even for a moment, not scattered here and there.

With each breath, reaffirming, rejoining the goodness, the goodness of being alive, just here. Just here, a sentient being sensing the breath sensations.

An opening, opening a door, opening our hearts. What is nourishing in this moment, in this body? Maybe the breath. Maybe the breath feels smooth, calming like a lullaby. And we enjoy it with appreciation. Let yourself enjoy.

Can we open up to something else that's nourishing, supportive in this moment? Maybe it's this chair or seat that's supporting us. Opening to its existence in our lives with appreciation. Maybe where we're sitting, there is clean air to breathe, so I'm appreciating there's air that we breathe. Supported by the air, the air element. Supported by what we're sitting on, the earth element. Supported by warmth—it's not too warm, not too cold. Us humans, out of the limited range of comfort we can survive in. So yeah, supported by warmth. Nice, thank you.

Supported by this body. So many organs functioning internally. The blood flowing. The water we drank earlier. The food we ate that's supporting us now.

And stay, you stay with appreciation. Stay with the good, stay with appreciating goodness. You can open it up more. And if your mind starts going to lack, those in the world who do not have these resources right now, yes it is true, and yet this is not the time for that practice. That is compassion practice, another time.

Bringing your mind, directing it kindly to stay with this practice, so that you can have enough stability, enough joy, to then open up to the suffering in the world. Not to turn away forever, but to have the space, to create the space, the stability, the joy to contain more of the challenges. So staying with the gratitude, feeling embodied, opening up the goodness in your life.

The relationships you're grateful for. Friendships. Using perhaps one relationship, bringing this particular person to mind with appreciation. Sharing your goodwill, your mettā^[1], for them. Your goodwill, your appreciation. Wishing them well, appreciating them as if they were sitting right in front of you. Bring them close in your mind's eye.

And maybe opening up to other friends, relationships, family, colleagues, and other appreciation. Feeling the abundance of your interconnectedness with so many amazing beings, alive, complex—as complex as you are.

And whoever comes to your mind, have some appreciation for them. Whoever shows up, even those you have challenges with. They are your teachers. They help you grow, they help us grow in ways we may not want to or find challenging. Appreciating whoever shows up.

And feel free if you'd like to open up to appreciating other aspects of your life. Maybe opportunities, and also challenges, what stretches you. Maybe consider something that has stretched you, challenged you recently. Can you be grateful for this? Yeah, and don't push it, but drop in the question, "Can I be grateful for this too?" And let yourself be surprised, see what comes up.

Can we open our hearts? Maybe experiment now, if you like. Imagining your heart so vast, so spacious. So spacious, your body so relaxed. Your heart so spacious, so vast, and you can include everything. To be grateful for everything. A generous heart that receives with gratitude goodness, challenges, opportunities, being alive in this human realm, all its ups and downs. Ten thousand joys, ten thousand sorrows. Of its impermanence deeply woven into the fabric. Being alive in this impermanent moment. Can this heart be wide open just for a moment? Experiment to receive it all passing through. Appreciating the whole catastrophe. Receiving, giving gratitude with generosity. Giving thanks.

Practicing opening it up. You can always close it in a minute if it feels too big, too much. But just for a moment, see what it feels like if you open your heart wide. Dare to open it wide. Spacious, spacious as the sky. Spacious as the universe. The grateful heart, as spacious as the universe itself, to include everything that has been, is, will be. The mystery of it all, beyond our understanding. That I am a part of this whole mystery. I'm a player in it, sentient, conscious, playing my part. Growing, learning, serving, giving, hurting, being hurt. Gratitude for all of it. All the ways I've grown and the ways I have yet to grow. I have yet to grow and stretch myself.

And if you find, if you meet the limits of your heart, it's okay. Bow to it, be grateful for that too. Be grateful for this too. This being authentic and true.

As we bring this meditation to a close, can we be grateful, appreciate whatever showed up, or didn't show up? It's okay. Appreciating that we showed up, we did our best, not attaching to our outcome. Appreciating ourselves. Appreciating the sangha^[2] for showing up and supporting us, these amazing human beings who keep showing up and practicing, cultivating their hearts.

Thank you. Thank you universe. Thank you my inner goodness to have led me here. Thank you all of the universe. Thank you karma. Thank you sangha, the community.

May our goodness, may our practice serve all beings everywhere. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free, including ourselves.

Thanks everyone. I'm grateful for your practice, for your showing up.

Reflections and Q&A

So I'd like to invite us to transition now to practice, to express our gratitude, appreciation in small groups. And the prompt is—and this can be quite powerful actually, this practice—the prompt is: "What are you grateful for?" So you say one thing you are grateful for, and then the next person will say something, then the next person, and then you again, and it goes round and round and round. And it can be so uplifting, feeling your own joy, letting it be witnessed, as well as witnessing other people. The sense of muditā^[3], vicarious joy, arises, especially if you're feeling a little heavy at this moment in time. This is a joyous practice, it's a wonderful uplifting practice to fill our hearts with joy.

So I invite you, let's go in alphabetical order, and "what brings you joy" is the prompt. I'm creating the rooms. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Again, you can also pass when your turn comes, just offering something and then letting other people have their turn. Okay, so I've created the rooms. Be kind, be gentle. And here we go, opening the rooms now.

[Breakout rooms session]

Okay, everybody's back. Welcome back everyone. I see some smiles, so yeah, this is great. I would love to hear from a couple of people, and you're also welcome to write your reflections in chat. If you just write it to me it will be private, I won't read your name, just your reflection. If it's to everyone then I'll read your name as well. And you can also raise your Zoom hand. Somebody's giving a thumbs up, I think they're trying to raise their Zoom hand. Is this Jamie? Are you trying to... no, that was my comment. Oh, that was your comment, thumbs up. You liked it, okay, that's great. I love it, they're very concise.

Now I want to invite you actually, especially if you haven't spoken recently. Susan says, "So much to be grateful for." If you haven't spoken recently, I'd like to invite you to challenge yourself and be grateful for the opportunity and step forward. I see you, Claire. I'm just gonna pause for a moment and see if we can get someone who hasn't spoken for a while, or maybe who's new to Happy Hour. What did you discover in the small groups or in this practice? Any aha moments?

Okay, all right. Christine, and then Claire please.

Christine: Thank you Nikki, I really enjoyed this meditation tonight. You've talked about that before, making a soup, like we made a soup tonight. And one of the gentlemen that was on my call, this is his first time here, and we all went around, and like I said we just added a little bit to each other tonight. It was just a lot of gratitude in my breakout room. So I'm grateful for both the people that were with me tonight, and my sangha. The first thing I said was I was grateful for showing up tonight and being part of all this, just exactly what was needed. So thank you so much Nikki and everyone.

Nikki Mirghafori: Beautiful, thank you so much for sharing Christine, and for your practice and showing up. Yay, it's so beautiful, makes me happy. Yay. Claire, please.

Claire: Actually I know I've said this before. First of all I want to say thank you for this. And I've said this before, but I'd just like to say it again. Through another spiritual program that I'm in, I started circulating a gratitude list with two friends on email about six or seven years ago. We do it every day, and it made such a difference in my life. And I think even just one night like this, it can make a huge difference. Because I tend to look at everything that's wrong with my life.

Nikki Mirghafori: We all tend to, yeah.

Claire: Exactly, forces me to look at what's right. There's a lot.

Nikki Mirghafori: There's just so much that's going right, it's overwhelming actually, it's quite lovely. Thank you Claire, thank you for that. And Diana, you're next. But before that, I want to read a message that came to me directly. One of you said, "I realized that a lot of my meditation practice was to observe things neutrally. It was very refreshing to observe things grateful." Yay, beautiful. Yes. So, lots of different practices, and with the practice of vipassanā^[4], with insight practice, we often try to—well, in some ways it's neutral, we're looking at arising and passing, we're looking at things. But with the practices of the heart, with mettā and with all the brahmavihārās^[5]—with loving-kindness, with compassion, with vicarious joy, and with equanimity—there's a particular way of looking. And especially with muditā—and by the way, gratitude fits under vicarious joy in the four brahmavihārās. That's where it fits. Because when you feel happy for someone else's happiness, it's joy for them. When you feel happy for your own blessings, yeah, guess what, that's gratitude.

Anyway, so yes, there's a beauty, there's a goodness to this practice of muditā, vicarious joy. Turned inward, that becomes gratitude. So I'm delighted, person who sent this reflection. Yes, it's so refreshing, it's so beautiful. And maybe I'll just say one more thing. The path towards awakening doesn't go through just the gray zone of things as they are. There's a lot of joy. The Buddha was known as the Happy One. And the path actually, in his instruction, step by step by step by step—as you study the suttas, you see there is joy, and there's contentment, then there's bliss, and there is gladness. All of these, pāmojja^[6] and pīti^[7] and sukha^[8], all of them, they're just laid out. So the path, and then at the end is, oh yes, nibbāna^[9], awakening. But it just goes through these. The mind, the heart need to contain joy, need to contain all these uplifting qualities in order to be liberated. It's not a grim duty to be liberated. So anyway, thank you for that reflection. Diana?

Diana: Oh, this is just really quick. We were thinking and saying that we could actually, if we had time, do this all night. This gratitude, just go around and around. Because what happens is you keep thinking, at least for me, you keep thinking of things and it builds. And oddball things too could come to mind, an oak tree. It's just an endless array. So it's a really joyful practice, thank you for offering this to us.

Nikki Mirghafori: Thank you, thank you so much, that's lovely. And one of you reflects: "I had a lot of rage come up during the session. It was not about joy at all for me tonight." No problem, and that's what needed to come up. Rage, anger. So there are conditions in the mind and the heart, and when you quiet your mind, there's just a lot of something else that needs to be attended to, maybe that comes up. Or maybe the rage has come up perhaps because of a sense of lack, or various things. But it's worthwhile not to push it away and say, "Okay, this didn't work out, it's a disaster." But actually stay curious. Stay curious. Can you—I know this is going to sound like a high bar—but can we even be curious, or have gratitude about the rage? Can we have gratitude that we can actually have emotions, instead of just being completely blank? That we have the mental faculties to feel rage? And then when you welcome rage with gratitude—not necessarily acting out of it, I'm not saying act out—but, "Well yeah, it's here. Okay. Can I be grateful for this too? Yeah, I can have emotions. I can feel upset." Can that be a way to then turn towards working with it, and actually cultivating gratitude?

Anyway, thank you all. Thank you so much for your practice, thank you for being here, for your cultivation. May all beings be well, may all beings be free, including ourselves.