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Posts Tagged ‘Gratitude’

How To Fully Enjoy Life

Oct 23rd, 2009
by ianpeatey.
30 comments

We all judge, whether we want to or not. Transforming our judgements can take us closer to experiencing, and enjoying, the world as it really is, rather than how we think it is.

To Judge Or Not To Judge

Raw judgements rarely help us except in urgent situations where we don’t have time to process our thinking. A figure approaching us from a dark alleyway with something silver glittering in its hand is probably going to trigger a judgement that this is ‘dangerous and bad’.

Our snap judgement could be wrong, of course, and there’s a chance (albeit very slim) they might have a handful of silver they want to give us. We’ll quite rightly respond to our immediate analysis by taking action – running away and shouting loudly would probably be a sensible thing to do.

At a basic level we think something or someone is ‘good’ or bad’ and at more advanced levels we have a rich vocabulary of adjectives to name our judgements.

Whatever level we operate at, those judgements are our thoughts. No more, no less.

Those thoughts often interfere with our capacity to fully experience life, and especially the people we share it with.

Many of us can recognise judgements as they pass our minds and see through them to reality, but it takes practice to consistently transform them from static statements of perception to more flowing and deeper explorations of our experience.

I believe this is true whether our judgements are ‘negative’ or ‘positive’.

The Mona Lisa Is Very Small

monalisaI remember my only visit to the Louvre in Paris when I was about 22 years old. It’s packed with some of the greatest works of art we’ve ever produced.

I walked from one painting or sculpture paying cursory attention to each with an internal running commentary going something like this:

‘That one’s nice. This is ugly. This one is beautiful.’

5 seconds at the Mona Lisa was enough to conclude ‘It’s small’ before passing on. The most famous painting in the world – and all I took away from it was its size!

With each piece I was more focussed on judging and categorising than I was on experiencing it. What a missed opportunity!

Now I realise that I used to do the same with people – still do sometimes, but I’m learning to change.

Transformation in 3 Steps

I’d like to share a simple 3 step practice that I’ve been using for a few years that has helped me immensely. It works equally well with things I don’t enjoy – but I’ll stay with the positive things to illustrate the practice.

  1. Observation
  2. Feelings
  3. Life enrichment

Step 1 Observation

I experience the world, then I filter it through my memories and belief systems, analyse and interpret it. Presto! Out pops a judgement. Instead, I try to imagine a full sensory video camera recording and I’m watching / hearing / touching /smelling / tasting the replay.

By bringing myself back, as far as I can, to what I actually see, hear, touch, smell or taste – without my ‘black box’ processing – I can find greater freedom in relation to it.

As an example I’ll use a true event, with the name changed (but you know who you are!).

Judgement - Katarzyna is a thoughtful, sensitive person with impeccably good taste in what she reads.

Transforms to – Katarzyna said to me last week that she reads my blog every few days, has printed out several articles and one article in particular touched her so much she cried.

The judgement stops me exploring further and takes my attention away from, in this case, the words I heard. Transforming my judgement allows me to savour the sensory experience.

Step 2 Feelings

Feelings are an important part of my humanity and I want to experience them as fully as possible. They are mine and do not belong to anyone else – in fact, people can’t make me feel anything. They’re involved but are the trigger and not the cause – more like catalysts.

When I believe they cause my feelings then I risk setting up an emotional dependency that reduces freedom and autonomy for both of us.

Judgement - Katarzyna makes me feel moved, grateful, proud and inspired.

Transforms to – I feel moved, grateful, proud and inspired.

The difference is subtle yet important.

The transformation helps me enjoy my feelings as coming from within and from my experience of life rather than received from the outside world.

Step 3 Life Enrichment

My life is continuously enriched in so many ways. It can be hard to define exactly which aspect of me is being enriched and words are often poor guides to describe this. Yet finding words is often the only way I have for connecting with that life energy deep within.

Judgement – Katarzyna cares and respects me and finds my writing meaningful and helpful.

Transforms to – My life is enriched through my needs of respect, meaning and making a difference to other people.

By finding the elements of my life energy (I call them ‘needs‘) that have been enriched I can connect more deeply to myself – and to Katarzyna. In this place I feel gratitude to Katarzyna for telling me this, and to myself for my role in the creation.

In this place I’m not focused on who is giving and who receiving – we are both givers and receivers. The transformation breaks down the boundaries between us and helps me connect to the universal life force that binds us all together.

472281_interconnected_2

Tips On Using The Practice

At first it may feel a little artificial and take time to transform judgements, but after a while of regular practice it becomes natural and automatic.

  • Gratitude journal – Keep a daily journal to use the 3 steps to record a few things that happened during the day that enriched your life. 5 – 10 minutes a day is a small investment in gratitude to others and to yourself.
  • Expressing gratitude – Practice using the 3 steps to express gratitude when someone does something that you enjoy. Tell them what they did, how you feel about it and how it enriched you.
  • Transforming criticism – Use the 3 steps to transform negative judgements. The process works equally well with things we don’t enjoy and the ways our lives were not enriched.
  • Share your experiences – If you use the process and find it helpful, bookmark this page and come back and leave a comment. That way you’ll enrich my life and maybe inspire others.

PS – I know the title is grammatically incorrect, but I think it sounds better that way. You know … ‘To boldly go’ versus ‘to go boldly.’

Do My Words Improve Silence?

Apr 15th, 2009
by ianpeatey.
48 comments

Silence is perfect, unformed nothingness and stillness. Only in silence is there complete tranquility and peace.

Speaking both creates and destroys.

I create new form out of my thoughts and in doing so I destroy the perfect silence. Every time I open my mouth to give voice to my words I disturb the quiet by creating a vibration, a ripple in the still pool of silence.

I had better make sure I’m creating something of meaning!

A man of few words

I’m usually a man of few words which often triggers infuriation in others. Many times I’ve heard the person I’m with utter the words ‘Say something to me!’

Most of the time my lack of words means I have nothing to say that improves on silence.

No words of wisdom come to me. No insightful thought to share. No experience that might throw light on the situation. I choose to remain in silence rather than break it.

And that can be quite hard for others because we’ve been so conditioned that we tend to forget that speaking is optional. Noise and the human voice is everywhere -  radio, TV, gossip in the bar or cafe.

Chatter, chatter, chatter.

Most of the noise we create is a complete waste of energy that adds nothing except background static. The more static, the harder I find it to differentiate those voices worth listening to.

It’s not so everywhere.

A British friend of mine, a manager in a large company in Helsinki, told me an anecdote. One Friday evening he took his team of 3 or 4 people for a drink after work. They sat the whole evening in complete silence. My friend getting more exasperated, bored and worried they weren’t having any fun while his Finnish colleagues silently drank their beer. At the end of the evening they said goodbye and thanked him for a really great evening.

He sensed they meant it.

Sometimes the human voice can be beautiful and the words it produces life changing and I don’t necessarily mean in big ways. A simple warning call, a sentence of wise advice, a question that causes me to step back and think, an expression of gratitude from the heart, a sign of life beyond the passing thought of the moment.

I would like to reduce the amount of noise I produce and create more value when I express myself. I’d like you to do the same!

Some of these ideas might help:

1  Before opening your mouth

  • Ask yourself  ‘Will what I’m about to say improve on silence’?
  • Be clear what you want as a result of opening your mouth. I’ve heard it said that we only ever say 2 things – ‘Please‘ and ‘Thank you‘. At its basic level the first is ‘Please listen to me‘ and the second ‘I want to celebrate‘.
  • If you want to be heard, make sure it’s something of value about yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your deeper self. Ideally it’s valuable for me to hear, too!
  • If you want to celebrate, make that very clear. I enjoy an opportunity for a good celebration!

2   When you speak

  • Don’t overload me with stuff.
  • Give me a chance to listen by pausing when you reach a full stop or question mark.
  • Allow silence to hold your words and let me savour them.
  • Wait for my reaction before continuing.

3   Get interested in me

  • If I’m not asking any questions, I’m probably not curious and your ”please listen to me’ may fall on barren ground. Try asking me something instead of telling me!
  • If I’m talking and you’re no longer listening (for whatever reason), interrupt me and tell me you’ve stopped listening. Don’t waste our life force on ‘noise’. You may have been told it’s impolite to interrupt, but in my world it’s worse to fake listening to me.
  • Refuse to talk about someone who’s not present. They are not there to hear our feedback, learn from our observations or celebrate what they’ve brought to our  lives. In my value system this is one of the highest forms of disrespect.

4   When you’re not engaged in conversation

  • Notice what noise you use as background – TV? Radio? Music? Which adds value to your life and which numbs you to what’s really important.
  • Develop an appreciation of silence. The more you appreciate it, the less likely you are to disturb it with things that don’t matter.

Do you have any tips for making sure that what comes out of our mouths improves on silence?

Expressing gratitude: with meaning

Jan 8th, 2009
by ianpeatey.
15 comments

As a kid I used to hate this post-Christmas and post-New Year period. The Christmas decorations came down a couple of days ago, school had opened again, TV got boring once more and those new toys either started to fall apart or at least were  losing their novelty value. But the part I hated more than anything else were the couple of tortured hours of the ‘Ritual Of The Thank You Note’.

My mother, with positive and compassionate motivation, would sit the three children down at the table and put pens and a pile of blank pieces of paper in front of us. She’d probably been trying to do this for more than a week by now and we’d stretched it out and delayed. Now there were no excuses left.

She would take out a list of all the presents left by Santa, each marked with the name of a relative or family friend. Our task for the next few hours was to write a personalised thank you note to each of the names expressing our gratitude and appreciation for the gifts received.

I had several problems with this routine.

First, everyone knew that Santa brought the presents so I couldn’t see any point in thanking Auntie Susan and Uncle Ken. It was just plain wrong.

Second, as I was the eldest (still am, in fact) I couldn’t plead youthfulness and escape the task. In fact, if I recall correctly, I might even have had to help out my younger sister with her notes.

Third, it was a boring, joyless job and I would rather have done pretty much anything else than sit and write out the same note twenty times. It was like some school punishment when I was forced to write ‘I will not talk during lessons’ 100 times. The notes always came out the same and went something like:

“Dear Auntie xxxx

Thank you for the ______. I really liked it and played with it ___ times over Christmas. Santa also brought me a ____ and a ____ and a ____. We ate turkey and Christmas pudding for lunch and went for a walk afterwards. The temperature was __ C which was mild/cold/ average for the season. Then we watched TV all afternoon while Dad drank beer and sang carols. I had a great day.”

I realise that round about now I’m sounding like a spoilt kid, which I probably was.

The point is that it’s very easy to say ‘thank you’. It’s not so easy to really mean it – I never did in all those ‘Thank You’ notes. All too often it’s used as a throw away comment, a social nicety or obligation of cultural politeness. Even today I often catch myself expressing thanks without any connection to the gratitude and appreciation behind it, and it’s not something I’m proud of.

A few years back I tried a different way with Laura when she was about the age at which I hated the post-Christmas letter writing. She’d received a gift from her grandparents and I offered her a choice:

“Do you want to do these notes the usual way or try another way? The new way will take a little longer because we’ll need to think more about what we’re saying ‘thank you’ for.”

She wanted to do it the longer way, which was a pleasant surprise. I asked her to think about two things:

1.    what she’d felt when she opened the gift and to describe those feelings in her note. Did she feel excited? surprised? delighted? relieved? touched?

2.    what this gift meant to her and how it made her life better in some way. Did it make her life easier? more comfortable? more beautiful? more enriched?

I’ve found that those two elements add a much greater richness to my gratitude. It works for anything and everything I’m grateful for be it gifts, actions, words of others or simply the small blessings around me everywhere. What feelings are inspired in me and how does it enrich my life.

Much more satisfying than a simple ‘Thank You’.

How do you express your gratitude when you really want it to be heard?

Success: I received an award and other celebrations

Jan 2nd, 2009
by ianpeatey.
13 comments

It’s been a great New Year period – especially from a blogging point of view so I’m going to allow myself a little celebratory dance.

A few things to celebrate.

1   Butterfly Award Received

I’m not motivated to do things to get awards given as rewards (diploma’s, certificates, Nobel Peace Prizes, for example) but this one feels different. This is a virtual award titled ‘Coolest Blog I know’ and it’s passed from one blogger to another. I always wanted to be a cool Dad, but never held any ambition to be a cool blogger so this is a real surprise to me. I receive this award with gratitude and as feedback that someone out there likes what I write about – which means a lot to me.

It was passed to me by Lea at Ocean Of Perspectives, a blogger and a site I’d not known about before, which is even more touching as I get to meet a new writer with similar interests! A deep ‘thank you’ Lea.

The award comes with some rules. Now I normally have a very strong rebellious reaction to any rules that I’ve not been involved with setting. But I can make an exception in this case as they don’t harm anyone.

The Rules

a)   Put the logo on your blog
b)   Add a link to the person who awarded it to you
c)   Link 10 other bloggers of whom you want to give this award to.

See what a good boy I’ve been? I’ve already done a) and b) and for c) I’ll start a new section.

2   Awarding the Butterfly Award

The idea, of course, is that I pass this onto those blogs I’d like to recognise.

Until this August I had never even looked at a blog and my guess is that there are many, many writers out there that I would love to read, but just haven’t come across them yet. On the other hand there are many writers I have read and many I check frequently and thoroughly enjoy, get inspired by, learn from or get deeply touched by. Here are nine writers and sites I visit regularly and highly recommend. And in my capacity as … well, ME! … I hereby bestow them with the Butterfly Award to do with as they please.

There are many more I could mention … I’ll just have to wait for the next award ;-)

3   Google Page Rank

Now this won’t mean much to the majority of the human race, but to many of the sub-breed known as ‘Bloggers’ the Google PageRank means a lot. Having been sitting on a Page Rank of 0 for the last few months, I noticed this morning that I’ve now gone up to 2! Yipeeeeee! Another dance.

The truth is that I have NO IDEA what it really means, other than 2 is better than 0. Frankly I don’t care too much either (but please Mr. Google, if you’re reading this then don’t take it away) but it does mean that I can add to my ‘cool blogger’ image by saying stuff like:

“Oh yeah! Well I’ve got a PR2, Technorati 15 and Alexa 390,693″

4    Commenters, Readers and Passersby

I started this blog on 5th August 2008 with no real idea about how many people would read it, comment on it or pass it by without more than a second’s look. I’ve been really touched by the number of people visiting the site and commenting and I have a real sense of community. It’s a huge community I know, but I’ve made some huge steps into it in these last months. Which, for someone who is a die-hard introvert (and proud of it!), is some achievement! Thank you to everyone and to myself!

I had expectations that if I put ads on the site then money would start rolling in and by Christmas I could give up all my other work and just concentrate on this blog – writing every day instead of twice a week and fulfilling a life long ambition to be a writer. Maybe even start a second blog about nonviolence in the business world.

I had to downsize my short-term ambitions fairly quickly when I realised that all those ‘Blog and Get Rich Quick’ sites out there are, how to put this without swearing? – piles of steaming shit! No, I just couldn’t find a better word. Apologies to anyone offended by that word, and I promise to never use it again.

I have a simple lifestyle but there is no way that I can live on USD 0.68 income a month. It’s not even going to make a dent in the hosting and domain costs – so for now I’m paying for this with money and huge amounts of time. But no complaints. And no turning back.

On to 2009 with dreams of becoming a writer full-time turned into a long term aim that I’ll come back once I’ve built this site into something more substantial.

Thank you to everyone

I wish you all a joyful 2009 and steps, big and small, on your path towards your own ambitions in life

Value for money

Aug 19th, 2008
by ianpeatey.
No comments yet

A few years ago I was playing with my relationship to money. My intention was to find ways to experience more joy whenever I paid cash for something. I wanted to find a different way than my habit of paying for something with a heavy energy or at the very least as an automatic act.

I tried for several weeks to focus. Each time money left my hand I wanted to connect with gratitude, to give money as feedback for my appreciation for what I was receiving. I tried several approaches, all of them unsuccessful. I wrote daily in my journal, I scribbled myself reminders on post-it notes, I put a slip of paper in my wallet so every time I opened it, out it fell. I even considered adding a tattoo to the back of my hand.

Nothing worked. Each transaction continued to flash by unconsciously, irrespective of what it was. A taxi ride, a coffee in a café, a carton of milk, not even a bar of chocolate (something I’m especially grateful for). Every time I bought something pretty much same sequence happened over and over again:

  1. enter store with intention to buy some small thing
  2. remind myself (using one of my highly inventive methods) to connect with my gratitude when it came to pay
  3. spot desired item, pick it up and head to cash desk
  4. completely forget to connect with my gratitude
  5. take out money, hand it over, leave shop
  6. remember that I had (yet again) completely failed and feel like a complete idiot

It really was uncanny. The more I focused, the further away I was and the more determined I became to do it. For a few weeks it became something of an obsession. I wondered if I was attempting some impossible feat … but I just couldn’t see what could possibly be so complicated. Clearly I was missing something important.

Breakthrough!

As the saying goes .. ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.’ After 2 or 3 weeks of struggling, it dawned on me that I needed to do something different. I even remember the place where this revelation came to me. I was in Budapest (I forget why) on my own and I had just sat down at the first restaurant that looked empty.

Usually I avoid empty restaurants on the basis that good ones are full, bad ones are empty. On the rare occasions I eat out on my own I choose the opposite strategy as I prefer privacy over quality. This particular restaurant did nothing to change my general rule as the food was less than outstanding.

But I decided to try an experiment. I was reading Paulo Coelho’s ‘The Pilgrimage‘ at the time and in one of the chapters he describes slowing down and concentrating attention completely on the smallest details around. Sitting in this sub-par tourist restaurant I decided to give it a go and see what happened. The food was taking an age to come so I had nothing better to do.

I imagined all the minute details that went into preparing the food I was hoping to be eating soon. I pictured the farm, the seeds, the fields, the animals. I saw the people caring for the food as it grew, harvesting it when ready. I added in the tools they used and the long, long history behind them. Where the materials came from and the countless generations of invention and refinement. I imagined the transport needed to get the food from farm to storage to restaurant. I could see the kitchen staff from time to time bobbing past the serving door, preparing the food. I visualised all the cleaning and peeling and cutting and cooking and mixing. I even noticed the care and attention of the waitress despite all the troubles she must face (judging from the complete lack of smile in her eyes).

And as imagined all these things I was filled with a huge admiration and awe. I felt quite small and large at the same time. Small in that all these things were about to culminate in the plate of food about to arrive in front of me. Large in that all these things were about to culminate in the plate of food about to arrive in front of me.

Guess what? That food tasted delicious! I’m not saying that it was great food. But in that moment, connected with all the love, care and human ingenuity in front of me, I felt truly privileged. When the check came, the money that left my hand contained all my gratefulness and love. I’m sure those particular Forints still circulate somewhere and bring a smile to whoever holds them.

The piece I had been missing was crystal clear. I had not been appreciating the other side of the buy/sell transaction. Every purchase now has the opportunity to bring so much pleasure and joy. When I connect to what is captured in a product or service then I get double joy. First from the product itself and second from giving money. It is no longer a ‘cost’ or a ‘payment’. There is no longer any loss or sacrifice.

I still slip into old habits, of course, but I have finally seen the light in getting value for money.