The Japanese Practice That Can Give More Meaning to an American Holiday
Episode Stats
Summary
The focus on gratitude is typical this time of year, but more often than not, the cognitive or behavioral nods we give gratitude around thanksgiving can feel a little limp-rote and unedifying. If you feel like this American holiday has been lacking in meaning, maybe what you need is to infuse it with a Japanese practice that helps practitioners dig further into its first question: What have I given?
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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the focus on gratitude is typical this time of year but more often than not the cognitive or
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behavioral nods we give gratitude around thanksgiving can feel a little limp rote and
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unedifying if you feel like this american holiday has been lacking in meaning maybe what you need
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is to infuse it with a japanese practice the nikon method of self-reflection grew out of buddhist
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spirituality has been recognized by psychologists as a way to develop greater self-awareness
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gratitude empathy and direction nikon involves asking yourself three questions what have i
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received from others what have i given others what troubles and difficulties have i caused others
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greg creech who's the executive director of the toto institute which promotes principles of
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psychology based on eastern traditions has created a thanksgiving specific version of nikon
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that helps practitioners dig further into its first question today on the show we talk about
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the way nikon differs from mainstream gratitude practices and is based less on feeling and more
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on seeing the world objectively greg shares six prompts that can help you recognize the reality
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of how you're being supported in the world cultivate the art of noticing and embrace life's grace
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after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is slash nikon
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all right greg creech welcome back to the show well thank you brett it's great to be here again
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so we had you on the podcast a few years ago to talk about the japanese practice of nikon and i wanted
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to bring you back on the show to discuss how we americans we're about to celebrate thanksgiving here
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how we can use this japanese practice of nikon to infuse our thanksgiving with more gratitude
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so let's start off with a recap of nikon for those who haven't heard about that previous episode
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what is it how did it develop and what's its purpose
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well in the simplest form nikon is simply a method of self-reflection
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and it's a very structured method of self-reflection when i was researching my first book on nikon
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i remember finding that virtually every religious and spiritual tradition encourages people to engage
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in self-reflection but in most cases there's no structure or guidance in terms of how to do that
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right so normally we just think about kind of finding a quiet place to sit and reflect and nikon provides
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a nice structure that basically shows us how we might do that and that structure consists of
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essentially three questions the first question all of which are very simple simple enough for children
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that the first question is what have i received from others or from a particular person the second
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question is what have i given so it's kind of turning that question around and the third question was what
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troubles and difficulties have i caused to others so those three questions really provide the foundation
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of this method of self-reflection and what's its purpose what's the end of doing this self-reflection
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what what do we hope happens well there's i think a variety of different purposes and i'd say that
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probably one of the most practical is trying to make a shift and i talk about this when i try to
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introduce people to japanese psychology in a concise way that there's three shifts that i think it
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encourages people to make and one of those shifts is a shift from what i call a complaint-based life
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to a life of genuine appreciation and gratitude and so that nikon self-reflection is basically a tool
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for helping us to make that shift and i think one of the things that has developed in our society over
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a long period of time is that i think to a great extent we have become a culture of complaint
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to the point where complaining is actually the norm right so a person comes home from work and
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their partner's there and they walk in the door and the partner says oh honey how was your day
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and the person now says oh let me tell you about my day and they go through a litany of problems that
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the copier broke and they were late for the meeting and there was construction you know on the way to
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work and they got all these emails that they couldn't catch up with and and on and on and on right and then
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the response to that may be something like to real person realizes that they've been doing all the
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talking so they say and how about your day honey and the other person says oh let me tell you about
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my day you think you had a bad day and we almost compete to see basically who can who can come up
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with the most complaints about their day and the reason that i say that's the norm is that if you
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walked into the house in most cases and someone said how would your day how was your day and your
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response was well let me tell you about my day this morning i got in the car and i turned the
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key and the car just started on the first crank just no problems whatsoever and i was driving to
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work and i got behind this truck that was painting those lines in the road and i realized how great
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it is that we've got those lines that distinguish between lanes so that we basically can stay in our
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own lane we don't constantly crash into other people and i got to work and i got a parking place
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the coffee was nice and hot and all ready for me i had a comfortable chair to sit in and after a while
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you know people are saying okay okay okay there's no drama to that right um i think we kind of like
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drama and complaining somehow seems to be associated with drama so if somebody actually was to give you a
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list of all the things that worked well for them or that supported them that day most of us would
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either find that boring and or think that person was kind of weird right and so what the the nikon
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practice does it's a structured way it's helping you see reality as it really is because as you said
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we tend to focus on the negative but there is all this good stuff that happens in our life
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yeah and i think and this isn't a new idea that we take most of that for granted you know we'll
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we'll go into the bathroom or to the kitchen and we'll flip on the light switch and that light switch
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will go on two or three or four hundred times in a row with no problem but one of those times that
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light's not going to go on because maybe the bulb is burned out and then we notice it right so those
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four hundred times when the light just went on we don't really pay much attention to it but as soon
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as it doesn't work we notice it and i think we do the same kind of thing with people with our partners
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with our children with our colleagues and friends you know we tend to get focused on when something
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happens that doesn't work or that doesn't meet our expectations or approval and so this kind of
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self-reflection when you ask what the purpose is part of it is to just give us some time
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to really reflect on our lives and our conduct how we're living our life which most of us don't do
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because we're so busy and by the time we're finished with our busyness we're tired and we're exhausted and
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we kind of zone out in front of the internet or a movie but the other thing that this does is in
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addition to the self-reflection we're doing it begins to affect the way that we see the world when
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we're not reflecting on our life so we get up the next day and we start noticing things that we
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hadn't noticed or thought about before particularly things that ways in which the world is supporting
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us or caring for us so it begins to not just give us a different way of looking at reality when we're
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doing that reflection it actually gives us another way of looking at reality as we start to go through
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our day okay so it's the traditional nikon questions there's three of them it's what have
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i received from a particular person or from the world and then the second question is what have i
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given and then that third question is what troubles and difficulties did i cause and again i think the
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thing with nikon you're trying to be as objective as possible you're just the goal is to notice notice
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things and not necessarily you know notice the things that make you feel bad or good
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yes i think that we're not uh i have come to see this after working with this material and teaching
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it for 30 years i've come to see this process as kind of a research experiment in the same way
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that you would do research in the field of science and that is that you know you start with
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data collection so if you're trying to do an experiment or research a particular hypothesis you start by
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collecting data and when you collect that data i think in most research you're trying not to be
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biased towards a particular outcome and so i i see it the same way we're not trying to find things
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that we're grateful for we're just simply noticing that as a result of the microphone that i'm using or
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the wi-fi in my house or some satellite someplace that you and i can actually have this conversation
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and that's just really a statement of fact right so because my auditory sense my my hearing is good
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i can actually hear you very very well in terms of us communicating online that's just a statement
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of fact so if i ask the question and this is where i think nikon differs from a lot of gratitude
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practices in positive psychology because we're not really asking a question what am i grateful for
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because what am i grateful for will vary depending on my mood at any given moment right if i've just
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had a big argument with my wife or with a colleague there may be lots of things going on that are
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supporting me but i'm not going to feel grateful for those because i'm just in a crappy mood
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but if i just simply list the fact that you know i've got electricity that's supporting me and i've got
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it's cold outside today it's below freezing and we've got heat in the house if i start listing
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those things as just ways that i'm being supported by reality it becomes actually much more of a
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research project and as you were saying much more objective and i think therefore meaningful
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yeah i've had that experience with i've done gratitude practices in the past and i always find
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that i'm able to list some stuff but then i run out of things to list because i'm like well i don't
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i'm not feeling the gratefulness for that particular item and because i'm not feeling gratefulness for it
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i'll overlook it and so what nikon does it takes the you don't need to feel gratitude to list it is
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just think of all the good things in your life don't even have to be grateful for it or feel any
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positive things towards it necessarily but just list those and then what happens though when you do this
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i've done this before as you start doing that you start feeling gratitude as a result i think that
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that's a common response when we start looking at our life and we start seeing if we start seeing
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this and i always like to phrase it that way because i do think of it as a research project
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but if we start seeing that we have a long list of ways that life and the world around us and the
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people and the objects and the forms of energy are supporting us then i think it is a natural response
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in those cases most often that we do respond internally with a sense of appreciation or a feeling of
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gratitude and it's a very natural response and i think when we do some of the gratitude practices
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as you were saying it's almost like there's a moral imperative for you to feel grateful for something
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and when i work with people doing nikon reflection if they read off a list of 20 things and they'll say
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you know what to be honest i don't actually feel grateful for any of those things i'll just say
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that's okay that's fine there's there's no it's not based on a an outcome that we're trying to get
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in which we feel grateful so when when that does happen it's really just a natural response that
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we have and curiously enough and there is some research to support this the more that we are
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aware of the way that the world in our life and others are supporting us and the more that we have
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that response of feeling grateful for that the more likely we are to want to give back to want to do
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something in return for the people we're closest to for the world for people who are struggling in
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other countries in other words it seems to stimulate a sense of wanting to give back because we feel very
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fortunate in terms of our own situation so what you've done in the past few years you've developed
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a thanksgiving nikon this is something a practice that you developed in your family and then you've
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shared it with others and what you've done is you've developed some more questions that dig deeper
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into that first question of nikon is what have i received from blank so let's start off with this
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question like how how can people incorporate a nikon reflection into their thanksgiving holiday i mean
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how can we make the experience a part of the ritual like what have you done in your family
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to make nikon a part of your thanksgiving well it's thanksgiving has always been my favorite
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holiday specifically because it's a holiday in which we try to step back from our lives
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and really appreciate a lot of the elements of our life and so you know we we raised two young girls
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and i think probably they were about a year and a half apart and probably when my oldest was about
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five years old maybe six i just developed a one-page sheet they didn't know how to write
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or read yet but they could understand the question of you know what is it in life that you're thankful
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for or what is it in life that's making you happy or providing care for you and so we just asked them
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to draw pictures in boxes we would say here's some boxes for people so like for instance grandma and
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here's some boxes for animals maybe maybe our dog barley and you know they would have questions here and
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there but the amazing thing was you know i would give them this piece of paper and even at that age
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we would take about 45 minutes everybody went to a separate room or corner of the house
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the idea was to be quiet for 45 minutes and just work with your sheet of paper and they were actually
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incredibly focused on this when we did it and then the wonderful thing was really getting back together
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after that 45 minute period with some tea or coffee or juice for the kids
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and going through you know and this started out just as one page but going through that
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and having everybody share you know we're here's some of the people that are really
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have played an important role in terms of supporting me or contributing to to my life during this past year
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and and the girls would do that and they were very capable of doing that at least as well as the adults were
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and that's also my experience when i did my training in japan that i would hear recordings of
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children doing nikon at the centers that i trained at that i did retreats at and i would often think
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they're better at this than i am even though i'm in my 30s at the time but that's how we kind of started
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this process and then every year it expanded and then sometimes we had people from outside guests
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often family sometimes non-family and we would invite them to participate in that so the mornings
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at least a portion of the morning was always dedicated to just quiet self-reflection but
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but using some kind of structure and then this wonderful experience of just sitting around
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and just sharing the ways in which life is supporting us from these various different perspectives and
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that's how we started our day and i think it it just created a completely different atmosphere
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in the home to start the day that way as we moved forward then into cooking and eating
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and a lot of times when people would join us for the first time they had never done this before
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and it was just great to kind of involve them in the process so that over years that's grown to this
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little booklet that you mentioned and and so now there's these different categories one category is
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who are people in the present of my life you know in this past year or so that have been supportive
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to me and how have they been supportive one of the most important things that people do if they try
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this process is to be specific because if if you were to ask me like well who's been supportive of
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you in the past you know a couple of weeks and i could say to oh my my wife linda she's been very
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supportive and i can say that without even thinking about what she did but if you followed up and said
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oh that's great that she's been supportive what did she actually do to be supportive well now i have
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to sit back and think well what did she actually do well you know she she brought me home a nice
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little chocolate tart when she went shopping yesterday which was really great to have for
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dessert and she gave me a foot massage the other day and she made a really nice pasta dinner a couple
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of nights ago and but to do that it takes some mental energy for me to remember back to do those things
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but if i say as a concept oh linda's so supportive or she's so helpful or she's such a loving wife i can
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say that as a phrase without it having any kind of content to it right and it doesn't take any mental
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energy so when we go through this process we don't want to just think of like oh this friend of mine you
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know has been really supportive we want to actually make a note how have they been supportive you know
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well they this uh couple lent us a a walker for my wife's surgery last year or something like that
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and that's a very specific thing and to do that it actually takes some quiet and it takes some time
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and it takes some mental energy but it's those details that really make this self-reflection a
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powerful process okay so we're going to talk about some of these questions but before we do let's just do
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the brass tacks practicalities i love this sort of thing so i love this idea to start off your
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thanksgiving with a nikon session and this can be done again it's just you need time by yourself
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i can see people making this like a ritual where they're getting around the fireplace
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and then they just have pen and paper should you write this thing down or is it just a mental practice
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yeah i always encourage people when they're doing it like this on a holiday or if they're just
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doing it as you know even a a daily practice to to actually write if you're using the thanks
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giving approach then you just basically in our booklet you know you would just you already have
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these boxes laid out you know there's a box for nature here's a box for forms of energy here's a box
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for people you know here's a box for things people who taught you things that you know how to do
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so the structure is already kind of laid out for you but you can just take a piece of paper but writing
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i think is a good way to stay focused if you go to japan or if you come here to vermont to do an
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actual retreat where for a week you spend about a hundred hours reflecting on your whole life
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that retreat you don't write it's actually something that is more in the direction of a
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meditation type of reflection so you're actually holding those memories in your mind or your heart
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in japanese there's a word kokoro which is the both mind and heart together so you're holding
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those there instead of actually writing them down but for thanksgiving i encourage people to write
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them down because then you have a chance to step back and look at what you've written and also it
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makes it easier to to share with other people and how long should a nikon session last it sounds
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like it needs to be kind of long because again you're not just being vague with your ideas
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you're trying to get specific so that takes time it's good to give it i think more time rather than
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less but i always tell people it's better to to just spend five minutes doing this than no time at
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all if you can spend on thanksgiving if you can spend 45 minutes or an hour or 40 minutes i think
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it's a nice block of time but if you have a half an hour you can do that's fine if you only have 20
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minutes that will work the key is to really try to stay focused so don't do this while you're cooking
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and you've got things on the stove and you have to constantly be running into the kitchen
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try to actually do it where you can sit quietly it's not something a lot of us do where we actually
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just sit quietly so it feels a little awkward at first but it's it's a great practice and i think
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if you've got other people i never we would never like force our kids to do this we would say this
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what we're going to do if you want to do it with us you can join us and in some cases when uh one of
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my daughters got into her teen years there there was a thanksgiving where she just didn't want to do it
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and that was fine but you can actually do this by yourself if you're spending thanksgiving day by
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yourself or if you're by yourself because people are coming over later in the day and they're not
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necessarily interested or you're going to just jump into eating you can also do it just by buddying up
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with somebody who's at a distance and you can both decide you're going to do it in the morning
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and then you get together at some appointed time online and you just kind of share your reflections
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with that person so so there's lots of of ways to make the mechanics of this work but i do think
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having a as good a block of time as you can where you can be free from distractions and really have
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some quiet reflective time that's that's really important so an important concept to keep in mind
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as you do this reflection of your blessings that's what they call it in nikon these good things
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is this idea of okagesama did i say that right you're close it's okagesama what what is that and
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how can it guide our thanksgiving reflections well it's a japanese phrase okagesama and and the
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foundation of that phrase okage actually translates into something like shadow but the phrase is actually
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used in japanese to just say thanks to you if somebody said i'm a musician and i play in a band
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and at the end of the concert you know if one of my band members comes up and says you know you did a
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great job on the lead on that song or you did a great job playing keyboards today and if in japan i
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might say okagesama which means thanks to you it means i'm recognizing that you contributed to the
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opportunity that i had you know to in this case play music in that band and so the term shadow means that
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we're trying to shed a light on things in our life which normally are in the shadows and in the shadows
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intentionally so in the shadows in the sense that we just don't notice them or we take them for granted
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or we don't really appreciate them and so this idea of okagesama day really means that we're stepping
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back to try to shine a light on these things in our life that have gone unnoticed and unappreciated
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all right so let's dig into the prompts you mentioned one earlier the first one is to list
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people who are blessings in our life in the present and i think most people when they do this exercise
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the first thing you're thinking of of course is your family or friends but with nikon again you're
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wanting to look into the shadows you wanted to look at who are the people that i i'm maybe overlooking
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you're encouraged to think more broadly about people who bless you so what are some of the people
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who bless us on the regular that people might not think of as blessing givers yeah i think it's it's
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really interesting to kind of try to step back from our life and think about people who play a
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particular role and how our life might be different if that person wasn't present in our life or if they
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didn't play that role and and so i remember for many years both my daughters took piano lessons for
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about six years they took used a an approach called suzuki music education and there was this
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wonderful suzuki piano teacher named jody and she was always on my list for all those years because
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she was doing such a great service not just for my daughters but for our whole family they became
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really you know just wonderful pianists and it was great listening to them in the house so she was
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always one of the people that i saw as being a blessing in the present of my life and even though
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it's been many years since my daughters had piano lessons with her i still when i look in it who
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have been blessings in my life from a standpoint of the past i always list her because she played such
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an instrumental role and so sometimes there are people who years ago were blessings in the present
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time of my life and they no longer are there they may not be alive they may not be part of my life
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in the same kind of way people drift off in different directions but if i think about what they did
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for me in the past even 10 or 20 or 30 years ago i can still see them as blessings and even in the
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my current life like we have a local auto repair garage we live in a pretty rural area and we have a
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local auto repair garage that's about two miles from here and they have been an incredible blessing
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in our lives even though we may only have contact with them a few times a year but for instance
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last year my my daughter who who lives in an apartment happened to be visiting and she was
00:24:31.760
driving home in the winter and a truck ran her off the road into a huge snowbank this was at seven
00:24:38.140
o'clock at night she couldn't get out and i picked up the phone and i called this garage they have a
00:24:43.500
towing service number and they know me and i know that guy and he was going out for dinner and he was
00:24:48.700
there in five minutes with a chain and a tow truck pulled her out and went off to his dinner and i'm just
00:24:53.700
thinking like to have someone like that in your life it's not just that particular incidence it's the
00:24:59.260
confidence that there's somebody there who's got your back in a situation like that where you have
00:25:04.380
a problem with a car right so he he's on my list this year his name is matt if he's listening he's
00:25:09.700
on my list this year as a real blessing in my life we're going to take a quick break for your word from
00:25:14.860
our sponsors and now back to the show we've been saying this word blessing and i think people when
00:25:22.380
people hear blessing it has religious connotations but for the japanese in this nikon practice what does
00:25:27.400
blessing mean yeah i think um it is a term that pretty much is associated with christianity and
00:25:34.640
i don't think it's necessarily used certainly the english word blessing isn't necessarily used
00:25:38.860
in japan or japanese but i like to distinguish between these terms of gratitude and grace and
00:25:46.280
gratitude i think is wonderful and i think as you mentioned earlier if we reflect on our lives in
00:25:51.840
this way often gratitude is just a natural response that gets stimulated but we can be
00:25:57.280
grateful for something and at the same time have a sense that we earned it or that we deserve it right
00:26:03.280
so i couldn't you know look around the house where i'm at and i can see all these nice little
00:26:09.500
furniture and books and calligraphy on the walls and photos and decorations and i can think you know
00:26:16.120
i'm really grateful to be able to have lived here all these years but i can also be thinking but you
00:26:21.700
know i worked really hard for this and i put in a lot of time and energy and kind of developing this
00:26:27.500
work and so so i think i earned this right and i'm not saying that you didn't i think everybody has
00:26:33.600
to look at that themselves but so we can be grateful but we could also have this kind of ego
00:26:39.420
sense of i really did earn this or i deserve it but with grace grace has a different kind of
00:26:46.260
implication i think grace is really something that we're given or something that happens to us
00:26:52.580
that we very clearly didn't earn and don't deserve and that's what i see is the difference between
00:26:58.660
gratitude and grace and grace i associate with the concept of a blessing so when i look at it's
00:27:04.960
something that like the thing i described for instance the incident with calling matt to have
00:27:09.520
him tell my daughter out from a snowbank that was grace you know it was grace that he answered the
00:27:15.260
phone it was grace that he was willing to come out and do this for us i think our insurance actually
00:27:21.800
paid for that so i don't even think we paid a penny directly for that service i don't have any sense
00:27:27.200
that i earned or deserved that service from him at that particular time of the evening in the
00:27:32.640
middle of the winter when it was dark so i see that much more as a blessing and i think the more
00:27:38.180
that we reflect on our lives i think part of what happens with me is that it tends to nurture a sense
00:27:45.080
of humility which is not natural for me at all i should say but when i look at how much i've received
00:27:51.180
and then i look at these other two questions what i've given in return and the troubles i've caused
00:27:56.000
it humbles me and in that humility i'm much more likely to see the things that i'm receiving as
00:28:03.240
blessings than the things that i earned or deserve okay so this idea of list people who are blessings
00:28:09.800
in your life so think beyond just friends and family it could be the tow truck guy it could be
00:28:15.200
a co-worker who always checks in with you and sees how you're doing how your kids are doing
00:28:20.540
it kind of brightens your day it could be the people who you know i think this past year we had
00:28:26.100
a big storm here in oklahoma and the power went out and it was because you know trees fell on the
00:28:31.740
power lines and i i remember like there was people out there 24 7 for several days trying to get the
00:28:37.300
power back on and i think the tendency at the time for was for people to like complain about it oh my
00:28:42.240
gosh this pso what are they doing they can't do anything right but it's like no there's these people
00:28:46.800
out there away from their families for several days trying to give me back electricity so that
00:28:53.080
you can think about those sorts of people just not just friends and family right and and you know
00:28:58.640
some of those people on your list for instance i know the towing person matt i know his name but the
00:29:04.160
kind of people you're mentioning are people we kind of know that they're there and we know what
00:29:08.280
they're doing but we don't even know their name there may be people whose faces we know and we
00:29:12.820
don't know their name there may be people who we just even don't know who they are if we saw
00:29:16.780
if you saw that person from the electric company on the street you wouldn't even know that they
00:29:20.020
were part of that process of trying to get the electricity back on but i have that same experience
00:29:26.000
because we get a lot of storms out here particularly in the winter that knock out our power and they
00:29:30.640
send these people out in trucks in the wee hours of the morning when the temperature is 20 below zero
00:29:36.460
and it's 25 mile an hour winds and they're out there trying to repair an electrical line and i wish that
00:29:42.460
i actually knew specifically who there were they were but we had this great experience a number of
00:29:47.960
years ago actually this is probably about 25 years ago where it was during the summer but there was an
00:29:52.600
electrical outage because of a big storm right during the time that we were having a residential
00:29:57.360
a 10-day residential program at the toto institute where people learn this this work and the power was
00:30:04.320
out for about two days and then it went back on right before the end of the program and this woman
00:30:08.360
from florida victoria said you know i i would like to send a gift over to the people at the electric
00:30:15.680
company who who got that power on and we said well we don't really know who they were and she said well
00:30:20.880
you know i'm going to give you some money i want you to pick up a box of chocolates and then whenever
00:30:24.460
you're over by their office just drop it off and and so my wife did this she bought a box of chocolates
00:30:30.520
and she went to the electric company and she said she walked in and the person behind the desk
00:30:35.140
looked at her and kind of out of the corner of her eye said yes can i help you because they're
00:30:40.580
obviously used to someone walking in with a problem or a complaint and my wife basically pulls out this
00:30:45.940
box of chocolates and she says you know we were doing this program and the power was out for two
00:30:50.820
days and they finally got it back on and we just wanted you to let you know that how much we appreciated
00:30:55.180
that and one of the people there wanted to send you a box of chocolates so i brought you a box of
00:30:59.320
chocolates and the woman almost like fainted she was she was so surprised you know to get that kind
00:31:06.580
of response and feedback instead of like why did it take you so long to to get the power back on you
00:31:12.500
know we didn't we weren't able to watch the football game kind of thing so i think it's actually a great
00:31:17.320
example of how in nikon there's no moral imperative to take any action as a result of your reflection in
00:31:26.040
other words our self-reflection ends when our self-reflection ends but often we're moved to
00:31:33.140
actually do something and i think this is a case of turning that self-reflective process actually into
00:31:39.380
real life action which in this case i think was the kind of action that makes in a little kind of
00:31:46.360
drop of water way makes the world a better place but again it's it's a very natural thing it's not
00:31:51.000
somebody who is being told like you should really do something nice for the electrical company
00:31:55.140
it's just a natural response that we might have when we begin to see these kinds of things
00:31:59.740
can the people who bless us also be people who hurt us
00:32:03.900
absolutely that's a great question and assumption i think that you know i think we've become very much
00:32:12.740
a society that tends to look at people as black and white not from a racial standpoint but from a
00:32:18.380
good and bad standpoint you know this has been reinforced by movies for you know decades and
00:32:24.040
television shows there's the hero and then there's the evil person in the in the show and so there are
00:32:30.540
people who hurt us you know who who genuinely do things that cause us trouble cause us problems they
00:32:36.920
neglect us they don't come through when we need them we all know who those people are anybody listening
00:32:42.120
to this could probably take two minutes and and start coming up with a list of names but those
00:32:47.000
people may also be they may also be people who provided us with a certain types of benefits or care or
00:32:54.280
support during our life and so one of the challenges of nikon is to be able to see that both of those
00:33:02.140
things are true this person actually caused me suffering or difficulty in my life and they also made it
00:33:10.380
possible for me to do this or to have this and they supported me when i was in this situation over
00:33:16.860
here when i really was desperate so you know in a sense it not just acknowledges that most of us have
00:33:24.440
the capacity to both be kind and to be selfish which i certainly do but it means that we recognize that
00:33:31.140
that's really kind of human nature and if we're connected with somebody whether it's a partner or a
00:33:37.260
friend from childhood or someone we've worked with for 20 years it's really just a matter of time
00:33:42.160
before people are going to disappoint us right and we don't want to let a single incident or even
00:33:48.580
several incidents dissolve a relationship that has lasted for decades and been based on a lot of
00:33:55.660
giving and taking between us because now suddenly there's this incident so i think it's it's one of the
00:34:02.900
great values of doing this kind of reflection is that we might come out come up with a conclusion
00:34:08.780
yeah that this person who actually caused me a lot of trouble also is someone who at a different time
00:34:14.400
gave me a lot and cared for me and supported me a lot and to be able to just live with that
00:34:20.240
paradox right that yeah that's both of those things are true yeah and to be clear you talk about
00:34:27.420
this in your book about nikon some people you've worked with have had people in their lives where
00:34:31.000
they're doing this reflection who has who's brought me blessings in my life or what have i've
00:34:35.300
gotten from somebody they have people who have been abusive but then at the same time they reflect
00:34:40.580
well also this abusive person has you know they did x for me i had a parent who was abusive but
00:34:45.560
my parent also signed me up for sports and i have this great memory of going on a trip with dad or
00:34:51.220
whatever and nikon isn't saying that oh you should just ignore the abuse and like you know maintain
00:34:56.480
that relationship despite that it's not saying that all it's you actually say no if you're in a
00:35:01.220
bad situation get out of that bad situation but the idea is just you have to look at the whole thing
00:35:05.500
it's trying to be objective as possible even with the bad stuff yeah and i would never suggest nikon
00:35:12.920
to someone at least nikon on a person who was actively abusing them i would in the same sense that
00:35:19.140
you just said i would first encourage that person to get to a safe situation so they're no longer
00:35:24.260
being abused but if somebody comes in who was abused you know years ago or decades ago or as a child
00:35:31.700
i think it can be very healing to go through this process because you're not just doing nikon
00:35:38.080
reflection on that person to see if there was any ways that they supported you or cared for you
00:35:43.780
you're doing nikon reflection on all these other people in your life as well and so it raises this
00:35:49.700
kind of interesting question that i think is a bigger question than than nikon it's much more of a
00:35:56.120
maybe a question about healing and what does it actually mean to heal or to be cured and i think
00:36:02.420
that the western approach to that tends to be to see things as tumors if we have something in our past in
00:36:10.780
which we suffered a lot that we somehow have to go through a process of surgically removing that from
00:36:18.700
our consciousness or our psyche or our memory so that we can then be at peace and be content and
00:36:25.900
essentially be healed but here's a very different kind of approach to healing which says that one of
00:36:31.980
the ways that we heal from being hurt is to basically realize how much care and love and support
00:36:39.520
we have received in the larger context not from a particular person but from everybody and everything
00:36:45.600
in the world and that healing isn't about getting rid of something that if it's in our past we really
00:36:51.720
can't get rid of it it's it's part of our karmic history so to speak but it's basically seeing it in
00:36:58.360
this larger context of a world which has you know brought us lots of of support and lots of joy
00:37:05.380
and cared for us to get us to this point in our life and yes there was this incident and there was
00:37:10.840
this incident and there was a whole string of these incidents but we see them in a much larger context of
00:37:16.040
being loved and cared for and i would say that that's actually a wonderful way to think about healing
00:37:21.720
okay so that's the first we went deep in that first question who are the people in your in the present
00:37:26.940
who are bringing blessings in your life and the key there think outside the box don't just think
00:37:31.580
friends and family and then also get very specific don't just be like i'm grateful for my wife for my
00:37:36.480
best friend like actually write down something specific they did in the past year to bring you
00:37:41.520
a grace in your life and then also you've been talking about you can do this with people in the
00:37:45.580
past in your life so you've done that with your daughter's piano teacher so this could be old
00:37:51.600
teachers you might have had old mentors you had at a job it could be old friends it could be
00:37:56.460
i mean just think back decades into your life years into back into your life to find these people don't
00:38:02.460
just don't just think about grandma grandpa of course if they're if that's there put it there but
00:38:08.240
get broad with this you want to get things out of the shadow and also get very specific you also
00:38:13.380
talk about objects list objects that are blessings in our lives what are some things that you list on your list
00:38:19.000
here well of course there you know particularly in in our culture these days there's always lots of
00:38:23.460
gadgets you know ranging from phones to tablets and those things i think for a lot of us play a very
00:38:28.480
practical support role but in terms of other types of objects you know our our car we have a four-wheel
00:38:35.140
drive toyota rav4 then we put studded snow tires on that this is what you're doing for my
00:38:39.400
so that that is a really important object during the winter because we live up on a hill 400 feet
00:38:45.840
from the road and we need to be able to get down to that road and that car is is just a great car
00:38:50.580
for us so that's certainly one of the objects i wear eyeglasses you know my my eyes are limited i'm
00:38:56.700
primarily nearsighted and wearing eyeglasses allows me to see the world so much more clearly
00:39:02.120
than if i don't have those eyeglasses and in fact allows me to drive safely as well so my eyeglasses are
00:39:08.620
an example of that my watch is an example of that and and i have an an apple watch which i got a few
00:39:14.240
years ago so now i use that as a timer when i'm baking and things like that so i could go on and
00:39:20.440
on in terms of everything from clothing i have a great bicycle i love cycling in vermont we have
00:39:26.000
some beautiful roads so that's that's a really a wonderful thing that i appreciate and that
00:39:30.200
is kind of a blessing in my life i think when we start you know thinking about objects just if
00:39:35.120
i just look around the room you know i'm looking at the we have a wood stove that we use to keep
00:39:40.140
the house warm and that's our fallback when we lose power is that we can heat in the wood stove
00:39:44.960
and get some heat in the house i have a nice stereo speakers that i've had since i was in college
00:39:50.500
these advent speakers which have a wonderful sound and i i love listening to music in the living room
00:39:56.120
because of that so and you know it's as i'm actually responding to your question tell me some
00:40:02.380
of the things on your list i can feel my internal experience changing i can feel myself kind of softening
00:40:08.760
to the world you know having more of a sense of appreciation for my life just by answering the
00:40:15.220
question for 60 seconds or 90 seconds in this conversation i already can kind of feel how my
00:40:22.800
attitude and my way of understanding my life at this moment has changed no i can do that i'm looking
00:40:29.160
i'm in my closet that's from my podcast studio and right in front of me i have my macbook pro i've had for
00:40:35.240
a long time it's beat up but this is what's giving me my livelihood it allows me to do my podcast
00:40:40.980
allows me to write articles it's allowed me to surf the internet and create memories for my family
00:40:46.740
you know planning trips communicate with friends who are who are gone so i mean right there my laptop
00:40:52.380
but there's so many things i could just be not even i don't have to be grateful for it again you don't
00:40:56.600
have to feel gratitude right away it's just what are the good things that your laptop has brought into
00:41:01.140
your life what else do i got here i've got a suit that i really enjoy that i i got to wear yesterday
00:41:06.920
and i look sharp at church there's a pair of shoes they're like flat sold they're a barefoot shoe that
00:41:12.300
helped alleviate some foot pain that i was experiencing last year so that that's a i think
00:41:17.060
you can you can go deep with that one and you can get really mundane you don't have to think about
00:41:21.420
the big things you can even just think really silly things that you might not might not think of if
00:41:26.920
you're doing a typical gratitude practice another prompt that i thought was interesting is list forms
00:41:32.460
of energies that are blessings in your life what do you mean by forms of energy well i think that the
00:41:39.160
one that probably most of our listeners are pretty clearly connected with would be electricity and i don't
00:41:45.920
really know in any deep way how electricity works i have a basic idea but if you think about the
00:41:53.300
electricity in your house what you see is you see these switches on the wall and you see these outlets
00:41:58.160
right and if you need to give power to something so it will work could be your kettle boiling water or
00:42:05.440
your coffee maker in the morning or your blender or just a lamp so that you can read you know you just
00:42:11.180
plug it into this thing in the wall and suddenly it is functional because it has power and because i've
00:42:17.900
done some construction work in my life i know what those walls look like before the inside walls get put up
00:42:23.060
there's all this wiring back there right but it's all hidden we don't see that wiring and i think it's a
00:42:28.100
great metaphor for a lot of our life you know what we see is what's on the surface but the world is
00:42:35.000
basically doing things that are underneath the surface or hidden from us are the way our postal mail comes
00:42:41.560
in the you know the amazing system of email that we have there's a whole kind of you know backstory
00:42:48.620
to how that came about and who invented it and who's maintaining it that we don't really see
00:42:55.380
so electricity is a great example of a form of energy that you can connect to so many things that
00:43:00.840
you do probably in the course of a day but sunlight uh even if you don't have solar we have windows and
00:43:07.560
i think on a day in vermont which are rare when it's really a sunny day the house just kind of has a
00:43:13.900
different feel for it when it's filled with sunlight so that to me is a form of of energy as well so you
00:43:20.680
can just think about other kind of forms of energy there's a type of energy we get for our bodies when
00:43:27.200
we eat you know particularly nutritious food right that gives us energy caffeine and coffee gives us
00:43:32.360
energy so we can even think about it that way but it's just another way to kind of slice this pie is
00:43:38.440
to really think about you know what is my life like thanks to different forms of energy and this
00:43:44.720
kind of question that we can always reverse which is what would my life be like without that thing
00:43:51.660
right what would my life be like without electricity would my life be like without sunlight or an object
00:43:57.280
without eyeglasses and we realize as soon as we start thinking about what would happen if that was
00:44:02.700
missing from our life often we see it very differently and then of course it's not till it really is
00:44:07.100
missing that it becomes very noticeable yeah that's the george bailey effect right from it's a wonderful
00:44:14.120
life where you know george bailey he's able to see how blessed he is by seeing what would happen if
00:44:19.740
he didn't exist and so you can do that with people like what would happen if i didn't have my wife in
00:44:26.680
my life what would my life be like if my child wasn't in my life and then you can start it helps you bring
00:44:32.000
things out of the shadows that you otherwise would overlook so that's another thing you can do during
00:44:36.360
this nikon practice another prompt you have for your thanksgiving nikon session is that i really
00:44:41.760
liked is list things that you have learned to do that have been blessings in your life and so again
00:44:46.820
i i did this myself kind of quickly before we got on the show and it's just you i got really mundane
00:44:51.780
i was like i learned how i know how to walk i learned how to ride a bike i learned how to throw a
00:44:56.820
football i learned how to hit a baseball i've learned how to read i've learned how to write and then i get
00:45:01.600
more complex i've learned how to navigate complex bureaucracies uh you know the life skills allow
00:45:08.120
me to navigate life and all these things have brought me so many good things in my life and as
00:45:12.800
i was thinking about this reflection about things you have learned i think this is a great antidote
00:45:17.560
to self-pity when we take on that victim mindset we kind of think of ourselves as less than able to
00:45:24.840
navigate the world we think of ourselves with less agency but focusing on the things that we have
00:45:30.480
learned in our life can help us get out of that we can actually see oh actually i'm capable of
00:45:35.620
increasing my agency so i can navigate the world and take on the world so i think that can be a really
00:45:41.380
powerful reflection especially if you're feeling a lot of victimization self-pity yes i i agree and i
00:45:48.060
think that the other thing that you can do once you start creating that list is then take each of those
00:45:54.140
items and actually think about can you think of someone or how it was that you learned that so i
00:46:00.780
had a piano teacher you know for six years that taught me how to introduce me to playing piano and
00:46:06.820
it's one of the reasons that i can actually play professionally now but my mother was a singer and
00:46:11.680
she also provided tremendous inspiration and encouragement for me to practice and and basically
00:46:17.960
there was always music going on in our house so when i you know look at whatever musical skill i have
00:46:24.140
i can actually start identifying specific people or things you know that basically inspired me and
00:46:30.220
sometimes it's a youtube video where they did a lesson in you know how to solo in the blues or
00:46:35.480
something like that but for each of those things i remember because i'm a writer also and and i can go back
00:46:42.680
to first grade the first person i think who really started teaching me how to write was my first grade
00:46:48.400
teacher mrs myers i remember her name and uh and so so part of it is we realize how much we've learned
00:46:55.060
to do and part of it is we've realized that when we're born we don't know how to do anything
00:47:00.140
right we basically kind of know how to breathe and cry but pretty much everything that we know how to
00:47:06.540
do at this point even if it's to cook rice or how to clean the bathtub is something that at some point
00:47:13.400
we had to learn from someone or from some mechanism even if it's a book or a video and so i think it's
00:47:19.880
also very humbling to realize that we have benefited from again so many people some of whom we don't
00:47:26.860
even know that made it possible for us to learn how to drive a car do you remember who taught you how
00:47:33.180
to drive a car brett uh it was my parents so like my dad and my mom would take me out different times
00:47:38.520
yeah and and i remember my dad specifically taking me to this high school parking lot you know where
00:47:44.920
i grew up in illinois and uh when it was empty on a sunday morning and you know i would be driving
00:47:50.400
around learning how to drive and so again these are things that we we take for granted but often there
00:47:56.380
were specific people involved and this question is an example of the interactive nature of this
00:48:03.300
process because i may think about things that i've learned to do and i may connect me with someone
00:48:09.520
who taught me to do that and then i think oh i can put that on my list of people who were blessings
00:48:16.720
from my past right because i didn't think of them when i did that list so it's not really as
00:48:22.540
sequential sequential of a process as it may seem because often we're jumping back and forth between
00:48:28.280
those lists because we're working on thinking about objects or thinking about what we've learned
00:48:33.460
and that's getting us helping us to remember something that goes on a different list so the
00:48:40.320
idea is to really just try to capture as much as we can objectively you know about our life our life
00:48:47.640
from the as far back as we can remember until the present day so that gives us a kind of picture of
00:48:53.520
essentially where we've come and where we are at this point and it doesn't mean that we didn't
00:48:59.100
suffer or have problems or challenges or difficulties but for many people going through this process is a
00:49:06.600
way of just reconnecting with a very natural sense of appreciation and gratitude that we have the life
00:49:13.040
that we have so this last prompt can be a tough one list difficulties and disappointments that have
00:49:18.980
turned out to be blessings in your life what kind of things might end up on this list
00:49:22.820
yeah and that is a difficult one and i and when people come and do a retreat i don't give them
00:49:30.900
this question until towards the end of the retreat and i always make it optional because i don't want
00:49:36.980
people to i think that there's a certain kind of energy in in some of the views about gratitude
00:49:42.620
that you should be able to look at any difficulty tragedy in your life and see how it was a blessing
00:49:50.080
and i don't believe that i don't think you can be grateful for everything that happened to you in
00:49:55.040
your life there are things that i think that are painful and tragic and i don't think we should force
00:50:00.780
ourselves to try to be grateful for those things on the other hand i think that sometimes when we look
00:50:07.680
back over something that happened so many years ago and the example that comes up for me and i'll just
00:50:13.820
give you a very short version of this is that when my dad was in his mid-80s after many many years of
00:50:19.880
my suggesting this he finally agreed to come and move to vermont and live here so he could be close
00:50:24.680
to us he lived in chicago and i went out to get him in january of 2014 i had a one-way ticket for him
00:50:32.200
so he could come back on the plane with me and we were going to just pack up a couple suitcases and
00:50:36.140
have things shipped and when i got to his house he wasn't there it turned out he was in the hospital he had
00:50:41.560
fallen in the hospital they diagnosed him with stage four lung cancer and i unexpectedly spent
00:50:47.980
the last 10 days of his life in hospice with him where he died in my arms it was not the ending of a
00:50:54.220
story that made me very happy i was terribly upset i went through a lot of grief it was all a complete
00:51:00.400
surprise when i look at this now almost 10 years later it was a real blessing and what was a blessing
00:51:05.600
is i got to spend the last 10 days of his life with him sitting next to him talking to him
00:51:11.120
holding his hand and a lot of people don't have that opportunity with a loved one and i did and
00:51:17.360
and so i see it now not as something oh you know it wasn't sad it wasn't upsetting it was but when i
00:51:24.780
look back at it now it was really a blessing that i had had that time with him the way that i did
00:51:29.300
so that's an example of something that i could put in there very genuinely as a blessing that's really
00:51:35.260
beautiful well greg this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about
00:51:39.440
your work in this thanksgiving nikon well our website where we have a lot of this work up is
00:51:45.620
called 30 000 days dot org so it's 30 000 days all one word dot org and what i thought we could do if
00:51:54.980
this is okay with you brett is to put up the actual booklet that we're using i always revise it every
00:52:00.280
year so it won't be probably up till monday but we'll put it up on the site so that people who are
00:52:06.380
listening to this if they hear this in time for thanksgiving or if they even if it's after
00:52:10.620
thanksgiving they'll be able to go to the site and actually download that booklet if they want to use
00:52:15.220
it does that sound okay sounds great well greg thanks so much for your time i hope you have a
00:52:20.300
very happy thanksgiving yes and you too brett i hope you have a great holiday and a great holiday
00:52:25.800
season and again thanks for allowing me to be a guest on the show today my guest today was greg
00:52:31.800
he's the executive director of the toto institute you can find more information about his work at
00:52:36.320
his website 30 000 days dot org and while you're there make sure to request a free copy of their
00:52:41.420
guide to thanksgiving reflection also check out our show notes at aom.is slash nikon we find links
00:52:49.000
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:53:00.800
artofmanly.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we've written
00:53:05.360
over the years about pretty much anything you think of and i want to wish you all a happy
00:53:08.840
thanksgiving thank you for listening to the podcast i hope you have a great holiday with your friends
00:53:12.660
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00:53:17.320
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00:53:21.900
things help our podcast grow so thank you so much happy thanksgiving we'll see you next time
00:53:26.320
and don't just listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action