Gratitude recipes

 

As I entered a Hestia phase in the House of Enchantments that visitors unanimously find "homey", to become a fully accomplished goddess of the hearth, I seek to expand my repertoire to include how-to's and recipes. I extract wisdom from people around me, present and past, including my ancestors. This recipe book from 1915 belonged to my grandmother Idéa. It doesn't include recipes for happiness but made me reflect on "recipes" for a mindfulness quality that many people I admire embody: gratitude.

I was raised to say "please" and "thank you" as if these markers of politeness were punctuation. "It's the intention that matters", was a recurring refrain in my family as my siblings and I navigated the reality of gift-giving and receiving. I quickly learned to appreciate early on the value of time and attention beyond monetary value. "Reconnaissance" (French word best translated into appreciativeness) was this quality I admired in many people, including my parents, because they not only thanked me for my modest presents as a kid, but they showed some use for what I thought was really trivial. As they emphasized the value in the form of usefulness or beauty of what I had offered them, they also made me feel like I had value as a person. Whenever my effort to give something that made me cringe years later was met with warmth and enthusiasm, I felt better about myself.

This has helped me experience the immense power of gratitude. During the pandemic, I tried to buffer the stress by inviting my family to share gratitude about one thing during dinner. My children are natural at gratitude in the sense that from a very young age, they would tend to appreciate even the smallest attentions (whether it was a table set on their first day of school, whatever junk they could find on a trail, a very ordinary hotel in a town we were exploring, or stockings filled with inexpensive treats during a connecting flight in Chicago on our way to celebrating Christmas with my family in Quebec). 

And what is more touching than rediscovering, as I am emptying boxes, this note of gratitude of love for my love, from Kristof to me when he was little:

Gratitude is one of the many faces of love.

I have always admired my children for their ability to be grateful, to see the world without comparing the present moment with what has been or what could be. They have showed me repeatedly that we access true abundance in expressing joy as we find it in even the smallest things, or in everything we tend to take for granted, especially as grownups. Joy and gratitude are mindfulness qualities, and living in our heads more than living fully in the instant prevents us from experiencing them. Let's follow our kids' example as they are generally Zen masters.

With time, appreciativeness went beyond a polite script and deepened to become gratitude. And I came to realize that this is something no one could ever take away from me: the ability to access my inner abundance by simply being thankful. There is a sense of wholeness and fullness that comes from such a realization.

I have developed this ritual in group therapy or some lectures during introductions or check-ins: everyone is invited to share one thing to be thankful for. When we actually pause and find the good in the midst of adversity, we feel better. And even when we cannot quite find something to be grateful for at that moment, we can still feel better from hearing others' own gratitude. So the positive effect of expressing gratitude can be contagious.

I wanted my children to really feel these great emotions one Christmas a few years ago. I suggested that before rushing to the next present to unwrap, that they really unwrap each one slowly, and allow a pause between the unwrapping sessions, especially to recognize the kind gesture of people who were not in our house at that time, like our friends from Spain or their grandparents in Canada. They were attentive through this process, soaked in their joy and gratitude longer, and that was a good exercise for me as well. 

When I offer a gift, I tend to put some effort into the present. It is often affordable but what I consider to be its value in divine currency can be very high because the process that led to offer a present was made of time and mental space as a planned and even put together the gift by wrapping it with love or writing a card in a way that signals my philosophy of life (recycled wrapping paper, handmade card etc). But beyond the actual material gift, there is another gift I consider we give: we offer the person an opportunity to experience gratitude. 

And when there is no such gratitude perceived, instead of feeling crushed, I have learned to develop the gratitude from the life teachings the person's reaction (or lack of) gives me: for instance, we can train children to robotically say thank you, but heartfelt gratitude cannot be forced. Until the person reaches that stage of accessing inner abundance, I try to practice compassion. So, it is always a win-win because I can only be grateful either way, since I can learn from others that everyone follows their own path at their own pace towards gratitude, and I have an opportunity to practice compassion),

Next time someone offers me something (an invitation to lunch, a phone conversation, a cup of tea, a bag of treats, an advice, assistance to solve a problem or fix something, a book), I intent to pause even longer and try to imagine the steps that led to this present: the idea in a friend's heart, the message behind the gift, the time invested, the hopes about the specific emotions that would elicit in me. Receiving is an art as important as giving. When I was a resident training to become a psychiatrist in Montreal, a patient gave me a present. We had learned this "rule" that we were not supposed to accept presents from patients. When I told her that, she told me, "it takes humility to accept a present." This was one of my most powerful lessons from patients and learning experiences about gifts. I could only agree with such wise words. Humility was paired with gratitude as I accepted her present, which was in fact a vehicle for her own gratitude towards my care. This opened my eyes to the fact that accepting someone's gratitude is a like giving a gift back to the giver. In this case, accepting a present was considered therapeutic and facilitating closure as I moved to a different rotation in a different hospital for my specialty training. As long as it doesn't cause a financial stress or hardship, I also believe that accepting presents from our patients or from people who are wounded may help restore their dignity. 

Once we have practiced experiencing gratitude towards what makes us feel good, the next step is to learn to have gratitude for adversity. That is my biggest challenge at the moment. I have times when I tend to commiserate and think life is unfair if I am going through suffering I don't think I deserve. Yet, the emotions experienced, as painful as they are, can also offer some teachings. If anything, they offer teachings about the human condition. This leads to a softening of my heart to make me access my self-compassion so I can also think of others in a similar situation, feel connected to them, and send them compassion. Our world needs all the compassion it can find in order to heal.

In the darkest hours, there is always something to be thankful for. As we laugh, celebrate or suffer, we experience life. We feel, which means we are alive. And that is something to be thankful for, with each breath, each step forwards, each heartbeat.