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Feeling forced to say “thanks” at Thanksgiving dinner? Here are four exercises to help get the gratefulness going.
BY KIRA M. NEWMAN | NOVEMBER 18, 2015 “What are you grateful for?” For the shy adult or the grumpy teen, expressing gratitude around the Thanksgiving table can seem awkward and trite. Yet it’s basically compulsory—saying “nothing” or “I don’t know” when it’s our turn to speak won’t endear us to our family members. We end up saying the same thing we do every year, everyone smiles, and then it’s Aunt Edna’s turn. According to research, though, feeling socially pressured to perform a certain happiness practice isn’t an effective path toward actually feeling happier. Psychologists Sonja Lyubomirsky and Ken Sheldon suggest that the best happiness practices are ones we choose, not ones we feel forced into based on our circumstances. External pressures can undermine “self-determined motivation,” the healthy drive that springs from our authentic interests and values. “Even though I’ve advocated a number of evidence-based practices, I’m actually moving away from prescribing specific practices and exercises because it can lead to what I am calling ‘to-do list’ gratitude or ‘check-list’ gratitude,” pioneering gratitude researcher Robert Emmons explains in a recent blog post. “Practicing gratitude becomes a burden rather than a blessing, making life heavier rather than lighter.” What’s more, Thanksgiving declarations of gratitude tend to be brief and general—along the lines of, “I’m grateful for my family and my health.” But broad statements of gratitude might not be as effective as detailed ones, research suggests. An unpublished University of Southern California study cited in Emmons’s book, Gratitude Works!, found that writing one sentence about five things we’re grateful for is less beneficial than writing five sentences about one thing we’re grateful for. After 10 weeks of gratitude journaling, the group who wrote in more detail about one thing each time felt less tired, sad, and lethargic and more alert, happy, excited, and elated than the less-detailed group. The GGSC's coverage of gratitude is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation as part of our Expanding Gratitude project.Even those of us with the best intentions may struggle. As an introvert, I always feel put on the spot during my family’s Thanksgiving gratitude ritual, even though cultivating gratitude is important to me. And many of us may yearn to feel deep gratitude but can’t conjure it up on command. This is not to say that we should jettison our Thanksgiving gratitude rituals. In fact, experts believe that it’s the repeated practice of gratitude—even when we don’t feel grateful—that will eventually lead to a more enduring attitude of gratitude. “If you go through grateful motions, the emotion of gratitude should be triggered,” writes Emmons in “10 Ways to Become More Grateful.” So what would a no-pressure Thanksgiving look like, one that tries to encourage everyone—even the inarticulate, the shy, the grumpy, and the alienated—to safely express their thanks? What “grateful motions” might feel less forced and more genuine? Here are some suggestions. 1. Give people a chance to think before they thankHave a family member lead everyone in a short gratitude meditation before the Thanksgiving meal, like this one from Jack Kornfield’s book, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace. “Gratitude is a gracious acknowledgment of all that sustains us, a bow to our blessings, great and small, an appreciation of the moments of good fortune that sustain our life every day,” writes Kornfield. His meditation asks you to think of the environment and the people who make your life possible: With gratitude I remember the people, animals, plants, insects, creatures of the sky and sea, air and water, fire and earth, all whose joyful exertion blesses my life every day. With gratitude I remember the care and labor of a thousand generations of elders and ancestors who came before me. For some people, the quiet contemplation of gratefulness might make for a solid first step—and help them to think of something concrete to say in front of family and friends! 2. Ask guests to imagine themselves alone at the tableThere is an exercise called “Mental Subtraction of Relationships” that asks you to think about what your life might have been like had you never met someone special. As part of the pre-dinner meditation, you might ask guests to imagine themselves without anyone to spend Thanksgiving with. Here’s how to do it, adapted from Greater Good in Action, which provides “science-tested practices for a meaningful life”: 1. Take a moment to think about one person at the table. 2. Think back to where and how you met this person. If he or she is a family member, try to recall your first memories. 3. Think about all of the possible events and decisions—large and small—that could have prevented you from meeting this person, or kept him or her from your life. 4. Imagine what your life would be like now if events had unfolded differently and you had never met this person, or if they had left your life at some earlier point. Bring to mind some of the joys and benefits you have enjoyed as a result of this relationship—and consider how you would feel if you were denied all of them. 5. Shift your focus to remind yourself that you did actually meet this person and reflect upon the benefits this relationship has brought you. Now that you have considered how things might have turned out differently, appreciate that these benefits were not inevitable in your life. Allow yourself to feel grateful that things happened as they did and this person is now in your life. After imagining a solitary Thanksgiving, opening your eyes to a table full of smiling faces can inspire gratitude. 3. Write letters to each otherIn advance of dinner, ask your Thanksgiving guests to write short gratitude letters to read at the table. A gratitude letter expresses appreciation for someone—a relative, friend, teacher, or colleague—who made an impact on your life but hasn’t been properly thanked. The letter can detail what they did, why you feel thankful, and how your life is different today: 1. Write as though you are addressing this person directly (“Dear ______”) 2. Don’t worry about perfect grammar or spelling. 3. Describe in specific terms what this person did, why you are grateful to this person, and how this person’s behavior affected your life. Try to be as concrete as possible. 4. Describe what you are doing in your life now and how you often remember his or her efforts. 5. Try to keep your letter to roughly one page (~300 words). Research shows that reading gratitude letters produces a big happiness boost. The feelings of warmth and connection may be strong enough to outweigh any lingering shyness, and expressing gratitude for a person, rather than health or food, may feel more natural. 4. After dinner, take a walk—then give thanks over dessert
To truly appreciate what you see on your walk, take a moment to pause over each new and beautiful sight. Point it out to your family members, so they too can join in the mindful appreciation. Try to think about why each sight is pleasurable to you; perhaps the piles of golden leaves remind you of time spent playing as a kid. This technique is called a “Savoring Walk.” If we’re inspired to keep up these gratitude practices, our view of gratitude may change—from a Thanksgiving chore to a meaningful way of thinking year-round. Then, “What are you grateful for?” will no longer be such a tricky question to answer.
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By SARAH RUDELL BEACH
We know mindfulness is good for us. Mindfulness allows us to be present in our parenting, choosing the skillful response instead of succumbing to our visceral reactions. Mindfulness is also good for our kids. There is an emerging body of research that indicates that mindfulness can help our children improve their abilities to pay attention, to calm down when they are upset, and to make better decisions. In short, it helps with emotional regulation and cognitive focus. Do I even need to ask if you want that for your kids? So where do we start? How can we teach mindfulness to kids? First things first… Establish your own practice. You would have trouble teaching your children ballet if you had never danced. To authentically teach mindfulness to your children, you need to practice it yourself. You can read my guide to establishing a meditation practice here, or my popular post 40 Ways to Bring Mindfulness to Your Days here for some ideas to get started. Don’t let this step intimidate you — you’re probably practicing a lot of mindful habits already! Check your expectations. A core principle of mindfulness is letting go of expectations, and this certainly applies to teaching mindfulness to kids. Are you expecting mindfulness to eliminate tantrums? to make your active child calm? to make your house quiet? If so, you are likely to be disappointed. While feeling calm or being quiet are nice side-effects of mindfulness, they are not the ultimate purpose. The purpose of teaching mindfulness to our children is to give them skills to develop their awareness of their inner and outer experiences, to recognize their thoughts as “just thoughts,” to understand how emotions manifest in their bodies, to recognize when their attention has wandered, and to provide tools for impulse control. It is not a panacea, and it will not completely get rid of what is, frankly, normal kid behavior, like tantrums and loudness and whining and exuberance and arguing… Don’t force it. If your kids aren’t interested in your lesson or activity, drop it. This is a good time for you to practice non-attachment to outcomes! Don’t make mindfulness a punishment. This shouldn’t be, “You hit your sister! Go sit in the mindful corner!” ’nuff said. Now that we’ve got the preliminaries out of the way, here are my suggestions for how you can begin to introduce mindfulness to your children. 10 Ways to Teach Mindfulness to Kids 1. Keep it simple. With older kids, you can share the widely-used definition from Jon Kabat-Zinn in the image above. But those are a lot of big words for little kids. I prefer to use the words awareness or noticing with my children {ages 5 and 7, for reference}. Mindfulness is noticing our thoughts, what our body feels like, what our ears are hearing, and anything else that is around us and happening right now. 2. Listen to the bell. An easy way for children to practice mindfulness is to focus on paying attention to what they can hear. I’ve used a singing bowl, like the one on the right, for this exercise, but you could use a bell, a set of chimes, or a phone app that has sounds on it. Tell your children that you will make the sound, and they should listen carefully until they can no longer hear the sound (which is usually 30 seconds to a minute). I find that this exercise does have a calming effect on my children, and it’s a fun way to teach them to pay attention to their surroundings. 3. Create a mindful bedtime ritual. Bedtime is a great time to introduce mindfulness to kids. My daughter loves to do a short body-scan meditation before bed — she closes her eyes, and I tell her to bring her attention to her toes, to her feet, to her legs, etc. It is a calming way to return to the body at the end of the day. You can find several downloadable meditation scripts (including body scans) here, and you can read about the bedtime ritual my daughter and I created here. 4. Practice with a breathing buddy. For young children, an instruction to simply “pay attention to the breath” can be hard to follow. In this Edutopia video, Daniel Goleman describes a 2nd-grade classroom that does a “breathing buddy” exercise: each student grabs a stuffed animal, and then lies down on their back with their buddy on their belly. They focus their attention on the rise and fall of the stuffed animal as they breathe in and out. {You should definitely check out the video — it’s less than 2 minutes and explains the exercise and all the good stuff that it teaches kids!} 5. Make your walks mindful. One of my children’s favorite things to do in the summer is a “noticing walk.” We stroll through our neighborhood and notice things we haven’t seen before. We’ll designate one minute of the walk where we are completely silent and simply pay attention to all the sounds we can hear — frogs, woodpeckers, a lawnmower. We don’t even call it “mindfulness,” but that’s what it is. 6. Establish a gratitude practice. I believe gratitude is a fundamental component of mindfulness, teaching our children to appreciate the abundance in their lives, as opposed to focusing on all the toys and goodies that they crave. This post describes my family’s nightly gratitude practice — each night at dinner we each share one thing we are thankful for. It is one of my favorite parts of the day. 7. Try the SpiderMan meditation! My five-year-old son is in to all things superheroes, and this SpiderMan meditation is right up his alley. This meditation from Kids Relaxation teaches children to activate their “spidey-senses” and their ability to focus on all they can smell, taste, and hear in the present moment. Such a clever idea! 8. Meditate with your children. I cannot even tell you how many times my meditation sessions have been interrupted by my children. They know by now what mommy is doing when she meditates, so I will try to continue with my meditation even as they play around me. Sometimes, my daughter will sit down and join me for a few minutes. It’s beautiful. 9. Check your personal weather report. In Sitting Still Like a Frog, Eline Snel encourages children to “summon the weather report that best describes [their] feelings at the moment.” Sunny, rainy, stormy, calm, windy, tsunami? This activity allows children to observe their present state without overly identifying with their emotions. They can’t change the weather outside, and we can’t change our emotions or feelings either. All we can change is how we relate to them. As Snel describes it, children can recognize, “I am not the downpour, but I notice that it is raining; I am not a scaredy-cat, but I realize that sometimes I have this big scared feeling somewhere near my throat.” 10. Practice mindful eating. The exercise of mindfully eating a raisin or a piece of chocolate is a staple of mindfulness education, and is a great activity for kids. You can find a script for a 7-minute mindful eating exercise for children here. This is a fun way to teach children to pay attention to and savor their food, and by extension, the present moment. ***** Above all, remember to have fun and keep it simple. You can provide your children with many opportunities to add helpful practices to their toolkit — some of them will work for them and some won’t. But it’s fun to experiment! Teach mindfulness to your kids — it can help them develop emotional regulation and cognitive focus. |
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