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| Morning Glory, by Okumura Togyu, 1935 |
Art of Manliness - #945 - Greg Krech - "The Japanese Practice That"
Naikan provides a nice structure that basically shows us how we might do that. And that structure consists of essentially three questions, all of which are very simple, simple enough for children. The first question is, what have I received from others or from a particular person? The second question is, what have I given? So it’s kind of turning that question around. And the third question was, what troubles and difficulties have I caused to others?
that there’s three shifts that I think it encourages people to make. And one of those shifts is a shift from what I call a complaint-based life to a life of genuine appreciation and gratitude. And so that Naikan self-reflection is basically a tool for helping us to make that shift. I think one of the things that has developed in our society over a long period of time is that I think to a great extent, we have become a culture of complaint to the point where complaining is actually the norm. So a person comes home from work and their partner’s there and they walk in the door and the partner says, “oh, honey, how was your day?” And the person now says, “oh, let me tell you about my day.” And they go through a litany of problems that the copier broke and they were late for the meeting and there was construction on the way to work and they got all these emails that they couldn’t catch up with and on and on and on.
[instead, imagine if it were different:]. And your response was, “well, let me tell you about my day, this morning I got in the car and I turned the key and the car just started on the first crank, just no problems whatsoever. And I was driving to work and I got behind this truck that was painting those lines in the road. And I realized how great it is that we’ve got those lines that distinguish between lanes so that we basically can stay in our own lane. We don’t constantly crash into other people. And then I got to work and I got a parking place. The coffee was nice and hot and all ready for me. I had a comfortable chair to sit in.” And after a while people are saying, okay, okay, okay. There’s no drama to that. I think we kind of like drama and complaining somehow seems to be associated with drama. So if somebody actually was to give you a list of all the things that worked well for them or that supported them that day, most of us would either find that boring and or think that person was kind of weird.
We’ll go into the bathroom or to the kitchen and we’ll flip on the light switch and that light switch will go on two or three or 400 times in a row with no problem. But one of those times that light’s not gonna go on because maybe the bulb is burned out and then we notice it. So those 400 times when the light just went on, we don’t really pay much attention to it, but as soon as it doesn’t work, we notice it. And I think we do the same kind of thing with people, with our partners, with our children, with our colleagues and friends. We tend to get focused on when something happens that doesn’t work or that doesn’t meet our expectations or approval. And so this kind of self-reflection, when you ask what the purpose is, part of it is to just give us some time to really reflect on our lives and our conduct, how we’re living our life. Which most of us don’t do because we’re so busy. And by the time we’re finished with our busyness, we’re tired and we’re exhausted and we kind of zone out in front of the internet or a movie. But the other thing that this does is in addition to the self-reflection we’re doing, it begins to affect the way that we see the world when we’re not reflecting on our life.
So we get up the next day and we start noticing things that we hadn’t noticed or thought about before, particularly things the ways in which the world is supporting us or caring for us. So it begins to not just give us a different way of looking at reality when we’re doing that reflection, it actually gives us another way of looking at reality as we start to go through our day.
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We’re not trying to find things that we’re grateful for. We’re just simply noticing that as a result of the microphone that I’m using or the Wi-Fi in my house or some satellite someplace, that you and I can actually have this conversation.
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[This is different than a 'gratefulness practice']... Because what am I grateful for will vary depending on my mood at any given moment, right. If I’ve just had a big argument with my wife or with a colleague, there may be lots of things going on that are supporting me, but I’m not going to feel grateful for those because I’m just in a crappy mood. But if I just simply list the fact that I’ve got electricity that’s supporting me and I’ve got, it’s cold outside today, it’s below freezing and we’ve got heat in the house. If I start listing those things as just ways that I’m being supported by reality, it becomes actually much more of a research project, and as you were saying, much more objective, and I think therefore meaningful.
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if we start seeing that we have a long list of ways that life and the world around us and the people and the objects and the forms of energy are supporting us, then I think it is a natural response in those cases most often that we do respond internally with a sense of appreciation or a feeling of gratitude. And it’s a very natural response. And I think when we do some of the gratitude practices, as you were saying, it’s almost like there’s a moral imperative for you to feel grateful for something. And when I work with people doing Naikan reflection, if they read off a list of 20 things and they’ll say you know what? To be honest, I don’t actually feel grateful for any of those things. I’ll just say, that’s okay. That’s fine. It’s not based on an outcome that we’re trying to get in which we feel grateful. So when that does happen, it’s really just a natural response that we have.
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[origins of the Thanksgiving Practice]
And so we raised two young girls, and I think probably they were about a year and a half apart. And probably when my oldest was about five years old, maybe six, I just developed a one-page sheet. They didn’t know how to write or read yet, but they could understand the question of what is it in life that you’re thankful for? Or what is it in life that’s making you happy or providing care for you? And so we just asked them to draw pictures in boxes. We would say, here’s some boxes for people. So for instance, grandma, and here’s some boxes for animals, maybe our dog, Barley. And they would have questions here and there. But the amazing thing was, I would give them this piece of paper, and even at that age, we would take about 45 minutes. Everybody went to a separate room or corner of the house. And the idea was to be quiet for 45 minutes and just work with your sheet of paper. And they were actually incredibly focused on this when we did it.
And then the wonderful thing was really getting back together after that 45 minute period with some tea or coffee or juice for the kids and going through and this started out just as one page, but going through that and having everybody share here’s some of the people that are really have played an important role in terms of supporting me or contributing to my life during this past year 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 then this wonderful experience of just sitting around and just sharing the ways in which life is supporting us from these various different perspectives. And that’s how we started our day. And I think it just created a completely different atmosphere in the home to start the day that way as we moved forward then into cooking and eating. And a lot of times when people would join us for the first time, they had never done this before. And it was just great to kind of involve them in the process. So that over years, that’s grown to this little booklet that you mentioned. And so now there’s these different categories. One category is who are people in the present of my life in this past year or so that have been supportive to me. And how have they been supportive? One of the most important things that people do if they try this process is to be specific. Because if you were to ask me well, who’s been supportive of you in the past couple of weeks? And I could say to you, “oh, my wife, Linda, she’s been very supportive.” And I can say that without even thinking about what she did. But if you followed up and said, “oh, that’s great that she’s been supportive. What did she actually do to be supportive?” Well, now I have to sit back and think, well, what did she actually do? Well, she brought me home a nice little chocolate tart when she went shopping yesterday, which was really great to have for dessert. And she gave me a foot massage the other day. And she made a really nice pasta dinner a couple of nights ago. But to do that, it takes some mental energy for me to remember back to do those things. But if I say as a concept, “oh, Linda is so supportive or she’s so helpful, where she’s such a loving wife.” I can say that as a phrase without it having any kind of content to it, right. And it doesn’t take any mental energy. So when we go through this process, we don’t want to just think of like, oh, this friend of mine has been really supportive. We want to actually make a note, how have they been supportive? Well, this couple lent us a walker for my wife’s surgery last year or something like that. And that’s a very specific thing. And to do that, it actually takes some quiet and it takes some time and it takes some mental energy, but it’s those details that really make this self-reflection a powerful process.
I always encourage people when they’re doing it like this on a holiday or if they’re just doing it as even a daily practice to actually write. If you’re using the Thanksgiving approach, then you just basically, in our booklet, you already have these boxes laid out. There’s a box for nature. Here’s a box for forms of energy. Here’s a box for people. Here’s a box for people who taught you things that you know how to do. So the structure is already kind of laid out for you, but you can just take a piece of paper, copy paper. But writing, I think, is a good way to stay focused.
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Well, it’s a Japanese phrase, Okagesama, and, and the foundation of that phrase, Okage actually translates into something like shadow. But the phrase is actually used in Japanese to just say thanks to you. If somebody said, I’m a musician and I play in a, a band. And if at the end of the concert, you know, if one of my band members comes up and says, you know, you did a great job on the lead on that song, or You did a great job playing keyboards today. And if in Japan I might say Okagesama, which means thanks to you, it means I’m recognizing that you contributed to the opportunity that I had, you know, to, in this case, play music in that band. And so the term shadow means that we’re trying to shed a light on things in our life, which normally are in the shadows and in the shadows in the sense that we just don’t notice them, or we take them for granted, or we don’t really appreciate them. And so this idea of Okagesamade really means that we’re stepping back to try to shine a light on these things in our life that have gone unnoticed and unappreciated.
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[You can be grateful in a way that highlights your own hard work... but another way that's more about grace, focusing on the sense of a blessing.] gratitude is just a natural response that gets stimulated. But we can be grateful for something and at the same time have a sense that we earned it or that we deserve it, right? So I can, you know, look around, the house where I’m at, and I can see all these nice little furniture and books and calligraphy on the walls and photos and decorations. And I can think, you know, I’m really grateful to be able to have lived here all these years, but I can also be thinking, but you know, I worked really hard for this and, I put in a lot of time and energy in kind of developing this work.And so, so I think I earned this, right? And I’m not saying that you didn’t, I think everybody has to look at that themselves, but so we can be grateful, but we could also have this kind of ego sense of I really did earn this, or I deserve it. But with grace, grace has a different kind of implication. I think grace is really something that we’re given or something that happens to us that we very clearly didn’t earn and don’t deserve. And that’s what I see as the difference between gratitude and grace [considers this associated with 'blessing'].
when I look at how much I’ve received and then I look at these other two questions, what I’ve given in return and the troubles I’ve caused, it humbles me. And in that humility, I’m much more likely to see the things that I’m receiving as blessings than the things that I earned or deserve.
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[A non-western idea of healing.]. I think that the western approach to that tends to be to see things as tumors. If we have something in our past in which we suffered a lot, that we somehow have to go through a process of surgically removing that from our consciousness or our psyche or our memory so that we can then be at peace and be content and, and essentially be healed. But here’s a very different kind of approach to healing, which says that one of the ways that we heal from being hurt is to basically realize how much care and love and support we have received in the larger context. Not from a particular person, but from everybody and everything in the world. And that healing isn’t about getting rid of something that if it’s in our past, we really 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 this larger context of a world which has, you know, brought us lots of, of support and lots of joy and cared for us to get us to this point in our life. And yes, there was this incident and there was this incident and there was a whole string of these incidents, but we see them in a much larger context of being loved and cared for. And I would say that that’s actually a wonderful way to think about healing
[talks about also taking note of other two types of things that have supported us this year: THINGS and ENERGY - electricity, sun, food energy]
And I think that the other thing that you can do once you start creating that list is then take each of those items and actually think about, can you think of someone or how it was that you learned that? So I had a, a piano teacher, you know, for six years that taught me how to in introduced me to playing piano. And, and it’s one of the reasons that I can actually play professionally now. But my mother was a singer and she also provided tremendous inspiration and encouragement for me to practice. And, and, and basically there was always music going out in our house. So when I, you know, look at whatever musical skill I have right now, I can actually start identifying specific people or things, you know, that basically inspired me. And sometimes it’s a YouTube video where they did a lesson in, you know, how to solo in the blues or something like that.
Last questions (which can be heavy... talks about being called to help his father in Chicago and bc of that responsibility, being able to spend the last 10 days of life together). List difficulties and disappointments that have turned out to be blessings in your life.
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