Today has been a good, long day. I was away from home for about 12 hours today, finally getting home from a class at around 9:30 p.m. I am grateful for many things today, most of them of the “simple gratitude” variety, but grateful nonetheless. Let me start with this: the other day I was watching Wayne Dyer doing a special on PBS. Wayne Dyer is a fairly well known spiritual teacher and writer. He was talking about the power in the words, “I Am,” and how important our language is in the way we refer to ourselves (like, “I am sad,” “I am angry” “I am fat,” etc.) I think about some of the messages I’ve sent myself recently from the realm of “I am” and some of them are not very good. So I decided this morning that I was going to write down some positive “I Ams” on a yellow sticky and put it up where I can see it. Because the truth is, I AM a lot of good things. So are you.
The trouble is that we take so little time acknowledging all the wonderful things we are and either ignore them or, worse yet, we dwell on all the icky I Ams. In a matter of one minute or less, I had a list of about 12 things. And that was without really trying. When I look at the phrases they are not things that are difficult to believe or a stretch to imagine (like I didn’t say, “I am glamorous” for example.) But for the most part, they are things that are true and that I can actually believe about myself (things like “I am strong,” “I am resilient,” “I am wise.”) And just to stretch myself out there a little bit I did include, “I am beautiful,” which hasn’t always been the easiest thing for me to believe about myself, particularly depending on how one defines beauty. And I didn’t just stick with adjectives, I also wrote I AM statements in noun form, claiming some of what I see myself being. “I am a writer,” “I am a teacher,” “I am a mother,” etc. I plan to look at my I Am list and to add to it regularly and I invite you to do the same. God knows we know how to tell ourselves the bad stuff; and even if we have a pretty health dose of self esteem, the world around us, society-at-large sometimes seems wired to tell us that’s wrong with us and how we don’t measure up to some standard.
Now I’m not encouraging self-centered, narcissistic, navel gazing. In fact, as I am learning in my studying some Buddhist teaching, you can also extend this I Am practice to people around you. Tell a coworker, “You are wise” or a good friend “You are kind” or your child “you are beautiful” or whatever. You get the point. I will add “I am grateful” to the list.
I am also grateful this evening for good teachers. I just finished a four-week class on The Four Noble Truths in Buddhism and tonight I started another one on “The Eightfold Path,” both of which are being taught by the same teacher. I am so pleased to be learning from this teacher Mushim Patricia Ikeda (http://mushim.wordpress.com/) whom I so appreciate for her wisdom, her down-to-earth personality and a wonderful sense of humor. I am fortunate to live in the Bay area where I have access to a wide variety of spiritual and cultural communities and many good teachers. I am increasingly biased by the quality of teaching at the East Bay Meditation Center of which Mushim is a big part. What I like about what Mushim is teaching is the every day practicality of engaging in mindful, thoughtful, aware ways of being in the world. I am not likely to become a fully practicing Buddhist any time soon, but what I am learning in the classes and through my own mindfulness (insight) meditation is definitely adding quality and value to my life.
And as I sit in the class and listen and learn, I feel the familiar stirrings in myself that remind me that I too am a teacher, that I have wisdom and gifts to share with the world. One of the temporary casualties of having been unemployed for a long period of time is that I forget that. I’m looking forward to finding and/or creating opportunities for me to teach something to anyone I can find. I say that a little tongue-in-cheek, but I am setting out there the intention that I’ll create something sometime soon that will allow me to do that. I’ve been a teacher of sorts my whole life and have had opportunities over the years to do some formal teaching at universities, and a lot of outside of classroom teaching through facilitating workshops and dialogues, etc. I love being taught and I love to teach. I am a lifelong learner.
I’m grateful for many things, including you who read along with me as I meander my way through gratefulness. May you enjoy happiness and be free from suffering. May you accept and love yourself for every bit of who you are. May you know your own worth. May you be happy and peaceful, safe and protected, healthy and strong. May you live with joy, ease, and wellbeing. So may we all!
