Gratitude = Goodness

Want a natural high? Just tell someone thank you (sincerely). From Psychology Today:

Gratitude is a sentiment we'd all do well to cultivate, according to positive psychologists, mental health clinicians and researchers who seek to help everyone create more joy in life. Feeling thankful and expressing that thanks makes you happier and heartier—not hokier.

The biggest bonuses come from experiencing gratitude habitually, but natural ingrates needn't despair. Simple exercises can give even skeptics a short-term mood boost, and "once you get started, you find more and more things to be grateful for," says Robert Emmons, a leading gratitude researcher at the University of California at Davis.

In gratitude letters like those penned by Peterson and his students, writers detail the kindnesses of someone they've never properly thanked. Read this letter aloud to the person you're thanking, Peterson says, and you'll see measurable improvements in your mood. Studies show that for a full month after a "gratitude visit" (in which a person makes an appointment to read the letter to the recipient), happiness levels tend to go up, while boredom and other negative feelings go down. In fact, the gratitude visit is more effective than any other exercise in positive psychology.

Forgiveness is the key to happiness

When you observe others do you tend to pass judgment? Do you judge their actions as mistakes or sins?

Sin is an idea we teach ourselves, and we can also teach ourselves to forgive. It takes some practice. If we are willing, we can learn to take the key to happiness, and use it on our own behalf. Let's try to devote ten minutes today, to learning how to forgive and receive forgiveness, too.

Some may not believe that giving and receiving are the same. Yet we will try to learn today that they are one through practicing forgiveness toward one whom we think of as an enemy, and one whom we consider a friend. And as we learn to see them both as one, the lesson will be extended to ourselves, and we will see that their release included our own.

Begin by thinking of someone you do not like, who seems to irritate you, or to cause regret in you; one you actively despise, or merely try to ignore. It does not matter what form your anger takes. You probably have chosen the person already.

Now close your eyes and see this person in your mind, and look at them a while. Try to perceive some light in them somewhere; a little gleam which you had never noticed. Try to find some little spark of brightness shining through the ugly picture that you hold of them. Look at this picture till you see a light somewhere within it, and then try to let this light extend until it covers them, and makes the picture beautiful and good. Look at this changed perception for a while.

Now, turn your mind to someone you call a friend. Try to transfer the light you learned to see around your former "enemy" to your friend. Perceive them now as more than friend to you, for in that light their holiness shows you your savior, saved and saving, healed and whole. Then let your friend offer you the light you see in him, and let your "enemy" and friend unite in blessing you with what you gave. Now are you one with them, and they with you. Now you have been forgiven by yourself.

Forgiveness is the key to happiness.
I will awaken from the dream that I am mortal,
fallible and full of sin,
and know I am the perfect Son of God.

From A Course in Miracles, Lesson 121

Love is...

Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a stage of vulnerability.
- J Krishnamurti

Hansei Shinasai

Reprinted from the blog tongodeon:

I was helping a Japanese friend move a while ago and I noticed a book in her collection: "How To Deal With Americans Who Don't Hansei". The cover art was striking and I became interested.

"What's hansei?"
"There really isn't a word for it in English."
"So what does it mean?"
"Hmmm, it is hard to explain."

"Hansei" literally means "reflection". Figuratively it describes being conscious of your behavior and its impact on others. People who take pride in driving noisy cars do not hansei. People having loud conversations while walking past your bedroom window at 2AM do not hansei. People who stall checkout lines at the grocery store while they figure out whether or not they've got the money to buy what they selected do not hansei. Hansei is the reason why mobile phones are always on vibrate and only used for sms in public areas: text creates less disturbance than loud conversations. Hansei is at the center of Japan's iconic anti-smoking ads, reminding smokers not of their own health risks but of the disturbance they are causing to others. Hansei also means greeting success with modesty and humility. To stop hansei means to stop learning. With hansei one never becomes so convinced of one's own superiority that there is no more room or need for further improvement.


George Bush is the international no-hansei icon; he does not self-reflect, and because of this he makes the same mistakes over and over. The Iraq War is a no-hansei disaster with no regard for world opinion and no plan for victory beyond the presumption that our supremacy makes success inevitable and guaranteed. Without familiarity with such a basic concept we are a nation whose parents did not raise us right.

From the blog Gemba Panta Rei:

"Han" means to change, turn over, turn upside down. "Sei" is the simplified form of a character meaning to look back upon, review, examine oneself. As a native speaker of Japanese "hansei" strikes me as both an intellectual and emotional exercise. With hansei there is a sense of shame, if that is not too hard of a word. This may come from having been asked to do a lot of hansei as a child, being told "hanse shinasai!" which in English might be "Learn to behave!"

The point is, when you do hansei it is almost never because you are "considering past experience" as if they were happy memories. You are confronting brutal facts about your actions and the impact they had, in hopes that you can learn from this and change your behavior in the future.