With Thanksgiving last week, I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about the practice of being grateful or thankfulness. The challenge of the week in the dojo is to spend at least one minute each day thinking about the things you are thankful for. This simple practice is easy to discount, yet it could absolutely change your life.

Balance

As martial artists, we seek balance. Physical balance can look like not falling over when you throw a kick or spinning technique. It can also be striving to have equal skill across a range of techniques. It can be striving to have equal skill on both sides for an individual technique. If a Tai Chi posture like white stork cools wings is good on one side but less than good on the other, you’re normal. (Many students have nightmares about mirror image). Yet we shouldn’t resign ourselves to being bad at a technique or posture. We accept our skill for what it is today and then decide how to improve it. A very simple way to create balance is to repeat what we need the most work on more times. If your right leg hook kick is fine but your left leg is pitiful, rep the left leg twice as much until it resembles something you aren’t embarrassed about.

We also seek internal balance. The balance of our thoughts tends to lean massively towards the negative. On average, human beings have 3-5 negative thoughts for every positive thought. While this serves a purpose for survival from an evolutionary standpoint, it is far less important in our world today to notice so many negatives. To achieve balance, we simply take the same method for improving technique and apply it to our thoughts. When you recognize a negative thought, consciously have 3-5 positive thoughts. Build up your capacity for thankfulness.

Sitting with thankfulness

The practice of sitting and consciously thinking about thankfulness helps in the same way. The thoughts that we have and actions that we take become easier and easier the more we repeat them, and eventually become habit. A student yesterday was telling me about an exercise he does every morning as part of his daily routine. He names at least 75 things he is grateful for, starting from the biggest things like nebulae and black holes, then moving to smaller things like animals and food. This student said that he notices it makes him feel more thankful throughout the day and gives him more energy when approaching life from that perspective.

Before I started practicing martial arts, I was very unhappy. I spent my days obsessing over the things I didn’t like about myself or the world. In one of the first meditation talks I attended, Sifu Brown casually said, “Happiness is a choice.” My mind was blown. It was the first time I had considered that I could choose my thoughts, emotions and internal state. Right then, I made a shift. I consciously made myself move away from negative thought patterns and replaced them with positive ones. This keeps me motivated and empowered rather than bogged down by things I cannot change.

Can you be too positive?

At this point, I may even recognize too many positives and not pay enough attention to the things I should strive to improve. As the world seems to pull us all in a continuingly downward spiral with the pandemic, racial and economic inequality and pretty much anything else you see when you turn on the news, we must of course remain steadfast in our efforts to make progress. Yet any imbalance towards the positive is perhaps acting as a counter-weight to the negative in the world around. Or so I tell myself.

Take on the practice of one minute of thankfulness for a week. See what kind of shift you can create in your consciousness and your life. If you feel more empowered and energized, keep it up.