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Hi, my name is Kaira Jewel Lingo, and...
I want to share about the importance of
cultivating our own capacity for happiness.
That we each have this capacity inside of us, and it's there all the time.
Just like the sun is there--even when it's cloudy or
even when it's night, the sun is still there.
So whenever we want to bring up our
seed of happiness, we can do it.
And this is possible in any moment.
And one of the ways that I have found to be the quickest to access
it is through gratitude and being aware of what I'm grateful for.
And it's very important to take the time to express our
gratitude to the people in our lives who we're close to,
to let them know what is really wonderful about them and not take that for granted.
And if you would like to try the practice of writing a love letter,
it could be very powerful.
I did this when my father turned 68, I decided to write him 68 thank yous.
And I didn't know how many I'd be able to write, but I managed to write 90.
And it just snowballed, and I found myself grateful for
things I had never thought to be grateful for, that I had just taken for granted.
So I was thanking him for doing my diapers, for
doing my hair, for encouraging me and
my brother to give donations at the end of the year, for
apologizing when he was wrong, for telling me no when I needed no.
And at the end of writing this letter, I felt so much richer,
even though nothing externally to me had changed.
I was happier, I felt just buoyed up, because there were
all these things that I never thought to be grateful for
that suddenly I had, even if they were in the past.
So I gave him this letter on his birthday, and, of course,
he felt very happy to receive such a letter.
And he told me that he takes the letter with him everywhere he goes, and
when he doesn't feel good about himself, he reads it and he feels better.
And I've shared this practice with many people, and I always am hearing back from
them, in person or through email, I did this with my mother, my father,
my sister, my brother, and it's made a big difference in our relationship.
And you cannot overestimate the power of appreciation.
One sister in community wrote this letter for her father when he turned 50.
She wrote him 50 thank yous, and he said to her,
I've been waiting for this letter for my whole life.
And I understood that to mean there are certain things that only we
can see in another person.
And if we don't express them, then they'll never bloom.
So she had written a letter that only she could see those things in him, and
he had been waiting till he was 50 for someone to recognize and
appreciate those qualities in him.
So I encourage each of us to look into our relationships and
see, is there someone or some people that we might write
a love letter to, to express our gratitude and not take for
granted the good things that we have in that relationship?
And just reflecting on what brings us joy,
what we're grateful for, can shift our mind state immediately.
Whenever I...
If I'm in a bad mood, feeling very low, and
I just write down a few things that I'm grateful for, something shifts.
And my problems may not be solved, I'm not completely happy, but
I'm no longer caught in that mind state of something's lacking or
something's not okay.
There's some part of me that realizes, even if I'm going through a difficult
moment, there are also things that are to be celebrated and to be appreciative of.
And that really helps me hold the difficult moment with more space.
And I think we are individuals that are a part of a collective,
and right in this moment in time, we have a lot of collective
suffering that impacts each of us individually.
There's a lot of confusion, a lot of division,
a lot of judgment, and a lot of pain.
And I think it's really important to remember that the collective is made up
of the individual.
The collective consciousness is made up of our individual consciousness.
So to the extent that we can connect with what is good,
what is healing, what is nourishing,
that has an effect on the collective consciousness.
And...
This practice of gratitude is very revolutionary,
because we especially need to cultivate gratitude in moments
when we don't feel grateful, in moments that are hard.
And that creates a sense of fullness that doesn't require us to consume or
to feed into this narrative in our society that we're not okay as we are.
That's the message we're always getting--we have to buy this in order to
be okay, we have to have this degree, have this car,
have this experience in order to be okay.
But the practice of gratitude is revolutionary because
it takes us out of that story and helps us to see that we're
okay as we are, that the sun is always shining.
That our own goodness is always there, and
other people's goodness is always there, and it needs to be watered.
So even the people who are very much on the opposite
spectrum than we are, socially, politically,
how can we see what can access our own human goodness and water that?
And that shifts the collective awareness, the collective consciousness.
There are people in our communities,
in our country that are holding on to very dangerous,
very harmful views, that want to harm and hurt and destroy others.
The white supremacist movement that's growing so much steam now...
And how can we look at that situation through the understanding
of interbeing, that we're completely interconnected?
And that these people don't come out of a vacuum,
but they are products of a whole history and
culture and society that we're also products of.
And we share this country.
And a friend of mine did research on what caused people in white nationalist,
white supremacist groups to leave and shift their perspective.
And in every case, it was not being chastised, being judged,
being condemned, or logically being convinced.
In the cases that she looked at, it was...every one of them was kindness,
was someone seeing that person's humanity, affirming it.
Expressing some kind of love or appreciation or care...
And that's what shifted this person's mind to realize they were doing the wrong thing
with their lives.
So this practice of the love letter, how can we share this with
those that we are on the opposite end of the spectrum with?
How can we affirm people whose ideas really do need to be addressed,
because they are dangerous, without dehumanizing them?
How can we really see that these are people who are capable of
having other seeds in them watered?
Like, there are examples of people who had very extreme
violent views who have shifted and became part of the resistance to that,
who stood up for the dignity of peoples of color.
After having been in the Ku Klux Klan, for example, there are people who have
totally shifted, and apologized and asked for forgiveness for their harm.
So how do we see that potential in all of
the people that we may feel are against us?
In that, we need to cultivate our own minds, our own stillness,
our own peace, take good care of our good seeds and make them grow.
And then figure out how to see that that possibility is
always there in every human being, whose capacity for
awakening, for deep wisdom and compassion to arise.
So we need to stay in touch with that in ourselves and
we need to stay connected to that potential in others.
And we need other people to support us.
We can't do that on our own.
But we need to build communities where this
kind of wisdom, this kind of compassion,
is our vocabulary, is our currency.
So that we have the capacity to be with hatred without meeting it with hatred.
Because we cannot address hatred
with hatred, it just increases it.
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