Creating Positive Spaces with a Grateful Mindset

Creating Positive Spaces with a Grateful Mindset

It's so simple, could it really change our outlook, experience and classrooms?  In this episode of the Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein looks at ways that gratitude can transform our experience and deepen our understanding of presence, interconnectedness, and awe. 

You will see how we can shift our perspectives, working with everyday events like traffic irritation, and cultivate a very different mindset. It's not lightweight, it can have a real impact and reveal profound truths about the nature of our world. 

Discovering how when we foster gratitude we not only improve personal well-being, we also build a deeper sense of connection and belonging. This can create  a ripple effect in our classrooms and communities.

Step into the Conscious Classroom with Amy as she explores practical tips and educational insights to nurture mindfulness and awareness. This episode is designed for anyone passionate about making a positive impact, particularly educators working with teens.

Chapters

• 0:10 Cultivating Gratitude in Daily Life

Transcript

Amy: 0:10

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teens to create more conscious, supportive and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Share let's get on with this next episode. Hello and welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast.

Amy: 0:51

My name is Amy Edelstein and I'm very excited today to speak with you about gratitude or, as the dear brother David Steindlrast calls it, gratefulness, the quality of being grateful and the attitude and approach to life which is one of gratitude. It's a very profound and moving contemplation. It's also very practical in this day and age to focus on gratitude and having an attitude of gratefulness. It's a real antidote and counteracts a lot of the negativity, frustration, victimization and complaints that we see and hear and are subjected to in our contemporary culture. It's no surprise to everyone that we're living in a time of fragmentation and a time of great frustration, short tempers and imagining ill intent where there may not be any, and once that attitude becomes popular and common, it's hard to stand against it. The beautiful thing about practicing gratitude and cultivating an orientation to life of gratefulness is that you simply start in the privacy of your own heart and mind. You don't need to change people around you, you don't need to talk about it and in many ways, you don't even need to assume a particular posture or practice, although it can be helpful to do that done or has done to our detriment, to shifting our attention to the good qualities that are present. So, first of all, it develops mindfulness. Gratitude and that present moment attention are deeply intertwined. We become aware of our surroundings, we become aware of what's occurring and as we become aware, we rest our attention on that which we appreciate, which we're grateful for, which we appreciate, which we're grateful for, and that appreciation, when we really let ourselves drop into it, is a type of awakening. It forms this sense of the richness of life, the interconnectedness of life, the fact that we're not alone and the fact that, even in the midst of the most difficult conditions, we can find something to be grateful for, to be grateful for. So this requires a tremendous act of faith and courage. But let's start with a very simple example.

Amy: 4:36

If you live anywhere where you need to drive or take public transportation, which is pretty much everywhere in our contemporary world, there are very few places left where people only move by foot or by horse or donkey or yak or Joe, and being in a car can evoke very strong feelings of frustration. And then there's inevitably one person who just has no patience and is trying to weave in and out when there's a little more than a foot and a half between bumpers and you start to feel your frustration rise. You start to feel angry, annoyed by the selfishness and the lack of patience. And the more you feel angry and annoyed by the lack of patience, the more you start feeling that and exhibiting that yourself. So in those moments they're perfect to practice gratitude and simply shift our attention off of what's causing frustration, since we can't do anything about it anyway, and to what we appreciate. So maybe you appreciate the car that you're in, the fact that you have a car or, if you're in public transportation or a rideshare, the fact that you're being carried and you don't have to navigate the traffic behind the wheel. Maybe you appreciate the feel of the steering wheel or the upholstery or the color or the music you might be listening to, or the upholstery or the color or the music you might be listening to, or the weather. Maybe you're in a rural area and you're passing some beautiful trees. Maybe you appreciate the fact that you, of where you're coming from, that you have a job that supports you and a home that you're going towards. Maybe you appreciate one small thing that happened at work. And all of a sudden, as you start to look for these things that exist in your experience no need to fabricate them you start resting your attention on one thing after another that brings that quality of appreciation, of awareness and of gratefulness and of gratefulness.

Amy: 7:49

And if you're in the midst of deep suffering, whether it's physical pain and illness or conflict in your immediate environment, or if you're suffering in a greater conflict and now you live in a place of natural that's just experienced natural disaster or profound unrest, appreciate that you're safe, appreciate a moment of kindness from someone, appreciate the clean water that you had, it's not to avoid the reality of difficultness, it's to fortify ourselves with that heartfulness, that sense of well-being. When we feel fortified with that upwelling of good feeling and of positivity, no-transcript mistakenly feel that if they feel gratefulness, they're going to become selfish. If they're looking for what's been given to them, they're all of a sudden going to be self-focused. And really the opposite is true, because the minute that we start resting our attention on all these different things in our immediate vicinity that we love and appreciate, that give us delight and good feeling, that bring a sense of safety and warmth, that invite humility, we immediately see that our experience and existence is not, as we might have been emotionally feeling, isolated and alone and separate. We're inextricably intertwined, interdependent with everything around us, independent with everything around us. Those feelings of isolation and separation can melt as soon as we start feeling gratefulness for the world around us. We recognize that we actually are connected. There are so many things that interact and intersect with our world. We're not fundamentally separate from all that exists. And when we start allowing that sense of gratefulness, that feeling of being in the right place, of belonging, even if we're in a very difficult situation or we're suffering an illness, we recognize our place in the grand scheme of life and the people around us and the medical community supporting us and the farmers bringing us good nutrition, we start to see that we are not separate from life. And we can dissolve those feelings of alienation and difficulty when we allow ourselves to put our attention on the small things that we are grateful for and cultivating that sense and seeing the interconnectedness and extending that circle out and out and out, that attitude of gratitude. It lifts our heart and mind because we all want to be connected, lifts our heart and mind because we all want to be connected.

Amy: 12:21

And that connection, part of the mystery of the fabric of being formal or informal, whether it is something we sit down to do or write about or keep a gratitude journal, or we cultivate a practice of noticing at random moments throughout the day, we develop this habit and touchstone of gratitude and that starts to infuse our conversations, our interactions, our interpretations, our way of seeing. It starts to develop that sense of immediacy, that sense of being present with what is and with all the invisible aspects of what makes this present moment. When we start seeing how much we care about, whether it's the beautiful shape in a picture that we're looking at, or an unbelievably vibrant color, or the sunlight reflecting off the trees, or the change of weather and the scent of a coming new season, or the voice of someone we care about, we start to feel how full the immediate moment is. And when we feel how full the immediate moment is, and when we feel how full the immediate moment is, we realize that each drop of presence contains everything and we no longer need to be off balance, leaning forward, wishing we had something we didn't or regretting something we've lost. It allows us to accept and let go. It allows us to feel a sense of awe at how everything works and how much love there is in life.

Amy: 15:12

When we work with our students, cultivating an attitude of gratefulness teaches them a good and healthy orientation to life. If you have a visitor to class, having them write a thank you note that's authentic and personal. If a student has done something supportive, having the class appreciate them and express their support, which is another form of gratitude. And having students keep a gratitude jar all the things they're grateful for and filling up that jar so that they don't feel frustrated and they don't feel hard done by. And they start seeing that jar being filled with beautiful colored pieces of paper, all of which are expressing thanks for something that happened that day in the classroom or another day in the classroom.

Amy: 16:36

You can practice direct gratitude with mindfulness, practice adjusting the love and kindness. So it's more related to gratefulness, and let's try that now. This is something simple that you can do with your students. You can invite them to tell you one thing that they're grateful for, or you can evoke it yourself and have them sit in a mindfulness posture, taking a deep breath in and thinking as they breathe in.

Amy: 17:20

I'm grateful for my breath. It oxygenates my whole body, helping me move and think and digest and live, and, as they breathe out, invite them to be grateful for their out-breath. I'm grateful for my out-breath because it carries out the waste that my body does not need, the carbon dioxide that is no longer needed. I'm grateful for my breath because it makes me know I'm alive. I'm grateful for my exhale because I love how my body relaxes as I release. I'm grateful for my senses, being aware that I'm sitting and I can tell the temperature and I can feel the softness of my clothes. I'm grateful for my sense of hearing so that I can learn when people are talking, and I'm grateful for my speech so I can communicate and connect and share. I'm grateful for my school building, having a community to come to where I can make friends and learn. I'm grateful for the water fountain for when I'm thirsty, I'm grateful for my teachers who help me grow and I'm grateful for the homework, even if I don't like it, because in the end I do love to learn.

Amy: 19:51

We can close our practice by taking a deep breath in and a deep breath out, and another deep breath in and another deep breath out, and let's bring our attention back to our shared exploration. So you can see, it's so easy to find things to be grateful for, it's so easy to cultivate a habit of shifting our attention from what's not going right to what we're so grateful for grateful that it exists, grateful that it's in our immediate surroundings and that refocusing, that shifting of attention softens our sense of being, softens our attitude, softens our frustrations, softens the way we want to negotiate and deal with problems. When we do this with our students, we can picture the adults in our school, we can picture our own spheres and what we're grateful for, and that can truly make a huge difference for our experience of teaching and for our engagement with our students and for our orientation to life. So I hope that you practice this. I wish you well and I look forward to talking again next time. Well, and I look forward to talking again next time.

Amy: 22:04

Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, amy Edelstein. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.