Summer and the happy habit

Beautiful, beautiful August! Such a good time to get into the habit of exercising our gratitude muscles. Here is my piece for Conscious this week.

My spiritual teacher, the humanitarian Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma), visited New York recently, and as ever, it was a time of great joy and learning for me. Amma is popularly known as “the hugging saint” because she gives her blessing in the form of a very tender embrace. This hug is known as darshan, which you can translate as “a glimpse of God”, and indeed, in the moments when you’re nestled in the arms of this awakened person, it can feel like time disappears and you’re part of something infinitely vast.

One learns about love on a visceral level, both in Amma’s embrace, and in watching her hugging people—one after another after another—for 12, maybe 13 or 14 hours non-stop. She has said before that where love flows, everything is effortless, and watching the affection coming from Amma and in the faces of those people she’s embracing can be like seeing love made visible. Everyone is lit up.

But there’s also a more instructional kind of learning on offer in the form of the talks that she gives before darshan. On this New York visit, she spoke about gratitude, specifically on how it’s so easy to focus on what we don’t have. It’s like if there’s something wrong in your mouth—say you’ve lost a tooth—your tongue can’t help but endlessly explore that area, and the gap feels enormous. We’re compelled to explore that lack, even as we forget the other perfectly good teeth in our mouths, or the general miraculousness of our bodies. When we get obsessive about what we don’t have, we lose sight of what we do have.

I notice that gratitude comes more easily to me in the summer. Yesterday I lay in the park just watching the flowers nod gently in the breeze, and I felt utterly bowled over by the gorgeousness and generosity of summer. It is a time of ripeness, abundance, fecundity, playfulness, smiles at the beach, ice-cream truck music… Even the quality of being physically alone in summer can feel different to in other seasons; there’s a certain kind of freedom and a quiet joy to it.

This being so, it is a very good time to practice being thankful. Not to simply strike things off a list, ”I am grateful for this, that and the other”, but to really feel it in our bodies: The way the evening breeze feels on your skin; your feet in the sand; a mouthful of ice-cream; the feeling of leaning your head on your friend’s shoulder, and their shoulder being warm from the sun. It’s like everything is humming with the same sweet energy. To me, it is darshan in everyday form.

Developing such awareness to your body is something anyone can support through yoga practice, if that’s an option that appeals. Simply focussing your attention on your breath and what it feels like to be inside your body in the outside world can have a transformative effect on your relationship with your own body, mind and soul, not to mention other people’s, whatever the time of year.

But right now it is summer. Why not let the sun melt your heart and your anxieties? And see if you can let yourself just hang out in those moments of sweetness and thankfulness. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. Just here.

Happiness can, I think, be like doing headstands: It takes some practice. What a beautiful time it is to get into the habit of being grateful.