Part 4: Questions & Expressing and Receiving Gratitude
This morning you made a reference to giraffe mourning,
and that there's a different way of saying you're sorry to someone,
and I wanted to hear what that was.
- Ok. Let's real quick look at what I mean by "giraffe mourning".
Think of something you did
that you wished you hadn't done.
[Laughter]
And identify...recall as best as you can how you talked to yourself,
when you said it or did it, whatever you did.
So, what did you do that you wished you hadn't done after you'd done it?
And give me a sample of what you said to yourself when you did it.
You have one in mind?
- Ok.
That I was feeling defensive, and I criticized someone.
- So, what you did is
you said some things to another person that you wished you hadn't done.
- Right. - Ok. And what did you say to yourself when you did that?
- Usually, in the moment I feel defensive with myself.
- No, I want to concretely know... for this exercise I need to know concretely
what you say to yourself when you behave in a way you don't like.
This is very important to answer your question about giraffe mourning,
very important to identify what your inner educator is saying to you.
See this? All of us have an inner educator,
whose function is to educate us when we are less than perfect.
Now, most of us made the mistake of sending our inner educator off
to a brutal jackal academy for inner educators.
And so, it's important to be conscious
of how our inner educator talks to us. So that's what I'm asking you.
When you said what you did to your husband, what did your inner educator...
how did your inner educator try to educate you?
What did it say to you about what you had done?
- In the moment or later? - Either one.
- Well, the point when I've start to feel regret or sorry is later.
- At any point, what did you say to yourself about what you had done?
- Ok. I said I'm a bad person...
- Now, that's enough.
Your inner educator tries to educate you through penitence.
Through making you hate yourself for what you've done.
It uses language that implies there's such a thing as a bad person.
All right. Now, if you apologize out of that energy, that's jackal.
Any apology that comes out of thinking you did something wrong
is not going to be good for you or the other person.
You with me so far?
- I know it feels bad. - Yeah. It feels bad.
And I really want you to feel bad in this situation,
but I want you to feel sweet bad.
A sweet bad that will help you learn from this without hating yourself.
When you have a thought in your head that you're a bad person, that's ugly bad.
That's a punitive bad.
That will first make it hard to learn.
And even if you do learn, it's out of self-hatred,
so whatever changes you make are at great cost.
So, that's your inner educator.
That was your inner educator speaking to you
when it said you're a bad person.
Now, we've been learning today
that all judgements are expressions of needs, right?
So, your inner educator means well.
It really means well. It wants you to learn from this
in a way that will serve life.
It means well, it's just its language that sucks. Ok?
So we don't want to hear what the inner educator thinks about us.
We want to hear the need that isn't getting met,
that it's trying to call to our attention.
So, what need is your inner educator trying to bring to your attention
that you didn't meet by how you behaved?
- Aaah... a need to...
...be in a relationship with the other person?
- A need...in what kind of relationship?
- A mutual understanding, respectful? - Right.
So it didn't meet your need for respecting and understanding the other person.
- Yeah. - And how do you feel when that need isn't met?
- Guilty. - Then you still got the bad person image in mind. See?
You still think you're a bad... if there's anything still going on,
that guilt comes from the judgement.
- Well, I feel separate and isolated.
But how do you feel? What emotion do you feel about
not meeting your own needs
for understanding and respecting?
See, the guilt comes from that image of a bad person.
What feeling comes from not meeting your need
to respond toward this person with respect and understanding?
- Sad.
- That's a sweet pain.
That's giraffe mourning.
So, if you say to the person
"The way I talk to you, I feel really sad.
It doesn't meet my need for respecting you and understanding you".
You see? There's no image in there that I'm a bad person.
I'm sad.
I didn't meet my own need for respecting and understanding you.
Check with the other person what they'd rather hear.
Whether they'd rather hear the giraffe mourning,
or the apology that you're a bad person.
Yes.
- I'm having a little problem trying to find the teeth
in this model somehow.
It seems like everything is... even though we're talking as on a feeling level,
everything seems... i'm interpreting, anyway...
is sort of on a mental level as opposed to an emotional level,
and I guess I operate a lot from my gut,
and I'm trying to get down to that somehow.
So I need some help with it.
Basically, tell me how
I would be able to use this technique in my daily life.
to make it not... well, so that it's natural, you know?
It's not natural for me to operate this way.
- The first thing I would recommend to you
is change the word "natural" to "habitual".
- Do what? - Change the word "natural" to "habitual".
I think this process is natural,
more natural than the way you were trained to think.
So, Gandhi says "It's very dangerous to mix up the words
'natural' and 'habitual'".
He says "We have been trained to be quite habitual at communicating
in ways that are quite unnatural".
So, I can't think of a more natural way to communicate
than to talk about what's alive in us.
Just what we're feeling and needing.
- When you feel like saying...if I feel like saying "no",
saying "no" seems ok to me, but what you were saying before is that...
- What do you mean by "ok" in "It's ok to say 'no'"?
- What do you mean by what do I mean? We could go back and forth.
- Pardon? - We can go back and forth by asking each other...
- Yes, so let me be more specific.
When you say "no",
I predict that by saying "no",
more often than you would like the other person is going to react to you
in a way that isn't in your best interest.
But if you say the need behind the "no", that's less likely to happen.
- So, then, if I understand what you're saying,
you're trying to...the idea is to communicate in a way that
the other person would communicate back to you,
so that it's in my best interest?
- I'm saying the purpose of this process is to get everybody's needs met,
and that the needs are met by people giving willingly,
not out of any coercive motivation.
And I'm saying that when you say "no", it gets in the way of
the likelihood that everybody's needs are going to end up getting met.
If you say the need that keeps you from saying "yes",
I predict there's more likelihood that everybody's needs will end up getting met.
- If I understand what you're saying,
you're saying: "Just express your needs without saying the 'no'."
- I'm saying the need is a clearer expression of what you're trying to say than "no".
You get clearer and more connected to life
when you say the need that keeps you from saying "yes"
than just saying "no".
And it's less likely to be interpreted as a rejection,
as you being defensive...
To just say the "no" by itself, I predict
is more likely to get you interpretations that aren't in your best interest.
- Sometimes when I don't hear a "no"
I look at it as being sort of a passive aggressive response
to something that I might want.
Someone... for example if I make an appointment with somebody
and instead of them saying "no", they just don't show up.
And then they give me a reason why they don't show up.
- Yes. I'm not suggesting that. I'm not suggesting that response.
I'm suggesting that I would have liked that person
to have told you honestly at the time what their need was.
I think if they had done that you wouldn't have gotten into that situation.
They said a "yes" that wasn't so.
- Some people won't say "I'm afraid". - Pardon me?
- Let's say if the reason is that they are afraid to.
- That would depend a lot on what has happened in the past to them
when they have said "no" in whatever way they did it.
If they have not enjoyed very empathic responses to it in the past,
then they're probably afraid to be honest about it now.
- I see the value in all this. I really do.
I guess it's the idea that it's a touchy-feely type of thing
that I'm not used to working around.
- What you're trying to figure out, if I'm understanding,
is how to really put this into a
idiom that you can use daily and feels comfortable to you.
- That's one way of putting it.
- And so, in our training,
we first show people how to develop the literacy
and then how to put it into their regular language.
I had a student traveling with me,
and he wanted to give me gratitude. Ok?
He liked something I did. I was really working the group hard.
And during the break, he said "dictator".
That was giraffe,
because he knew that I knew what he was reacting to.
He knew i wouldn't hear a judgement.
He knew that I would guess in there what he was feeling and needing.
So he could say that to me: "Dictator!"
So, after we really know how to clearly identify
our feelings, needs, requests,
then we can start to put it into a language
that can connect us with people we're speaking with.
But in this stage of the day, after one day,
I'm still working with you on making sure you understand
what a feeling and a need is, because if you don't really understand that,
it's going to be hard to know how to then put it into your idiom.
- I guess I'm a recovering New York jackal.
[Laughter]
I'm getting the impression that
apology isn't really
the best service of being a giraffe.
I'd like to know if you could model...
I'd like to see you model for me
an acknowledgement of missing the mark,
sinning courageously...
- If you recall earlier,
I showed an example of that where I showed the person saying
"I feel sad. I would've liked
to have responded with more understanding than I did".
- So you're not using the words "I'm sorry". You're saying "I'm sad".
It's not so much the words "I'm sorry".
What we shifted from was thinking that I did something wrong
that it was bad. It's that thinking that is the problem,
and the "I'm sorry" follows from that thinking.
So it's not just that I don't say "I'm sorry", I say "I'm sad", if I'm sad.
The words "I'm sorry" mean almost nothing.
People can say that and not feel anything.
You say that to buy forgiveness.
So, if I'm feeling sad, I say that. "I'm feeling sad. I would have liked to
have been more aware of your needs" for example
where I didn't take the person's needs into consideration.
But I don't say "I'm sorry, that was inconsiderate of me".
There's no self-blame. I didn't do anything wrong.
There is no such thing as doing anything wrong.
What I did was not in harmony with my needs. I want to mourn that.
"I'm sad. I would've liked to have been more aware of your needs".
- Something like that. Does that give you the example? - Very much so. Thank you.
- I have a question. Over here. To your left.
I have a situation with my intimate partner
that many times we get together and we argue a lot,
and I have this need
that you were saying earlier is inappropriate:
I want her to be happy.
- I didn't say it's inappropriate. I said it was undoable.
- OK. Right. That's what she keeps telling me.
- If you're going to tell me to be happy, tell me the action to get there.
That I can do. If you tell me an action
which you predict that if I do that, I'll be happy at the end,
that would be helpful. Tell me the action. Don't just tell me to be happy.
Don't tell me to have confidence in myself.
Tell me what you would like me to do to feel that confidence.
The action will get me there, but just telling me what to feel
puts me into a paradoxical bind.
- Ok.
One of the other things would be that
when we get together, I don't necessarily want to be
going somewhere with her, if she's not in a good mood at that time
or if there's some kind of tenseness...
- Then empathize with why I'm not in a good mood and I'll be in one.
But telling me that I got to be in a better mood
for you to want to go with me gets me in a worse mood.
- Ok.
- I'm wondering if there are some times when...
Over here.
I'm feeling some anxiety about a trip I'm planning to visit my mother soon
and we have a dynamic where she really wants to help me
figure out every detail of what I'm doing during my stay,
and I'd like to be left alone. - So, let me show you how to do it.
- And I'm afraid that if I talk to her like this,
it's going to make matters much worse. - Ok. Then we'll teach you how...
If it does, we'll show you how to enjoy it when it gets worse.
But first, let me show you the first thing to do
if we want a person to consider another behaviour than the one they're doing,
start the communication by showing them that
what they're doing is the most precious thing they could be doing.
This way: empathy.
Start by empathizing with mother's intent in behaving as she does.
"Mother, I'm guessing that when you jump in and want to
show me all the things that could be done,
you really care a lot about my enjoying myself on this trip
and want to be sure you support that.
- Oh, yes, yes, blá, blá...
- Yeah, so, it's really very important to you that
I have a good time and you want to contribute to it.
- Yeah."
That's step one. See what I mean?
That's what I mean by starting by showing you understand.
Now, the more we're concerned about that behaviour,
the more important it is to start with this.
See? That's why when I work in prisons,
and this person has been sexualy molesting people, or raping people,
if I would like this person to find another way of behaving,
the first thing I got to do is make sure they don't hate themselves for what they're doing.
The more they hate themselves for what they're doing, the more they'll continue doing it.
So I start by empathizing with what their needs are, in doing it.
Ok. So, you got that step. The next step...
What we started off the day with... I'd tell honestly how I feel.
"Mom, I feel torn right now because I'm grateful for your intent.
But... I really have a need to kind of make my own choices here,
because I think it would be very hard for anybody else to really know what I need
and I need this space to figure it out for myself.
So, would you tell me what you heard me say, mother,
so I can see if I'm making myself clear?"
[Laughter]
So now I know mother didn't hear me.
Now I know mother didn't hear my needs.
She probably heard a rejection.
She probably heard that she's not valued.
But it's important that I not think that her reaction is because of what I said.
If I express my feelings and needs,
it would be impossible for a person to react this way, if they heard it.
They would've gotten a gift.
They would have the eyes of a little child getting a gift from Santa Claus.
That doesn't look like what mother's looking like right now.
"So, mom, could you tell me what you just heard me say?
- You don't want me.
- So, you heard it as a kind of a rejection, mother?
- Of course. How else could I have heard it?
- Well, thank you for telling me you heard it as a rejection, mother."
Notice I didn't say "that isn't what I said".
See?
If you want to have people understand you differently,
never tell them "you're misunderstanding me".
Never say "That isn't what I said".
Say "Thank you for telling me that's what you heard.
I can see I didn't make myself clear. I'd like to try again, mother,
because I do value very much, your offering to help,
but I have a need to kind of get my own needs clear and structure my own time.
Can you tell me what you heard me say?
- So you think I don't have any intelligence about helping you.
- Thank you for telling me that's what you're hearing, mother.
I'd like for you to hear it differently.
I'd like you just to hear my needs.
That I have a real need to kind of sort things out for myself, and structure my own time.
Could you tell me what you heard?
- You have a need to kind of get clear for yourself what you want and to figure things out.
- Thank you mother."
See how easy it is to get empathy from a jackal? Just about
3 ear pulls, and I got it. Right?
Now, there are some 8-pull jackals, too, I know that.
But I can tell from how sweet you are your mother is a 3-pull jackal.
- Thank you.
[Laughter]
- Yes...
- You mentioned earlier this morning about enjoying suffering.
Could you elaborate on that?
- Oh yes. That's very important. Thank you for getting back to me about it.
Ok. A friend of yours says this to you:
"I'm a nothing.
I'll never amount to anything. Look, I'm an assistant clerk at age 45.
My brother's the head of his company,
my sister's a top attorney,
and I'm nothing."
Ok?
Now, to enjoy this person's suffering,
we have to release ourselves from 2 kinds of responsibility.
First, that we didn't cause the pain.
And we want to release ourselves from that,
especially when the other person's trying to make us believe we did cause the pain.
So if this person had started "and you're at fault for all of this why I'm a nothing."
Especially when a person says that,
we do not want to in any way think that we caused this person's pain,
because you can't cause another person's psychological pain.
Well, in this case, the person wasn't saying that so that's pretty easy to
liberate ourself from feeling responsible,
but the second one is the hard one.
To think we have to fix it.
To make the person feel better.
The more we think it's our job to make a person feel better,
the more we're going to make it worse.
Because you can't fix people.
The good news is you don't have to.
There is a very powerful healing energy always available
if we don't block it. And how do we block that energy?
By trying to fix things ourselves.
So, how do we help that energy to do the job?
By empathy.
Empathy requires presence, just to be present.
When we are just present, when we are remembering the Buddha's advice
"don't do something. Stand there."
When we do that, and that energy works through us,
there is a precious connection between that person and us.
And that precious connection is what i mean by enjoying the pain,
to enjoy that precious connection.
And whether this person's feeling joy or pain,
if we are present there with them,
that's what I mean.
But we block that beautiful energy whenever we step in and think we have to fix things.
So, if we say "there, there, there. You'll feel better. You'll get over it" we make it worse.
When we start to give advice, we make it worse.
So, what does that look like?
"So, you're feeling really discouraged and really would like
to have achieved more in your life at this moment than you've done.
- Yes, yes, I've had every opportunity, and look at me.
I've just never made use of anything.
- Yeah, so you're really discouraged and frustrated, and
would really liked to have made different use of some things than you have.
- Yeah."
See, I'm just present.
I'm not trying to fix it.
And when that happens, there's a very precious connection.
That's what I mean by enjoyment.
And that precious connection does the healing.
Not your advice, not your whatever.
Yes...
- Can you clarify the distinction between empathizing,
and sort of encouraging and supporting the soap opera of,
you know, somebody who is...
somebody who's suffering, and sometimes by being there,
it's sort of a subtle encouragement, as opposed to...
- The subtle encouragement that I think you're talking about
comes about when this person is talking about what happened to them,
for the 50th time you've heard the story.
So, if I'm really listening to them,
I don't hear what they talk about the past,
because I know that the more they talk about the past,
the less healing will take place.
So I interrupt.
But I interrupt to bring the conversation to life.
They're talking about the past, and I interrupt and I say
"excuse me, but it sounds like right now you're still feeling hurt,
because your need for respect wasn't met in that".
See? Because just letting them talk about the past
and asking them questions about what happened about the past
is to just keep the soap opera going.
So I interrupt when they talk about the past
because we don't heal by talking about the past.
we heal by talking about what's alive in us right now,
stimulated by the past, but it's what is here now
and when I connect at that level they won't keep talking about it.
They'll heal.
Last question and then I'm going to get into
the subject that I'd like to cover before the end. Yes?
- You talk about having... let's see...
if someone else cannot cause our emotional pain...
- That's right. - ...and I think about
the abuse that I grew up with and that I see in a lot of families
and the suffering that I've experienced throughout my life,
through my recovery and all that,...
- And other people were a stimulus for your suffering
and you were a participant by how you dealt with it.
For example, if you follow me in my work you would see this very clearly.
In places like Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone,
I'm working with people that had their families killed.
Some of those people have such rage
that all they live for, moment by moment is the possibility of vengeance.
Others have no anger, have never had anger.
Same exact stimulus.
They have deep feelings, but not rage.
So it is not the stimulus that determines how our emocional reaction is.
That part is up to us.
I work with some women, unfortunately a lot, who have been raped.
And some of them feel shame, deep shame,
some feel rage, some feel other things.
So the same stimulus
depends how people take it whether they feel shame, rage or other things.
I'm working with a women from Rwanda who had...
she heard her three children being killed because she got
to underneath the sink, hid underneath the sink in time,
the children didn't make it to the hiding place in time, they got killed, she heard them,
she heard her husband being killed and her brother.
She had to stay underneath there 11 days to save her own life
because they stayed in the house after they killed the family.
This woman has deep feelings,
but never once she had the kind of anger that makes her want to get vengeance.
She has put all of her feelings and lots of them into protecting...
preventing this happening to anybody else. You see?
So the way she looked at it leads her to want to
prevent this happening to anybody else. She came to my workshop
because she wanted to know how to deal with the rage towards her
from other people in her tribe who are furious with her
that she won't join their efforts to kill the other people.
Same stimulus, quite different reactions.
- Ok, so I had this stimulus
and somewhere I learned how to deal with it
in the way that I had dealt with it and I'm learning to change that now.
- Yes. The worst thing of course would be no matter how you did choose to deal with it
is to think that there is something wrong with how you chose to deal with it.
I'm not wanting us to get into one way is right or wrong, I'm just saying that
no matter what happens to us,
the other person is responsible for what they did,
I'm not saying that the other person doesn't have responsability.
- That's my question about accountability.
- That person is responsible for what they did and why they did it.
We are responsible for how we deal with that.
OK?
I'm just wondering how a child becomes responsible... I mean still...
The first thing I do is, I wouldn't want to teach the child the lesson I just tought you
until I had given that child all the empathy that child needed
and I would guess it would be a lot.
So I can see myself dealing with a long time
of hearing this childs enormous pain as a result of this.
But then in the course of this I would be seeing this child
having some pain created by how they looked at it.
So I would see that they're creating pain on top of pain,
by how they looked at it
so, after the child had all the empathy he or she needed
then I would do what I could to get them to see it
in a way that wouldn't create unnecessary pain for themselves.
This is a baby jackal yes.
OK, now what I would like to do in the precious time that we have left
is to deal with a very important part of giraffe, because I wouldn't want you to
get the idea that Non Violent Communication
is solely interested in conflict resolution,
because it's equally interested in celebration.
How could we celebrate life
in fact, the part that I have left for ten minutes before the end
is in some respects the most important part because it's where we get the fuel
to stay giraffe
in a what's often a very jackalish world.
So it's going to be pretty hard to make this radical transformation into
back to our nature
in many situations unless we are getting plenty of fuel.
Now where does the fuel come from?
The fuel comes from celebration.
And what kind of celebration?
It comes from saying thank you in giraffe.
So let's see now, in the last minutes, how we celebrate
by saying thank you in giraffe.
Expressing gratitude in giraffe.
And first I would like to remind you of how jackals say thank you.
"You did a good job on that paper."
"You are a very kind person."
"You are a good dancer."
Can you see why that's jackal?
Moralistic judgements.
Positive moralistic judgements are equally
as violent in my estimations as negative ones.
Namely they reinforce the idea that the negative exist. If I say you're a kind person,
I'm implying there's such a thing as an unkind person.
I'm also implying that I'm the judge that knows the difference.
So no more praise or compliments, OK? No more praise or compliments.
Especially when you intend them as a reward.
That's the ultimate dehumanization, to use thank you as a reward.
To say it for the purpose of trying to reinforce someting,
To get the person to continue doing it.
It's like sending a... what goes on at a dog obedience school?
Punishment and rewards.
Giving a compliment or praise for the purpose of reinforcement
is giving the dog a... something to eat to reinforce it for something.
People are not for that treatment.
And it destroys the beauty of thank you,
when people have to wonder:
"Is this being said out of that energy?"
"- But it works!
- What does, jackal?
- Studies in management indicate that if managers
praise and compliment employees daily, product goes up.
Studies in school show that if teachers
praise and compliment students daily they work harder.
- Jackal take another look at the research.
I think you'll see that that only works for a very short time,
until people see the manipulation.
And then it no longer works.
And it destroys the beauty of thank you
because now you can not even trust gratitude
without wondering whether it's being used as reinforcement, as a reward.
- Well what if I want to build up the other person's self-esteem, what's wrong with that?
- So you... jackal you don't see the irony of that?
- What?
- If the other person can only like themself when you compliment them, they have no self-esteem.
You've just addicted them to your rewards.
That they only feel good when you say something about them. They have no self-esteem."
OK.
How does a giraffe say "thank you"? Or gratitude?
First, there are three things that are involved in a giraffe expression of
gratitude that give us energy to keep being a giraffe.
The first thing in a giraffe expression of gratitude
is we bring to this other person's attention concretely
what they have done that has made life more wonderful for us.
See, that's what we need to do, daily.
We need to bring our consciousness and attention
to the power that each one of us has
to make life more wonderful.
Each of us is a powerhouse.
We have words
that have the power to contribute to making people's lives more wonderful.
We have touch, we can touch people in ways
that can make life more wonderful.
We can provide services for people.
We are powerhouses.
The more we remember this,
we'll not get caught up in any violent games.
Why would we use our energy
any way other than to make life wonderful when we remember that we have this power?
So that's one thing we've got to make clear in our expression of gratitude
specifically what the person did,
not some vague generality.
For example a woman in Geneva Switzerland came by up to me at the end of a workshop.
Here's what she said to me: "You're brilliant."
I said: "Doesn't help."
She said: "What do you mean?"
I said: "You know mam, I've been called a lot of names in my life, really I have.
Some positive and some far less than positive.
And I can never recall learning anything valuable by somebody telling me what I am.
I think there's zero information value being told what you are
and great danger, you might believe it.
And it's just as dangerous to believe that you're smart as that you're stupid.
Both of them reduce you to a thing.
We're much more than either of those.
But I can see in your eyes that you want to express some gratitude.
- Yes!
- And I want to receive it but, doesn't help me to be told what I am.
- What do you need to hear?
- What did I do to make life more wonderful for you?
- Well, well, you're so intelligent.
- No, doesn't help.
- Doesn't help. What did I do?
Oh I got you, I got you."
She opens up her notebook,
she showed me two things that I had said that she had written down.
She put a big star by them.
See? That helps me now. Ok.
That helps to know, that somehow,
my saying those two things made this persons life more wonderful.
So that's the first thing we need to say
in appreciation. We need to bring to the persons attention concretely what they did
that made life more wonderful.
Second: at the moment we're giving the gratitude
to say how we feel at that moment about the person having done that.
So I said to this woman:
"Could you tell me how you feel now as the result of my having said those two things?"
She said "Hopeful and relieved."
- Oh! Hopeful and relieved!
That gives me much more than telling me what I am, that I'm brilliant."
Just to know that somehow my saying those two things,
now this person feels hopeful and relieved.
Now when I hear the third thing I'll be able to really enjoy this gratitude.
I said: "what need of yours was fulfilled
by my saying what I did
that leaves you feeling hopeful and relieved?"
And that's the third thing we need to see in a giraffe gratitude.
She said, "I have an 18 year old son.
I've never been able to connect with him.
It's been very painful that we never can connect,
and I have needed some direction, to help me connect with him.
Those two things you said met my need for some concrete direction."
So had she exressed her gratitude in giraffe, she would have said:
"Marshall when you said these two things,"
(showed me what the two things were)
"it leaves me feeling hopeful and relieved,
it meets a need of mine to connect with my son in a way that I want."
OK? That's how we say gratitude in giraffe. Those three things.
And it's also important how we receive gratitude.
Let me show you how a jackal receives gratitude.
"Jackal when you offered to give me the ride
that just now to where I'm going afterwards
I feel very grateful because
I really have a need to spend more time with my family,
and if I took the bus I'd have an hour less time.
- It's nothing."
"De rien."
If you want to terrorize a jackal, express love and appreciation to him.
Really, if you really want to scare a jackal,
I've never seen anything scare jackal-speaking people more
than sincere gratitude or love.
"Why do you get so nervous, jackal, when you hear it?
- Well I don't know that I deserved it."
See, jackals have this dangerous concept in their head:
Deserve.
It's a very violent concept.
See it implies you have to deserve appreciation.
You do deserve punishment if you behave in a certain way. See, the concept of deserve
is a key ingredient in a violent way of life.
If you believe in deserve you think certain things are worth things,
and you'll set up a very destructive economic system.
You'll set up a destructive correctional system.
Very dangerous concept.
"Well that's not the only reason.
- Why else do you get so scared when you hear gratitude jackal?
- What's wrong with being humble?
- So you want to... have a need for humility?
- Yes.
- Well you know jackal there's different kinds of humility.
I'm afraid that your kind is a jackal humility.
I think your kind is the kind that Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister,
was reacting to when she said to one of her politicians:
'Don't be so humble, you're not that great.'"
But the main reason that I believe that gratitude
is so scary for many of us to receive
is beautifully and poetically written in 'The Course of Miracles'
where they say "it's our light, not our darkness,
that scares us the most."
See having been educated in this jackal way to hate ourselves,
to think there's something wrong with us.
It's a big jump to really see what I was saying.
That we have an enormous power to make life wonderful.
And there's nothing we enjoy doing more than exercising that power.
That's pretty unfortunately a pretty big jump for us to come to. But we can come to it.
So that's how we say gratitude: observation, feeling and need.
Same literacy.
Make sure it's coming from the heart to celebrate,
and never to praise, compliment, reward.
So any last comments or questions before our time runs out?
I'm grateful for all your time and attention to me.