The first step in being able to cultivate gratitude in others is to fully embody it yourself. After all, how can you teach what you don’t practice? In the first half of this episode I share mantras and other ways to create a gratitude mindset for yourself. In the second half I share techniques, ideas and resources for cultivating more gratitude with children.

There are so many amazing resources in this episode. Read about the mantras, songs, books + more.

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Welcome to the Simple Ayurveda podcast. I’m Angela Perger, and this is a place where we discuss how ancient wisdom can be applied to your everyday life, so that you can be your happiest, healthiest self.  

Thank you for tuning in to Episode 7, Cultivating Gratitude as Family. This topic is very near and dear to my heart. I have my Master’s of Science in Education and I taught inner city elementary school in Philadelphia for a few years, and that’s what really led me to take my first Yoga teacher training, was that I wanted to share the power of Yoga and breath and all of that with my students. Since then I took a kids Yoga teacher training and then developed my own curriculum with a friend of mine and led local teacher trainings for school psychologists and teachers how they could start to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom. 

So let’s jump in. I think when we’re talking about cultivating gratitude as a family, the most important part is that you can’t teach what you don’t practice. It’s the same as the Yoga teacher that never attends class or doesn’t have a strong Yoga practice at home. So before we can expect our children or our partners to have a loving, grateful attitude toward life, we have to cultivate that loving, grateful attitude for ourselves. 

So some of the things that I feel can be very helpful, that have been very helpful for me, are using a mantra. And a mantra is a tool for the mind that creates focus, and you can do it during a Yoga practice but you don’t have to. You could use it anytime you want. You could use it while you’re lying in bed in the morning before you get up, once you’re up you could just close your eyes whenever you need to and repeat the words in your mind. So one of my very favorite mantras is just simply “all is well.” And just by saying that I feel happy and relaxed and I have this earth to support me and I can be grateful for that and I can be grateful for all of the abundance that I have in my life. So, by infusing your day with the words “all is well” you could try that on and see if it sits with you, and the beautiful thing about this is that if a mantra or a set of words doesn’t feel right, just let it go and try a different one. Another really powerful mantra that has created such transformation for me is just simply the words “I am” and then whatever word I need for that day. So, as I breathe in I might think “I am” and as I breathe out, “ease.” The word could be joy, the word could be love, the word could be peace, but basically we’re just brainwashing ourselves to know that that is what I am, that is what my cells are composed of, that is my being. I am love, I am ease, I am joy. And then the last mantra that I’m going to offer for today is a Sanskrit and it is “so hum”, and it loosely translates to ‘I am” and the purpose of it is that it connects us to our higher consciousness, and the Sanskrit shifts our vibration. So any of these mantras that work for you, do them, if they don’t there are so many out there just keep trying until you find the right one. I’ve found it very powerful to use one of these during my Yoga practice, just because that effort in the mindfulness, the fact that my phone’s not there with me, that I’m not doing anything else but standing with my body in a certain shape, breathing and focusing on the manra, just makes it that powerful. And especially to finish a Yoga practice with a meditation and maybe to use the mantra then too. But like I said, you could use it anytime. 

Another way that I like to infuse mantra into my life is through music, and I have a mantra playlist on Spotify, I’ll share the link in the show notes for Episode 7, and mantra music is just the extension of what I’m saying here. It’s just someone else repeating those words that you listen to, and it sounds beautiful and it’s calming, and I like to listen to them when I drive, or when I’m cleaning, and I like to listen to them when my kids are around too.

The next tool to cultivate gratitude for yourself comes from Shawn Achor, he’s a Harvard grad and he’s a positive psychologist, that’s his job, and he talks about writing down three new things each day for 21 days that you are grateful for. And how this has been scientifically proven to change our perspective on life. So the key is that every day for those 21 days, rather than writing down the same things that we’re grateful for, like you can’t just write down “family” every day, you have to get creative and write down three new things, and it just widens our perspective on what is in our life and what we do have. And he has a TedTalk and a book, and I’ll put links to his resources, and his name is Shawn Achor. 

So now you are so full of gratitude for everything that’s in your life that you can’t help but share it with other people, and that can start right with your family or those that are closest to you. So for example, when my son crawls into my room in the morning, rather than being upset I try to look at it like he’s only going to be little for so long, and even though he’s five and still sleeping half the night in my bed, I can turn and say, “Good morning, I’m so happy to see you,” give him a hug, “I love you so much, let’s start our day, let’s go make breakfast,” and then just as an example, “What shall we have today? Let’s make pancakes, aren’t you so grateful that we went to the store to get this pancake mix the other day?” And, I can start to connect that maybe he didn’t really want to do, and shift the perspective, like grocery shopping wasn’t really fun but now look, we have the stuff to make pancakes. So now that I’m practicing gratitude myself, I’m expressing it toward the members of my family, I can start to acknowledge when they are doing kind things for each other, and showing my gratitude for that. So another example comes from this morning. I was downstairs, my husband and my five year old and our two year old was still sleeping. So when we heard her feet stomping on the second floor we know that she gets upset if she’s upstairs by herself. So we asked the five year old can you run upstairs and say “good morning!” and help her down. And he did, so as they came down I said to my daughter “Good morning! You look so happy that he came upstairs to help you, it’s going to be a great day!” And then I turned to my son and I say “Thank you so much for going upstairs and helping her, look how happy she is.” And I’m acknowledging what he’s doing, I’m grateful for the effort that he took to go upstairs, and I’m helping them to acknowledge each other even though they don’t have the language for it yet. And then after that he turned to her and he said “Oh good morning can I give you a hug?” and he wanted a little bit of thankfulness back, and he said “Aren’t you so happy brother came to get you?” So as a mother or the caregiver, you can jump on this anytime you see anything, you can point out anything that you are grateful for or that they should be grateful for with each other. And this is another way that you can use gratitude to start to shift their perspective. When it comes to something that they don’t want to do, like cleaning, I’ll turn and say, “We’re so lucky to have all of these toys, let’s work together to clean it up,” and then even further I can say, “It’s so much faster to clean when we all work together, aren’t we so lucky to have each other? I’m so grateful to have you to help clean up.” And just keep using that language that there’s abundance and that I’m happy and that I’m grateful and this work is just taking care of all of these things that we have. And this is not foolproof and of course they complain, or don’t help sometimes, but I’m setting the precedent that this is the sort of language that we use in the house, and that I feel lucky and grateful and that’s what I’m modeling for them. 

It happens to be fall while I’m recording this podcast, and every year for the month of November, we make a family gratitude tree. So mine is super simple, I just take a brown paper bag and cut out a trunk, and then I use colored paper to cut out a stack of leaves, and every night each person in the family writes down one thing they’re thankful for on each leaf. So I’ve been doing the writing, we started when my son was two, and every night we write down each person. So he wrote down things like ‘mud’, or ‘lion’, and lots of silly stuff but then by the end of the month when he was two he did say ‘mom’, or ‘dad’, or ‘play’, and this is something that we just keep building on each year, and this is sort of like back to Shawn Achor’s study that writing down three new things every day, so we’re writing down one new thing each day and the tree keeps growing. And I’ve also done a family gratitude jar with a family Yoga class where they start the jar and then they write down slips of paper, and that’s fun too because you can write down different experiences with older kids and then later you can pull them out and read it and it’s like starting a family memory bank. So being grateful for all of that stuff that you did together. 

You can use gratitude throughout the day by asking in the morning while everyone is eating breakfast, “What are you grateful for today?” or at dinner, “What was the best part of your day?” I like to make it a game, like if we go on a nature walk outside I’ll say something like, “Those birds must be thankful for the tree where they’re building their nest, I’m thankful for our house too.” So I’m making a connection to nature and how animals might feel grateful for something, and kids love that. Or, “Those ducklings are thankful for each other just like we’re thankful for each other.” A few books that I really love are The Peace Book by Todd Parr, Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message by Chief Jake Swamp, The Fill A Bucket Book, and then we have this really fun book Taking A Bath With The Dog And Other Things That Make Me Happy. So I’ll put links to those in the show notes or at simpleayurveda.com Episode 7. There is a kids album by the Yoga singer Snatam Kuar, it’s called ‘Feeling Good Today’ and the songs on there are just so beautiful, there’s one that’s called ‘I Am Happy’, another one called ‘The Sun Shines on Everyone’, another one ‘I Am The Light of My Soul’, and I also have a kids playlist that I play when we’re in the car or when we need a Spotify, and I’ll put the link there too in case you wanna listen. 

And then I’m gonna end with talking about our goodnight rituals. So, one of the things that, I can’t remember where I got this when my son was a baby five years ago, but it is to just repeat people’s names that love so his name is Max so I would say, “I love Max, Nana loves Max, Grandpa loves Max,” and this is when he was a baby and a toddler and I could just go on and on and name all of the people that love him that just fills him up and makes him so happy, and he’ll pick out the names too. And it’s sort of like even though this isn’t a direct gratitude exercise it’s like building that love and bond that with each person that I say their name, it creates gratitude feelings that he has that love and bond and that he’s grateful for that person. There is a Sanskrit mantra, ‘Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu’ and it means may all beings everywhere be happy and free, and may my own thoughts, words and actions contribute to happiness and freedom for all. And so this song is like a prayer, and there are a few versions. I love the one by Bonnie Argo and also Snatam Kuar, the same singer that does the kids album. So I sort of take the words of this prayer and combine it with my idea of a loving kindness meditation, and we just do a kids version. So I’ll say the words and then he’ll repeat the words. So I’ll say, “May I be happy”, and then he says “may I be happy” and then I say “may I be healthy, may I be free” and then we go on to the next person. “May Daddy be happy, may Daddy be healthy, may Daddy be free.” “May Grandma be happy, may Grandma be healthy, may Grandma be free.” And we go on and then we say “May my friends be happy, may my friends me healthy, may my friends be free.” And we end with “May the world be happy, may the world be healthy, may the world be free.” So if we’re short on time we may just do ‘I’ and then ‘the world.’ Or, if he wants to drag out bedtime he can add more and more people. I just picked those words happy, healthy, free, but you could really fill it in with whatever feels good and appropriate and connects with your family. 

In conclusion, the first step to cultivating gratitude as a family is to cultivate gratitude in your own heart. Some tools that might be helpful are using a mantra, listening to mantra music, journaling three things each day that are new that you’re thankful for for 21 days, and then once you feel gratitude yourself, starting to express that to members of your family and those around you and then noticing when they do nice things for each other and talking about it and describing what they’re doing for each other. Adding books that are gratitude based, listening to music, connecting things that are happening with nature with gratitude and then using the loving kindnes s prayer. I would love to see how this shows up for you and your family, please join the Facebook group, it’s Simple Ayurveda Community. 

You can find out more at simpleayurveda.com. All of the social media will be listed in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. Namaste.