Mindful Matter

Five Principles for Grateful Living

“Grateful living is fundamentally grounded in the invitation to see life itself as a gift: an unexpected gift that you did not need to do anything to earn or deserve, but is coming to you — wrapped in a wide range of packaging. In every moment that you are alive, this life has been given to you.” — Kristi Nelson, author of Wake Up Grateful If you are receiving this email, you understand both the importance of making gratitude an active part of your life and how hard it can be to do this consistently. Something I find helpful in my own gratitude practice are the Five Guiding Principles inspired by gratefulness.org founder Brother David Steindl-Rast. Here is how Kristi Nelson, executive director of gratefulness.org, describes these principles in her book Wake Up Grateful: 1. Life Is a Gift “Grateful living is fundamentally grounded in the invitation to see life itself as a gift: an unexpected gift that you did not need to do anything to earn or deserve, but is coming to you — wrapped in a wide range of packaging. In every moment that you are alive, this life has been given to you.” 2. Everything Is Surprise “When you regard life as an unexpected gift and one you are lucky to have renewed itself each day, it can shift your experience of expectation. You can behold life with the openness of experiencing things as if for the very first, or the very last, time.” 3. The Ordinary Is Extraordinary “One of the most accessible and direct pathways to a sense of abundance ... is to savor and celebrate the ordinary. How can you experience the generosity of your life more vividly and more consistently?” 4. Appreciation Is Generative “Appreciation brings about a shift from passively to actively engaging with life. We recognize that we have choices when it comes to orienting our attention.” 5. Love Is Transformative “Love lives deeply rooted within each of us, protected from the comings and goings of people and circumstances. It simply exists as a force within us and around us... Whenever we nurture and tend the things we value, that is love in action.” What I love about these principles is how each one gets to the root of living gratefully, and how succinctly they pull together the foundations of grateful living. At Holstee, we have been fans of the gratefulness.org team for a long time — they speak with their hearts and minds to values we firmly believe in. This past year, we’ve been working closely with them to bring the power of gratefulness more within reach through our latest collaboration: Gratitude Cards. They are still in development, but you can get a sneak peek at them here! More than any other virtue, gratitude has profoundly shifted my perspective and outlook the past few years. I'm thrilled to have been able to work with gratefulness.org on this new tool. I can’t wait for you to experience it. Grateful for you,   Mike Radparvar Co-Founder, Holstee & Reflection.app

My mantra for uncertain times.

I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed and out-of-sync lately. Maybe you have, too. The uncertainty is getting to me again, similar to how it did in March, and again in April. Like so many others, I am tired of not seeing my friends and family. I am tired of feeling grief for so many who have fallen ill or lost their lives. I am tired of saying let’s wait and see how things are next month. I am tired of feeling like life is on hold, and at the same time that it is passing me by. It’s not easy, but I keep reminding myself to return to the wisdom of the stoics and focus on what is in my control, not what is outside of it. Regardless of what is happening that is outside of my control, I can always choose how I react in the moment. It's not easy to remember — and it's even harder to put them into practice — but these three simple sentences have become my mantra in the past few days: I can be kind. I can be present. I can be grateful. I can be kind to my wife, to my neighbors, and on the phone with friends and family. I can be present with my son, with the books I read, with the tea I drink, and with the leaves falling outside my window. I can be grateful that no one in my family has been hospitalized due to COVID. I can be grateful that the grocery store remains open and is well stocked with food. I can be grateful that when things are challenging for me, there are people I can turn to and ask for help. In order to help me live these mantras, I connect them to my existing activities and thought patterns. When I am missing my friends and family, I remember to be kind to those near me. When I am thinking ahead to when it may be safe for our son, Shilo, to finally meet and hug his grandparents, I remember to be present with Shilo and shower him with the love and attention his grandparents would. When my glasses fog up from wearing a mask, instead of feeling frustrated, I try to remember to be grateful for my health and the health of loved ones. If you are also feeling overwhelmed with uncertainty, despair, and longing, know that you are not alone. We are all navigating this unique and uncertain time, each in our own way. These times are challenging. And exhausting. But I am certain of one thing: we will get through this, and we will be stronger for it. With kindness, presence, and gratitude, Dave RadparvarCo-Founder, Holstee P.S. I'd love to hear, how do you stay grounded during times of uncertainty? Share your thoughts and learn from others in our community forum for members. →

Understanding value in the stock market — and in life.

During a finance class I took in college, I learned an important lesson about the stock market — but also about life. I learned that the current state of reality can be overshadowed by expectations. For example, if a publicly traded company's sales or earnings fall short of analyst expectations, it can cause the company's valuation (and stock price) to drop — even if the company is otherwise performing well. This is because the current market valuation usually includes future expectations (sales, expenses, market growth, etc). While this is an important reality of the stock market, it doesn't need to be how we evaluate our own lives. In other words, we don't need to compare how things are with how we expected them to be in order to determine the value of what we have right now. This comparison trap makes it very hard to feel gratitude in the present moment. Our fixation on ‘what was’ and ‘what could be’ makes it difficult to see ‘what is’. It isn’t that we need to be grateful for everything. But in every moment, if we open ourselves to it, there is something to be grateful for. Dave RadparvarCo-Founder, Holstee

In The Studio With Bailey Sullivan

The Holstee Team

Q&A with Kristi Nelson

Kristi Nelson is the Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living (Gratefulness.org) and has dedicated her life to nonprofit leadership, fundraising, and organizational development. She’s passionate about strengthening  organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. For a little more about Kristi, here's a short Q&A!  For those who received November's 2019 Gratitude Kit, as a part of our monthly Holstee Membership, you will notice that some pieces of this Q&A are featured in the guide!  “I see gratitude as an inside-job, available to us in great abundance if we make it a moment-to-moment practice so that we don’t take life - and its existing gifts - for granted.” — Kristi Nelson What is it that makes you feel most alive? First thoughts: Nature. Love. Light. Poetry. Especially when I get to experience them all at the same time. I am captivated by love for nature and the nature of love, love of light and the light of love, and the essential poetry of it all. And of course it is gratitude for every speck of what inspires aliveness that brings me even more alive. The longer I live, the more I am enlivened by being a student of Life in all its moments and manifestations. Knowing that I can learn from everything deeply experienced, I would like to believe that I come alive in the whole “great fullness” of life. What initially drew you to the work you are doing now? I was always wired for gratitude, but when I was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in my early 30’s, my capacity for appreciating life - and everything in it - grew to a whole new level. Gratefulness now offered an enhanced articulation and framework for how I related to life. It was like mindfulness + gratitude + reverence + love, all in one. I began to look for a lifestyle that could embrace all of that, and allow me to practice with my heart and eyes wide open. I found it. What do people tend to get wrong about gratitude? We tend to reserve gratitude for the moments when circumstances and people deliver the exact experience we are looking for. This can turn into a kind of hustle for more and more gratitude-inducing moments. Like the pursuit of happiness, it can put gratitude beyond us and turn it into something we need to orchestrate and await. I see gratitude as an inside-job, available to us in great abundance if we make it a moment-to-moment practice so that we don’t take life - and its existing gifts - for granted. What is your definition of a successful life? Love as a vibrantly active verb. Success is that the people we love know that we love them. They feel it, hear it, see it. But not just our small, chosen circles. A successful life would mean that a much more diverse and vast swath of humanity gets included among those “people we love” so that less and less of the world need wonder whether they are loved. Loving that way is available to us in every moment. The challenge is to step up to every interaction and opportunity with our most generous hearts on the line. How do you want to be remembered?   That I was simply, relentlessly, intensely grateful for the opportunity to live and love every day, and that I sought not to take this privilege - or any of my privileges and blessings - for granted.

Want to be happy? Be grateful.

Gratitude: Digital Art Download

The Holstee Team

Grief and gratitude.

Last week our grandfather, or Babajoon as we called him, passed away at the incredible age of 104. His death came just four months after the passing of Mamanjoon, our grandmother and his wife of 75 years. His passing also marked the loss of our last living grandparent. After the news of his death, our family received many comforting messages and words of wisdom to guide this period of grief. One video in particular was shared a few times, first by our cousin and then again by a close friend. It was an honest, heartfelt, and open conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper discussing life after losing loved ones. About 13 minutes in, Cooper says to Colbert: "You told an interviewer that you have learned to love the things that you most wish had not happened. You went on to say, ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ Do you really believe that?" Colbert took a moment and responded: "Yes. It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. But I didn’t learn it — that I was grateful for the thing that I most wished hadn’t happened. It’s that I realized it... I don’t want it to have happened. I want it to not have happened. But if you’re grateful for your life — and not everyone is, and I’m not always… then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for. Then what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss, which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it’s like to be a human being…and however imperfectly, acknowledge their suffering and to connect with them and to love them in a deep way that not only accepts that all of us suffer, but also that makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered so that you can know that about other people. And that’s what I mean. It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here and being human if you can’t be the most human you can be?" Learning to find peace, growth, and even gratitude from our most painful moments — is an incredible act of Resilience. To life, love, and humanity, Mike and Dave RadparvarCo-Founders, Holstee

The greatest gift.

Day by day and year by year, we race through life — running around on earth, while the planet dances in circles around the sun. But from a few stars away, the earth looks still. Our lives, our joy, our worries, our collective existence — all unidentifiable. What is the meaning of it all? It’s a cliché question, but I used to think about it a lot. I would stress about it, thinking that if I could not figure out the meaning of life, how could I ever know if I’m making the right decisions? One day, my mother said something that really changed how I experience the world. She said: "Life is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be enjoyed." Simple and profound. I come back to her words often. It helps me put the biggest decisions I face into perspective. When we look at our life like it’s a problem, we try to find ways to fix it. But what if this life, this existence, isn't a problem that needs solving? What if it’s a gift? A gift that reveals itself a bit more with each passing day. All we need to do is stop and look around to realize this life is pretty amazing.  Dave RadparvarCo-Founder, Holstee P.S. I've tried to find the original source for my mother’s words of wisdom. Søren Kierkegaard is often attributed with a variation of the quote, but it is not cited in any of his published works. The earliest version I could find is from Dutch philosopher J. J. "Koos" van der Leeuw in his work, "The Conquest of Illusion" (1928). I found the whole paragraph stunning: "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is reality to be experienced. Beware of the man who claims to have solved the problem of life, who would explain its complexities and, with deadly logic, build a system in which all the facts of our existence may be pigeon-holed and neatly stored away. He stands condemned by his own claim. The child which sees wonder in all the world around it, to whom the shells with which it plays on the beach are objects breathless excitement and thrilled amazement, is nearer to divine truth than the intellectualist who would strip a world of its mystery and takes pride in showing us its anatomy in ruthless dissection. For a while it may satisfy evolving man to know that the splendors of a sunset are but the breaking of light-rays in a moist atmosphere; he will come to realize that he may have explained the method, but has not touched the mystery at all. Recovering from the sureness of youth, never doubting itself, awakened man returns to the wonder of childhood and once again sees a world, which, as the years pass by, deepens in mystery and beauty, but is never exhausted or explained."