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[Music] [Music] [Laughter] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] oh well good morning and welcome to everyone who is joining us for our sunday morning family service for vista buddhist temple in orange county buddhist church today is january 31st 2021 and i am reverend ellen hamada crane very happy to be conducting the service for you today and i hope you will find something meaningful from this service i'm very happy to know that we are making some headway with the pandemic i understand some people are getting vaccinated now and hopefully more of us will as as time goes on and hopefully we will have enough people vaccinated that we can all get together again back at ocbc and at vbt would really like to see that happening all right to begin um we will i will explain the order of service for this morning uh we will begin with shin buddhist life principles on page nine hopefully all of you have have our service book and you can refer to the items that we will be doing throughout the service from this book as i said mentioned shin buddhist life principles are will be on page nine followed following that we will be doing the juni die chanting which is on pages 49 in english in 53 in japanese after that will be the dharma talk followed by a musical offering and then we will have some announcements and that will be our service today so let's begin with our shin buddhist life principles now mommy doubles no mommy doubles no man doubles please follow along with me shin buddhist life principles entrusting in the vow of the buddha calling out the buddha's name i will pass through the journey of life with strength and joy revering the light of the buddha reflecting upon my imperfect self i will strive to live a life of gratitude following the teachings of the buddha discerning the right path i will share the true dharma with all rejoicing in the compassion of the buddha respecting and aiding all sentient beings i will work towards the welfare of society and the world now moamido next we will go into our chanting as i mentioned we will be doing the junior eye on pages 49 and 53. and a little bit about the genie die it's very ancient chant it was written probably in the second century of the common era and it originated in the mahayana tradition of india during the time of the pure land master nagarjuna was one of our seven masters so we are when we chant this uh following a tradition that has gone on for almost 2 000 years let's begin now mommy doublets no mommy doublets num on dogs so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] so [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] shoes [Music] is [Music] he [Music] on [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] numbers the title of my dharma talk today is called the gratitude reflex and i wanted to tell you a little bit about how this came about during the pandemic my husband tom and i have been listening to many different podcasts it's one of the things that you can do these days when you have so much time on your hands and we've actually always enjoyed listening to them but we found a few that we have really gotten very engaged with and one of them happens to be npr's hidden brain podcast it's hosted by a man named shankar vidantum he is the social science science correspondent for npr and he takes human behavior and the social sciences research and looks at them in very interesting and unusual ways in ways that we maybe wouldn't be thinking about them and so it's fascinating to kind of uncover various aspects of of the brain and the way we think and the way we act this is an extremely popular podcast there are over 2 million downloads a week everyday buddhist would love something like that happening with with our online school there are over 250 public radio stations across the united states that feature this podcast so well worth listening to and i highly recommend it anyway a while back there was an episode entitled where gratitude gets you so jodi shinchu we talk a lot about gratitude this title immediately caught my attention i thought there might be some interesting nuggets um that we could relate to and indeed there were and so i hope to share some of what i i learned from the podcast with you so what he did was um interviewed a dr david desteno from northwestern university in the boston area who's a psychologist who has done a lot of research in the emotional side of human behavior so he wrote a book called emotional success the power of gratitude compassion and pride so there's a lot of information in there of course we can immediately relate to gratitude and compassion today we'll focus mostly on the gratitude aspect so they ask the question why is it so hard to do the right thing and he also discusses the importance and the limitations of willpower and self-control which are both related to that question he also explores a habit a very easy habit that helps us achieve our goals isn't related to willpower and self-control and of course that is the practice of gratitude so we'll see how powerful that practice can be so they asked the question can you do the difficult thing now for a reward in the future because future success often requires sacrificing in the short term for benefits giving into temptation for immediate gratification can sometimes lead to problems down the road we all know that we've all experienced that you're familiar with the esop's fable of the grasshopper and the ant and we all know about the aunt who was very diligent during the spring and summer months collecting food for the winter working very hard to store up his supplies and we know about the lazy grasshopper who lazed and danced and sang and had a great time while food was plenty and when winter came he had no reserves he had nothing stored up and he perished because of that rather harsh moral to to that story but the point being you have to work hard sometimes in the present for future rewards and that's exactly what happened in that story we also heard from reverend john a couple weeks ago about the power of personality and how stable it might be or unchangeable it is or isn't and he mentioned something called the marshmallow test that was um conducted by walter michelle this is a very famous test that many of you are familiar with it occurred at took place at stanford university many years ago where he took a group of children and placed them in a room one by one and gave them a marshmallow and then told them i'm gonna walk out of this room if you don't eat the marshmallow when i come back i will give you two marshmallows so it was a test on um specific children's ability to delay gratification to get two in the future if or one presently so in dr desteno's discussion he used it as an example of delayed gratification i think rev john used it more in terms of personality issues well what dr desteno did is a somewhat similar experiment using adults and he didn't use marshmallows but he used money he figured adults were more inclined to want money than marshmallows and so what he he did in his experiment was that he told his subjects that in the future in in a year's time i will give you one hundred dollars or you can get a certain amount of cash today in lieu of the hundred dollars in a year and what he found after working with many many different subjects that the amount was dollars which i found surprising that to wait a year for a hundred dollars most people on average would take seventeen dollars today we'll come back to that experiment later on in my talk because he gives it a little bit of a twist so what's going on in here or what's going on here oftentimes people characterize this as a war between different parts of our brain you know oftentimes we we talk about the rational brain versus the emotional brain and they are sometimes pitted against each other you know we think of our rational brain coming from our frontal cortex and our emotional brain is from a more primitive part of our our brain the amygdala where we have more instinctual types of urges and wants and needs and so they sometimes we feel like they are at opposite ends or purposes we face questions like do i study now or play a video game do i exercise or sit in front of the tv do i save for retirement or buy that fancy new car or or gigantic tv those are all questions that on the one hand we know our the rational executive part of our brains will tell us oh we need to we need to do the right thing and not give in to our impulses so in these situations our emotions can lead us astray and we think that the way to reach our goals is to persevere and delay gratification and resist temptation by relying on willpower well it turns out the reality of willpower is it's not a very good mechanism for doing what we should dr desteno says that most of us actually don't do very well with our willpower statistically 20 of the time people give in and this is for you know minor kind of decisions and the numbers get worse for difficult or important decisions another example is that new year's resolutions 25 are gone by january mid-january and that eight percent are kept to the end of the year so this strategy of relying on logic and willpower doesn't work all that well in many cases we think willpower and self-control is important and and we all can function or be successful if we are able to do that but it's it's hard and um we face many of those decisions in our lives we think willpower as being the key to self-control and that our emotions are the things that undermine us but dr desteno disagrees because um he feels that this model misses something very crucial there are negative emotions that that sabotage our efforts to do the right thing or to do what we should but he also says that emotions can be enormously powerful and constructive and help with self-control and so he he proceeds to explain how how that is as part of the problem comes from the fact that a lot of research has been focused on the negative emotions things like fear anger anxiety and in buddhism of course we are very aware of the three poisons of great anger and ignorance we are constantly made aware of the ego self and its wants and needs and that as bombu foolish beings our desires are endless no wonder willpower fails as so often but we also see that the necessity of willpower in self-control has its limitations as we've already learned so he asked what if there is another way to accomplish the things we want and not have to rely so much on willpower or self-control and dr desteno came to the conclusion that we can look to other emotions for an answer so in his book mentioned previously emotional success the power of gratitude compassion and pride he found some answers and today as i mentioned we will focus primarily on the gratitude aspect he says that some emotions help us reach our goals and so he talks about how emotions can shape and control long-term decision making and specifically he tested differences in people in the way that they were experiencing the emotion of gratitude and what effect that would have on willpower and self-control and delayed gratification so he found that there was a correlation between gratitude and people's willingness and ability to delay gratification and and to maintain some self-control turns out that when people are feeling grateful they double their ability to exert self-control and so this is how he was able to determine that in an experiment so let's go back to that 100 in a year test and what he did was he tweaked it by putting in a a new element into the equation so he offered people 100 in a year a year from now and found or set out to determine what amount would it take for them to forego the hundred dollars and take the money today if they were experiencing gratitude so before they made their decision he had his subjects recall a moment where they experienced a deep sense of gratitude they reflected on something that someone had done or something that had happened in their lives for which they were extremely grateful for and then they were asked to make that decision how much would you take today and to forego the hundred dollars a year from now turns out that the amount it would take is almost double the 17 it takes 31 today to forego the 100 in the future which means that people valued having the hundred dollars in the future more because they have this sense of gratitude it was a pro very profound result in my opinion so what he came to conclude was that gratitude altered the way people valued future goals and they were more willing to delay their present gratification and this was done effortlessly it wasn't like you know they would do any kind of different calculations it was just that they felt that they'd be more willing to wait and it would take more to get them to not wait so there wasn't any need for them to exert self-control or other cognitive strategies pretty amazing so there was another experiment that he did that i also thought was very interesting in which he induced gratitude in his subjects very interesting experiment he had um a subject coming to take a uh like a very onerous um test it entailed something like 45 very difficult logic questions that they had to had to complete and what he did is he had a confederate also in the room there was supposedly two people doing the same task they had to do this 45 minute onerous task test and so with the subject what happened to the subject person is that at the end of the test their computer would crash and they would lose all the data all the work that they had had done in that 45 minutes was basically gone and they were told they would have to do the test over well the other confederate person who was supposedly taking the test would come over and say well you know i'm pretty good with computers let me see if i could try to retrieve your information and so that person would start fiddling with the buttons on the computer and eventually they would push a certain button that that would time for the answers to pop back up again so the subject would feel enormous relief enormous gratitude to this person for having saved their data and save them from having to do this terrible test over again and so what they found and then there was another part to the test so this very grateful person would leave the testing site and in the lobby there would be somebody who needed help some some help with with something that they they really look like they were in distress 95 of the people feeling gratitude would help the person in need because they they felt so much gratitude that they were willing to pay it forward and to to help the person that appeared to be in need another very remarkable finding then he talked about another test that another psychologist did where he he basically just like this other psychologist i think it was dr emmons and i don't know where he was from but he had people his study people um do a daily gratitude reflection basically counting your blessings daily and what he found was that there was reduced stress in their lives they were better able to exercise they had a better quality in their relationships with the people around them and fewer symptoms of illness so this gratitude practice kind of led over into the well-being of their entire life gratitude changed and changes the things we value and it's not like building a specific habit like you might try to develop a habit of say i don't know going going to bed at 10 o'clock at night or something you know some some habits some specific habit and the problem with trying to build specific habits is that they are specific to whatever it is you are trying to to alter in the case of gratitude it has a far and wide reaching effect in many aspects of your life it's sort of a one-size-fits-all kind of activity or practice that has wonderful and powerful consequences for the rest of your life many ways we can kind of consider it a superpower that does affect many dimensions of your life gratitude changes what your mind values and you value long term more among many other things so these are the ways that a gratitude practice can have very practical benefits to your everyday life let's look briefly at what it means for our spiritual journey as all of you probably know gratitude is a incredibly important aspect to the shin path something that shinron emphasized in a very special way it is an essential aspect to the xinjing awakening experience that he talked so much about and was the cornerstone of our shin practice as i've said many times and i reflect the words of rev tetsuo uno when he says that gratitude can take you very far on the shin buddhist path but it isn't enough by itself there's there's an additional element and that has to do with deep gratitude for amita's home gone for the the gift of awakening and transcendence that we received from all of reality of all of life of all of existence and in that recognition of this power beyond the self we feel a great sense of both humility and a great sense of appreciation and gratitude i think we recognize that we are not worthy of the gifts that we receive and from that comes comes this sense of inconceivable gratitude and tremendous humility in in our in not being really truly worthy of of receiving it so hopefully this dharma talk has been shed some light on our buddhist path and that you can appreciate the importance that we place on gratitude in our in our practice as i mentioned it it has powerful implications for our everyday life but even more powerful implications for our journey to xinjin please join me in gosh show and thank you for joining me today now mommy double two now me double two no mommy double two no mandalas we will now have a musical offering performed by ocbc dharma school student jin swan he will be doing the gotha asa no utah on page 99 of our service book it's a song that it has four verses two in japanese and two in english beautiful song i was trying to figure out a way that i could join in the singing of the song but it got technically too difficult to try to figure out so just please enjoy the song and please sing i i miss hearing all of us singing together in the honda and hopefully this is a way that you can participate in the musical offering as well asano uttar page 99. [Music] you [Music] you [Music] so thank you jen for that beautiful rendition of asanutha i hope everyone enjoyed that now we will go to our announcements we have four since today is january 31st and the fifth sunday of the month there are no scheduled dharma school classes unless one of the classes decided to have a an extra class on their own but otherwise there should not be any dharma school classes being held today a reminder that next saturday is our schwetsky service and although in the quoting it it says that it will be shown at 4 30 it actually will be available from 10 o'clock we figure that people could access the service whenever they want and so it's being put up earlier and that will be the practice going forward as long as we are in in a remote and virtual situation also a reminder that next sunday our reverend mitsumi wondrous will be doing the family service at 10 o'clock our last announcement has to do with our efforts to help our sangha member paul goodman who is undergoing cancer treatment currently and is looking for bone marrow um donate donations and with respect to that there has been a tremendous effort put into um um bone marrow drive to to get samples that might be possible matches for him i want to thank all of those who have participated in any of the four drive-through opportunities there will be one today at ocbc starting at noon and i hope that some of you will be able to participate in that today even though this is the last event there's also opportunities to do a contribution or to do a a bone marrow test in your home and there will be a couple of um flyers following this announcement that will show how that can be done um cheek swab to for a bone marrow a possibility possible matching situation thank you for to all those who have helped and participated in this drive we are we're hoping that there will be some good news through all of all of our efforts and we wish the good ones our sincerest best wishes with that i would like to close with gusto not you