Gregg Krech

Gregg Krech is one of the leading authorities on Japanese psychology in the United States and the author of Naikan: Gratitude, Grace and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection. Naikan reflection, which helps cultivate gratitude, is based on three questions: 1) What have I received from X? 2) What have I given to X? and 3) What troubles or difficulties have I caused X?

Grateful People: You’ve made extensive study of both Western and Eastern cultures. Why in the West – and I think especially in the U.S. – does gratitude seem to present such a challenge to us? Is gratitude seen as more of a virtue in the East?

Gregg Krech: Let me preface my answer by saying my experience of having people do naikan in the West is really no different than my experience of naikan in Japan. Once people are actually going through the process of reflecting on their lives I don’t really see a great deal of difference between the cultures. But I think there is much more emphasis in the United States on what I call the “myth of the self-made man” -- and the idea that we’re responsible for our success. There are certainly cultural themes that I think make gratitude harder to reach naturally than they do in Japan.

If you receive an award in Japan – and I think this is true of some other Asian cultures – one of the first things you’re going to say is to acknowledge all the people who contributed to whatever it is you did. In the U.S. there’s much more of a tendency to take it personally, so to speak, or to just go through the motions of gratitude – like in the Academy Awards where winners have a long list of people to thank but you rarely get a sense that people are particularly genuine about that.

How can naikan help us move away from, as you put it, “the myth of the self-made man” – and to help us become more aware of what we’ve received from others?

I use the term “complaint-based life” – and it’s really the way a lot of people in our society live, where the foundation of what we talk about and think about is built around complaints – around the things we want that we don’t have or the problems that we have that we wish we didn’t have. [Coughs] I can use my own experience right now as an example. Having the flu I can either go through my days constantly complaining… And to be honest with you I do some of that, as my wife would tell you! But I’m also very aware of the things going on to support me. For example, even though I feel very sick, and I’ve been sick for a couple days, I’m very conscious of the fact that I have a comfortable place to be sick. I live in Vermont in the country up on a hill, I have a library with a sofa where I can lie down and watch the birds in the bird feeder, I have a nice comfortable bed with a skylight.

Y’know, I spent some time many years ago working in refugee camps on the borders of Cambodia and Laos. People would come in across the Cambodian border having their legs just blown off by a landmine. There was a Red Cross building there that was very basic. You were given a bed, but the bed was a bamboo cot with no mattress. Of course, you were in a single room where other people were screaming and crying and smelling. Not only were you suffering, but you were in a circumstance that was not particularly comfortable. So I’m very aware of the fact that even though I don’t feel well, I’m in a very comfortable situation that makes it easier for me to rest and recover. I’m very aware of my wife making me tea or bringing me a pillow or blanket, or taking on a lot of the extra work that’s involved with picking up our daughters from school or driving them someplace. So I can either have that focus of being aware of how I’m being supported, or how I can have a focus of being aware of how rotten I feel. I think what naikan does is open your eyes to the fact that even when you’re feeling rotten, there’s still often all this stuff going on around you in which you’re being cared for and supported, and to not acknowledge that is really to betray the truth of your life.

There are a lot of people who are severely suffering in the world – you mentioned the refugees in Cambodia whom you worked with, for example. I think that for many, the idea of being grateful can seem like bitter medicine in the sense that gratitude may not seem a natural response to life’s sufferings. For those who are reading this who might be experiencing serious struggles, is it perverse to suggest that they should be grateful or to focus on finding gratitude? How can naikan speak to people for whom everything seems to be going wrong?

First of all, I don’t actually suggest that people feel grateful! When I suggest that people do naikan I’m really suggesting they just step back and reflect on their life. If they do that and they do that well they get a deeper awareness of what’s going on in their life, not just the thing that they’re focused on which is often a problem, but all these other things going on around them. Awareness is really what naikan provides. In many cases, though not all cases, a natural extension of that awareness is a feeling of gratitude. When it’s authentic, is just spontaneous.

Part of what I’ve seen that I think isn’t actually healthy for people is people trying to feel grateful for something that they’re not. People sometimes come from a New Age or a Christian background or something where they’ve gotten the idea that they should always feel grateful – I don’t really believe that. The experience of gratitude is something that when it’s authentic it just happens naturally.

Going back to your initial question, when I was working in one of the camps on the Cambodian border there was a group of Buddhist monks there. We talked a little about naikan – this was just after I had come from Japan so I had only been studying and training in naikan for about two or three years. They asked if I would give a talk to the people in the camp. I reacted automatically and said sure. They set this up for the next day, and then I started thinking about it. I realized I had never presented this material to people in such dire circumstances – living in huts with dirt floors – the conditions of the camp were not good at all. I began to wonder what kind of response they would have would to this material because it certainly wasn’t a typical middle-class or mental health professional audience. But I went through the presentation. Whenever I do a presentation in naikan I always have people do the questions – in other words they actually do naikan during my presentations. I’ll ask “What have you received in the past 24 hours?” and we’ll have 5 minutes of silence where we’ll go through each of the questions that way.

What I found at the end of my presentation was that people’s response was very much the same in terms of their general reaction which was much more of a sense of having been cared for and supported than they had been before they went through the process of naikan reflection. However, the content of what they came up with was dramatically different! For example, one of the things they received -- there was a person who drove a truck filled with fresh water so they could have water to drink that wasn’t toxic. In other words, the things that were on their list were of course completely different from what you would find in most other circumstances. But their response to those things – of being aware that if it wasn’t for this truck coming in with water they would not have water, if it wasn’t for the Red Cross they would not have any medical care, if it wasn’t for the food brought in by the United Nations they would not have food – was really very similar. I think even people whose circumstances are very difficult can do naikan and have an increased awareness of how life is supporting them.

There’s another thing I describe in one of my books I call the “myth of circumstances.” It’s the idea that we put so much of our energy into trying to change the circumstances of our life. We try to get a nice house and find a nice play to live and find someone nice to marry and maybe get an advanced education and get a nice stereo so we can listen to music. But really, after our basic needs are met, a change in circumstances has little effect in our sense of appreciation or gratitude for our life. Otherwise, people who are materially in much better situations would be much more grateful than people who are materially in worse situations, except that’s not what they find in the research. So we really should be working on putting much more energy into changing our view of our life, our attitude, our awareness, in other words how we actually look at our life. But very few of us do that, because we think the solution lies in changing our circumstances. However, in most cases it doesn’t give us the outcome we’re looking for which is happiness and gratitude.  

That’s an interesting point. I know there have been researchers who have calculated a happiness index for countries – and the findings were that countries with the happiest people are not always the ones that are the wealthiest. The U.S., if I remember, didn’t make the top 10.

That brings me to my next question. For those who have a comfortable material life, by Western standards, in terms of having readily potable water, plumbing, a comfortable environment – things which may be relatively recent phenomena in human history but which very few of us would think to be grateful for on a daily basis. Can naikan help us appreciate these benefits?

Well, fortunately most of the things that we have at some point break. That’s really a wonderful opportunity to experience what life is like without those benefits. Where we live in Vermont, either because of a snowstorm or thunderstorm, we usually lose power at least three times a year or more. Sometimes it’s for a few hours and sometimes it’s for a few days. So suddenly we have to understand what it’s like to not have electricity available.

It’s funny you mention that! Last week I’d had a particularly long day and was looking forward to a hot shower to relax. But when I turned on the tap only ice cold water poured out. I found myself grumbling about it as I took a quick rinse off in the cold water. The next day when I went to take a shower the hot water had returned, and as it poured out I found myself feeling very grateful for something I had completely taken for granted countless times beforehand. 

Exactly. If you have that experience, even once, you can always bring that experience back. I think that it’s a great opportunity when things aren’t going well. Even with health, when you have a bad cold or the flu or even something more serious, to be aware of what a gift it is to get up and be able to go through the day in relatively good health. The key to me is we have to really retrain our minds to get away from this complaint-based type of thinking and talking where we’re constantly focusing on problems and what isn’t going right so that we begin to think life is way too hard or overwhelming and not worth living.

Has there been a time in your life when you were experiencing something difficult or painful or hard in some way, and then, after having gone through it, the practice of gratitude somehow changed your relationship to that experience?

What comes to mind is the death of my father, which was a year and three days ago. We just did a little anniversary thing for the first anniversary of his death. If I go way back, before I even got involved with naikan, I had a very stressful and difficult relationship with my father. We really didn’t get along well when I was young and as a teenager. After I went to Japan for the first time and did my first naikan retreat there it changed my whole understanding of him. It really changed our whole relationship, which then really blossomed and became very close for the next 25 years.

But the situation a year ago was that I actually went to Chicago with a plane ticket for him to bring him back to Vermont to live here. After about five years of trying to coax him into coming out here he had finally agreed to it. We had an apartment that we had rented and furnished for him near where my girls go to school. Everything was all planned out. I flew to Chicago and I went to his house about 9 o’clock in the morning and there was no answer. I found out he had been taken by an ambulance to the hospital just an hour before I arrived.

There’s a longer story I won’t go into now, but the result was that he ended up in a hospice. I spent the last two weeks of his life with him in the hospital and then in the hospice, and then he died in my arms. At the time it was an incredibly sad experience. It broke my heart, particularly with this expectation that he was going to be coming back to Vermont. And now two weeks later he’s dead… So I was really very grief-stricken and upset.

But as I was able to get some distance and actually reflect on the situation, including doing some naikan on my time with him (which, by the way, made me really appreciate the people in the hospice and the work they did there), I realized was what a gift it was to be able to have that time with him. I could have easily gotten a call in Vermont saying that my dad had a heart attack and died and gone out and never seen him again. Instead I got to spend two weeks every single day at his bedside with him. I was able to talk to him and tell him stories and tell him I love him. The day before he died I flew in my wife and children and also my brother’s kids. We had a party for my father. He was conscious and everybody was there. It was a wonderful experience. He died the next day and I thought “What a better way could there be to die?” He spent the last full day of his life surrounded by the people who love him. By literally every single person who loved him. As I look back on it now, of course I still wish that he had lived longer and I had spent more time with him, but I realized that circumstances during those two weeks were such an amazing blessing and I feel tremendous gratitude that it unfolded that way, even though at the time I was extremely upset and disappointed and heartbroken.

Thank you for sharing that. What would you recommend for people who would like to begin practicing naikan? What resources are there?

The nice thing is that you don’t need any resources! You need to know the three questions. You need a space that gives you a little solitude. I encourage people when they first start naikan to do it in writing – to actually have a little pad or journal where they can write their answers to the three questions. I also encourage daily naikan, which is just looking at the last 24 hours of your life. So there’s not much you need in terms of resources or support. You really just need to get yourself to take the time to do it. If you did this before you went to bed, we’re talking maybe 20 minutes at the most to be able to get a sense of what your day was like. But most people choose to get on Facebook or surf the Internet or watch Netflix because we don’t realize that it’s important for us to do this kind of reflection. But I’m very much convinced that it is, and that it can make a big difference in terms of individuals, in terms of families, in terms of organizations, if people are engaged in some regular practice of self-reflection.

Thank you. Very lastly, what is something that you are grateful for from this particular day?

The thing that really stands out is that… I’ve been alternating between trying to get a little work done and laying down on the sofa and resting to get over my flu. I work in the library mostly and there’s a window out onto the deck where I have a couple of birdfeeders. For years I’ve been feeding these birds. There’s a real assortment of different birds – chickadees and cardinals and woodpeckers. I really enjoy watching them. I had this experience today, which was actually a little scary because I feel very responsible for these birds now. They’re like my kids! [Laughs].

Anyway, I looked out my window this morning and there was a giant hawk sitting on a tree limb about five feet from the bird feeder. Just huge. You don’t get to see hawks close up like that – you usually see them in the sky. But when you see them close up they’re bigger than virtually any other bird. It was clear this hawk was there for his breakfast. As much as he’s entitled to his breakfast I was worried that he was going to grab one of my birds, so I knocked loudly on the window and he immediately flew off. But I’m grateful for the opportunity to have seen something like that. It was just incredible to look outside and see a hawk not more than 12 feet away from me.

I can imagine that was quite a sight!

There’s a man, Brother David Steindl-Rast, who has a wonderful understanding of gratitude. He talked about the relationship between gratitude and surprise. I think it’s a really astute observation. Often when something happens that is out of the ordinary that surprises us, we’re much more likely to have a natural response of feeling appreciative or grateful for it, whereas everyday we turn on our car and the car starts – we really just take it for granted. I think there are two interesting conclusions we can draw from that. One is that if we’re trying to stimulate gratitude in other people – like our family, our friends, our colleagues at work – it’s a great idea to surprise people. We don’t do enough of that.

My daughters love Chinese food, and just bringing home an order of spring rolls from the Chinese restaurant when they don’t expect it is a great surprise for them. The other side of that is for ourselves, when we’re trying to think about our lives and appreciate our lives, to just respond to things with that sense of surprise. Think about what it would be like if that were the first time the car started, or the first strawberry you tasted, or the first time I used a microwave and it heated up my food in sixty seconds. It’s hard to do that of course because we get so accustomed to our cars, our microwaves, and all these other conveniences. But the more we can cultivate this sense of surprise the more that I think we can nurture a sense of gratitude within our own hearts.

Thank you so much for sharing that, and for all of your time today, especially in the midst of your recovery from the flu. I really enjoyed talking to you.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you.