Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [2]
Since the workshop wasn’t yet fully developed, the teacher, Johnny, asked for our patience. We’d be acting as guinea pigs for this program, he said, and there wouldn’t be any charge. A romp into positive thinking—gratis? I couldn’t resist.
One of the first things Johnny taught us was a Zulu warrior greeting. Everyone paired off, standing an arm’s length across from his partner. Then we looked deep into each other’s eyes. When you felt a connection, you were supposed to say, “I have come to see you.” The other would respond, “I have come to be seen.” The gazing would continue until that person felt the click and proclaimed, “I have come to see you.” Then, you moved on to the next classmate. Each session began this way, to affirm that we were here for real, pure, honest interaction, heart to heart. You weren’t supposed to say you had come to see and be seen until and unless you really meant it.
Doing this exercise made me want to stare right into the eyeballs of every single person I encountered, to make up for all the times I’d distractedly engaged in “conversation.” Gazing intensely at people I hardly knew reinforced how rarely I looked directly at the people I did know. We were all perennially distracted, attempting to triage the various competing demands on our time, multitasking our days away. Almost worse was communicating with the family and longtime friends who lived in other zip codes and time zones altogether. Static-filled cell phone conversations and emails were the hollow tools that connected us, eye contact sorely lacking. I craved meaningful human contact.
Other simple assignments from Johnny were crafted to help us discover what we appreciated in ourselves, and what inspired us about others.
“Describe in detail a person you love—and why”; “Write a toast to four difficult periods in your life, and how you handled them”; “Summarize your life story as if you were ninety and telling a child.”
The themes were the same for me each time. I could see that it was a triumph to have made my way in the world, despite various misguided choices with men, the random steps that comprised my career, even an act of violence I’d experienced as a young woman. I saw how fortunate I was to have been cloaked in love and support all along. How, in the absence of creating a traditional family for myself, I’d cobbled together an army of dear friends around the world with whom I enjoyed rich, textured relationships. It moved me how many of the people I knew ended our conversations with the words “I love you.” That counted for something. It counted for a lot.
No, it wasn’t perfect. What was that, anyway? No one I knew would say their choices had yielded an ideal existence. Maybe my life wasn’t conventional, by some old-fashioned definition of convention. The years had been flawed, but they had been leavened with much good. Such were the ingredients of a life.
At the end of the third session, almost as a throwaway, Johnny assigned an exercise that really started to bring the jumble in my brain to order. It was a simple nightly ritual, and it taught me how to appreciate life in the most basic terms.
“I want you to keep a notebook by your bed,” he said. “And every night, before you go to sleep, I want you to review your day. Make a short list of three things that happened that were good.”
“What if three good things didn’t happen?” several of us asked in unison. Clearly, we weren’t naturally wired with a positive way of looking at the world.
“Well, that’s the point,” he said. “This exercise challenges you to find three good things in each day. They don’t have to be big things. In fact, most of the time they’re not going to be big things. Big, important things don’t happen to us every day. Winning an award, getting married, starting a new job,