In Memory of Gil Boyne 1925 - 2010

Along with Milton Erickson and Dave Ellman, Gil Boyne was one of the three founding fathers of hypnotherapy. He passed away last month.

When I first published this article, a couple of years ago, he kindly wrote to me telling me how it had moved him. It is re-published here this month in his memory.


An Attitude of Gratitude

Last month I travelled to Poland in order to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. It was a journey I had long delayed and, as I had anticipated, it was amongst the most moving and humbling experiences of my life.

It is impossible to visit these sites -- the electric fences and barbed wire; the mountains of human hair, shoes, spectacles; the brutal deprivation and torture cells; the gas chamber and crematorium; the wall after wall full of photographs documenting just a fraction of those human beings whose lives were so appallingly stolen from them -- without feeling a terrible sense of melancholy, awe and humility.

The incomprehensible brutality and suffering for which these death camps are infamous leaves us with such a deep sadness. That we are capable of doing these things fills one with such profound disappointment. Yet it puts things so keenly into perspective, forcing us to recognise that whatever our own troubles might be, they really are quite insignificant compared to what they might have been.

And with this realization, mingling in with the shock and the horror, comes a feeling of intense, almost overwhelming gratitude for what we have and how lucky we truly are to have it.

So often we take our lives and everything in our lives for granted. So often we are blind to the wonderful abundance which not only surrounds each one of us, but is within each one of us.

In his book Man's Search for Meaning, Auschwitz survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl records how misery, deprivation and suffering made even the smallest and most mundane of things truly important and meaningful.

'The spirit reached out for them longingly', he observes.

Surrounded by starvation, deprivation, appalling cruelty and inhumanity, prisoners' minds became focused on that which they once took for granted and did not appreciate.

'In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centred on such details, and these memories could move one to tears,' writes Frankl.

In the midst of horror and ugliness, even the smallest, most mundane of experiences could take on real significance.

The simple recognition of beauty, when seeing the magnificent, glowing sky reflected in a muddy puddle was enough to bring a hushed reverence to those prisoners who noticed it. As Frankl reports: 'Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another: "How beautiful the world could be".'

Never was a truer word ever spoken. That we are capable of seing these things fills one with such wonderful hope.

With all its pain and heartbreak, its difficulties and disappointments, the world -- our world -- really can be beautiful. It is here, waiting for us to recognise this, allow this.

We are gifted with life for such a brief time. And in life, mixed right in with the difficulties and disappointments there is tremendous joy. Yes, perhaps that joy is sometimes difficult to feel. But on other days, and at other times, that joy can simply be palpable, almost tangible. No matter how much or how little we are aware of it, joy is always unfailingly there awaiting us.

And all we need do is to wake up to this simple truth.

There really is no need to wait until we are ill in order to appreciate health, no need to wait until we are alone in order to appreciate friendship, no need to wait until we are homeless in order to appreciate that we are warm and dry and have a roof over our head: No need to be on our death bed in order to appreciate life.

We can start right now. And all it takes is a genuine willingness to foster an 'attitude of gratitude'.

Because the fact is that we can and we do choose our own attitude, towards ourselves and towards life. And attitudes can be re-framed and re-aligned. They can be changed.

Everything we need is right here, inside us, waiting for us to awaken to.

It's not there in some of us; it's in each and every one of us. And it's there now.

Choose to live your life in a positive 'attitude of gratitude' and your whole existence becomes somehow different. Rejoice in even the smallest of things and observe how your life becomes transformed.

Unlike those souls interred in the blasphemy of Auschwitz and Birkenau, we are lucky, we have a choice. 'How beautiful the world could be...' And all we have to do is change could to can, and to allow it. We don't need to be victims. It really is within our power to change things.

You don't even need to let life come to you. It is already here. Learn to welcome every bit of it -- with all its wonders and all its shortcomings.

Learn to be grateful for it.

What are you waiting for?

You really can start - right now.

" How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world "
Anne Frank