Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude
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I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now.

Today on Super Soul Conversations, 91-year-old author, scholar, and Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindlrost, is beloved the world over for his enduring message about gratefulness. It's the true source of lasting joy. Today, Brother Steindlrost invites us to embrace the spiritual practice of grateful living.

I know the study of gratitude has been your life's work. And as we now in the world are searching for ways to find common ground, you believe that all humans share the same yearning. What is that yearning? The yearning is basically, I think, all humans who agree to be happy.

to be happy, to be joyful. And I make a little distinction between happy and joyful because we say we want to be happy, but we want to be happy with the happiness that lasts. Yes. And we are well aware that happiness just doesn't last. Right. Happiness cannot last. Cannot last. So we have to find the happiness that lasts, and that happiness I call joy. And we can't find that.

because we can't find that joy even in the midst of unhappiness. Yes. So for you, is gratefulness a practice? Yes. That's very important. Or just a way of being? It's a way of being. But the practice is your way of being. It's a way of living. That's why lately I talk less about gratitude but more about grateful living.

Because when you speak about gratitude, people often think, oh yeah, when something nice happens, then of course I'm grateful. But grateful living is to be grateful at all times, at all times, no matter what happens. And that means reaping the joy that comes from gratefulness at all times, also in the midst of suffering.

And so what do you think the essence of grateful living is? If I want to live more gratefully in my life, which I'm telling you... First you have to ask, what are you really grateful for? And there it's important to realize you're not grateful for what...

happens at this moment necessarily because it may be something for which you cannot be grateful. If you get news that your dearest friend has just died or if you're just faced on the news with oppression and exploitation and misery and violence, you can't be grateful for that. But at every moment,

Life gives you the opportunity to do something with what life gives you. And therefore, grateful living means

learning to avail yourself moment by moment of that opportunity. Yes. And that most of the time is the opportunity to enjoy. Yes. And one really has to help people realize that just 99% of the time we could enjoy, that we can breathe, enjoy that we have eyes and ears to hear, everything, everything. And not wait until you have to lose your sight of

or have to breathe through a machine, or have some kind of disease before you can appreciate the fact that you have all of this. Right, exactly, that you have legs, you notice when you break a leg or when you have some difficulty. No, at the hard times. But that is...

enjoyment. That is the opportunity to enjoy. So you can imagine that in our country, as well as all over the world actually, disruption is occurring at a rate that we have never seen. I was so happy to read in Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer,

how you see everything as an opportunity, because I've been thinking deeply about our situation. And I think this moment in our culture, in our world, in our society is a moment that calls for each of us to step into this opportunity. Absolutely. And that is quite a different opportunity from enjoying things. Yes, yes. But it is also a gift and a great gift that in a time and in a place

It's the whole world today where everything is torn and broken. Yeah, dissension. We have the opportunity to stretch even further than people had to stretch themselves before to understand one another, to listen to one another. Yeah, to come to a common hope. And I love how you define hope.

Would you share this with our viewers? I think hope is something very different from our hopes. I think that's so important. Because the hopes are always something that we can imagine. You can't hope for it unless you can imagine it. But hope in this truly spiritual sense is openness for surprise.

for that which you cannot imagine. - The real hope, with a capital H, is being open to surprise. - For surprise. - Yes. - And to open your heart for that surprise. - As opposed to the hope for the thing that you imagine or you want or you're wishing for. - Exactly. - Yes. - And if you trust life

it will surprise you and it will always give you good things. Okay, so let's start right there because I think that what you just said is the key, is that unlocks the path to a successful life and that is trust life.

That is the beginning. That is the beginning, right? Isn't that the foundation? That's the foundation of everything. And that's what ultimately faith is, is it not? We can withhold that trust or we can give it. And if we withhold it, we can try it for a little while, but everything goes wrong. How can people learn to not withhold it when you feel like life has given you...

an unfair shot. How can you develop faith, maintain sustained faith when you really think life has been really unfair? I too quickly say, well, yes, you should trust in life and I would be very careful, but it's the only thing that you can say. And you ask, how can I prove that life is worth trusting?

If you know the person well enough and can really speak from heart to heart, that's also necessary. But you can make them look back on their life and they will see that even the worst things that happened to them turned out to be bad.

If you look back on your life, you see situations and times when everything seemed to be just terrible, terrible, catastrophe. And now, out of this catastrophe, not in spite of it, even because of it, you got where you are.

And that is so encouraging. But you see it mostly when you look in the rear mirror, so to say. You see it looking back. And when you look forward, you can't see it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be in the difficult situation. Correct. But I think also developing a trust in life, even when the hard times come, you know you'll get through it. That is the point. Because you have experience in the past...

And you can see it when you look at the past. But when you look at the future, you can't see it. That's what makes it so difficult. And then you need that trust. Even though I don't see it, I trust that life will give me good things. Yes. So how do you come to be a human being who lives more alive?

Well, first you have to stop because we are in such a fast lane in life, most of us. Whether we want it or not, life is so fast these days. So we are really rushed along and

We don't see the opportunity, you see. Life offers us moment by moment opportunity. So you have to stop and get into the present moment. Our shared friend Eckhart Tolle, he has really taught people that. You have to stop long enough to be present. And then you can listen, look,

smell if necessary, whatever. What is now the opportunity that life offers me at this moment? And then that is to look and then go and grab it. Do something with it.

When it comes to enjoyment, enjoy the moment really. Don't just say nice flowers and go on to something else. But look at the flowers, let them impress you. So stop, look, go. Those are the three things

necessary steps that have to be repeated over and over to really come alive. That is really the happiness that we are long for, to be alive on all levels, on the physical level, on mental level, emotional level, and on the spiritual level. Wasn't that delicious? So good. Your bill, ladies. I got it. No, I got it. I got it.

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I know you believe that gratitude can inspire a revolution because during your TED talk you said, "Gratitude can change our world in immensely important ways." Because if you're grateful, you're not fearful. And if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity. And you are willing to share. Since we've lived under the power pyramid for so many hundreds of years, can, do you think, being grateful inspire a revolution?

Well, the reason why the power pyramid is so destructive... Tell us what you mean by the power pyramid. Yes. It's the social life, the form that we give our social life if we are fearful. And those are the two possibilities to life, either to trust life...

or to be fearful of life. Fearfulness makes you violent, and the root of violence is fearfulness. Yes, absolutely. And then this fear builds this pyramid because the one that is a little higher up than the others is fearful that somebody else might get there, and so uses violence to oppress the others. There's already oppression. So when we see the terrorists throughout the world

the violence being enacted upon people throughout the world, all those people are doing that because they're afraid. Exactly, and they are afraid of one another, that the other one would get ahead. So you get competition and rivalry, and then you get greed because people think, "Oh, that's not enough."

Again, fear. Fear that there's not enough. And if you fear that there's not enough, you want to get as much as possible for yourself. - Correct. - Exactly the opposite is when you trust life because then you are not fearful instead of violence, non-violence, peace. That is exactly the world Oliver's want, a world of peace, of cooperation, and of sharing. - Something I read that struck me

Where you were saying this time that we're all living in now where everybody feels so divided and can't agree, that this time may be offering us the opportunity to love our enemies. Exactly.

- What a concept. - That's what we have to learn today. And I put emphasis on the fact that it remains the enemy because if suddenly they became your friends, you would love your friends but not your enemies. They remain your enemies but you love them. - How is that possible? - Well, first of all, you have to say what do you mean by love? - Yes. - And the one definition if you want, sort of working definition,

of any kind of love. There's so many kinds of love. Love of your spouse, love of your friend, love of your animals, love of your country.

What all of them have together is, I say, "Yes, we belong together." Yes to belonging. Love is a yes to belonging that is not only said with your mouth, but with your whole being. A lived yes to belonging, existential yes to belonging. That's a great definition. Love is a lived yes to belonging. So what I hear you saying is that you can love your enemies,

Love them by understanding they have as much right to belong. We belong together. We belong together. Belong as you do. Yes. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them. No. Because if you're going to love your enemies, they have to remain your enemies, right? Yes.

One of the aspects of loving your enemies is that you listen to them, you listen to what they are saying, and then you say maybe they are right for a moment, you must think maybe they are right and not I. So you check what your opinion is against their opinion. That's already a step forward. Then you look at the

at the issue, that would be the real thing. Let's together look at the issue and not have our preconceived notions. So you're trying to get your enemies to look at the issues, not at their position. And where can we find some common ground? Where can we find common ground? But it also means that in those aspects,

in which your enemies, say it with quotation marks, because usually when you say enemies, you think you hate them. No, the enemies whom you love, in some cases, you have to do everything to thwart their purpose. If somebody...

stands for destruction of the environment, cuts down the rainforest. They are my enemies. I can't help it. They are my enemies. And I will do everything possible to protect the animals. But will you still love them? I will still love them because we belong together. Do you believe that every person who comes into the world has a calling? Absolutely.

but it's difficult to become aware of it. I think everybody has a calling. I speak of life, it's that great mystery that we confront as human beings. Life... And great mystery is another word you use for God. For that, for life. Life or mystery. And if you...

are sure that you are using the word God correctly, you could even call it God, but there are so many misunderstandings. So I call it life. Everybody knows what we mean by that. It's very mysterious. You cannot analyze it. You cannot grasp it, but you can understand it if you give yourself to it, if you let it take hold of you. And life offers you things.

things very different from any other person. There has never been another person that had exactly your fingerprints. The same experience. The same ancestors, same one at this time in history that makes a great difference. All these things make you very, very unique.

And this uniqueness is your calling to live it to the full, that uniqueness. It's like a role that we are given, you see. When I say we all belong together, that is our self. Yes. So the real calling for all of us is this calling that each of us as an individual has inside.

to come alive as a human being and express whatever that is. Exactly. Yeah. People want to come alive in their uniqueness and to be able to express what that is, which is the mystery, the mystery expressing itself through them. In that unique form. In that unique form. As never before. Yeah.

There is a beautiful story from the mystical tradition in Judaism where one great master prays, Oh God, make me like Abraham. And the voice comes from heaven and says, I've already got one, Abraham. That's right. I want you in your uniqueness. That's right. That's right. I appreciate you saying that the term spirit has been so misused today

that I would be perfectly happy to drop it completely, declare a moratorium on the word spirit, and use always the term common sense. Because in contemporary parlance, that says it much better. It makes sense. It's connected with the body through the senses. I thought that was brilliant when I read that. I kind of like that. Yes. Because I think the word spirit is so confusing for people.

that if we start using it's the common... Sense. Common sense. It makes sense. It has to do with the senses, with all our senses. And it is common to all. And it leads to awareness that we are all one. That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee.

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So this is what's so fascinating to me about your life story is that your own path to gratefulness actually started as a teenager growing up in Nazi-occupied Austria, where you witnessed the horrors of Hitler's power. So you have been in that space where it is as bad as you can get.

And how did you cultivate a practice of gratitude in the midst of war?

When everything is so uncertain, and when the bombs are flying left and right, and you don't even know whether your house is... By no means, whether your house is going to be... Yeah, there were many times where the bombs would go off, and you were surprised that you were still alive. Yes, many, many times. And when you live in that way... So were you allowed to stay in your home? You were never taken off to a camp? I was in the army, in the German army, but we were not in camps there.

We have to live in the present moment, the toilet moment. And when you live in the present moment, you are all there. That's where the stop brings you. Then you can look and you can do, go from that moment. I can imagine that the only thing you can do is focus on right now because it's too much to try to worry about what's going to happen

An hour from now. You have not the slightest idea. I have not the slightest idea. I remember a situation in which one of our teachers gave us a homework and he said, "This is for next Thursday." And the whole class burst out laughing. "Next Thursday? Who knows what's next Thursday?" Wow.

I know. I read that you didn't even know... You never expected to live to 20. Absolutely not. You didn't expect to make it to 20, and here you are, 91. Yeah. Wow. Will you share the lesson in gratitude you learned from keeping death before your eyes and where you got that at all times? Well...

What I just described, the situation in which you have to live in the present moment because the bombs are firing left and right and in every other way your life is endangered, this living in the present moment, that is what gives you joy in life. As I read this sentence in a little book called The Rule of Saint Benedict, that is the rule according to which

the Benedictine monks lives for 1500 years now. And we read it only because we wanted to do something spiteful against our Nazi teachers. We knew they didn't want us to read that sort of thing. And that sentence, to have death at all times before your eyes, that struck me deeply. And then when the war was over,

It came back to my mind and I thought, but that's why we were so joyful, you know, because we had death before our eyes. We had to live in the present moment. We had a wonderful youth. I wouldn't want to trade it against anything with all the hardships.

And that, because I had read it in the Rule of St. Benedict, I thought, well, probably I should become a Benedictine monk. But I didn't like the idea at all, and I was running away from it for many years. Really? Yeah, yeah. So how did you finally become a Benedictine monk? Well...

First of all, I started studying anything, finding any alibi that I could find. So studying this and I have to finish that. Studied art and then I studied psychology and then I even went to the United States from Europe.

You don't go to the United States in order to become a monk. No, you don't. And then I told a friend, you know, if I had lived in the Middle Ages, I would have joined the Benedictines, but I want that original spirit. And I told this to a friend and he said, oh, that's funny.

I just read that they started a monastery in Elmira, New York, and it's supposed to be a reform of the Benedictine life, and they want to come back to the original fervor of the rule. And that was it. I went there, and I knew that was it. Love at first sight, and I would do it again. So how old were you when you first joined? I was 26. So what's the life of a Benedictine monk like?

Well, we do basically three activities, kinds of activities. The one is we have a choir, we pray in choir, and we pray seven times a day. Sometimes that's adjusted and so, but basically

at sunrise, at noon, at sunset, and in between at those hours. So we have what we call the hours of the day. We come together, we chant. Many people nowadays like this chant. Like the chanting, yes. They feel that. So we chant. We pray together, we chant. That is one of our activities. The other one is that we study

or meditate on scripture, but also on all sorts of other things. And the third activity is working with your hands. So everybody works with their hands part of the time, part of the day. It keeps you down to earth, as we say. That's typically Benedictine.

And my favorite work, now at my age there isn't much else I can do, is washing the dishes. With your hands. But that is also a wonderful way of stop, look, go. You feel the dishcloth, you feel the warm water and the cold rinsing water.

You are aware of it, you become aware of it. That is the joy. Most people don't like washing dishes, but it can be a real communication with life. That would even be an entrance to living a life of grateful living by asking yourself, "What do I hate to do?" Start with that.

And then find the opportunity in it, in that thing that up to now you hated it. Now you find, what opportunity does it give me?

I think so many people are feeling overwhelmed by their anger today. How can we transform that anger into something more positive? Anger, I actually have a rather positive view of anger. Do you? Anger gives you a lot of energy. So the anger in itself, that burst of energy, is something very positive.

So, bat yourself on the shoulder if you are alive enough. If you're going to let it motivate you to do something. But now comes the point, how should it motivate you? And it should motivate you by looking at the others as your equals. We belong together. But the anger itself, that burst of energy,

Let's use it. Let's use it positively. And positively means by remembering we belong together. This is our world. This is one world. I know. The faulty thinking is people believing that certain groups have a right to be here and others do not. That's where we've gone wrong. And you believe that one way toward a better world is to remember one of the most popular commands in the Bible, which is...

Fear not. Fear not. That is the main thing. Fear not. I know, and you said that it's in the Bible 365 times. One for every day of the year. I don't think that's an accident, right? I didn't count it, but I read it, so I believe it. It's very good for every day of the year. Fear not. Fear not.

That is the main thing, because it's the opposite of the power pyramid. Out of fear, violence, out of fear, greed, out of fear, rivalry, all these bad things. And out of trust in life comes fear.

cooperation, peace, sharing. That's what we need today. But we have to distinguish. And ultimately that love, that love that says yes. To belonging. We all belong together. And we live on a limited planet and we cannot have unlimited growth on a limited planet. So at 90 years old, at 91, what still surprises you? What still surprises me?

Everything, every day. Everything. I would have to list everything. That I can sit here and have this conversation with you, what a gift that is and what a surprise. And I never expected it. Wonderful. Very grateful for it. But everything is surprising. So I want to end with a passage from your forthcoming book, I Am Through You, So I.

You write, daily it becomes clearer to me. Gratitude is a celebration of love, just as love is the lived yes of joyful mutual belonging.

Wow.

I guess you got to be a Benedictine monk to come up with that. Thank you so much. Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for this opportunity. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast.

Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening. That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time.

This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. My name is Lily, and I've had hydrodinitis suprativa HS for years. I finally found some relief since taking Cosentix. Relief means I can show up more.

or worsen.

Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or cosentix.com. Ask your dermatologist about Cosentix.