Your Life is Being Saved

By: Gregg Krech

Your life is being saved at this very moment. Each moment. Each breath. You may not notice it, yet ten, twenty, or thirty times a minute your life is saved by the life-giving air that you are breathing. Take a deep breath. Notice the air going deep into your lungs. Your body takes what it needs to survive. Once again, your life is saved. What is your attitude toward air? What have you done for air lately? Could you ever do enough to repay it for giving you life? What trouble have you caused the air that continually saves your life.

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But it isn’t only air that saved my life today. Water also deserves this recognition. Most of my body consists of water, which is constantly replenished by food and drink. And my heart keeps beating without rest. Even when I take a coffee break, my heart does not. And my lungs and every essential organ in my body work together in ways I don’t even understand so I can breath and speak and urinate. And then there’s heat. And sunlight.

I slept fairly well last night, even though I didn’t try to sleep well. When I try to sleep well I usually don’t sleep well at all. It seems more accurate, more realistic, to consider a good night’s sleep a gift. Thank you, water. Thank you, lungs. Thank you, sleep. Thank you, bed.

From: Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection. For more information on Naikan and Gregg Krech, see the Reading posted on November 28, 2025.

Gratitude and the Practice of Attention and Reflection

By: Gregg Krech

It is rare to meet a person whose life is full of gratitude. Even though the course of a single day may bring innumerable blessings to us, the few moments of genuine gratitude we experience are often overshadowed by our complaints, disappointments, sorrow, and frustration. We may not truly appreciate what we have until it is gone. And having lost the opportunity to be grateful, we simply find a new opportunity to be disappointed.

Gratitude requires attention and reflection. If we don’t pay attention, the countless and constant ways we are supported go unnoticed. If we don’t reflect, we fail to acquire the wisdom that comes with perspective.

From: Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection. Naikan, a structured method of self-reflection, was developed in Japan in the 1940’s by Ishin Yoshimoto, a devout Buddhist of the Pure Land Sect. Gregg Krech is an American practitioner of Naikan and the Executive Director of the TōDō Institute in Middlebury, Vermont, an education and retreat center.

Gratitude by Norman Fischer

All my life I have been contemplating a question of Heidegger’s that has always struck me as strangely profound: Why is there something, why not rather nothing?

Have you ever thought about that? We take our life, we take life, we take existence, for granted. We take it as a given, and then we complain that it isn't working out as we wanted it to. But why should we be here in the first place? Why should we exist at all? Why should anything exist at all? Really there's no reason for it. Why not nothing rather than something? Nothing would be simpler.

… It would appear that none [of the creation of the universe] of that had to happen. Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it, and our recent appearance in this universe, although connected absolutely to all of it, the necessary causal fruition of it all, is literally gratuitous.

It seems to me that gratitude then isn't so much an emotion or a feeling as an actual fact, maybe even the primary fact, of our being at all. If we are, in other words, we belong, radically belong, are possessed by, embraced by, all that is, and gratitude is literally what we are when we are most attuned to what we are, when we plunge deeply into our nature, and stop complaining.

…When we do [sitting meditation], zazen, as Dogen tells us, we are not examining ourselves or trying to make personal improvements. We are sitting within Buddha's heart, releasing ourselves to that aspect of ourselves that deeply belongs to the universe and is grateful for it.