I am Grateful
I am Grateful
I’ve been sitting with the idea of Gratitude all month. Normally I see this topic examined in November, closer to Thanksgiving, perhaps with a thirty-day challenge attached to it. I love the idea of working on gratitude just before the peak holiday season. But it can also be a year-round practice.
Gratitude is the quality of being thankful. I read that gratitude is a feeling, which is different from being grateful, which is an action. In other words, gratitude is to feel thankful, gratefulness is to act with thankfulness. A quick Google search shows that people who practice gratitude:
✨Experience more positive emotions
✨Feel more alive
✨Sleep better
✨Express more compassion & kindness
✨Reduce their anxiety
✨Strengthen relationships
✨Improve mental health
✨Reduce their stress
This month I selected readings like Melodie Beattie’s daily reader “The Language of Letting Go”, poems from Mary Oliver like “Sometimes” and “ Gratitude” and “The Summer Day”, readings from "A Gift from the Sea" by Anne Morrow, or Merlin Sheldrake's “Entangled Life”. In each of these readings, I’ve looked at the importance of thankfulness in our individual lives, as well as for instructions for building a gratitude practice.
REFRAME YOUR MINDSET
Melodie Beattie is a specialist in the language of codependency. Codependents excessively tie their well-being to another person. Learning to detach from codependent behavior is hard. I know this took me a long time to work through in my early adulthood. The book “ The Language of Letting Go'' was instrumental in helping. Beattie's take on Gratitude has resonated with me for many years. She says, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow."
She works with the idea of reframing our experiences, shifting from negative thoughts to positive ones. Reframing is a powerful tool that helps us see things from multiple sides. It helps us create space between stimulus and response. In that space, we get the opportunity to be in choice, rather than being in reaction. Gratitude helps reframe problems by inserting a small wedge between a thought process (or feeling or sensation) and reaction, shifting us slightly away from an issue so that we can see it from a new perspective.
SMALL CHANGES CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE
Merlin Sheldrake wrote an amazing book called “Entangled Life,” about the rich, interesting, complicated world just under our feet. When I started gardening, I became fascinated with the soil I was digging in, the interconnected roots of plants. As I read "Entangled Life," I learned about the mycelial network that transports information and nutrients across the soil, even allowing trees to communicate. Merlin Sheldrake writes, “Within complex adaptive systems, small changes can bring about large effects that can only be observed in the system as a whole. Rarely can a neat arrow be plotted between cause and effect. Stimuli - which may be unremarkable gestures in themselves - swirl into often surprising responses."
As humans, we are complex adaptive beings. We adjust to the circumstances of our own needs, the demands of our lives, the responsibilities of our careers, the expectations of our culture, and the needs of our chosen communities. Offering gratitude is a small act that can bring about profound changes. It brings us into the present moment. It asks us to savor, absorb, experience, and feel good in our current moment.
GRATITUDE IS NOT A BYPASS
I don’t think a gratitude practice is about toxic positivity (good vibes only) or spiritual bypassing (glossing over negative behaviors because of a perceived Spiritual path). Life demands that we are accountable for our behavior, that we do the work we need to do, address the problems that we are ready to address, and grow in our life where we can. Yoga, the Yuj, the union of the body, emotions, and mind asks us to find our purpose and share it with the world. That work can’t be bypassed. Gratitude doesn’t allow us to pretend that life is perfect when it isn’t. It just simply asks us to stop, savor the things that are good, absorb ourselves in the moments that fill us up, count our blessings. Mary Oliver sums up the essential gratitude practice in her poem “Sometimes”:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay Attention
Be Astonished
Tell About it
A SPECIFIC GUIDE TO A GRATITUDE PRACTICE
Start your gratitude practice by sitting for a few moments. Observe your breath. Notice what’s going on in your mind. What thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise? Observe the inhale. Observe the exhale. Compare the length of the inhale to the length of the exhale. Notice where the breath moves in the body, either in the chest and/or abdomen. Notice if the breath feels smooth or punctuated. Notice the length of the pause between inhale and exhale.
After a few minutes of observing the breath, see if you can breathe evenly for a few minutes. Shift your breath to your belly. Notice the rise and fall of your abdomen. Count to 4 on your inhale, and count to 4 on your exhale. Breath in this way for a few minutes.
Come back to your natural breath. Bring yourself to the present moment. Be absorbed in, savor it, notice it, Observe the effects on your thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Quietly to yourself, first offer thanks to yourself, a small act of self-love and kindness towards your being. Quietly to yourself, offer thanks to someone you love. Then decide if you want to share those offerings with someone in your life.
