“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgiving, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.” - Proverb
The promise of mindfulness is a fuller, more satisfying life – one where we can navigate life’s joys and sorrows with attention and a sense of peace. But, other than sitting on our meditation cushions as often as we can and practicing, what can we do off the cushion, during our “everyday” life?
According to research done at the University of Pennsylvania, having a sense of gratitude is the number one personality trait associated with an overall sense of well-being. Not health. Not success. Not even being generally positive. Gratitude is the key.
Think about it… practicing gratitude, finding moments/acts/people to feel grateful for requires directing your attention to the good as opposed to looking for problems and issues. We can even find things to be grateful for in the midst of sorrow and pain. This summer I was struck with Covid just as my grown sons came for a visit. I spent the entire time holed up in a small cabin, isolating. In the midst of that sorrow and sickness, I was still able to practice. I noticed the way the sun hit the trees outside my covid cabin, I identified birds, I read a whole series of novels. Even as I experienced deep sadness about not being able to be with my children, I was able to remind myself and truly be with the fact that grief is love with nowhere to go – I am blessed to have such wonderful sons and I am so very grateful for how much I love them and how much they love me. Everything is fodder for gratitude.
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning offers us all a powerful lesson in how we can work with our responses to life’s challenges. Frankl famously survived being imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War 2. As a psychologist, he was interested in what set apart those who survived in the camps versus those who did not. He said,
“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
At its essence, gratitude is about our relationship to the world.
“But”, you say to yourself… “my life isn’t so great right now”. Or… “I am not generally ‘wired’ to notice the positive.” The good news? You can strengthen your positive response with the following exercise.
Bookending is one of the best ways to practice gratitude: Every morning, I write down what Martin Seligman, founder of Positive Psychology calls Three Blessings. I jot down what is moving me just then. Importantly, I also include why I am grateful. This second step has been really important to my development and my ability to lean into what I know to be necessary for me and my life at this time. Before going to bed, I take the time to think about (and sometimes write down) what happened during the day that makes me grateful. I bookend my day with gratitude.
Each time, I feel a literal lightening of my heart and an opening to the beauty in my life.
Interestingly, the practice doesn’t stay on the page or even during those specific times that I am actively writing down my blessings. I find that I notice more and more to be grateful for throughout my days as my practice deepens. And this makes sense. After all, when we do something that creates a feeling of well-being, we are (neurologically speaking) providing our brains with a little hit of dopamine, that neurotransmitter that is responsible in part for creating an overall sense of happiness. Increasing your dopamine levels has all sorts of positive impacts – it strengthens memory, attention, learning, health and more. And, as humans, we are generally attracted to things that give us pleasure. If gratitude is one of the clearest ways to instill well-being, we can be sure that it is a very effective way to increase dopamine.
To help you experience deep gratitude and learn practices to foster even more gratitude, we are introducing a new workshop: Gratitude: learn to fall in love with your life, November 19th from 12-4 pm.
In this workshop, we will work with active, guided meditations, movement, journaling and creating to explore our own sense of gratitude. We will make our own My Three Blessings journals with personalized covers, prompts and other goodness so that you will walk away with a beautiful journal for your own gratitude practice (or if you feel moved, it can be a lovely gift to someone in your life!).