Gratitude

Gratitude.  It is a word that rolls off the tongue and sounds as sweet as it feels.  There are so many situations where gratitude comes easily.  It’s the warm feeling in the center of your chest when a child hugs you or a parent tells you how proud they are of you.  It’s sparked by the selfless act of a friend who comes through for you when you’re at wits end.  It’s there when that sweet Labradoodle jumps straight up in the air, tail wagging whenever you walk in the door (even though she knocked over the garbage and ate an entire bag of bagels off the counter).

Finding gratitude in any given experience can also be tricky. You may have to do some soul searching to feel grateful for being stuck in traffic for an extra 45 minutes during your morning commute.  Rather than inspiring gratitude, having to live through the trials of taking your teenage daughter to seven different stores to find the perfect dress for the dance could test the patience of Job himself.  The more heart wrenching and painful experiences in life make gratitude seem as far off as Pluto and as difficult to find.    

Ironically, gratitude is one of the most useful tools to move through these difficult experiences.  Full disclosure, this is not a scientific dissertation of any kind and I have no hard research to back this up.  Except that, it’s true.  Finding the gift in any experience or situation, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is key to allowing yourself to find satisfaction in it.  By that I mean, allowing it to be complete.  This does not imply, by any stretch of the imagination, that you are satisfied with a traumatic experience.  But rather that you have examined the experience, made a conscious choice to find some gift in the experience, and made yet another conscious choice to allow that experience some type of closure (and yourself some freedom from it).  By allowing completion, you make space for the next experience.  Without this notion of gratitude, you can remain “stuck” in experiences that maintain the pain and suffering of the story rather than receiving its gifts and moving on. 

Gratitude is a vital part of a life well-lived.  Because, if you always get what you want, when you want it and lack gratitude, chances are there’s very little satisfaction in what you have.  In other words, when you receive without gratitude, again there is no closure or completion.  And so, you want more and more and more.  There never seems to be enough of what you’re getting.  Whether you recognize it as such, you are “stuck”.  You might be asking, “Is getting everything I want a bad thing?”  And my question back would be “If you’re getting everything you want, why wouldn’t you be grateful for it?”

I like to think about gratitude as a muscle.  Like one of those core muscles that we yoga teachers are always cueing students to engage.  That’s because, akin to having a strong core, when you have developed a strong practice of gratitude, everything else you do flows with less effort and more ease.  You don’t really think about engaging your core muscles, you just move around in the world.  Same principle with gratitude, with practice it just becomes a natural and easy part of everyday life. 

I learn more about the beauty of gratitude every day and I am never disappointed by its gifts.   Embracing gratitude has changed my worldview and how I perceive people and situations around me.  I will say that there are times when I have to dig deep for it but gratitude is always with me and the more I give it the easier it is to find.

Reach out for more on the healing power of gratitude at appleblossomunlimited@gmail.com P