Calling Up Gratitude
It’s easy to feel grateful when things are going well. Thanks and appreciation pours from our lips with a kind of ease and brightness. But during tougher times, feeling grateful can be hard indeed. It’s easy to focus on what’s not good, what’s not going well, and on disappointments and regrets. And for many of our friends and patients, these last couple of years have offered up heaping servings of bad news, loss, boredom, and feelings of isolation and worry. Feeling grateful is difficult to access, it may feel remote or even irrelevant.
It’s during tough times that looking for and articulating gratitude is most important. Like any muscle, when you use your gratitude muscle, it grows and shifts your perspective, even when challenges abound. Here’s an invitation to take a few minutes today, or this week, or if you are gathering to celebrate the holiday, to say aloud the things you are grateful for. Take a moment, take a breath, and list out the blessings, large and small.
In my own gratitude practice, which I roll into a daily time of quiet and meditation, I often say the same things over and again: I am grateful for my family, for my health, for my home, for work that sustains me. But then I pull in something from my day. Today I added,I am thankful for the auburn leaves covering my yard, I am grateful for the sparkling pomegranate seeds I had with breakfast, I am thankful for these…
