An Introduction to Gratitude Practices and How They Can Be Designed to Change Your Life
I have received many questions over the years about gratitude practices so I want to take this opportunity to explain what they are and how you can make them work for you. Let me start by sharing the story of a client.
To protect the client’s identity, I will refer to her as Mila. When I first started working with Mila she explained that she started every morning with a gratitude practice to help her stay in a more positive mindset throughout the day. Essentially, she would sit on the side of her bed in the morning and recite the things she was grateful for: her health, home, daughters, career, a painting she admired, etc.
When I asked her how effective this was in setting her mood for the day, she told me it was about a 3 out of 10, with 1 being a low impact, and 10 being a very high impact. She told me she hoped the practice would be more effective and when I asked her why she thought it wasn’t working for her the way she expected, she said something I thought was very insightful: “I just feel like I’m reciting words because I’m supposed to”. In my opinion, Mila’s instincts were bang on, and a clear explanation as to why her gratitude practice was not working for her.
A gratitude practice in its simplest form is about being mindful of the gifts that life has blessed you with. This might be the presence of a loved one in your life, the walls that make up your home, or the air that gives you life. These practices can take many forms including journaling, making collages of happy moments, or simply connecting with a sense of gratitude as Mila was trying to do (my preferred method). Gratitude practices are intended to bring about a mindset shift; to move from greeting the day with, for example, a sense of scarcity or fear or indifference, to starting your day with a sense of abundance, excitement, and vigor. Mindset shifts take time and practice, and ultimately they can lead to transformational change – a profound change in the way you see yourself and the world around you.
In order to engender personal change, mindset practices (like gratitude) require several components:
1. Understanding. An understanding of what is not working for you, or what you want to change, or what you want more of. Common examples are:
I want to stop feeling guilty
I want to get more joy out of life
I want to be fearless
2. Somatic awareness. By this I mean that you are aware of what you are feeling in your body when you experience an unwanted sensation, and when you experience a more positive sensation. Common examples are:
I feel a heaviness in my shoulders
I feel light and like I want to dance
I feel a churning in my stomach
3. Embodied or somatic connection. This refers to a generally positive sensation in your body (that you are aware of) which accompanies a generally positive emotion or thought. Common examples are:
A lightness and sensation of joy
A warm glow in your chest and a deep feeling of love (often spiritual)
A tingling energy and a certainty that you can achieve what you want to achieve
In simple terms, understanding is not enough. To be effective, mindset practices require that you not only understand what is not working for you (and what you want to change), but also somatic awareness and embodied connection. Mila’s gratitude practice failed to deliver for her because her understanding was limited to the intellectual.
This begs the question: how do we develop somatic awareness and embodied connection?
In Mila’s case, I worked with her through many sessions slowly learning to cultivate this awareness in real time and enriching her sense of embodied connection. Over time, Mila’s somatic knowing became truly impressive and she came to consider her gratitude practice as a wonderful gift, or as she stated “a ten out of ten!”. Now, when she sat on the edge of her bed in the morning, she felt an embodied and powerful sense of “her blessings”. Not only did she learn to start her day in this powerful mindset, but she was able to practice gratitude throughout her day whenever she “needed a lift” or whenever she felt “overwhelmed”.
Obviously, I am not able to replicate my work with Mila in a blog post. However, I will offer several insights that I believe will help you, dear reader, as you begin to explore a gratitude practice – or any kind of mindset work.
#1 Mindfulness
Begin with mindfulness. This is about developing the practice of noticing what emotion you are experiencing, what you are thinking, and the corresponding feeling in your body. The body-mind separation is an artificial one. As a neuroscientist friend of mine once suggested, you cannot have an emotion or a thought without a body. Your body is like an early warning system if something is off. So, pay attention to what you experience in your body when you have a strong negative or positive emotion. For instance, if I’m anxious about something I will always feel it in my abdomen. Ironically, when I am excited or happy about something I feel it there too! The more you intentionally notice your body, the easier it will become. Eventually, the awareness of your body opens doors of understanding that may surprise you and lead to new insights about yourself and your relationship with the world. This in turn, can often lead to new opportunities for growth.
A caution here: when we experience unpleasant thoughts or emotions we often suppress them or run from them. Unfortunately, they don’t really disappear when we do this – they are in a sense stored in our mind-body and can in chronic cases lead to health problems. A key part of developing somatic awareness is to notice, not suppress, these thoughts or emotions, but to do so without personal judgment. And this leads to point number two.
#2 Self-compassion
Be kind to yourself and recognize that we all have internal stories that we tell ourselves, and some of them do not serve us. As you experiment with mindset work, remind yourself that you are human, and that you are growing. Being self-critical doesn’t serve you in this process. What does serve you is to be mindfully aware and allow yourself to acknowledge whatever you find – even things that you currently do not like about yourself. However, I strongly encourage you to do this with the knowledge that you are doing something about it. As living things, we are in a continual process of change, and this means we have the innate ability to transform and grow. From my experience, many people don’t ever reach the level of self-awareness needed for change. If you are brave enough to be honest with yourself, you have already achieved more than most. That is something to be proud of!
#3 Practice and Repetition
Mindset work involves both understanding (e.g. intellectually you recognize that you experience chronic guilt), as well as embodied knowing. Understanding can sometimes occur as an ‘aha’ moment where you realize something about yourself or how you perceive the world that was formerly a blind spot. Somatic knowing, on the other hand, typically takes repetition, and it is typically achieved through embodied practices like gratitude.
Your gratitude practice, like all forms of embodied practices, is built on repetition and consistency. Think of it like learning a new sport, where you are strengthening your muscles to support the physical activity of the sport, honing your reflexes, and at the same time building your confidence and capacity. All this takes time, practice, and repetition. The good news is that the more you do this kind of work the easier it will be to replicate. In addition, you will likely notice a more profound impact on your life.
#4 The Embodied Moment
One of the things I believe is least understood about mindset work, is that it is not an all or nothing game. Sometimes it will work for you, and sometimes it won’t – and that’s normal, and that’s ok.
What I encourage my clients to do is to continue the practice until they have an ‘embodied moment’. That means, they feel an embodied sense of gratitude (for example) even if it only lasts a second. It is very important to recognize that this is still a win. You’ve demonstrated to yourself that you can do it, and that means you have the ability to replicate it again in the future. Sometimes a sense of gratitude and well-being will stay with you for many minutes, or many moments throughout the day, or even throughout the whole day. And sometimes you won’t feel it at all. If the latter happens, let it go, move on, and try again tomorrow!
Ultimately, for your gratitude practice to really have a positive impact in your life, you will need to consistently experience embodied moments. The more you are able to experience embodied moments, the easier it will be for you to generate them consistently. This in turn, leads us to my final piece of advice.
#5 Intentionally Generating Embodied Moments
One of the most beautiful and empowering things that you can discover on your journey of personal growth is that you do not need to be a passive recipient of your emotions. You have the ability to be intentional about how you want to feel, and where you choose to bring your attention and intention. A gratitude practice is an intention to be present in the moment, and to find beauty in your body, life, surroundings and relationships. By bringing your attention to the now, you choose to forego the modern habit of projecting perpetually into the future or chronically worshipping the past. When you do this, you realize that only the present moment truly exists and you get to design what you want to be and how you want to feel in that moment. With practice and repetition, your ability to design your moments, and ultimately your life, grows much stronger. And from my perspective, the central purpose of mindset work (like gratitude practices) is about developing the capacity to design your life.
I hope you have found this helpful. If you have additional questions do not hesitate to reach out. Until next time, I wish you a happy, engaged and successful week!
