Creating Gratitude
Hello World!
I cried a lot today. I cried when I wrote my dad a birthday message and I cried when one of my dear clients said she wanted to write a testimonial to let people know how much I had helped her. I cried because I felt so much gratitude. I’m so grateful to have developed this amazing relationship with my loving father and I’m so grateful to be a coach and to have amazing clients.
Why is it important to feel gratitude? Not because it makes you “better” or because if you don’t you are “bad”, but because, selfishly, it feels so freaking amazing to the person feeling it. I love feeling gratitude.
And it’s one of the easiest things to practice. I got the idea from a journal my best friend got me when I was depressed - everyday it had three lines to write three things I was grateful for. I have long since filled out those pages, but every night I still fall asleep thinking: “What are three things I am grateful for today?”
When I first started doing it, at my darkest point, it felt stupid and difficult. I had trouble even finding one thing to write. I think one of the first things I put might have been “I’m grateful I have this bed to crawl in and cry in”. My brain really resisted thinking grateful thoughts because it was really locked in its pattern of negative thinking. You guys, thinking grateful thoughts was HARD.
But I stuck with it and kept trying to find things.
“I’m grateful I have teeth”
“I’m grateful I have all my eyelashes”
and then “I’m grateful I can see”, “I’m grateful I can walk”
and now being grateful comes so easily. I mean, I have practiced thinking grateful thoughts and then creating gratitude from those thoughts that now that neural pathway in my brain is super strong - it gets used a lot!
Maybe this practice sounds cheesy or maybe it sounds difficult or maybe it sounds too simple, but it’s one of the best tools I have used. It’s the doing it daily that really drives it home, and it’s cool to see that not only is it easier now to think grateful thoughts, it has also increased by capacity to feel it. To the point of literally crying. Tomorrow when I see my puffy eyes, I know I will feel gratitude for having eyes!
What three things are you grateful for today?
If you don’t feel gratitude easily, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s another skill that you can get better at with practice. And there’s also nothing wrong with not practising gratitude if you don’t want to either. It’s just interesting to notice that you generate gratitude (or really, any emotion) from your thoughts, and so you can create any emotional experience for yourself that you want just by finding the thoughts that create it. If you would like to learn more about how to create gratitude or any emotions you choose, I would love to work with you!