Healing? Start with Gratitude.
Saying thank you for the small moments
Happy Monday, dear Reader,
Spooky season is about to be retired and gratitude season is nigh. I am looking forward to giving out candy to the children in my neighborhood as well as surprising my college-aged students with my costume (it’s a basic one).
Yes, I’ll take a picture and share. Duh.
But I am also looking forward to November. The month means it’s time to slow down, reflect, and be grateful for the life you have, the one you didn’t have (thank goodness) and what you will one day hope to have.
If there has ever been a year in my life to practice gratitude, it’s this one. That’s why I’m starting a small series in the newsletter about gratitude — how I’ve come to it, how it’s been redefined, and what it actually means.
I am also starting a project which I am really excited about too. That detail is in this week’s missive below.
During the heart of my healing process, I had become accustomed to sitting outside and crying. I figured that the then Spring weather was too nice to waist on things like lounging and, if I had to feel like second day, warmed-up oatmeal might as well do it with the sun in my face.
During the months of March and April this year, the grass was not watered by the rain but by my suffering in the most dramatic of fashions.
But, as much as I cried and screamed at the Universe those months, I also began something called a gratitude meditation. I can’t recall how I came to the Ritual app and thus to Alex Elle, writer, gratitude practitioner, and all around bad-ass, but there I was breathing in and out, counting backwards from four, learning about the box breath, and letting micro-moments of gratitude bubble up.
It would take another couple of weeks before I learned what the hell a micro-moment of gratitude was and to find that, in a typical day, between sobs and pretending not to cry, there was so much to be grateful for.
And it all began with the breath.
The studies on gratitude all agree, it’s a pretty good thing — lowers stress, anxiety, and increases the positives in one’s life. There’s an opportunity to tint the world with a different lens, not quite rose but not dark doom and gloom either.
This tinting is what can put a pep in your step IF you learn how to be grateful.
According to Psychology Today, the reasons that gratitude is difficult is because
People have stopped paying attention to what they have, meaning we’re not as present as we need to be
Gratitude reminds us of what we didn’t have in the past and that can make us sad.
And that makes gratitude a double-edged sword. While being grateful for people and things and moments, our brains can turn that feeling on its head, making us focus on the lack. A reminder of a time we didn’t have the thing that we are grateful for. Or, we rush from one thing to another and forget to say thank you for the basic things.
Gratitude made me anxious. I should be grateful for a job, a roof over my head, food in the fridge, relatively healthy family members. However, I was anything but.
Would I ever be happy again? How? When? As usual I had more questions than answers. And, as I had learned in my healing journey, I needed to find the answers.
So, here comes the definition of micro-moments of gratitude — it’s the small, seemingly insignificant moments of life that, when you slow down long enough, are a snap shot of the life you wanted all along.
The way gravel sounds when you run.
How my mother’s hardy laugh fills a room.
How our family pet has a personality ten times the size of her body
How I get so wonderfully lost in teaching a lesson I forget to think about my pain
How beautiful my hometown’s skyline is at night, it almost makes you hopeful
The intoxicating smell of earth after rain.
How the sunlight marks a moment and turns it into a memory?
What if we could be grateful for deeper things, the basic level things, the truest things we could think of.? What if we did that everyday? Where would we find gratitude? Where would gratitude find us?
After months of gratitude meditations, it was time to take it beyond ritual and into out action. In other words, extend the hygge of gratitude.
How does one make a good thing better? Or how does one take a someone passive practice like meditating on gratitude to make it more active?
After reading, “I Want to Thank You: How a Year of Gratitude Can Bring Joy and Meaning in a Disconnected World”, I had an idea.
Gina Hamadey, the writer, did this experiment around COVID time. She would write a thank you note for each day of the year — 365 notes.
That’s a lot of notes. And postage. And writing.
Throughout her thank you year, several things happened. Conversations that needed to happen, happened. Friends she hadn’t spoken to in years caught up. Several times, the thank you note arrived at a time that the person needed a lift-me-up moment.
I needed a lift-me-up moment. Maybe this is what I needed to do?
When Alex Elle says to breathe, you inhale from your stomach on a four count. You hold it for four. You exhale for four. This is called the box breath.
In meditation, it’s not about clearing the thoughts but observing them before moving to the present. For me the breath is mechanism for being in the present. It’s the reminder to be here, right now, concentrating on breath.
Inhale. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Exhale. 1. 2. 3. 4.
And that is all you have to concentrate on. For 10 minutes, that is all you have to do. The to-do list can wait. The grading can too. Email? Get in line. It’s all not as important as you are in this moment. In this breath. In the next one.
All of it can wait. It does.
What are you grateful for? Breathing. Waiting. Being here, right now, alleviated from the heaviness of day-to-day life. My healing. The space to cry. The space not to cry. The progress. The days where I feel I can conquer the world. The days where I can’t get out of bed. The moments when I can pretend everything is okay. The safe spaces I can retreat to. How I am finding self love in this process. How I am finding that it’s more than just me, in this moment, right now.
I am grateful for all this and so much more.
Confession: I over did it on the buying of the thank you cards. Gina Hamadey did too when she first started her thank you year. She went for the nice, lux cards, the kind you buy at a stationary store that sells paper too nice for a grocery list.
Another confession: I’m not doing a thank you year. I’m not sure I know 365 people. But I do know 30 people am grateful for.
So, here’s the plan: Write a thank you note everyday in November. Make it like NaNoWriMo but for gratitude. That way there are 30 cards — mailed, handed, or otherwise delivered to 30 people.
Thirty people, 30 opportunities to show gratitude, 30 breaths of air, 30 ways to highlight the best of people. I wonder what this journey will have in store? I wonder how much deeper my gratitude will grow?
I wonder if I’ll ever stop asking questions? I wonder if these 30 days are the answer to them?