Being grateful — actually doing it, not just thinking about doing it for five seconds before moving on to criticize myself — does help me feel better. People who study brain chemistry have found that just thinking about what you might be grateful for increases dopamine, one of the feel-good chemicals in the brain (Kolb 2012). I’m all in favor of dopamine. Being thankful produces this increase naturally, so there’s no need to worry about the correct dosing or possible side effects. Just let her roll.
If you are who I think you are, you probably already practice gratitude already. Which is great! Lately I’ve gotten better at it, and I’d like to share with you how I’ve done that, so you can, too.
I’d like to intensify the effect and improve our practice of gratitude:
First, by shifting some feelings that had prevented me from really getting into the whole gratitude thing with gusto, and second, by suggesting an option for expanding your repertoire of skills.
Getting past your resistances
I realized that I had had some blocks around practicing gratitude. A big one is the word itself: “grateful”. It’s awesome in a band name, but it carries some connotations for me that made me resist it.
In my past I’d been told“You should be grateful for X,” which first of all, contains the word “should” and all its limitless train of crapola.
(Toss should. Right now. In the trash; the recyclers won’t take it.
When you hear should, be forewarned that the person saying it is about to dump a truckload of bullshit on you. To whatever extent you might be saying should to yourself, please cease and desist immediately. )
I’ve historically resisted grateful because of implication that I’ve gotten something that I don’t really deserve.
Of course that’s wrong. Nobody deserves anything good she gets dealt, or anything bad she gets dealt, either. I couldn’t possibly deserve the marvelous, generous people I know, much less the love and friendship they gift me with. Nobody could deserve such wealth.
Fortunately, I don’t have to deserve it. (Some religious traditions call this kind of gift “grace”).
I ought to give myself some credit for not completely alienating my friends, though. In the past, because of my own issues, I’ve been unable to return friendship. If you have a healthy relationship, you’re doing some work to maintain it. So this gift is not some charity on the part of The Universe.
I don’t truly believe that anybody deserves illness or being downsized, either. They’re just things that happen.
To develop a healthier handle on the concept of gratitude, I draw on literature. Specifically, The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Shug is telling Celie about God, whom she calls It, to get around the problem of gender, and posits that God wants to be please us as well as the other way around. Here Celie is asking for clarification:
You sayin God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. . . .
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it trying to please us back. . . . It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect. (Walker, 1982)
The present-day cultural conversation can call it gratitude, but I’d like to suggest more active terms. Ways of being grateful for something include, but are not limited to:
Noticing it;
Appreciating it;
Describing it: enumerating all the details that make a thing so awesome,
Rejoicing in it;
Celebrating it;
Taking a moment to breathe with it;
Praising it;
Blessing it;
Thanking it.
More advanced methods of gratitude for a thing include:
Indulging in it;
Reveling in it;
Sharing it;
Doing it;
Breathing it in;
Drinking it in;
Rolling in it.
It occurs to me just now that possibly the most advanced method of practicing gratitude for something might be teaching it.
Gratitude Exercise: The Blessing of the Coffee
Everyone has her own sacrament / ritual / indulgence/ fuel to start her day. Take a minute to appreciate the gift of another day — and the coffee and chocolate that often begin it. Here are some examples:
One warrior I know gets up half an hour before the rest of her household, to make coffee and to stare into space drinking it while she regains consciousness. Then she heads upstairs, she and her cats start waking the rest of the family, and she goes about her normal day of kicking ass and taking names.
A morning person in a family of nocturnal animals habitually gets up, takes a regular supermarket bag of coffee and an ordinary automatic coffee maker, and creates something that tastes like art. I’ve tasted it. She sits quietly on the couch, breathes, and watches the sun rise, while making notes for work or answering messages on her phone or laptop. One by one, her kids who are at home drift in from the sleepy reaches of the house, lean against her, and they slowly rise into consciousness together. I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in this sacrament myself.
When my brother designed websites working from home, he’d get to his computer at nine a.m. sharp. He would do this by falling into bed after midnight, setting his alarm for eight fifty-five, crawling to the kitchen in his work uniform of sweatpants and a tee shirt, and boiling water for a cup of green tea, which would be steeped, in his cup, in his hand, at the computer, at nine a.m. Somehow his capacious brain managed to immediately spring into action. (This is merely one of Kris’ superpowers).
One poet-hero of mine walks the outdoor spaces where she lives, celebrating and appreciating the world around her, through her photographs. She titles and shares these one-image meditations via Facebook. This is a beautiful gift to her community, a breath of calm as only she can see it, at the beginning of the day.
Here’s how my own practice of gratitude worked for me one day last week:
The blessing of the coffee
To the tree that produced this coffee, a Coffea arabica somewhere on a hill:
Thank you, magical tree! May your tribe increase!
May the shade you crave rise around you and shelter you. May it filter the sun’s rays to endow you with exactly what you need, at exactly the right time.
May the small birds sing in your branches. May you render their songs in your fruits.
May the farmers who tend you be gentle at harvest.
May their wives be contented.
May their children be healthy and happy.
May those who tend you receive a good price for your beans.
Blessings be upon the cat who sits in my lap as I write!
Her weight on my legs steadies me in my task.
Her purring gives voice to the steady mechanism of my invention.
Stroking the silkiness of her fur calms me.
At a pause in my task, when I pause to stroke her, the flow of her fur encourages my river of thought.
She teaches me to revel in the moment: Overcast morning, swaying branches, the few notes from my neighbor’s wind chimes.
I attune to their harmony.
A-HEM! Before I go on, let me hypothesize that silliness does nothing to harm one’s mood. Okay, go on.
. . . Blessings on the Irish cows who grazed the grass and gave the milk for the Kerrygold butter whipped into my bulletproof coffee. The gentle brogue of their mooing sweetens my drink.
Bless the coconut trees whose fruits were transmuted into the elixir that helps me think. I sense their fronds’ dance in the warm breeze. The pulse of its rhythm propels me.
Bless the clay that formed the cup that delivers my coffee, hemispherical, capacious. Its handle is the question mark of eternal wonder, leading me to explore the world in thought.
OK! Now you try it.
Be a good citizen: Do your part to help increase your brain’s dopamine and improve the well-being of everyone who comes in contact with you through your own enhanced mood.
You don’t ever have to show anyone what you write (although I’d love to see it).
I want you to begin this gratitude exercise [I’m still not crazy about the term gratitude] even more skeptically than I did, and to execute it with even more joie de vivre than I did. (Note to fellow skeptics: How do you want to refer to gratitude right now? As celebration? That’s good; it’s more energetic. Praise is also a nice, active way to think about being thankful. Choose to call it as something you can feel enthusiastic about doing).
Exercise your gratefulness thoroughly. Whatever it is you’re being thankful for, notice it and describe it in detail.
Once you’ve scratched notes on a piece of paper, you can’t use it for anything else, really, so keep going. The space for 30 scant kilobytes of information in the form of words costs you nothing, so you might as well use all you can, since it’s free.
The time is what you are really spending. Know that your own well-being is worth investing in whatever time you’ve got to invest.
Encourage yourself to invest the time to do this, exactly the way you would encourage somebody else you care about to do it.
I can’t be there to nag you right at the moment — I’m writing a blog post. So you’ll have to nag yourself.
Thank you.
Notice that, over ten minutes of doing this exercise, your gratitude begins to amplify. Good!
Give yourself extra points if:
- You discover new details about the thing you’re thankful for.
- You discover new items to be thankful for.
- You veer in the distinct direction of goofiness. This means you are energetically engaging with your practice of gratitude.
- *Extra* bonus points if you *do*, literally, laugh at yourself.
You will know you are finished with this rep of the exercise when you feel the urge to go on and write something else, or otherwise feel the energy to proceed to the rest of your day, you warrior-badass, you! Namaste.
For further reading:
Grout, P. (2014). E-Cubed: Nine More Energy Experiments That Prove Manifesting Magic and Miracles Is Your Full-Time Gig. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House Publishing.
Grout, P. (2013). E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House Publishing.
Korb, A. (2012, November 20). The grateful brain: the neuroscience of giving thanks [Weblog post]. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prefrontal-nudity/201211/the-grateful-brain
Walker, A. (1982). The Color Purple. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [It’s out in Kindle now, so read it again].
Think UP! 