Why Gratitude Practice?
Today I’m posting this interlude in addition to my daily post. Now that we are twelve days into the sadhana as a group and personally, I thought I’d share a bit about how I came to the gratitude practice, what keeps me coming back to it, and what happens when we do it.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I had the good fortune to study abroad in Spain while I was at University. My roommate at my homestay was also from the US but from a completely different area of the country. In our “getting to know you process” in our shared room one night, she happened to mention this thing that her friend did each day. Her friend wrote down something good that happened each day in a notebook. My new roomie and budding friend said she was going to try to do the same during our semester. I LOVED this idea and said I would do it too. It wasn’t exactly a gratitude practice, but it was a forerunner or a gateway to the daily practice I do now.
During that semester, I did this practice just about every day. It was my first experience of actually doing a daily practice. Though I had already started yoga by this time, I was still a dabbler in the practice and had yet to go deep with it, so this kind of daily practice and mindset practice was new. And that’s what it was, a mindset practice. It took effort at the beginning, but once I started to train myself to look at good things in each day and not just hyper focus on the bad (as is the brain’s natural negative bias habit), I found it more and more easily. During those four or five months, I started retraining my brain without knowing that that was what I was doing. I still have those small notebooks filled with these daily good things, and the best part is that they are in Spanish. I read through them a few years back and there was only one day of that whole period where I could not reach into the day and find something good. It was during a family health crisis which I was disconnected from being an ocean away but still felt keenly. Every day for months and I only found one day without a good thing. That is amazing to me, still. It’s not that there wasn’t any bad, or challenging things during that time period, there was absolutely was, but this practice helped me to also find the good consistently for the first time in my life.
So a few benefits here, and why we practice. This is a very abbreviated list. Gratitude can,
• Improve sleep quality
• Aid in stress regulation
• Reduce anxiety and depression
• Create new pathways in the brain
• Interrupt negative thought loops
• Help us come into deeper communion with what we already have
• Bring us back to the present moment
• And so many other things
Giving and receiving gratitude releases serotonin and dopamine in the brain. These are commonly known has the feel good or happy hormones (really a neurotransmitter). These give us a boost and also perform integral functions within our body system. They interplay with things like learning, motivation, sleep, attention, mood, pain, movement, cognition and other physical processes in the body. And fun fact, they are the same things that get released when we use our phones and receive likes or a notification. The cool thing is that when we work with gratitude, the catalyst for their release comes from within us instead of outside of us. It happens naturally instead of from an artificial feedback loop created to addict us and control our behavior. We create these good feelings from within ourselves, for ourselves, and for all those we meet. We create a grounded stability from within.
Bad things will always be present and the brain will always have a negativity bias (at least in our lifetime). The gratitude practice is simply leveling the field a bit. It’s helping to interrupt thought patterns and negative loops. For most of us the negativity bias will always exist, I think of this like a little helper to soften that bias. While this practice has been co-opted by culture and made trite with #gratefulfor, there is real neuroscience (which I encourage you to look into) behind the benefits of the practice when it is done consistently and with intent. Social media and culture can make us needy and greedy, always encouraging us to reach outward for something. This practice, helps us reach inward and recognize what is already there and in our lives. It brings us back again and again to the present moment. It’s not a bypass, it is a direct connection with what is, and that is why I practice.
Experiment: If a gratitude practice is something you want to cultivate, consider feeling into a time when you received gratitude. Pick a specific memory or event when you received gratitude from someone else. What did that feel like to you in your body? What is at the center of this feeling? Can you bring it into your body now? From that place/energy/feeling/emotion, begin your practice.
Note: If gratitude practice is not for you, that is completely ok. Skip it and do a practice that feels supportive to you. If you want to try it, are new to it, and finding it challenging, perhaps offer yourself some compassion and the gift of time. It takes time to learn a practice you have never done before. As with yoga or a sport or a new language or skill, there is a learning curve. You are beginning to look at something you may have never looked at before. You are creating a new way of being in your world. Start small. There are no wrong answers. Try more than one practice. There is no result to get to, only what you are learning along the way.
