The Power of Gratitude

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough.” —Melodie Beatty

As anyone familiar with positive psychology probably knows by now, research shows that a gratitude practice can change your brain, improve mood, lessen depression and improve mental and even physical health. In a piece by Harvard Health it states that “gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”

Link: Harvard Health: Giving thanks can make you happier

“Science shows we can train ourselves to experience thankfulness more often simply by paying attention to our lives differently. Attention is like a spotlight in the brain, as whatever we repeatedly bring attention to becomes stronger and brighter over time.” – Ellie Cobb, PhD

LIFEHACK: My favorite way to make sure that I take a few moments to immerse myself in gratitude each day (whether I keep up with my gratitude journal or not!) is to attach the practice of listing things I’m grateful for to my morning habit of teeth brushing. Why? Because I NEVER forget to brush my teeth. (Or “fangs” as we lovingly like to call them in our house.)  It has become a Pavlovian response: pick up toothbrush….start the gratitude list.

Sometimes I’m grateful for just the tiniest of things: a working pen by the phone when I need one.  The gorgeous scent of my face oil.  Coated dental floss that tastes like mint! Other times, it is more profound and includes my family, the earth, ancestors, LOVE as an energy. What we are grateful for does not seem to matter…it is the feelings that well up in us that does us some real benefit. The emotional, mental, physical SHIFT can be transformational!

To start your day with gratitude can have a lasting, positive effect on the rest of your day too. 🙂

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As I type this- I am so grateful that you have taken your precious, valuable time to read my blog. Thank you.

I may not be able to share my Thanksgiving plate with you, but here is a feast of another type:

This is a piece that I love by David Whyte.

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GRATITUDE by David Whyte

is not a passive response to something given to us,

gratitude is being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

Gratitude is not something that is shown after the event,

it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together

and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air,

that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living,

participating human being is privilege, that we are part of something, rather than nothing.

Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair,

we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue,

the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks.

To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him.

To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives,

to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones,

and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word,

is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us,

that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness.

We sit at the table part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort,

this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative means we are simply not paying attention.

© David Whyte
November Thoughts 2013