“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” – John F. Kennedy
“It’s a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.” – Germany Kent
“Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.” – John Ortberg
I’m an advocate for living a life of gratitude. I truly believe gratitude creates the foundation of a joyful life. When we can truly appreciate that which is beautiful and good in our lives, it will multiply. And starting from a place of gratitude offers a strong springboard for creating more of what we want and appreciate in our lives.
No-one can create from a space of negativity, pessimism, or complacency. But a space of gratitude offers deep joy, deep awareness of what’s here, and the inspiration to think creatively about what’s possible. It doesn’t mean we ignore the pain and frustration; it simply helps us to put the pain into perspective.
Recently I read an article by Jessica Stillman, on three unexpected habits of exceptionally grateful people where she shares that there is a difference between merely giving thanks for the obvious things in your life, or occasionally reflecting on what you are grateful for, versus practicing deep gratitude regularly. When you live from a place of deep gratitude, you literally rewire your brain to start thinking in a different way. This can be deeply transformational, because you show up differently in your life as a result of it.
I can attest to the truth of this. I have run this experiment in my own life. I used to live with a lot of fear and anxiety, and I used to focus on what was wrong, or missing, or dysfunctional, or problematic. This affected the way I showed up in my world.
After four years of maintaining a daily gratitude practice – and I will add also receiving some deep coaching around my fears, beliefs, frustrations, projections etc. – I’ve noticed a significant shift in my way of thinking. I pay more attention to things than I used to. I appreciate the nuances of the mundane. I choose to stay present more often. I slow down and savour, and I’m deeply grateful even for the painful, difficult, and challenging experiences in my life, because I understand now that they happen FOR me. They help me become the person I know I can be, and they help me stretch those parts of myself that need stretching to grow into that future version of myself.
Stillman shares that those who practice deep gratitude, cultivate three habits that help them go deeper with their gratitude practice.
Firstly, they often think of death. This practice was first adopted by the Stoics as a way to be more present and to appreciate the impermanence of everything. Contemplating your own death and those of the ones you love, reminds you that your time here on earth is finite and almost urges you to stay more present in your relationships, because every interaction could be your very last interaction with someone.
What I have found to be true for me, is living as if I’m on the verge of death, encourages me to take action NOW on the things that matter most, instead of putting them off, because I might never get to do them otherwise. It encourages me to savour the moments I get with loved ones. It reminds me to slow down, pay attention, notice, give thanks, enjoy, soak up, because it might be my last memory of that person. It reminds me to not sweat the small stuff and to be truly grateful to simply be alive; to truly savour this gift of life and to not waste it. The prospect of death makes life far more precious and pulls us out of autopilot.
The second thing that those who practice deep gratitude do, ties in with living as if they are on the verge of death, and that is that they savour the small things. They intentionally choose to slow down, notice, pay more attention, make a point of enjoying, savouring, sitting with, basking in. Stillman describes it by saying “they notice the pancakes” and what she means by that is that they notice the small details.
In our busy rushed lives, we often rush from one thing to the next, without paying attention to any of it. If you were tasked with remembering the details of a particular scene, how well willy you be able to relay it? Or would you struggle to describe the outfit the other person was wearing, or the temperature in the room, or the colour of the walls…? Often the reason why you would struggle to relay the details of an event, is because you were so stuck in your own head, that you weren’t really paying attention to the details of what was going on around you. You were simply making your way through that event, without a moment’s pause to notice what was happening, or even to pay attention to what you were feeling in that moment.
When I moved to Canada, I spent a lot of time in that first year, thinking about the colour of my mom-in-law’s eyes, or the number of frown lines on my father’s forehead, or the lines on my mother’s fingers… I tried to remember, because I was afraid that I might forget… And that also happens when someone we love dies. We try to remember their features and we can’t. We catch ourselves remembering small details. The smell of them. Or how they would giggle when they felt nervous, or their favourite tea, or food, nervous ticks they may have had, or things they used to say…
When you live from a place of deep gratitude, you choose to pay attention to the details in your life as they happen. You notice the smell, the taste, the texture of things, and you pay attention to your own feelings in that moment. You don’t just gobble up the pancakes. You savour every bite. You notice how the syrup drips off them, or how fluffy they feel under your fingers. You eat those pancakes as if they will be the last pancakes you will ever eat.
I recall something Michael Singer said in his book, The Untethered Soul. He said we don’t need a larger variety of experiences, rather we need more depth of experience. We need to delve deeper into the experiences that life is already presenting us with. It’s not the number of experiences that matter. It is how deeply present you are to your experiences as you are having them.
Lastly, people who practice deep gratitude are not merely grateful for the good things in their lives. They are also deeply grateful for challenges, frustrations, and obstacles along the way, because they recognise and appreciate that there are gifts hidden in any experience.
Shirzad Chamine tells us that in any situation we may receive one of three possible gifts. First, there is the gift of knowledge or insight. If you learn something valuable from an experience, then you have received a gift form having had that experience.
Often changing old behaviours or taking on new challenges require that we unlearn, learn, and relearn to keep moving forward. When we resist learning, we set ourselves up to keep repeating that experience until we are willing to learn the lesson we are meant to learn. Life is funny that way, it will keep bringing you similar experiences until you face that which you know the experience is calling you to face.
Second, there is the gift of growth. Any challenging experience can be an opportunity to grow and stretch into the person you want to become. Any difficult experience represents a learning opportunity that is fundamentally part of your spiritual curriculum here on earth.
There are certain lessons you are here to learn that help you grow and evolve as a person. Sometimes when you are faced with a difficult experience or decision, the questions to ask include, What do I need to grow in myself here? How can I use this experience for my own growth and learning? How is this experience a lesson from the universe? How might this be exactly what I need, even if it isn’t what I want right now?
Lastly, challenging experiences often offer us the gift of inspiration, to survive, to not give up, or to take action so no-one else has to go through a similar experience. Any difficult experience can serve as a springboard for where we would like to go. It could help us to think bigger than we have before, or it could inspire us to want to give those we love more.
Stillman postulates that the really tough-minded grateful person thanks the boyfriend who dumped them, the homeless person who asked for change, the boss who laid them off, the friend who betrayed them, the partner who cheated, the bully who used to beat them up…. Finding a reason to be thankful for our most difficult transitions “can help us turn disaster into a stepping stone.” It can inspire us to prove the doubters in our lives wrong, or to not let someone else have control over your life anymore, or to start a movement towards positive social change.
This is what is meant with post-traumatic growth. It’s turning a heartbreaking, difficult, harrowing experience into something that helps you step up your game, finally put those boundaries in place, break the cycle of abuse, call out those who are perpetuating the system that serves no-one etc. Many people derive their deepest sense of purpose or meaning from those experiences that tested them to the point of breaking.
This process can’t be forced or rushed – pushing people to express positive emotions they don’t feel is “toxic positivity”. This is not what I’m talking about here. Every person should be allowed the grace of their own experience. It’s only when you are willing to lean into your shadow self and do the deep inner work that will get you to the other side, that you are able to look back on challenges and see how they turned you into the person you are today. You know that you have outgrown that horrible experience, when you no longer recognise the person who went through that experience as you, because YOU are a different person now.
So, as we approach the festive season, my invitation is to dig deep for those gifts of gratitude. I want to challenge you to not just recite the standard things that most people would be grateful for – even though those things are important too – but to also reach deeper to delve for the nuances in your life that maybe didn’t feel like gifts at the time, but that you now in retrospect can see for the gifts they actually were.
And if you currently find yourself in the middle of a really challenging situation, and you are not ready to see the gifts in the situation, that’s ok too. Give yourself permission to feel what you feel, AND consciously make the decision to notice the good things in your life too. I’m guessing there are still good things, even amidst a really difficult situation. In fact, see it as an opportunity to really stretch that gratitude muscle. Find the ONE thing today that still grounds you, that still makes you say thank you as you crawl into bed and fall asleep after a particularly hard day. That is how you rewire your brain for deep gratitude. That’s how you cultivate your inner appreciator and learn to live aligned with life instead of in resistance to it.
References:
- Breytenbach, C. (2020). Cultivating your Appreciator. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/cultivating_your_appreciator/
- Breytenbach, C. (2020). The value of Stoic Principles in times of crisis. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/value_of_stoic_principles_in_times_of_crisis/
- Breytenbach, C. (2020). Contemplating death. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/contemplating_death/
- Breytenbach, C. (2021). It starts with gratitude. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/it_starts_with_gratitude/
- Singer, M. A. (2007). The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself. Oakland, California: New Harbinger.
- Stillman, J. (2021). 3 Unexpected habits of exceptionally grateful people. Inc. Available online at: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/thanksgiving-gratitude-berkeley-greater-good-science-center.html