Gratitude as a Mindset to Unburden Your Heart

Appreciating what you have

In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday in the (not so) United States, I wanted to share the power of Gratitude (Kritajna), not only as a practice, but as a general mindset.

As a practice, naming things that for which you are grateful helps you orient your mind toward the positive. Our brains have a natural negativity bias due to evolution and helping us survive, but for many of us, survival isn’t our daily goal. We want to thrive and enjoy being alive.

Having Gratitude as your default mindset takes practice, but will help you live a wholehearted life. I wrote about Gratitude last April, sharing my own journey with Gratitude and practical ways to apply it to your life. You can read that here (click the link):

Everyday Gratitude

Gratitude as a Mindset

Before diving in, I want to discuss the difference between orienting your mind toward Gratitude vs using it to bypass bad feelings. Cultivating an “Attitude of Gratitude” means learning to appreciate the people and things in your life. It goes against capitalist urges of “more, more, more,” and allows you to find peace with and appreciated for what you have.

Gratitude means appreciating the small things as well as the big. I am grateful for my cup of tea in the morning, and for the relationships I get to share with my loved ones. I am grateful for sunny Autumn days when I get to walk in the woods and have the leaves fall around me. I am grateful to live in a state where all people have rights over what they do with their body.

When you practice Gratitude by naming things for which you are grateful, you start to notice more things to be grateful for. Over time, this becomes how you see the world. When bad things happen, you can appreciate them too, for the lessons they teach. Feeling grief for a loss gives you the opportunity to appreciate the person who is gone and connect to your love for them. Grieving is hard and can swallow you whole, but how you relate to your grief is within your control.

Using Gratitude to bypass

Emotions, like grief, can be difficult to tolerate. In the past I have numbed myself with all sorts of things so as not to feel it. You can read about that here and here. It could be easy to use Gratitude to do that. Forcing yourself to be positive when you are having difficult feelings doesn’t make those feelings go away (unfortunately). It just suppresses them until they explode everywhere and you have to deal with them. I don’t recommend this tactic.

Bypassing difficult feelings through Gratitude is what is called Toxic Positivity. Having a positive attitude is great, but being human means we have all sorts of feelings. Denying bad feelings and only feeling good ones isn’t possible. We get to feel a rainbow of feelings, ranging from deeply pleasurable to deeply uncomfortable, and everything in between.

Feeling your feelings allows you to learn from them and release them. Bypassing them by forcing yourself to feel good won’t work. Using your mind to bypass your heart also won’t work long term (trust me, I’ve tried). It’s actually less effort to feel the emotion than it is to suppress it. Once you’ve felt your feeling, then you can turn toward Gratitude to help you recover.

Gratitude’s connection to Acceptance

This time of year can be challenging, as the holiday season starts up, and family interactions increase. Gathering family members together, with lots of different personalities, can bring up old childhood wounds and cause you (and others) to act out like you did when you were young. It’s important to feel your feelings, whatever they are, but not necessarily act on them.

If your parents/siblings/cousins, etc stress you out, notice the stories you are telling yourself about the situation. Can you accept these people for who they are and expect them to behave exactly as they always have?

I am grateful for finally understanding this concept, although it took me a long time to get there. People are who they are and they show you who they are all the time. For some reason, in my experience, we want them to be someone else and expect them to behave differently than they always have. When you can expect people to show up and be exactly who they are, that acceptance brings you peace.

It also gives you choice. If Uncle Joe gets drunk and ruins every holiday, you can decide not to serve alcohol. He can then decide if he comes or not. Either way, you get a peaceful holiday. Serving alcohol and asking Uncle Joe not to drink to excess is expecting him to behave in a way he never has. Control what you can control (only Uncle Joe can control Uncle Joe).

When you accept your people for who they are, it unburdens you from wishing/hoping/expecting them to be anyone else and therefore surprising/upsetting you. You can let go of unreasonable expectations and find acceptance of what is. Once you’ve reached acceptance, you have choice. You can choose how you interact with them or how you don’t. You can be grateful for the role they had/have in your life and decide to let them be or continue with things as they have always been.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to go along with everything, acceptance only means that you see things as they are. When you have clarity, you can be grateful for that clarity. You can be grateful for the lessons you learned and that you are no longer a victim to wishing things were otherwise.

May you enjoy your Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, or a regular ol’ Thursday. I am grateful for you.

My book comes out Friday!

So, I wrote a book…

I can’t believe this day is actually here! I compiled my series of essays on the Yamas and Niyamas, infused them with other stories, reflections, and more, and came up with Living Yoga: One Yoga Teacher’s Journey to Surrender. The digital version is available for pre-order now, and the paperback version will be available on Friday, November 29th! Thank you so much for all of the support you have given me and my writing, I am so excited to put this book into the world!

If you are local to Metrowest Massachusetts and want to join me for a book signing in mid-December, I would love for you to stop by! More information on that soon.