Hi,
It's Giles.
This is a short piece for you to take time out with and reflect on.
A light-hearted story that points to something that's true for all of us.
As such,
There's no effort required while you're listening.
Only something to realise.
Something that can lead to profound,
Permanent change.
So get comfortable,
Relax,
And listen quietly for insight.
Gratitude for the hard of journaling.
Gratitude is there when our mind isn't creating problems.
Dr Amy Johnson I started working with a client recently who had me in stitches when they let rip with their views on gratitude.
Off work from the NHS with anxiety,
Stress and burnout,
They'd tried lots of things and none had worked.
Including written reflection.
So don't go suggesting I start a gratitude journal or anything,
Because I'll just burn it.
This tickled me because it reflected my own experience when,
During a particularly low period in my life,
I took up journaling in order to try and feel better.
And failed spectacularly.
Sure,
At first it helped me to focus on the things I had rather than the things I felt were missing.
But I slowly came to see it as a chore.
Evidence of yet another thing I'd failed at when I literally couldn't think of anything to be grateful for.
After several months of striving for an attitude of gratitude,
All I could muster was something more akin to a defective perspective.
So I gave up.
And yet,
It's important,
Isn't it,
Gratitude?
Gratitude is a key feature of every religious and spiritual text going,
And has been shown to be associated with higher levels of subjective well-being,
Lower levels of stress and depression,
Better sleep and more satisfying relationships.
So what was I doing wrong?
There's a clue in one dictionary definition of the word which says it's a warm and friendly feeling in response to a favour or favours received.
Now,
While I have no problem with the first half of that definition,
Gratitude is,
After all,
A feeling state,
The second can easily trip us up.
Because it reinforces the widely held misunderstanding that our feelings come from situations,
People or things.
As soon as we mistakenly attribute warm and friendly feelings to anything outside of us I am grateful for,
We're not only buying into this illusion,
But we're also subconsciously implying that the absence of those things is cause for feelings of lack.
It's a big dollar,
That not enough dollar.
In a classic homo sapiens move,
We've taken a built-in,
Always available,
Lovely state of being,
And gone and turned it into a doing.
But you can't reverse engineer gratitude,
It's just part of who and what we are.
We experience warm and friendly feelings for free every time we're not thinking about all the things that are wrong with our lives.
Four sessions later and my client was back at work and seeing all of life through a completely different lens.
By working together to better understand the nature of thought,
We'd got some serious distance from the mind's jabbering and it had largely given up the ghost,
To their surprise,
Leaving them feeling calm,
Clear-headed and confident.
Hesitantly,
I revisited the notion of gratitude and it was their turn to laugh.
Oh,
I totally get it now.
I'm so much more present that I'm just naturally noticing a whole load of stuff to be grateful for.
Well,
Everything really.
Gratitude is not something you do,
It's our default.
A feeling that we reconnect to every time we're fully present to life.
Which,
It turns out,
Is pretty amazing,
Just as it is.
You can write that down if you like.
With love,
Giles And as with all my talks,
A deeper appreciation for what I'm pointing to can be had with repeated listens.
You'll hear something different next time.
