When Gratitude is a Stretch, Try This Instead
I’ve been practicing gratitude for a long time and strongly believe in acknowledging how lucky we are to have everything that we do. But, it has occured to me during this wild time of COVID-19 (a time that has brought huge loss of lives, businesses, freedom, special celebrations, and certainty), in some situations it just doesn’t feel right to encourage someone to express gratitude. Sometimes it even feels downright offensive, despite our hope of brightening their mood.
“Good vibes only” has become a token phrase plastered on t-shirts, mugs, and posters over recent years. And while I agree with keeping a positive outlook on life, I think mantras like this breed a culture that not only discourages people from feeling their heavier emotions, but also sets them up to feel shame. Why? Because they’re supposed to always be feeling those good vibes. And the last thing that anyone needs is a heavy whomp of shame piled on top of the weight of their anxiety, grief, or doubt.
Our western culture—obsessed with positive-thinking—puts people at risk of engaging in spiritual bypassing, which is using spiritual ideas to avoid dealing with unresolved “negative feelings.” Instead, people are encouraged to sidestep this difficult emotional work by suggesting they “keep on the sunny side of life.” According to Karol Kruman, author of Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, this is dangerous thinking. She writes, “What you may not realize is that when negative feelings are not resolved as they occur, these feelings remain very much alive in your physical energy field (body) and these feelings affect each day of our life … These feelings have a personality, and these feelings that have been buried alive will, of necessity, have to manifest themselves sooner or later.”
So, we are better off pulling up our bootstraps now and start exploring the feelings we’d rather ignore. By starting now, we may also reduce the risk that unresolved feelings will resurface down the road (maybe more intensely, or at an even more inconvenient time than the present).
Rumi’s got it figured out:
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably…”
So, if denying the presence of troubling feelings, or trying to brush them over with forced gratefulness when you’re feeling anything but grateful, is not the best approach (but you also don’t want to get swallowed up by them), What can you do? Is there something instead that can bring more light and positive energy into otherwise tough experiences?
I recently discovered an answer to these questions in Julia Cameron’s 12-week The Artist’s Way program, which is described as “a course in discovering and recovering your creative self.” Famous writers like Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love credit their success to this program, and as someone who has a love of writing but not a lot of discipline to actually sit down and write, I decided that getting laid off from my job nine weeks ago gave me the perfect space to dive into it.
In her book, Cameron says that her grandmother saw life as a “series of small miracles” and shares, “My Grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: successful or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”
The act of paying attention, she goes on to explain, is “always healing,” and it is also “an act of connection” that reminds us that we are not alone.
For me, paying attention is getting outside, getting up close, and admiring the intricacies of nature that are so often overlooked. Getting down on my hands and knees to smell delicious hyacinths; gazing into the tightly packed center of daisies; tracing my fingertips over the incredible network of veins running through every size and shape of leaf I can find; closing my eyes to hear the sweet song of birds. I truly love this!
Throughout life you will likely find yourself in situations where you may not (rightly so) be ready/able/wanting to jump into gratitude—an act typically performed with the hope of creating positive feelings. But what I have discovered is that paying attention is also incredibly helpful in bringing up those feelings we want: love, awe, fascination, wonder, optimism, praise. As I navigated through a heavy season of anxiety and grief over these past few months, I found that paying attention was the perfect solution. It allowed me to care for myself by being gentle, by meeting myself exactly where I was (without judgement), and without forcing myself to feel grateful—when that felt like an unnatural stretch. At the same time, it brought the right amount of sweetness into my days to keep me from perpetually focusing on pain. Simply put, it has been healing.
You see, you can simultaneously acknowledge fear and still experience pleasure when you smell the first white and purple lilacs of the year. You can know that you are grieving and still feel awe when cherry blossoms rain down like tissue drops outside your front door. You can admit being heartbroken and still feel comfort when your neighbor’s cat rubs against your legs with its plush fur and purrs happily. You can feel regret and still experience reverence when you discover the first shoots of springs bulbs pushing through the cold hard dirt, bringing you promises of hope.
Paying attention makes room for everything.
Everything is welcome.
On the other hand, making a list of what you’re grateful for when you feel overwhelmed with fear, grief, heartbreak or regret, may not be quite as simple a process.
What I like about paying attention is that it encourages interaction with the outside world. Of course, your version could have you sitting on your couch—feeling blown-away about a technology that allows you to FaceTime Aunt Sally, or has you joining an online music festival with people from around the world during a quarantine. But what allows me to hold onto the belief that everything is going to be OK in this world, is nature. It’s tempting to isolate ourselves and shut out the world when we are feeling down. But after a while this can lead to becoming stuck in our own suffering. What I like about the intention to pay attention is the way it encourages us to leave home, connect with the world and give strangers a smile, which usually helps us feel less alone. We are reminded that we are part of something bigger and very beautiful.
Even when we think we are not capable of gratitude, I have found that it’s not long before words like this start running through my mind when out for a walk. “How gorgeous is this thing?! Such crazy patterns on the petals. I wish I could have a dress in this color. And the fragrance! Better than anything I could buy. I feel grateful to live in a world where such things … Dammit! I just said I was grateful!”
Trust me, gratitude will eventually sneak itself in. Please welcome it!
Another benefit of paying attention is that it grounds us firmly in the present moment like meditation so that we are not consumed by regret about the past or anxiety about the future. The Artist’s Way author Cameron writes, “In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right. Yesterday the marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that’s all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.”
Of course, if you are someone who can always see the positive regardless of how many cruel curveballs you’ve been thrown, then I salute you!
By all means KEEP IT UP! But if you are not one of these people, I want to prevent you from beating yourself up and give you another idea to try.
If you’ve lost your job, your boyfriend, or your dog and you are desperate for something to brighten your spirit but gratitude is initially too big a leap, or whether you’re just looking to add another layer of richness to your human experience, I invite you to pay attention even a littttttle bit more. I promise that you’re going to feel lighter, maybe even a little more joyful or optimistic, and when you least expect it, even grateful.
With light and love, Sarah xo
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“Touching the first tight bud
in late winter
before the blossoms of Spring…
these are the small gaps
where magic falls
Into a world of unseen subtlety.
Be subtle, know subtle, feel subtle
And never miss the life
That moves beneath your feet.” - Sez Kristiansen
“Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.” - David Whyte
“We carry many old beliefs about pain. We believe we can't handle it. We believe if we open that door the flood of grief will never stop. We believe it will overwhelm us. These are preverbal beliefs born of early experiences where we were left to cry alone and the bigness of the pain in such a tiny, soft body felt as if it would kill us. The beliefs were true then - big pain in a small, lonely body is too much to handle and the only choice is to dissociate and shut down - but it's not true now. You can handle your pain. I promise you can. I've seen clients as shut down as possible open to their pain and what happens in the thawing out is the most glorious sight you can imagine. They don't die. They come alive. They don't freeze in a fight-or-flight response; they open completely like a flower in spring. Oh, how we fear grief. But there is really nothing to fear. When my sons cry so hard they lose their breath and choke and I can see them trying to get away from their pain I hold them close and whisper in their ear, ‘It's okay to feel sad. It's only energy. It will pass through you.’ We only need to move toward to it with our breath and our attention, to carve out time and space to invite the grief to surface, and it will come. Many people move at a steady, serious pace and then wonder why they have trouble connecting to their grief, or can only do so during a therapy session. Sadness is a vulnerable, shy animal. It's a child that isn't going to tell you about her pain while you're frantically getting ready for work in the morning. The pain particles require that we slow down in order to hear their sobs and catch their tears. They require a slowness of living that is almost lost in today's breakneck pace. But when you do stop and make time and open to another rhythm, you can enter the grief place. And then particles thaw out. And then they shimmer with light. And we realize then, when we've cried a small river of wordless tears, when we wake up the next morning and feel a ray of sun in the soul after the storm, when there's a lightness to our step, that the grief place is also the joy place. We know then that grief and joy live in the same chamber of the heart. We know it is not something to be feared, but that it is the pathway to the peace we all seek.” - Sheryl Paul