gratitude for the gratitude averse…

Welcome to Tuesdays with Chel.

Each week Chel Micheline of gingerblue dot com will offer her perspectives on our Bliss Habits. Please enjoy the wisdom and clarity she offers.

I will admit, I am one of those people that struggle a little with gratitude. Not basic gratitude (as in “wow, thanks for this surprise gift!” “thanks for letting me merge into this lane of traffic!” “thanks for holding the door open for me!” “thanks for making me dinner!”) but the deeper stuff- gratitude for the basics of life. It was forced on me bit when I was younger, so as I’ve gotten older, I felt that it was something I was obligated to feel as opposed to something that came up on its own, naturally.

For years, I kept reading over and over and over again how essential gratitude was for well-being. But no matter how many gratitude journals I diligently kept over the years, no matter how long my gratitude lists became, it wasn’t *real*. I could easily make you a list of 1,000 things I was grateful for, but not really feel anything inside me about any of them. In fact, I struggled with it so much that I began a daily gratitude project almost a year ago to try and figure it all out.

It’s been a great experience, and it’s ongoing. But I wanted to share with you some of the things I’ve learned over the last few months.

The first is that you DON’T need to be grateful for everything in your life, all the time. Not everyone feels gratitude for their house, or running water, or their family, or food on their plate every single day (or much at all, let’s be honest). It’s OKAY not to always feel gratitude for those things, so let it go.

Just because you’re not including these things in your gratitude lists and practices doesn’t mean you’re UNGRATEFUL for them and, therefore, you don’t deserve them in the first place. It just means you’re being honest about the process. There *isn’t* an opposite to gratitude, no matter what anyone has told you. It doesn’t make you a jerk if you’re not grateful for things. That gratitude will come later, I promise.

If you get stuck on trying to find gratitude where it’s not showing up, you’ll be struggling with it forever. And, as I’ve said before, a laundry list of gratitudes has absolutely nothing on one moment of genuine gratitude that is felt deep in the heart.

The second thing I’ve learned is that gratitude is *not* easy. For some of us, gratitude isn’t an obvious emotion, like surprise, joy, anger, confusion, etc.  In fact, I have found that gratitude almost always “tags along” with larger emotions, like joy, awe, surprise, and relief.

Gratitude is not something that often bubbles up to the surface on its own. In fact, I would go out on a limb and say that for many people, like myself, it has to be cultivated over time.

So for those, like me, who are “gratitude averse”, I have a simple exercise to help.

I want you to think of one thing in your regular life that you like. This should be something that you have regular access to, or regularly experience. It doesn’t have to be your family or the fact you have a roof over your head or any of those “typical” things. Instead I want it to be whatever you truly like, no matter what it is.

Maybe it’s the first cup of coffee in the morning, the moment when you can finally get to bed at night, that feeling on Friday afternoons when work is done and you realize the weekend is stretching in front of you, a purring cat curled in your lap, holding hands with your partner, a TV show, the sunset, painting, doing yoga, listening to music really loud in your car, a favorite movie or YouTube video, a game on your iPhone, whatever.

Now think about how *doing* that thing, or if it’s an object or experience, think about yourself *experiencing* that thing. What does it sound like? Feel like? Smell like? Taste like? Look like? Just try and explore your senses in relation to that thing.

How does it make you feel? Does it make you feel relaxed or nourished or powerful or smart or engaged or tuned in or energized? How does your body and mind feel when you are engaged with or at this thing that you like?

Think about *why* this thing makes you happy. Is it a treat? Does it make you smile? Does it feel warm and comforting? Does it make you laugh?

One last time- just connect this thing with a positive emotion it brings up in you. FEEL that emotion as you think about your “thing”. It may take a little while, and maybe a few different memories need to be explored, but it’s okay to work on it for a little while, ponder why you TRULY like this thing, what it means to you.

When you feel that positive connection… well, there’s your gratitude. It may not present itself as gratitude, it’s probably showing up as joy or laughter or amusement or comfort or relief. If you are anything like me, you may have to ask yourself where the gratitude *is*.

But if you are feeling a deeply positive emotion related to this thing that you like, I can assure you, gratitude is mixed in with that. I would actually argue that what you are feeling- that cocktail of positive emotions and memories and reactions- is BETTER than gratitude. It’s bigger. It’s setting off your neurons in your brain and its making new connections between them. And the more you make those new connections, and the more you USE those new connections, the more they’ll start doing their thing on their own, WITHOUT you needing to recall something you like and do a little emotional exploration of it. It’s like building muscle in the body- you slowly build muscle over time, and you become stronger.

So if you are struggling with gratitude like I always have, if you’re from a background where gratitude was demanded of you and you are resistant to it, if you just not *feeling* gratitude as much as you’d like to be, try cultivating gratitude through emotions that you CAN easily access. Every day, just think of something you like- whether it’s deep and meaningful or silly and simple – and explore the emotions that come up.

Bottom line- gratitude is NOT about the “what”, it’s about the “why”.