Everyday Gratitude

Feeling thankful for ordinary things

My “Gratitude Journey” was not initially of my own doing. It was November, maybe 2018 or 2019. I was the Yoga Director at a health club and The Boss told me to create a program celebrating or practicing gratitude for the month of November. I created #30DaysofGratitude. Everyday I would post a quote related to gratitude to our Facebook page. The quotes were from all sorts of people, like Brene Brown, Zig Ziglar, Melody Beattie and more.

I would read the quotes aloud when teaching my daily yoga classes.Simply reading the quotes every day started to shift how I felt. I looked forward to reading them and people looked forward to hearing them. Reading about gratitude put me in a better mood with a more open heart. 

I felt a bit of a let down when the 30 days were coming to an end, but I happened upon a Facebook Group called The Gratitude Circle (it has since closed and was recreated as The Gratitude Garden). They were starting a 40 day challenge that December, where every day you would post one thing for which you were grateful. I signed up and stuck with it the entire 40 days.

During those 40 days, gratitude became a part of my daily living. Not only did I look forward to posting my daily gratitudes and reading other people’s, but my whole worldview shifted toward gratitude. I began looking for and thinking about things in my life that I was grateful for. 

It wasn’t only uplifting to write my own gratitudes, but seeing my newsfeed filled with other people’s gratitudes was incredible. There’s so much happening in the world today with will bring you down in an instant. Listen to the news for 5 minutes and you’ll see what I mean. When you are reading “I am grateful for” over and over, it is a completely different experience.

What you focus on grows.

Have you ever noticed that when you are buying a new car, all you see on the road are that brand of car? Or when you want to move, suddenly there are For Sale signs everywhere? I know when I wanted to have kids, suddenly pregnant people were everywhere. Were there actually more of these things/people around? No, but by bringing my attention to them increased my ability to see them. The same works with gratitude.

When you complain all day long, you tend to focus on the negative. You notice what’s bothering you, how that person annoyed you, how your coffee was too hot/too cold, whatever it may be. It chronically brings your mood down.

When you focus on gratitude, your vision expands. When you are consistently grateful for even small things in your life, it turns your mind toward optimism and your heart opens.

This is not to say that bad things don’t happen and get you down. I fully believe in feeling ALL of your feelings and not squelching them. However, when you focus on gratitude, it can be easier to get through those painful moments. 

Gratitude in everyday life

Recently after swimming at my local pool, I was in the shower and heard 2 little girls with their mom a few stalls over. One of the girls proclaimed “this is the best water ever!” I smiled to myself, realizing that I had been moaning in my head about the lack of water pressure. This child (maybe 4 or 5 judging by her little voice) was so excited just to be in the hot water.

Her joy was contagious. Although she didn’t use those words, she was so excited and grateful to be in the warm water. She didn’t care about the water pressure, being in the shower was “the best ever!” It was something so simple and common, yet it brought her great joy.

Practicing gratitude can bring a child’s delight into your daily life, even if you’re a jaded adult. When you find enchantment in the mundane, it will completely change your mindset and world view.

How do you practice Gratitude?

There are many ways to practice gratitude, and no way is better than any other. You just need to see what works best for you.

One way is to write down something that you are grateful for in a daily journal. Start with “I am grateful for” and see what comes. You can just leave it at that, or elaborate on why you are grateful.

You can write multiple items as bullet points, or work it into a poem. What matters most is that the feeling of gratitude is coming from your heart, not your head. 

A simple shift

As someone who has spent a lifetime suppressing my feelings and overriding them with thinking, I know what it’s like to get stuck in your head and bypass feeling things. It can be easy to think of things you are grateful for and go through the motions without actually feeling.

Instead, allow yourself to pause and feel how truly grateful you are, for the hot water that makes your tea such a comfort, or for the person who plows your driveway when it snows. Maybe you are grateful for the person who grows the cacao beans that support your dark chocolate indulgence (my dark chocolate indulgence…). 

It’s so easy to live life on autopilot, just going through the motions and not taking in how wonderful things are. And some days are not wonderful, they truly suck, but there is always something to be grateful for. 

• Even though the traffic made you late to work, you can be grateful for the time to yourself listening to your favorite podcast.

• Even though your boss yelled at you, you can be grateful that you have a job and that you were able to speak up for yourself.

• Even though it’s rainy today, you can be grateful that you are warm and dry inside listening to the plinky sound of the drops falling on the roof.

And so on.

While I don’t still post in the Facebook group, I do have a regular gratitude practice. I find it uplifts my mood, and when I am going through a rough time, it’s something I can fall back on.

I have had many hard times when I let go of practicing gratitude and instead chose to wallow for a while. Sometimes you just need to wallow. But when I was done, I went back to gratitude and it helped me feel better.

What are you grateful for today? Leave a comment, let’s share gratitude with each other!