Redefining Gratitude: How to Embrace Joy & Giving Thanks in a Complex, Painful World

It’s November again.

Like every year, our feeds are about to be overrun with reductive posts on gratitude, even more than usual.

Before I dive into my latest thoughts on the role of gratitude in our modern, digital lives, let’s do a brief recap.

I’ve done 3 episodes on gratitude over the years, all tackling some aspect of it. How gratitude is sometimes weaponized as a source of guilt or shame, where the line is between gratitude and toxic positivity, and, of course, the real positive impact gratitude can have on our contentment as part of a mindfulness practice. You can catch up if you’d like:

Listen to or read Gratitude: Guilt’s Grisly Sibling.

Listen to or read What We’ve Gotten Wrong About Gratitude.

And listen to or read The Integration of Gratitude Using “Both/And” Mentality.

*want to listen to this blog instead? It’s on the podcast here*

But here’s the official 2023 addendum on the role of gratitude in our lives.

Gratitude can increase our levels of joy when practiced with mindfulness and knowledge of the nuance surrounding it. It can also have different meanings depending on where you come from (such as individualist cultures like the US or collectivist cultures like India) and your life experience.

For instance, a parent telling their child to finish their meal because there are starving children somewhere else can be toxic – a call for gratitude using shame and guilt. However, what if that parent is an immigrant parent to a first-generation child?

Is it still toxic? How do we acknowledge and hold the parent’s lived experience – of possibly seeing malnourished children growing up in an underdeveloped (or exploited) place, or experiencing malnourishment themselves? How do we witness their journey and difficult choice of creating a new experience for their children despite a lack of resources? The overwork and overwhelm and sacrifices so many make in order to ensure more opportunities for future generations?

There is no simple answer as to how to practice gratitude perfectly, and who gets to call for gratitude and how they choose to… Because those parents in this example have every right to hold their children accountable and aware of what they have and what it took to give them that. However, coercion lessens the impact of gratitude and can cause harmful miscommunications.

The more we speak on gratitude, the more complex it becomes. Folks from collectivist cultures, as mentioned in those previous episodes, might even have painful emotions attached to gratitude because to be thanked for something implies it was not expected in the first place.

So the best conclusion we can come to is this:

However a gratitude practice makes you feel is ‘normal’ and okay.

There are many benefits to gratitude, to acknowledging and witnessing and speaking what you have and who you are. AND. Most things in life are bittersweet. Nothing exists in a vacuum. It’s not wrong of you to have other emotions tied up with gratitude.

Your gratitude practice doesn’t have to look like the simple, radiant joy that Instagram says it should look like.

The best gratitude practice for you is YOUR version of it.

Be mindful about what you have, what you’ve been through, and what you haven’t had to go through (privilege). Create space for the folks around you who have different experiences, whether or not we could label them as “better off” or “worse off” than you.

You deserve joy even if others have less joy than you. You deserve joy even if others have more joy than you. And, finding joy through gratitude, mucky as it may be, is one of the well-being practices that can make us more compassionate and responsive people. More able to help solve the world’s problems and connect with one another.

Since gratitude is FOR us, we can practice it in whatever mucky way we want.

So what could a healthy gratitude practice look like for you?

First, the arguably most important AND SIMPLEST practice of gratitude starts with presence. For instance, when you wake up in the morning, do you pause to become present? Or do you immediately unlock your phone or begin thinking about the future? Is there a moment when you wake where you simply lay there, or sit, or brush your teeth in the silence and stillness of being alive?

Second, you don’t have to force it. In fact, a healing gratitude practice for you might come more naturally and easily if you refrain from holding yourself to certain standards (like minutes meditated, pages journaled, affirmations recited, etc).

Instead, you can allow gratitude to arise naturally (for me it might be when I see my dog stretch and I think about how lucky I am to have her and how she’s so cute). By leaving space, as opposed to checking off to-do’s for your practice, we can begin to notice when we already practice it in our lives. And, lucky for us, simply recognizing moments here and there opens us up to recognizing even more. To noticing how soft your sheets are. To noticing the warmth of your home, or the hug of your partner or friend.

Gratitude is natural. We need only make room for it in our busy lives.

What’s your current relationship with gratitude? How will you be engaging with gratitude as the holiday season approaches?

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