By Beth Dayo
Most people know gratitude is good for them and very few admit how often it feels impossible. Especially when life is falling apart, or even just when faced with difficult relatives and stress of family gatherings. If you’re someone who has been disciplined enough to establish a gratitude practice or journal, you’ve probably felt it contrived at times.
And yet appreciation is a natural experience, innate to our being human. So what gives? What's in the way of that, and how does gratitude practice help or hinder our natural appreciation?
Gratitude is a felt experience, not a mental one. It’s a physical wave of emotion moving through the body. Our lifestyle promotes a habit of mind over body, and we have learned to override fatigue, push past discomfort, and ignore the subtle signals meant to guide us. This habit disconnects us from the body and leads to rigidity and density where there used to be space and flow.
Like a pier breaking the ocean’s waves, this fullness and tension interrupt the waves of sensation and we literally do not notice what we once did. We are desensitized which makes subtle gratitude nearly impossible. We can think about it, and name it, but the space for feeling it is all but lost in the hustle we live in.
The good news is that the pathway back to feeling is inside you. The blockages to gratitude and other sensation become the openings to it. When we soften into sensation, emotion, breath, and gravity, the wave returns. Gratitude reappears naturally, in small, spontaneous moments.
In the video below, I’ll show you a short practice you can use for ten minutes a day. With a little consistency, you will find gratitude showing up on its own again, you may even notice a subtle wave of it for the video itself.
With just a few days before our gratitude holiday, take some time to reconnect to your feeling, to return to your softness so you can feel the waves as they come through.
Happy Thanksgiving. From our Life in the Body to Yours!
Beth Dayo has spent 20 years helping others refine their sensitivity, reconnect with themself and revive their Life in the Body. In ways big and small, the movement, energy, sound and stillness practices she teaches will bring you back to life.
Visit lifeinthebody.com to learn more.
