A Quick Gratitude Shift
A helpful tool for re-orienting yourself when thankfulness seems hard.
Uta Opitz is joining us for another group energy bath via Zoom on Saturday, May 2nd at 10am. (If you missed the last one, it was powerful! I didn’t know what to expect, but it was amazing.) This is for paid members of the Pulling the Thread community, so the link is below the paywall at the end of the email. (Instead of signing up to register and then canceling your paid membership, ping me if you need to be comped—it will save me the transaction fees!)
It’s not too late to sign up for my retreat with Satya Doyle Byock next month at Omega: We’ll be gathering from May 25-29 in upstate New York to go deep on identity death, purpose birthing, and what wants to come through us (in the best way, I promise). Come join us!
When people talk about gratitude practices, I find myself gritting and grinding my teeth. There’s something about being told to say THANK YOU that brings me back to my childhood—I’ve never been someone who enjoys being told what to do. While I totally get that we need to teach our kids manners, there’s something shaming about enforcing thankfulness. After all, gratitude feels best—on the receiving end, at least—when it’s not commanded or from obligation, but is real, felt, and genuinely expressed. (Internally, performing a script doesn’t feel particularly good either.)
But when gratitude is real, or literally heartfelt, we know from study after study that it’s one of the most powerful practices in our toolkit. Sharing it with people in your life—like writing that letter to your second grade teacher, sending a quick text to a friend to tell them how much they mean to you, sending a note after a dinner party, trading jokes and appreciation with your morning barista—meaningfully impact not only your day, but can echo out like a skipped stone. Feelings are contagious—and appreciation is one that is worth spreading.
But more than being something that feels good, or brightens days, or makes you feel seen, gratitude is an attitude. Gratitude is how you ground and orient yourself not only to your life, but to the universe as a whole. How do you accept, with thanks, whatever comes your way? Do you hold every experience—whether it’s what you would choose, or its absolute opposite—as a gift? Not to be a Pollyanna, or toxically positive, but more like Job: God gives, God takes. And regardless, thank you.
I’ve been thinking about gratitude—and that phrase from Job, in particular—because I spent the weekend buried in Rachel Goldberg Polin’s book, When We See You Again. It’s as devastating and beautiful as you would expect, and it’s also right-sizing. (I can’t talk about the book until it publishes (April 21), but please support Hersh’s family and pre-order a copy.) It asks of the biggest questions in life: Can one stay in relationship with gratitude despite getting alternately pummeled and blessed by life?
That’s a big and hard question and I think it’s overwhelming to contemplate on the daily. And it can feel difficult to mount a practice that doesn’t feel treacly and maybe a little lame in the vastness of this request. And so here is a small shift, one that I learned from a Carissa Schumacher transmission last year, that reminds me of what I value, and reorients me into a place of gratitude. Here we go: I swap I have to, for I get to. It’s that simple. I repeat this to myself on the mat during early morning workout sessions (hello WLDCAT) while doing an interminable number of leg lifts, or more than 60 seconds of a plank (or to be honest, 20). I repeat this to myself when I’m battling rush hour traffic to deliver one of my kids to school. I repeat this as I’m getting on the phone to have a hard conversation. I repeat this every time I’m feeling overwhelmed by podcast prep or book notes or just life being life. I get to. It’s an honor, even when it hurts.