Hey there. So today I want to share with you some musings on a powerful modulator of our health and well-being. And that is gratitude. And gratitude is, you know, something we think and talk a lot about around Thanksgiving time and the holidays. But it’s not, not just something to investigate and practice at the holidays. It is something all year round and every day of our lives because it has the potential to shape how we experience our lives and how we experience ourselves.
And it has a real biological impact on our health. So we are biologically wired to look for the negative, to scan our environment to look for threats, and to protect ourselves against them. This is a biological function. And so we more easily pick up on sadness and the places where we feel not enough or we feel a sense of lack, of danger, of anger, of frustration, right?
All of these experiences leave us feeling not so great inside. And so we really have to intentionally cultivate our connection to gratitude. And so when we are cultivating gratitude, we’re intentionally looking for the places in ourselves, in our bodies, and in our lives that are already good, already full, already working well. And this is quite a radical shift from focusing on what’s not working, to focusing on fixing the problem, noticing the problems, and fixing them.
So gratitude leads us into the practice of noticing and cultivating our appreciation for what is already full. What this means when we are thinking about our relationship to our bodies is that you know, you could have a really deep and challenging dissatisfaction with your appearance or a part of your appearance. You could have pain happening in your body. You could have a challenging health condition that you’re dealing with right now that is really getting you down.
Any of those three things can be just such a heavy burden and we can get really caught in the negativity around our bodies and it drags us down as a whole. And so the way to bring in gratitude practice is to alongside the difficulty that you’re experiencing, to intentionally focus on a part of your experience in your body that is working well, right?
So you might even start with your senses, right? So if your senses are working, if you’re a seeing person, it might be shifting your attention to the beauty that you can take in through your eyes in the natural world. The sun is about to set and out this window, I have a west-facing window. And I just so enjoy getting to watch the sun setting on a clear day, which is going to be today.
And that just brings me into such a heart-centered gratitude. Not to mention the ease in navigating the world that comes from having eyes that work. You also think about the amazingness of our hands, right? If you’ve got working hands, the dexterity that we’ve got with our fingers, the ability to connect with another human, the ability to sense our environment through the very sensitive fingertips, the ability to hold and grasp and lift and carry, like, oh my gosh.
So amazing how that improves your experience in a human body to have working hands. So, you know, if you’re struggling with negativity around your body or body image, I invite you to cultivate gratitude for more neutral parts of your body, like your senses, like your hands. Or maybe there’s another aspect of your body that is coming to mind that you feel grateful for or could cultivate gratitude for.
So one of the keys to cultivating a gratitude practice is to not leave it in the realm of the mind, right? So thinking about gratitude, even writing a list in a gratitude journal is a start, but it leaves it in the realm of the mind. And what we want to do for this to be something that shifts our life experience for the better, is to drop it down into our heart, right?
So when you’ve got something that you want to contemplate and meditate on and cultivate gratitude for, bring that piece of gratitude into your heart and feel, really feel with your heart and with your whole body how your life is better because of this aspect of yourself or this thing that you feel grateful for and spend, you know, at least a few breaths, half a minute, maybe a few minutes, really allowing your system to feel your gratitude.
And then, you know, I find the beautiful thing about cultivating a practice like this is that when we feel our gratitude for something, when we feel it, we are more, the door is more open to taking care of that thing, right? So if it’s your body, right? When we cultivate gratitude for our bodies, there’s more desire and willingness, and effort that goes into taking care of our bodies.
Same thing with people. If there’s a person who you feel grateful for in your life, grateful for their support, their presence, for whatever reason, when you allow your heart and your body to feel that gratitude for that person, it opens up the doorway to approach them, to engage with them, to treat them with even more care, right? The same thing is true for our physical possessions, our material possessions.
So here’s the biology part. This is not just woo-woo, right? This is actual biology in the way that it shifts, the way that it shifts our health and well-being first of all, it just feels good, right? It feels good in our hearts and in our bodies to spend time with the experience of gratitude. And there’s a hormonal shift that happens in our bodies when we feel gratitude.
So when we are in a more stressed state and feeling emotions like anxiety or fear or anger, frustration, or sadness, we have a cortisol response in our body, which is our main stress hormone. Right? And cortisol breaks down. It’s a hormone that breaks down in our body. And when we cultivate gratitude, we are shifting our hormonal response. So cortisol goes down and we have an increase in the hormone dhea.
And this hormone facilitates and amplifies a whole host of physiological functions having to do with health and well-being, right? So it supports aspects of our metabolism and our physiological functions. Right? So it’s a, it’s a hormone that promotes healing versus cortisol, which is a hormone that breaks our systems down. So just a little bit of biology for you, but don’t get bogged down in that. If that feels too heady, come back to your heart and, you know, try it out.
See how it feels to spend a few moments in your heart space cultivating gratitude for the people in your life, for the material possessions that you have, and especially if you’re struggling with body image, which is most people in our society at some point in their lives, gratitude for neutral parts of your body can. It has the potential to really shift your experience of living inside your own body.
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