Gratitude
Gratitude
Practicing being grateful generates happiness and joy and so is an obvious habit of happy people.
Even in the most difficult of times there are things to be grateful for: the sun, the rain, a smile, a cup of tea. If we practice noticing all the little things in life we are grateful for, it can be amazing to discover how many things there are in our lives that we can be grateful for.
Generating joy helps to resource us to face the challenges in life with resilience, so that we don’t get ground down with life’s challenges.
As human beings we are evolved to be sensitive to anything that is threatening. Our ancestors who responded to threats quickly and ruminated on how to respond to threats, were the ones that survived.
In order to survive it is not important to be sensitive to the good things in life, that we are grateful for and which make us feel happy. Therefore, the human mind has evolved with a negativity bias, which is why we often find ourselves thinking about the things that make us feel anxious or angry. We are much less likely to find ourselves thinking about the things that make us feel happy.
Our ancestors were only aware of threats in their local environment. In this day and age, with 24/7 news and media, we are aware about the worst threats from all around the world. This increases the impact of the negativity bias on our minds and in our lives.
As meditation teacher and neuroscientist Rick Hanson often says, negative experiences stick in the mind like a velcro fastener, whereas positive experiences slide off the mind like a fried egg slides off a well oiled teflon frying pan.
So focussing on the things that we are grateful for is a balancing force to the negativity bias. To get the benefit from a positive experience we need to spend some time focussing on it and bathing in the experience.
Therefore, when we recall things that we feel grateful for and experience positive emotions such as joy and happiness, we spend some time imagining breathing them into our hearts and breathing these emotions out to bathe the whole of our body and mind.
When we practice gratitude, remember that there is no right or wrong way to feel. We might experience happiness and joy, but we might also experience resistance to gratitude and joy. For example, we might feel guilty about feeling happy or joyful, or worry that if we allow ourselves to feel happy or joyful that we will feel a loss when the joy and happiness subsides.
So whatever you notice, simply be curious.