GRATITUDE
How I found it, What it means to me and why it’s so very important.
Gratitude is a word you hear a lot these days. What are you grateful for today? Write down three things you are grateful for. Its so important to have gratitude. It can really change your life, but how do you find it?
I was told to do these things over and over. And I tried over and over. Mostly I’d sit there staring at a page for three to five minutes and then go do something else. Or if I did write something I’d get frustrated that it was rubbish or nothing new. In my mind the whole gratitude thing was a bit airy-fairy for me. Basically I didn’t get it. I knew I was grateful for my wife, family, house, job, food…etc. Do I also need to be constantly grateful for the birds, bugs and flowers too? (I was also way too angry to be grateful about anything. And trying to be grateful made me angry.) But I felt like these things were a given. If you weren’t grateful for all that stuff you must be in a bad place. And that’s where I left it.
Until I unknowingly started on a journey. An inward journey of self discovery. I didn’t know it but I was about to go head first, full steam ahead into the airy-fairy! Life was starting to throw reasons at me to look inwards.
As it turns out social media algorithms are actually useful. As I discovered people who were sharing their stories or sharing their teachings the more social media threw at me. Some were awesome, some not so much but with my limited experience I chose to follow or continued to follow those who resonated with me.
I suppose you could say this all started when, at age thirty three I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, I was in a lot of pain and could not do my job properly. I was given drugs that worked a treat. The problem was that I could only take those drugs for a maximum of two weeks at a time or my insides would start to dissolve (not the official medical wording but that’s the gist of it). So began my journey, researching other ways to make my body feel better. I gradually began to change my diet, way of thinking, lifestyle and life.
From there I discovered more things that interested me and the changes kept coming, the lifestyle changes were very minor but kept coming. My outlook started to change, my mind was opening. I took off my shoes, I stopped caring as much about what other people thought of me. I stopped caring as much about what I thought of other people. Feelings were returning to me in abundance. Love was returning. Love for myself, love for others and all creatures. Gratitude was starting to creep in.
I then found myself examining myself physically and mentally. I started seeing a new counsellor who guided me to figure out some of the things I was doing that was making my situation worse. And then all of a sudden I’m the guy choosing to go on my own to a four hour sound healing journey with one hundred other people. I’m learning to meditate, I’m messing around with breathwork techniques, I’m diving down rabbit holes of discovery with my training and my body. I go on a quest to ‘fix’ my back pain by discovering more about my mind and body and creating new daily habits.
As time goes by and social media works its magic I’m listening to podcasts and I’m actually maintaining concentration on what’s being said for the first time ever. I stumble across Ram Dass and his teachings and it opens my mind. Even if I’m too tired to hear what is being said I find the sound of his voice calming and relaxing. I dive deeper into breathwork which shows me my inner child and I do so much crying, so much emotional release. But it makes me feel stuck in the past. I can’t move on, I keep reliving the past over and over in my head and it drives me down a dark path. I try to meditate on it, and after stumbling across Dr Joe Dispenza, I find a path to letting go of the past and embracing the potential of the future.
Now with my new appreciation and understanding of the past I unwittingly start re-evaluating it all. Suddenly I’m grateful for boarding school. I’m grateful for my years of chronic back pain. I’m grateful for my parents splitting up. I’m grateful for the guy who punched me in the face outside the pub. I’m grateful for my panic disorder and depression. I’m grateful for all the sporting wins and losses. I’m grateful for everyone who has every helped me, stuck by me and loved me. I’m grateful for all the good and bad decisions (not proud, grateful). Shame starts to loosen its grip on me. All these things have taught me so much, shaped me into the man that I am today and the man I am on my way to becoming. I have had time to think over all these life events and see how it has steered me in the different directions I’ve gone in my life.
So what am I grateful for today? All of it. The big things, the little things, the good things and the bad. I take no enjoyment in the memory of past bad events but I start to learn more about them. It’s hard to see the good when you are in the shit because sometimes the shit keeps coming. But if you focus on the good that’s been and the good that will come, the shit will not seem so shit while you are enduring it. And one day you’ll look back at the shit with some level of gratitude. Not for the shit itself but for the outcome, the learning or any number of things that may have been a plus because of that situation.
Obviously there are things in this life that I have not experienced and hopefully never will. I can not speak of those things but what I have come to learn is that in order for you to continue with life and not let bad things completely dominate you and destroy who you are, there must be at least some level of forgiveness and at some point gratitude.
Sounds impossible I know, and it’s really hard work, but if you do the work daily the impossible doesn’t seem to be so bad after all. We must find gratitude in life, especially at the moment, we have so much to be angry about, we must find a way to see how this is shaping and teaching us. We must find gratitude in order to find peace, love and positivity.