Reading: A THANKFUL HEART
I try to hold fast to the truth that a full and thankful heart cannot entertain great conceits. When brimming with gratitude, one's heartbeat must surely result in outgoing love, the finest emotion that we can ever know.
Gratitude is a funny one because it’s another one of those concepts you have to really find on your own. If you think about maybe a young kid who is finding things hard, and when they talk about it, maybe their parents or someone will say, “don’t complain, you should just be grateful for what you’ve got.” Or “you’re so much better off than…. All these other people in the world…” or something like that – and it’s just so invalidating for that kid! Their experience of having a hard time, whatever the cause, is just totally dismissed as being selfish, short-sighted, ungrateful.
And I know for me, it can still feel a bit like that even when the context is different – I am a sensitive person – and to be honest, anytime anyone tells me to be grateful, I can’t help but resent it a bit. Like it’s an accusation, a criticism of me, of my attitude. My struggles are not that big of a deal… I should just get over it.
But I’m very aware of that reaction in myself and I’m aware of the potential for this to get in the way. I know that the mindset of gratitude is immensely powerful and that this emotional baggage and over-thinking has the potential to prevent me from accessing that tool.
How to deal with this? Well, I try to approach gratitude almost in a mechanistic way - sort of like a button I can press or exercise that I can perform without any particular kind of emotional engagement – for the purpose of achieving a certain outcome. When our thinking and feeling gets out of control, we can't fix this with more thinking, we need to start acting. It's about feet on the ground - what you do, not what you think.
I never cease to be amazed about how much I can use this principle in so many different situations.
In this case? This action is just about identifying a few things that I know cognitively that I’m grateful for. Writing down is a thousand times better than just thinking about it…. Just a simple way of separating this process from the other hundred thousand thoughts in my head! And I just write it – like other people have said, I’m grateful for a roof over my head, I’m grateful for my cup of coffee…. And the key thing for me here is that I don’t have to feel grateful. I don’t have to want to be grateful. I don’t have to be in any special state of mind for this activity to do it’s magic.
Because when you are going through those motions, you cannot help but be present. To identify those things, you literally have to be in the here and now. You are forced for that moment to let go of the past, to let go of the future, and just to find the present moment. That happens whatever your emotional state – and it is the most extraordinarily valuable “brain snap” there is.
And like it says in the reading “a thankful heart cannot entertain great conceits.” I see this in the same way – I don’t think it means, “when you’re a good person, you can’t be an arsehole anymore”, I think it literally means, when you use your brain to think about one type of thing, you can no longer use it for this other type of thing. When you are thinking about the things that you are grateful for, you are taking that mental power away from anxiety, from conceit, from catastrophising, whatever, and you are focussing it on something else – your gratitude, your immediate sense of self in this moment."
It might sound a bit too clinical and maybe unfeeling but it means I can access this tool HOWEVER I’m feeling, under whatever pressures or in whatever circumstances. And in the end, feelings come and go - it's that mechanical clinical stuff that keeps us alive.
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