If you keep a gratitude journal, try something new: consider your gratitude story with some of the following questions as prompts:
What is your earliest memory of someone teaching you about being grateful?
Did you understand it?
Did you begin saying ‘thank you’ out of habit?
How did it feel to express gratitude in your younger years?
What happened in your life, a precise event, that made you think, in a raw and powerful way: “I’m so grateful” or allow you to feel you knew what gratitude meant?
When you think of that memory, when that story fills you up, can you locate a physical sensation in your body?
What’s happening for you right now as you remember it?
Whatever response you notice is valid. This is your story.
That feeling you located, do you allow it to hang out with you for a while, in your body?
Sometimes, a deep gratitude is so powerful that we try to think ourselves past it, move on to do something else. (better make tea, get to that spreadsheet! –schwoo that was a bit much!)
Try to notice if you’re judging if you did gradituding “right.” Then imagine that judgement floating away and stay with your honest memories and feelings.
What is your story of gratitude?
