Do you practice gratitude every day, whether that be by writing it down in a journal or by taking moments in your day to mentally note what you are grateful for?  It’s a beautiful practice, and I highly recommend it. But do you still sometimes just not feel completely lit up?
I practice gratitude every day, and no I don’t write them down in a journal every day either, but there are many times I stop and savour a moment, or fully take in a revelation on something in my life and I realise I am blessed. Sometimes it’s a really conscious process and needing to get myself into gratitude when I feel angry or disappointed or sad or upset about something in my life. The thoughts that occupy your mind when in those emotional states can be a spiral of destruction and kicking yourself out of it by reflecting on what you have to be grateful for stops those thoughts in their tracks and get you out of your head, gets you to take a deep breath and get into your heart. When you are truly committed to that feeling of gratitude for what you have in that moment, anger, hate, sadness can’t exist at the same time.
But gratitude is such an introverted practice, don’t you think? And I know that it has its benefits. We can be so externally seeking a lot of the time. We are constantly bombarded with social media and advertising and other things to help us feel something, or with other people telling us what we need and what we should do, or what that voice in our head is telling us which is often the ego and coming from a place of fear. Gratitude is a great way of getting centred and in touch with our own guidance. Well that’s my experience with gratitude anyway. It fuels you from within. It’s internal and internally fuelling. It’s introverted. It doesn’t rely or depend on anyone else. The only connection is with you and a greater energy source. And there is magic in that.
Maybe because I spend so much time in an introverted state, if I’m to be totally honest, gratitude just doesn’t completely fill me up. I often feel like there is still something missing. I use to think that maybe I wasn’t doing gratitude correctly. That maybe I wasn’t grateful enough for those things in my life. But I was talking to a friend the other day and that, together with a few other situations in my life recently, something started to make sense. I saw a thread. And it’s all to do with appreciation and acknowledgement.
When someone tells you, quite unexpectedly, that you are appreciated and that they acknowledge something in you that has made things better, more wonderful, easier or less painful it makes you feel connected. There’s a sense that you matter. That you are not alone, that you are heard, seen, appreciated and acknowledged. That there is something unique about you, in your essence that is being appreciated. And though praise and compliments can boarder on ego fueling self importance, I think there can be an aspect of appreciation and acknowledgement that can be centering, grounding and fulfilling. Appreciation also probably boarders on acts of kindness, which I think we can all agree needs to become a lot more prevalent in the world. But I think appreciation and acknowledgement can be much deeper and more spiritual than that too.
To see someone, to really see someone, to really hear them, to really be touched by someone else’s presence, to acknowledge someone else, is really at its essence the meaning of namaste – the light in me sees and acknowledges the light in you. The thing about appreciation is it’s dependent on someone else. It’s extroverted. It externally fuels us. It comes as a result of something outside of ourselves. And that’s where the connection comes in. There is an energetic connection to another person and I think a lot of people don’t feel that enough. I feel that there a lot of people who feel grateful for their life and probably have a lot to be grateful for but still sad and disconnected because t