Gratitude is one of the more common pieces of homework people need. We’ll muscle test when and where and for how long to do it for. Sometime it is to be done before sleep, sometimes on the bus to work, sometimes together with someone else and sometimes written down.
Each person has a different optimal way to explore and experience gratitude and as always with Kinesiology, we can find the exact correct recipe for each person.
Why don’t we feel gratitude enough?
I come from South Africa, where many people exist in poverty. For them, a safe dry home and a warm, satisfying meal are reasons for deep gratitude. For others, these things are a normal part of daily reality and they feel grateful for other things.
It can be much harder to feel grateful in a world where we are constantly made to feel like we are lacking and always ‘wanting’ more. It is actually harder to feel happy with what you have in the First World where marketing is so prevalent and pervasive. In addition to this we feel extra pressure created by social media. Why doesn’t my life look like an instagram account? Why am I not all shiny and beautiful like them?
The muscles we don’t use lose strength
When last did you feel really really grateful? Was it sometime today? Sometime recently? This week, this month? Is it something that happens regularly for you?
The brain is super clever at information processing and storing. What we do regularly gets stored for easy access. The more time we dedicate to something, the more brain real estate it gets. Knowledge and skills that we don’t often use give up priority space to our favourites. They get stored in deeper, harder to access memory.
It can be hard to play a piano if you haven’t practised for a very long time, and it can be hard to feel grateful when it’s not something we regularly do.
Why do we need to practise Gratitude?
Practising gratitude regularly is training our brain to prioritise this feeling in our memory. Slowly over time, it becomes an easier and more natural response to our daily life.
If we are being exposed to marketing everywhere we go, all day long, we are most likely experiencing a state of lack or longing for something much more than we are even aware of feeling it. This is what marketing is designed to do, create a longing in us. We need to actively take back our brain real estate. We need to claim back our experience of gratitude for the wonderful things we have in our lives. For our safe dry homes and warm meals.
On a personal level, this is an important practise for a number of reasons:
- Gratitude feels good and is good for our mental health.
- A feeling of lack creates stress in our bodies. Gratitude creates satisfaction. It’s good for our nervous system, our digestion and our immune system.
- When we feel grateful, we want less and therefore will shop and spend less. We will have more money (less debt).
You can see where I am going with this can’t you… If we, as citizens of planet Earth, want to reverse and repair some of the damage that has been done from excessive growth and excessive consumption, we need to take back control over our emotional state. There are many steps to this, but one of the most important ones, is to retrain our emotional experience out of one of lack and into one of gratitude. And that is simply an act of training a muscle every day. It takes conscious, determined, and regular daily practise. It’s free and its good for you!