Embodied Gratitude
An exploration of embodying gratitude over several days and weeks. Exercises like these are facilitated in Embodied Solutions communities and events, including the Embodied Gratitude Community.
Week 1, Day 1
I think of the word gratitude and instantly I feel a gentle warmth at the bottom of my chest. My torso seems to respond with energy settling above and below the warmth. I become aware of my breaths as I relax into this settling. I feel a subtle urgency of curiosity to explore gratitude in detail, but also don’t want to rush past this settled relaxation that has not been easy to find within myself lately. The warmth at the bottom of my chest expands to my back and is present along with tension that is painful. I invite my awareness back to gratitude and my mind empties.
After enjoying the emptiness, as thoughts begin again, I invite my awareness to gratitude once more and I feel the urge to list what I’m thankful for, even though, or especially because, my focus today has mostly been on some challenges I am currently facing.
After writing out a list of specific things I’m thankful for, I feel a sense of plenty. So much has come to me in my life that I myself could not have attained or achieved alone. I am exceptionally grateful in this moment for the guidance leading me to embody gratitude. I feel my posture more upright than before, a confidence in the flow of life, a feeling of cooperation between me and something far greater than me. It feels like little holes within me that had caused me to slouch are filled in with solid support.
Week 1, Day 2
I think of the word gratitude and feel warmth settling from the middle of my back. It feels like it’s pulling density down with it as it settles. I’m aware of my breathing in front of the warmth and density. It’s a comfort and relief to begin my day with this invitation to feel gratitude again. It felt like an adjustment and alignment yesterday. It’s harder to go back to my usual pattern of worrying so much after reflecting on the long list of things I am thankful for. It seems like a preventative medicine. It feels mysterious to sit with awareness of things that go really really right and things that seemingly go really really wrong, or just don’t seem to be working in the timing I thought was needed. I’m aware of a deep breath, and these words coming out feel like a tsunami of subtle sensation, or awareness of sensation that was already there, flowing through my back and up my neck. Another breath feels regulating.
My breath gets my attention again. I feel warmth as a visualization comes into my awareness of the connection between this breath and the space to breathe around my back and stomach. I feel into the resource coming from beyond me, the simple element in the air all around, everywhere I look, that provides for my next minute of life, that nourishes my every cell. I have never considered how immediate that nourishment is. Of course it makes sense, if we can’t survive without it, but I only ever considered it from the perspective of danger in deficiency rather than what it does every minute of my life that I have it. I feel a fullness in my upper back, a sensation like I could almost cry at this feeling of connection to life, the environment around me, air between me and the next objects I see, the leaves out my window that are having the same exchange with air that I’m having, and the birds as well. I feel another breath and somehow it feels like the cells in my lungs and back are eating, full and satisfied. Even delicious. I feel a sadness come up again for not ever contemplating this or living this experience as fully as this moment. For taking it for granted.
I return to gratitude and it feels like warmth, an airy, space-infused warmth now, gentle-edged bubbles of peace and space, breathing around all the density and areas of discomfort in my body.
My mind and my sensing settle into the relaxed and restful space I’m in, feeling I have so much in this moment, inside and all around me. It feels like I’m surrounded in the softness of what I’ve been given. This is such a contrast to how I usually feel this time of day. I invite this contrast to provide more clarity to the concerns and worries of this time period in my life. I see myself as a dried up skeleton searching for ways to provide what I need for myself, not finding solutions, and not able to stop searching for solutions. I return to all I’ve been experiencing embodying gratitude and I feel the contrast, the full flesh on my bones, and I feel my muscles relax more than usual even in my shoulders and neck as I feel them in this capacity.
I feel so thankful that I’m guided here to be doing this exercise in this moment.
Day 3
I feel the warmth of gratitude immediately picking up where I left off these days from the day before. I feel like I could cry with gratitude but no tears come. I’m so thankful for being guided to do this. So thankful for these intentions and desires that have been put in me, seemingly from far beyond me.
I am feeling a lot of energy around my head and chest as I’m writing, and gently invite it, if possible, to settle a bit. I feel the peace of settled energy where I’m sitting. I still feel a bit of a disconnect between the top half and bottom half of my being. Where I’m sitting it feels like a firm and stable foundation. A firm and stable foundation that I know I did not used to have. I feel gratitude as I am able to feel more into this stability in detail. I feel that some of the extra energy has settled, though not all of it. I feel the energy still circulating in my head and chest is making a connection with the rest of me.
I invite my awareness again to gratitude. It feels like relief. My body sighs. It’s as if I can feel moment to moment the trust building within me, from some parts of me to the rest of me. I get the feeling of physical pathways connecting through my being, the feeling of tangible fibers forming, accompanying the visualization of the connection from the top to the bottom. Suddenly this feels like a hyper-focus inside, a bit intense, and I am drawn with my attention outward to the leaves fluttering in the wind. This brings a lightness to my experience. A deep breath comes and it feels more neutral.
Week 2 Day 1
A week has passed since I last spent time with the exercise of embodying gratitude. The stress of worrying returned but it must have been so subtle I hardly noticed it. It feels like it is just a default of my disposition, outside of my awareness. When I read my own words written last week, I am reminded of this feeling that took away worry. It is easy to settle into gratitude again. When I feel gratitude, as much as I feel so much better in the moment, I am sensing now the expansiveness of the impacts, how it noticeably shifts my entire disposition to life itself.
When I feel once again into all that is being provided, the anxiety of whatever else I thought I needed falls away.
Week 3 Day 1
After another week without the embodying gratitude exercise, I am surprised that my default continues to take me deeper and deeper into worry, and I notice that I am also pressuring myself a lot in aspects of life in which that pressure is actually counterproductive and motivated by fears. The feelings of having plenty and feeling gratitude are not my default, I see. I can feel the need in me to simply remind myself regularly to feel gratitude embodied, and even to continue to explore some of what I witness with the contrast of not embodying gratitude.
I read the words from Week 1 Day 2 about the skeleton not finding solutions, and not able to stop searching for solutions. I get tears in my eyes. I forget this in the middle of daily life, and I am grateful for this reminder.
I feel warmth wrap around my upper body, like a big embrace, from myself to myself. It is supportive and caring and wanting me to be ok, wanting me to feel this more frequently, to feel the reality of life, that so much comes from beyond me.
Week 3 Day 2
I have been paying attention to subtle movements shifting me back to thoughts and behaviors based in stresses and worries. Today I’m grateful immediately for gratitude itself. For the tangible change in my body as I feel it and its ability to modify so drastically the quality of my mental processes. It almost feels like gratitude is its own entity as I invite it in to my awareness, to be present now. The visual representation of what I’m feeling is a motion of receiving, a movement from outside of me toward me. It reminds of the American Sign Language sign for “give to me.” Without thinking of anything specific, I feel the same sensation I have felt re-reading my original exploration of embodied gratitude. I feel full, satisfied. I feel trust. The trust provides a contrast for what I recognize now as strong doubts that come against gratitude, peace, and trust in between these moments of intentionally embodying gratitude.
Fears come more clearly into my awareness; fear of being truly mentally delusional in that trust, and fear of not taking enough responsibility because of that trust. My mind goes to some of the specific items I am most thankful for and have listed out, and thinking of these and feeling what it feels like to be thankful for them make the trust tangible again. I feel a confidence in me feeling the support that this trust provides. A confidence that without the overshadowing of deep rooted worries and doubts, I can in fact achieve more, more freely, with more productivity, and more creativity. I feel hope, a sense that there are very different parts of me present at the same time and sharing this moment and this space in me. I invite the fear and doubt to be a little more present. I feel it first as a density in my chest, like a weight pulling me down, and then in my upper back as pain. A deep breath comes and goes. I look outside, feeling more connected to my outside surroundings. I feel resistance pushing outward from the inside of my chest as I write these words, and a sadness below my eyes.
There is a settling down through the center of my body, which brings a feeling of warmth, like an embrace around the outside of my being. I sit with this to marinate.
Gratitude is creating a healing environment in which I’m becoming aware of concerns and worries that were so normal to me I didn’t even notice them.
Embodying gratitude itself has been a gift, and has led me to embodied contentment, trust, patience, peace, satisfaction, and a newfound embodied freedom and creativity. So much wisdom has unfolded in these explorations that I am deeply thankful for too. I feel hope and a clarity that I need to continue to embody gratitude regularly.
