Gratitude and the Brain

Neurobiologist Dr. Rick Hanson is well known for helping us understand how our brains and nervous systems actually work based on his current and groundbreaking research. Gratitude can actually change your brain. A couple of years ago he boiled down the instructions in that article I linked his name to a very simple instruction: focus on the positive sensations that come with gratitude for 15 seconds. That's about 3 breaths. If you've taken classes with me, you've probably experienced this at some point. It's so powerful when repeated over time that for a long time I made it mainstay of our class ending structure. It goes like this:

You can do this with your peeps this Thanksgiving, maybe having each person place a hand over their hearts. Notice the shift in your internal and the external atmosphere.

Over time, this practice and internally sensing our own states can literally re-wire us. "Miracles" ensue.

Gratitude Unites Us and Is Timeless

[I’m leaving my gratitude list from this same week last year because as I re-read it, I realized all of it is still true and relevant - and still makes my eyes leak. We may not agree what the losses and gains are as we re-orient our activities, lives and thoughts, and it still matters most that we ALL feel them, acknowledge them, and keep talking about the deep complexity of our real lives. And that we talk about the simple, clear values that help us make us make sense of those complexities.

The values that guide me and guide this business remain the same:

• Clarity: authentic revelation is at the heart of effective physical, emotional and collective transformation.

• Research: science guides what and how YogaGuides teach so that we effectively relieve suffering.

• Compassion: connection is necessary for human thriving and empathy is its basis.

• Empowerment: YogaGuides support you applying the techniques in your own lives.

So, without further ado….]

Gratitude Is Complex

Me? I'm awash in gratitude in this week. So overcome with it my eyes are leaking on a regular basis. I'll share with you my messy gratitude list from today. It may not look like the sunshiny gratitude lists from books, but it's real: Right now, I'm grateful for...

• Kids First and every single person who is a part of the holiday gift drive, by praying for them, donating, sending gifts, thinking kindly about them. The opportunity to be a part of such mass goodness.

• The way my hearts absolutely screams every time I allow myself to absorb the fact that there are so many children to serve with this.

• Every reminder of how important it is for us to pay attention like we never have. Even when we don't have attention to pay anymore. The strain of remaining mindful and the reminders when I'm not (and I have to turn around for my mask, remember it's around my wrist when I get out of the car, disinfect the door handles) are really bringing home to me why we have SO many teachings in every tradition about remaining present. NOTHING is guaranteed. This reality is so raw and so painful. And so illuminating. So deeply connecting.

• Every person who wears a mask, even when they scowl behind it.

• Political turmoil and the opportunities to rewrite our destiny it is providing.

• The sacrifices made by every single person who has been impacted and even devastated in this turmoil and the heartbreaks both caused and revealed by it.

• Seeing more, more deeply.

• The opportunity to come together and realize how much we have taken for granted for so long. Those of us who could, because there are so many who haven't had so much to take for granted.

• Knowing that we will be different somehow on the other end of each trial and that we have everything to do with how that manifests in our communities.

• Every person who has ever practiced yoga.

• Every person who has ever practiced yoga with Badlands Yoga.

• Every person who has and will take one breath with complete presence.

• My enhanced and deepening awareness of institutional barriers to people in other skins and my opportunities to start and continue stopping my participation in them.

• The tears that often flow when I let myself really feel any of this.

• The messy conversations that brings on.

• Our realtor and her ability to be my yoga teacher, though she doesn't practice "yoga."

• Our home that keeps us warm and safe.

• Our fur friend who lets us care for and about him. Every fur friend who has broken my heart open and taught me what it really is to love.

• Our messy family, every messy moment that has brought us both closer and more separate in varying degrees.

• The Badlands Yoga community for the faces on that screen throughout these past 8 months and the ways they are truly present to themselves, their own suffering and joy and their ability to hold one another in care no matter what.

• The ability to feel the really hard feels, because it means I'm still human.

• Every single healthcare worker and the whole infrastructure that allows them to be - the dispatch and education, the mechanics and custodians, the hospitals and small clinics, the people who still manage to research and share despite an historic lack of support.

• The heartbreak that seems always just beneath our skins right now for the losses. We may not even agree about what the losses are, but we share that we have them and that means we are still a community.

• You.

Daily Gratitude List Can Change Your Life By Changing Your Mind

So that's mine today, unedited, for reals. [Still true a year later.] Feel free to make your own, maybe just wondering about it over the course of the week. But don't miss the opportunity to feel ALL the feels. There is bright, happy, transcendent gratitude, thank the heavens. And we must acknowledge all the messy, dark, heavy situations, realizations, awarenesses, feels that make those possible. And then be grateful for whatever it is that allows us to hold all that in awareness at the same time if we dare.