Hey folks, it's Robin from Dear Headspace.
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Hi there, welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday, it's Dora.
So I often think that gratitude gets a bad rep.
Only because it feels very topical.
Sad? Well, what are you grateful for?
Angry? Well, practice gratitude.
Lonely? Be grateful. And what I've been realizing is how many of these feel good practices need to be applicable to our own lives.
We need to go beyond the intellectual understanding of them and connect to the felt sense of gratitude.
As I always say, it's one thing to understand something and it's a totally other thing to really feel it.
Case in point, instead of leaving gratitude to the mind, it must also be felt in the body.
When you think of all the other thoughts that are competing for your attention, it's no wonder that gratitude can be hard to find.
But if we can intentionally shift our focus to choose gratitude and appreciation in the moment and also be aware of its presence in the body, our ability to connect to it on a deeper level grows.
Similar to when we begin to live more mindfully, when we practice gratitude, we have the ability to see and experience life from a different perspective.
So last December, I decided to go to Kenya for a month and a half, recovering from a season of fatigue and exhaustion.
One of the side effects of me being tired is I complain a lot.
In those moments, gratitude seems like a faraway place.
And it felt like instead of working through this complaining and finding the root of my exhaustion, I decided to go to a faraway place instead, as if my complaining mind wouldn't follow me wherever I went.
Now, being that my mom's side of the family is from Kenya, I was able to get the experience of a local and really immerse myself in the culture.
While I was there, I was also training for a marathon, so I was connected to a local running group and began training with them.
One morning, after a night of heavy rainfall, we set out to do our long run.
As we turned the corner on a residential street to a more urban area, we jogged past a family who was fetching water and bathing one of the potholes in the road.
Now, intellectually, I know that there's millions of impoverished people on this earth, living in conditions that I could never even imagine.
But to see this, in person, a few feet away was overwhelming.
And even now as I write about this, I have chills down my arm.
This moment left an imprint on my mind and my heart.
All that complaining I had been doing, which is human, but not always helpful, took a back seat in that moment.
I thought to myself, if I can hold on to this memory in my mind, whenever I decide to complain about meaningless things, and instead, appreciate life as it is in the moment and be grateful for what I do have, this will help me to put things into perspective.
And now, it's important to note that sometimes complaining is a way for us to release or vent our frustrations.
Oftentimes, it feels good.
We feel like we're connecting.
But it's equally important to recognize the impact that it has on our minds.
Being narrows our perspective.
We're so focused on what's going wrong, we miss out on what's going right in our lives.
So that's my invitation to you today.
You may not be able to connect to gratitude in the moment, but I invite you to think about all the things in your life that are going right.
And see if you can spend more time in that headspace.
Feel free to share what you're grateful for with me over on Instagram at DoraKamau, D-O-R-A-K-A-M-A-U.
I look forward to hearing from you, and I'll see you back here tomorrow, friends.
Take care.
