Begrudgingly Grateful —> Actually Grateful
How to stop forcing gratitude when you don’t actually feel it, and how to genuinely feel and grow gratitude over time.
In today’s article I will share with you
👉🏻 How this curmudgeon finally succumbed to gratitude practices that I thought were too ineffective to actually create profound change.
👉🏻 Why gratitude doesn’t work for some people, how to stop forcing gratitude & how to find your natural entry point into gratitude!
👨🎤 ← temporary diversion to highlight an emoji I’m sure none of us knew existed. I mean look at this guy. He clearly wants attention. Let’s give him the attention he deserves.
👉🏻 Why shaming yourself for the privilege you have is not a good recipe for opening your heart to gratitude. I know weird… How I believe privilege to be deeply misunderstood, and why I think everyone should be striving to gain true privilege.
Let’s get into it :)
Forcing yourself to be grateful is like telling a child to smile for a picture when they are clearly annoyed with you… Let’s find more genuine portals into gratitude shall we?
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about intelligent ways to administer wellness tools. Our western culture is very undeveloped in how we go about prescribing medicine, or spiritual practices, or mindfulness practices. It’s toooooo 🤔…how do I put it…Dumb.
Lol, sorry, i’m in an irreverent mood today and I’ve been annoyed with my own doctors lately who manage to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their life learning how to diagnose sickness & for some reason have zero fucking clue what to do with the problem after they diagnose it.
But I digress. In sincerity, people get too attached to their protocols and prescriptions and become fascinatingly blind to the havoc they are wreaking when they think they are “helping”. Here’s what I mean.
Let’s say you are in a desert and you want to turn it into an oasis. You notice how dry the soil is and you think, “I know what this desert is lacking! Water!”
Then you go dump a bunch of water into the cracked un-absorbant soil and watch it reject the water. Not only does the soil reject the water, but the water literally runs away with the few minerals the soil has, like a cackling bank robber.
And then, blinking in shock, you think to yourself, “That’s weird, what this landscape needs is water, it should have absorbed it. Let’s go get some more water and try again!”
You try again. More water runs off the soil and further erodes it.
Harder, more! It must be because you aren’t trying hard enough!?!!?
You try again, and it keeps getting worse. Your blindness to the actual situation in front of you is becoming more alarming by the minute as your devotion to your “solution” increases in fervency.
“BUT YOU NEED WATER, WHY ISN’T THIS WORKING!?” You shout in frustration at the soil after it turns into ashes and blows away in the wind.
People who study permaculture and know how to restore eroded soil miraculously teleport into the desert at this point, intervene, and say to you, “Young grasshopper, yes the soil needs water, but first you need to teach it how to ABSORB the water again.”
Before you dump a bunch of water on it, you need to first…
Improve the micro-biome by adding compost and manure
Add ground cover around the plants to protect the soil from further sun and wind erosion
Create a swale that holds and captures water, letting the water slowly absorb into the soil, until it gets a hang of absorbing water on its own.
You can’t just throw water at soil if it’s eroded.
Similarly, you can’t throw supplements or drugs at a complex problem in the body that requires LIFESTYLE and incremental biological/environmental changes over time within the body.
This concept ALSO applies to non-physical medicine beyond plants and chemicals. Energetic/spiritual tools and wellness practices ARE ALSO medicine. And when it comes to administering medicine, dosage, timing, & correct order is everything.
Gratitude is like water. Sure, if you’re a relatively happy plant in happy soil with a good microbiome that just happens to be a little bit dry, gratitude/water is a simple fix that will make the plant/you feel better almost immediately. Just adding water WOULD BE the obvious solution in that situation!
But if you’ve had shitty circumstances in your life that have created trauma and inner erosion, you can’t just throw gratitude at the problem and hope that it fixes it. It’s going to run off. It might create further damage and erosion.
Being grateful more, harder, and for longer periods of time, ain’t gonna work if your body is rejecting it. That’s why gratitude practices can seem stressful and ineffective for some people.
My body was one of those bodies that rejected gratitude for A LONG TIME.
This is literally a picture of me back when I was a gratitude starved curmudgeon.
There were several things that got in the way of me learning how to genuinely be grateful…
I grew up in a family that demanded gratitude rather than fostered it. They would say, “Here are all the things we do for you. You should be grateful even though we clearly sacrificed our well-being to give you things that you did not collaborate with us on or consent to.”
I grew up in a society that said, “We have this excess of wealth and privilege, (even though we are starving for community and spiritual depth) so you should shut-up and be grateful about this massive imbalance and continue happily consuming what’s making you sick.” (This was the weird logic our parents handed to us behind the classic “Children are starving in Africa, so you should eat everything on your plate,” phrase.)
Here’s a hilarious comedy bit highlighting the absurdity of this very idea…
I grew up in a culture that believed you should diminish your truth and never ask for your needs to be met. Instead, you should give to others with unspoken expectations that they give you exactly what you need in return. OR you should give to others without expecting anything at all in return which makes you resentful, and creates dynamics where people take advantage of you 🤔… hmm strange how that could POSSIBLY happen...
Here’s the thing about gratitude.
This might be a controversial opinion, but I believe that genuine gratitude is cultivated when you
ACTUALLY GET WHAT YOU NEED.
A lot of the advice around cultivating gratitude comes from a place of “be happy with what you have and don’t ask for more”, or “be happy with what you have in comparison to times you’ve had less, or in comparison to other people who have less.”
This advice comes from a well meaning place. People who research gratitude have science to back it up. They say, “If you focus on being grateful for what you have versus what you don’t have it’s supposed to release more Dopamine and Serotonin. It will strengthen your immune system, make you feel more peaceful, improve your relationships… etc.”
And then they prescribe “20 minutes of gratitude daily”.
But here’s the problem with that mentality. It overrides the nuance that if you are out of balance… that is to say if you have an excess of your needs met in one area, and you are starving for a need to be met in another area, it’s NATURAL to feel discord or dissatisfaction.
That is your body’s way of saying “Hey we are out of balance here, let’s change something so we can reach equilibrium again.”
Let’s say you have an endless supply of pizza but hardly any access to fresh vegetables. Somebody might look at you and say, “Wow you’re so privileged, you have access to all the pizza in the world! I know people who have never eaten pizza before, be grateful for what you have!”
But your internal experience is that your body is inflamed, your metabolism is slow, and you feel like you’re starving for real nutrition. Now not only does your body feel like shit, but you start to think you are a shitty person for having so much pizza and not being grateful for it.
Yes, some people have no access to pizza whatsoever, but this excess of pizza is making you sick. In what world would it make sense to be grateful for it?
People often misunderstand this concept when they come across people with excess money or fame for example.
Yes, as a famous person you might get so much attention, but it’s often at the cost of privacy or your mental health. It’s the kind of attention where people pedestalize and project stories onto you rather than really see and accept you for who you are.
This is why famous people can become addicted to drugs and somehow still be riddled with insecurity, and starved of attention and connection. Amy Winehouse is a classic example of this phenomenon.
Would you actually really want to switch places with this kind of “privileged” famous person?
This is why there are people who exist who have tons of money but are relationally or spiritually poor. We already KNOOWWW that. And yet if we really knew that, we wouldn’t be shaming ourselves or other people for the poisonous excess they have.
We wouldn’t be so adamant that “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor” is an actual viable solution.
If we really knew that, we wouldn’t be so surprised when people hoard their poisonous excess. Hoarding points to a LACK within the system. And when you demand people to share with you the “little” resources they have (even when they have millions of dollars and appear to have a lot) they become vicious with you because in actuality they are quite poor. They don’t have anything else besides money.
That is why I believe real privilege is not imbalanced excess. Real privilege is having a nervous system that is BALANCED and it is something we should all be striving for.
Real privilege is when you have the right amount of love, stability, connection to spirit, purpose, creative expression, sovereignty, interdependence, rest & free time, nature access, community, & resources in the perfect proportion for your blueprint.
As a result, people who have achieved this kind of balance, HAVE to be openhearted. It’s the natural physics/byproduct of achieving this holistic emotional state of being.
This balance by default plugs you into a natural wellspring of gratitude & generosity. People who have achieved this equilibrium HAVE TO shower everyone around them with the abundance they have. This state of being organically COMPELS people to share and lift everyone around them up, in the same way that lack COMPELS people to hoard.
I believe this balance is TRUE PRIVILEGE, and everyone should be striving for it, and grateful when they come across someone who has inherited or attained this harmonious state within their nervous system, because they are the “rising tide” kind of people that lifts all the boats around them. Our communities need more people to be in this state for the benefit of all.
So genuine gratitude comes about when you are actually moving back towards balance. You can not fake gratitude or be grateful for excess that is poisoning you.
Genuine gratitude comes about when, as a famous person, you get some real privacy or real meaningful connection. Genuine gratitude comes about when, as a rich person, you finally tap into spiritual wisdom that brings you enough peace to relax your death grip on money.
Genuine gratitude is when someone hands you a fresh bowl of hearty greens so you don’t have to eat another damn slice of pizza again.
All of that is to say, if you feel guilty about your privilege, and your excess.. it’s not helping you or anybody else to keep being ashamed or trying to be grateful for it. Seek out balance instead. Then, enjoy the genuine gratitude that arises for every relieving step you take towards equilibrium.
This nuance in how you find things to be grateful for (noticing whats bringing you back towards balance) is the equivalent of that first step in restoring eroded soil: adding compost and manure to it.
Once I understood this, it started to change my whole relationship to gratitude. I stopped forcing myself to be grateful for my excess & I started noticing and being grateful for little things that moved me towards balance.
For example, nowadays I have copious amounts of time freedom and sovereignty over how I spend my day and with whom, that most people who are stuck in 9-5 jobs would be COMPLETELY ENVIOUS of…
BUT surprise surprise… this amount of time freedom and sovereignty is something you can overdose on. I have noticed that it’s easy for me to slip into paralysis from having excessive amounts of options and unlimited decision making power.
Therefore, I REALLY take time to notice and appreciate when clients or friends put parameters on my time and dictate my schedule for the day, so I can move into mindless service and take a break from calling all the shots. I let the gratitude wash over me in that moment and make sure the little wins sink in. Before I go to bed, I relive those little moments of the day and savor them again.
Had I forced myself to be grateful for my time freedom and sovereignty, it would feel like swallowing shame pizza I’m already bloated on.
Once I search for things to be grateful for that bring me into balance, it revs up my gratitude engine. THEN From there, it is easier to widen my aperture of gratitude for things I usually take for granted.
Relieving myself of the shame and guilt people bestowed upon me on the past for giving me things I didn’t ask for was the equivalent of protecting my soil with crop covers.
For example, after my parents divorced, my mom (who went back to school to become a nurse), said she took on a side business on top of her already mad schedule to help support my extra curricular dance activities. She wanted to try to keep my life the same as it was before the divorce.
She would get disappointed in me when I didn’t perform well in competitions. Here she was pouring her precious time and money into my classes, and I was in too much grief and emotional shut down to want to go through the rigorous training. She interpreted my lethargy as being disrespectful of her time.
What I would have wanted instead was for my mom and I to sit down and have a conversation about how to get us both the emotional support we needed to process the grief of the divorce.
I would have LOVED it if she spent that extra time going to therapy so that she wouldn’t be stressed out as a single mother and unconsciously resentful towards me.
I would have much rather had her invest in her emotional wellbeing so she could emotionally feed into our mother-daughter connection and brainstorm ideas for rebuilding our family again.
I would have much rather foregone my expensive dance lifestyle that made her sacrifice her wellbeing & found less expensive extracurricular activities that would have helped me process my emotions better… like the free drama club at school!
Once I went back through my history to relieve myself of the guilt of people who did things for me I didn’t ask for, and wrote down what I would have wanted instead, it gave me the power to prevent those “net loss” exchange equations from happening in the future.
Now I am very conscious about the agreements and energy exchanges I make with people and am tremendously grateful when we can find a “win-win” situation that doesn’t ask anybody to sacrifice their well-being, and ends up feeding us both.
Having the capacity to advocate for win-win situations in my relationships, in my work, & in my daily life, has opened my heart to sustainable and ever-evolving levels of gratitude in my life. I have found there is no limit to the gratitude I can feel when I continue to stack win-win situations into my soul’s piggy bank.
Lastly, taking the time to sensationally/viscerally ABSORB the gratitude in my body is the equivalent of creating a swale for soil to slowly learn how to absorb water again.
Our society is so focused on measuring our success by our productivity, that we literally don’t have time to reap the rewards of what we have sowed, which leads to further emotional starvation and hamster wheeling.
It’s like spending hundreds of hours over many years tending a peach orchard and then when those trees finally bear fruit, we let the fruit rot and fall to the ground because we are too busy planting the plum orchard on the acre next to it.
I believe we must consciously harvest and sensationally EAT gratitude with our breath in the same way we harvest and eat fruit with our mouths. This means not just mentally writing your gratitudes down on a list. It means time blocking a portion of your day to revel in the body sensations that thankfulness invokes.
When I work with clients on expanding their capacity for pleasure in their body, I will literally use the words “Eat that sensation with your breath” making them breathe into their stomachs or their hips, imagining that every organ in our body had its own set of lungs we could directly breathe into.
Because the breath is how we digest emotion in the body. If you don’t breathe into bodily sensations, you can neither extract the nourishment from them, nor move them through and repel unwanted waste (in the same way our intestines sort food).
When you don’t know how to properly absorb energy in the form of gratitude and pleasure, it creates people who are addicted to drama/trauma in the same way people become addicted to unhealthy foods.
So I had to learn how to SLOOOWWWWW THHEE FAAACCKKKK DOWWWNNNN whenever I got what I truly wanted/needed and cherish the sensations of pleasure in the same way I would cherish a nice rack of lamb with glistening olives and sweet potato mash.
I’d ask myself questions to determine where I would feel that gratitude pleasure in my body. Was it in my heart, or stomach, or pelvis? Did it feel like bubbles, or warmth spreading across my tissue? How long could I cherish that feeling for? Could I breathe it in for just 30 seconds? Could I make that feeling last for 5 minutes?
You’d be surprised how many people reject pleasure and get uncomfortable slowing down. Yoga teachers always say that getting their students to stay in Savasana (a resting corpse pose) at the end of the class is actually harder to teach than some difficult pose or breathwork sequence.
BTW If you want help expanding your capacity for pleasure, I created a free video course you can access on Substack complete with journaling, meditations and exercises you can follow along to help you practice pleasure absorption. Click HERE to access that lesson on expanding capacity for pleasure.
I also noticed that when I practiced receptivity, I expanded my worthiness capacity.
The more time I spent absorbing pleasurable gratitude with my breath, the more I trained my brain and body that I was worthy of nourishment.
The more worthy I felt, the easier it was to identify and ask for my needs to be met, and the more people would magically come out of the woodwork excited to meet my needs.
Over the last few years I have become more energetically immune to situations and people that pull me towards imbalance and disease, and can more easily attract people and situations that bring me further towards equilibrium.
…and THAT ability and confidence I have developed within myself to move towards balance and create upwards spirals for myself , is what I am most grateful for above all. For nothing is more precious and valuable than empowerment.
IN CONCLUSION
So my friend… to review…
If you are feeling annoyed or repulsed by gratitude practices like I have been, try a few of these steps to rehabilitate your inner landscape so that absorbing gratitude begins to feel genuine and nourishing again.
Start by journaling about what areas in life you have excess in, and what you think would help balance it out. Do you have an excess of emotionally immature people in your life? Start noticing when moments of emotional maturity start to happen and really celebrate it. Do you have an excess of hyper independence in your life? Start noticing when small moments of help come your way. Do you have an excess of stress? Start noticing when moments of calm become available
Journal about times in your life when people made you feel bad about your privilege or lack of gratitude for something they gave you that you didn’t ask for. Journal about what you would have wanted instead that would have been a win-win situation for the both of you. Start advocating and communicating for win-win situations in as many relationships as possible.
Whenever you feel moments of gratitude, see if you can double or triple the time you feel it in your body. Did you feel 5 seconds of gratitude just then? Can you savor that feeling for 15 seconds? Then 45? Can you let the corners of your mouth raise into a little bit of a bigger smile?
If you need help expanding your gratitude/pleasure capacity…
I have a 1:1 three month long somatic transformational coaching program to help you transform ANY area of life that causes you trouble.
It doesn’t matter what area of life it is (health, prosperity, purpose, relationships, etc.) these transformational principles are universal and apply across the board.
You can read about the program details HERE
You can schedule a free 40 min call with me to see if we are a good match for working together HERE
Alright that’s all I got for you today.
Now Go fly :)
<3
Annika
P.S. If you are someone who gets a lot out of the free content from The Road Home and feels compelled to give back, donations are graciously accepted below! I also super appreciate little gestures like comments, shares and restacks!
Thank you!
Agree and beautifully written.
Premature forgiveness and forced gratitude are two of the most popular ways of spiritual bypassing. Thanks for the reminder :)
Love, love, loved it. You really sliced through a bunch of bland societal prescriptions for how humans “should” behave to address the core of actual human motivation. The pizza example gets extra applause 🍕