Somehow I’ve been doing gratitude rituals wrongly!
I’ve nothing but scorn for the way mindfulness and self-care have been co-opted and twisted by organisations and enterprises, but I’ve also come to realise that somewhere, in the name of “having no time,” I’ve abandoned several important mental equilibrium practices which used to be a big part of my life. Having morning and nightly rituals, making time for gratitude, even meditation—I used to practice them. And yet, precisely when I probably needed these practices most, I stopped.
So when my friend Priya gave me a set of Mindfulness cards, I was conflicted. At the time, I was just emerging from my “this nonsense doesn’t work!” phase; for me, self-care as a concept had become tainted, because it can come across as an organisation’s way of diverting attention away from systemic problems and pinning the burden of change entirely onto the individual.
Yet the timing felt right. And Priya is one of the wisest people I know. And also, I was tempted by the idea of a Mindfulness Monday series on the blog: surely this was an experiment worth documenting?
Reader, I decided to try out the cards.
Here they are:
Mindfulness cards in four categories: Awareness, Kindness, Self Care, and Gratitude.
Create a bedtime gratitude ritual by writing a list of at least 5 things for which you are grateful.
It says to “create a gratitude bedtime ritual by writing a list of at least five things for which you are grateful. For example, laughter with friends, a wonderful meal, a sunny day etc. If you cultivate this practice daily, you will probably start recognising moments of gratitude as they occur throughout the day.”
The first few days I tried it, I kept complaining it doesn’t work. I started by putting down the Big Things I was grateful for—the people in my life, being born in a relatively stable and comfortable time and place, the wherewithal to survive while I take stock and pivot my life… But this was precisely why I stopped doing gratitude lists in the past: these Big Things are so central to my life they kept repeating in my gratitude rituals, so much so that it started to feel like I was mechanically listing them for the sake of making a list. In other words, dreadful as it sounds, the act of making such gratitude lists actually desensitised me to these wonderful aspects of my life. Worse yet, when sad things happened to take away or decrease any of these Big Things in my life, the entire purpose of keeping to this ritual was called into question; the gratitude ritual became a sad reminder of what I’d lost. Gratitude was the last emotion I was feeling.
But since I am now a Content Creator, and must blog as though my life depends upon it—which in some ways it does—I found myself staring at the card again, as I was taking photos of it. And my brain suddenly registered something it had missed: the examples stated. “For example, laughter with friends, a wonderful meal, a sunny day etc.”
It clicked. I wasn’t supposed to be putting down The Big Things all the time! It was, as Tolkien puts it in The Hobbit, “the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk” that I was meant to remember, and hold to my heart.
Here’s what my latest gratitude list looks like:
1. Went for afternoon tea with the people I love!
2. The weather was perfect: neither bright nor overcast.
3. Bronson (my sister’s dog) was happy to see me today.
4. My students sent me videos of their performance.
5. Bronson looks adorable curled up like a doughnut.
Now I understand. Now I get it. A gratitude list is the record of cumulative small moments of peace, which work to counteract our brains’ compulsion to remember the negative. I am of course, still grateful for the Big Things—but it is by registering, and remembering the little moments, that I can build a store of gratitude in the first place. Put differently, I suspect that what happened to me in the past was: I kept drawing from my store of grateful feelings, until I had none left. Not even for the Big Things.
And I’m finding that this gratitude ritual is helping with one more thing: turning potentially negative memories into positive ones. I’m thinking of, for instance, the day my grandmother started nagging me about everything wrong in our lives. You can imagine I was not thrilled. And the house stank of awkwardness and angry things for a while afterward. But it happened to be a gratitude ritual night, so I dutifully sat down to write my list. I was fully expecting to be unable to.
But oddly, my thoughts kept returning to the disastrous morning. But I wasn’t angry anymore. Instead, calmed somehow by the ritual, I found myself putting down my grandmother’s nagging as a moment I was grateful for. Because I am grateful that she’s still around to nag at me!
The cynical voice in my head is saying things like, well yes, the gratitude ritual works now, when you don’t have pressing deadlines and so on. Will it still work when life really gets cranking?
I don’t know. No one does. I know rituals in general work, though, and for now, this particular ritual is working for me. Surely that’s enough?
