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_ I have had an active gratitude “practice” since mid-October of this year. It started when I watched an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s Lifeclass. I was moved by a guest who revealed that she kept a wall of writings and images of things she was grateful for in her life. My immediate response was, “I can do that.” And so I did. All it took was a pack of sticky notes, a pen and available wall space in my bedroom.
The original goal of this ritual was to write down five things I was grateful for on a daily basis. I decided after the first week that some days five is just too grand a number to reach without eliciting assistance from my incessantly active imagination. Some days I can only come up with one thing to be grateful for, and that may simply be the fact that I am breathing at the moment I write the note. Other days I sit on the edge of my bed believing that it is going to take an act of God to even recover one morsel of gratitude from my day, and I end up with six new sticky notes on my wall.
The picture you see of the wall was taken a few weeks before I sat down to write this post. The notes are farther down the wall now because I have not missed a day of this practice. But I do allow myself room for flexibility. If I have dragged my butt home on a Friday night after a rough week and have no desire to dissect the pieces of the day I am grateful for, I get up on Saturday morning and write my gratitude note for Friday. As you can see from the two individual notes, I date every one, so I don’t get to cheat.
This is an exercise that I attempted to perform earlier in the year in a small notebook that I carry in my purse, but the practice didn’t stick. There is something about seeing the volume of these notes expand and consume the surface space of the wall that I find striking. I fall asleep to this sight and I wake up to it. In between, if I need a reminder of what it is I do have in my life as opposed to what I don’t have, I go in my room and stand in front of the wall.
As a person whose default reaction to most things (good and bad, oddly) was always negative, I can say sincerely that my gratitude practice is changing me. I no longer intuitively reach for the “everything is a disaster, it’s the end of days,” card that I have played all of my life. Now, when things go bad (and, yes, they still do) and my mind tries to slip back into my old doom and gloom way of thinking, I find myself bumping against hope, as if the wall of gratitude in my bedroom has been replicated in my brain and it’s blocking those old, toxic thoughts.
I will continue my gratitude practice in 2012 and beyond.When I run out of wall space, I will paste the notes into a scrapbook and fill the wall up again. I love the idea that something as simple as being grateful has changed my brain and brought contentment to my life. That’s more than enough reason to keep up the practice.
-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com
The original goal of this ritual was to write down five things I was grateful for on a daily basis. I decided after the first week that some days five is just too grand a number to reach without eliciting assistance from my incessantly active imagination. Some days I can only come up with one thing to be grateful for, and that may simply be the fact that I am breathing at the moment I write the note. Other days I sit on the edge of my bed believing that it is going to take an act of God to even recover one morsel of gratitude from my day, and I end up with six new sticky notes on my wall.
The picture you see of the wall was taken a few weeks before I sat down to write this post. The notes are farther down the wall now because I have not missed a day of this practice. But I do allow myself room for flexibility. If I have dragged my butt home on a Friday night after a rough week and have no desire to dissect the pieces of the day I am grateful for, I get up on Saturday morning and write my gratitude note for Friday. As you can see from the two individual notes, I date every one, so I don’t get to cheat.
This is an exercise that I attempted to perform earlier in the year in a small notebook that I carry in my purse, but the practice didn’t stick. There is something about seeing the volume of these notes expand and consume the surface space of the wall that I find striking. I fall asleep to this sight and I wake up to it. In between, if I need a reminder of what it is I do have in my life as opposed to what I don’t have, I go in my room and stand in front of the wall.
As a person whose default reaction to most things (good and bad, oddly) was always negative, I can say sincerely that my gratitude practice is changing me. I no longer intuitively reach for the “everything is a disaster, it’s the end of days,” card that I have played all of my life. Now, when things go bad (and, yes, they still do) and my mind tries to slip back into my old doom and gloom way of thinking, I find myself bumping against hope, as if the wall of gratitude in my bedroom has been replicated in my brain and it’s blocking those old, toxic thoughts.
I will continue my gratitude practice in 2012 and beyond.When I run out of wall space, I will paste the notes into a scrapbook and fill the wall up again. I love the idea that something as simple as being grateful has changed my brain and brought contentment to my life. That’s more than enough reason to keep up the practice.
-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com
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