I haven’t done a gratitude post in a while, and I started to write one. But I got stuck.
Normally it’s a quick and easy post to write. I have so much to be grateful for in my life, and I do believe that gratitude is an important tool in dealing with the challenges of our current world.
And yet, today, I just couldn’t find the words.
A long time ago, I read a great book called Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. It was around the same time that I first started experiencing serious anxiety, where the feelings would hit out of the blue. My natural inclination was to always push back at how I was feeling, to talk to myself about how ridiculous I was being. And it was this book where I first came across the idea that you didn’t have to fight your bad feelings. That pushing back just made the fight last longer. That you could acknowledge, accept, and just let them pass through. And it for me it works.
I do still forget, often, and need to remind myself to practice this. Even today, I was trying to force myself to write something about gratitude. I was telling myself to push through the hesitation. But like all feelings, I think having a day where I just don’t feel like being grateful is ok.
So often we minimize feelings to good and bad, but it’s really about degrees. About balance. All feelings have validity, and all feelings can be taken to extremes. But pretending they’re not there doesn’t help.
So today I got a gentle reminder that my feelings are ok. I’m accepting where I am, I’m letting the feelings pass through, and maybe next weekend, I’ll be ready for that gratitude.