When Gratitude Silences Your Inner Truth
We have all heard of gratitude and the wonderful effects that it has on our body and our mind. The yogis have known about this for thousands of years. Science has even proven it. The hippies and the intellectuals agree, you should have a gratitude practice.
Gratitude helps you see your world from a place of abundance instead of lacking.
I’ve had a gratitude practice for many years now. I started with the book The Magic. Before that, I kind of always rolled my eyes at people talking about gratitude because it just seemed that everybody was grateful for the same things: family, partner, health, etc. It felt to me like a list to prove your virtuousness more than anything else. But The Magic really helped me to see gratitude in a different way. I did its 28 exercise and have been employing then ever since.
But this post is not about the greatness of gratitude. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great. I am a believer and an advocate. This post is about the point where gratitude starts to negate your inner truth.
Let’s say that you have a job you like, a house, a partner, a spouse, health, family. In paper you have all the ingredients for a happy life. You are super grateful for all that you have but you’re not 100% content. Or perhaps you were but now, not anymore. What do you do?
I’ll tell you what you do. You start feeling guilty. You say to yourself: “I have so much. So many people would love to have what I have. Get over it, Vanessa. Focus on all these positive things.” Then, you double down on the gratitude because you learned that the more you are grateful, the happier you will be. So, you silence that inner voice. You drown it out with lists of sunsets, children’s laughs, time together, and all that jazz.
It becomes a sort of emotional suppression with the best intentions. We don’t allow ourselves to ask why. “Why do we feel this way?” Asking this question, spending time with it does not make us ungrateful. I repeat, it does not make us ungrateful. It makes us aware.
You can seemingly have “all you need” and still have feelings of sadness, disappointment, grief, or dissatisfaction. These are all legitimate parts of the human experience. Does feeling dissatisfied cancel out all the things you’re happy about? Does grieving something that is gone or never was, make the things you do have count for less?
Gratitude and dissatisfaction can coexist.
When you allow yourself to feel both, it opens the door to more meaningful questions.
Have I changed? Is this dissatisfaction telling me that something in my life needs to change? Am I holding on to an expectation that doesn’t serve me? Am I grieving something? Am I comparing myself to others? Or is it simply a difficult time, and this feeling will pass?
In yoga, we say: What you resist, persists. I think the saying is actually attributed to Carl Jung, but we say it often in class. Suppressing our feelings doesn’t make them disappear. They can fester, building resentment or frustration until they eventually surface, sometimes in very inconvenient and destructive ways. Sitting with them, however, can bring some clarity to what we’re experiencing.
When we sit with these questions, we might also discover that change isn’t always the necessary response to dissatisfaction, grief, or disappointment. Perhaps we do need to change something. But perhaps what is needed is acceptance. Accepting that something is out of our control and it is what it is. Accepting that something is gone or will never be and allowing yourself to grieve. Perhaps disappointment is necessary because you were expecting something that wasn’t fair (on yourself, others, or life) and you have to pivot your thinking. Or even, it could be that you are at a crossroads and many things are in flux and what you need to exercise some patience to navigate that discomfort.
So, what if our gratitude practice becomes an exploration of everything? What if we acknowledge the magic that is life while also exploring and seeking to understand the parts that are not so magical? Wouldn't that be something?
After all, we are all human. And perhaps true contentment begins with allowing ourselves to be just that.
