Gratitude is an Opening of the Nervous System
You’ve heard it’s important to cultivate gratitude as part of spiritual practice. But what’s so important about it?
The answer lies in a deeper understanding of what gratitude actually is. Most people describe it as an expression of “thank you” after receiving something good. A trade. A give and a get. But gratitude is not a reciprocal response that arises after receiving. It’s an active gesture of the nervous system that precedes any receiving. An a-priori state of being you can cultivate and maintain all the time.
So what is this state, and how do you cultivate it?
For most of my life I focused obsessively on the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be. All my awareness on that gap, on the steps needed to close it. Maybe you can relate. There’s nothing wrong with this - it shows you know what perfection looks and feels like and you want to bring it into the world. Good motivator. But spending all your time focused on the gap trains your nervous system to feel like a failure. Like you’re not good enough. Like you’re not where you want to be. Here’s the thing: you will never be where you want to be. The miracle of your life is that there’s always more to create and experience. So you need to balance the focus on the gap with a focus on how far you’ve already come.
This is the beginning step. If you need a starting point, journal. Don’t make it a big deal - fast and simple. Before bed each night, write down a few things you’re grateful for.
As you practice putting awareness on what you’re grateful for - things you have, past experiences - you’ll notice something start to happen. It might feel like unclogging a blocked pipe. When this starts, put your attention on the sensations in your body and forget the thoughts that sparked the initial feeling. Practice with your eyes closed, minimal distractions, like in meditation, so you can focus fully on the sensations.
If you’re sensitive you might start to feel something like an empty tube extending vertically through the center of your body. When you put attention on it, it seems to widen. You’ll often feel blockages where the tube constricts - solar plexus, throat, center of the chest, pelvis, brain. Notice these constrictions with curiosity and equanimity. The same way you’d relax a tense muscle, relax these energetic constrictions. Allow the tube to open, widen. This is often accompanied by a rush of sensation or emotion. Notice. Allow it to pass. Don’t clamp down again to make it stop.
With practice, this empty tube widens until it envelops your whole body. The felt sense of your body shape can start to disappear. And as you keep attention on this tube you’ll notice something else: it stops feeling like emptiness and starts to feel like fullness. Like infinite potential energy ready to create anything you can imagine. This might sound strange, but the potential energy starts to feel like pure love. And in this field of love is everything that exists - all you have experienced and all you will experience.
The only way to understand what I mean is to practice it yourself. This isn’t something the mind can grasp alone. Don’t take my word for it - prove it to yourself. If you haven’t experienced these sensations, they’re not part of your reality yet.
Gratitude is the full-bandwidth experiencing of what is. Without tension, resistance, or blockages. It’s a gesture of opening the nervous system, opening the central channel, opening your very being. Opening so wide that your self dissolves and you become the experience itself. This gesture of opening allows you to fully receive the gift being given - the gift of this moment.
When you find this state, reactivate your mind and take an inventory of your life. The gift of my wife. The gift of my child. My dogs, my home, my health, my teachers. Feel the sparkle of each one shining as a miracle. To experience those things fully, with no blockage or resistance, is to respect and honor the sacred nature of those gifts, of all things, of existence itself. Allow any emotional release that needs to happen. Let go. Surrender.
Gratitude is an open receiving with no holding back. A fully surrendered experiencing. A dissolution of the experiencer into the moment. When you touch that - the utter pristine perfection - you can let go of all suffering, all dissatisfaction. They don’t exist, except as self-generated tensions and resistance to the open-bodied, open-hearted experience of reality.