It's such a relief to develop an appreciation for the details of our lives without imposing strict emotional limits on what it means to be grateful.
Navigating subjective experience can be fraught. Ironically, it becomes even more challenging when we try to develop admirable qualities like empathy, courage, resilience, and gratitude. It’s easy to expect emotional maturity to match our unrealistic ideas of how they should feel. Sometimes, we experience these qualities without even realizing it because our direct experience contrasts with what we expect.
This is part of what I find so encouraging about Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's ongoing myth-busting research into how humans experience emotions. It doesn’t always align with what's discussed in mindfulness circles, but I find it liberating to incorporate it into the cultivations of mindful awareness.
When she started studying emotion, she thought she would be able to observe it in the brain or body—that anger, fear, sadness, boredom, joy, humor, love, and peace must connect to specific mechanisms in our physiology. Instead, she found that emotions are something the brain constructs as it actively manages the body’s complex metabolic needs.
“In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to predictively guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When your brain constructs concepts from past experiences of emotion, your brain is categorizing sensations and guiding action.”1
According to her model, our brains interpret bodily sensations to make predictions based on abstract concepts we pick up from our families and communities. The brain simplifies the overwhelming amount of sensory data we experience by compressing it and constructing emotions that help us navigate social reality.
From this perspective, our emotional feelings aren’t universal. Our brains make them up as we go to conserve the body’s costly energy needs more efficiently.
What I find freeing about this is that we can practice experiencing our feelings without rushing to interpret them, and that our emotional interpretations aren’t inevitable or permanent.
“It’s impossible to change your past, but right now, with some effort, you can change how your brain will predict in the future. You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas. You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow.”2
Instead of trying to match our inner feelings to what we think others feel, we can leave space to discover what we feel—literally—and start relying less on the concepts we’ve habitually linked to our feelings.
“Variation is the norm in emotional experience. When a person experiences the same emotion in the same situation multiple times, she can vary in her physical changes depending on what action she takes. The same emotion can also vary across multiple contexts, such as being bumped in a hallway by a stranger, unfairly evaluated in a stressful interview, and while recalling a frustrating event…
A human can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear, gasp in fear, hide in fear, attack in fear, and even laugh in the face of fear. But this in no way implies that some central state of fear exists that is controlling all these behaviors in an attempt to protect the self from harm.”3
When we ease up on the impulse to make sense of our feelings, we leave room to become more curious about the raw sensations and perceptions that signal the brain is trying to guess what’s coming based on its previous predictions.
We can try to let gratitude, for example, feel however it feels when we reflect on things that are integral to our lives.
In practice, I find it helpful to allow gratitude to feel pleasant, unpleasant, a messy mixture of both, or even completely neutral.
Sometimes, when I think about my Grandma Donna’s laughter in the face of getting lost, I feel pleasant sensations. At other times, the feelings seem related to grief and loss. Often, the mix is complex, and I don’t need to force it into one category or another. Sometimes I don’t feel any emotional reaction at all, and in those moments, I’m free to let gratitude feel neutral.
So, if you’re asked to share what you’re thankful for this holiday season, say whatever seems appropriate for the situation. But if you carve out some time to privately reflect on what you love about your life (which I hope you will), try to put aside any need to explain it to anyone or even to understand it for yourself, and just feel it instead.
Exercise
This exercise strengthens emotional awareness and fosters a gentle relationship to the felt-sense of emotional complexity.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Decorating for the holidays
Driving home from work or running errands
Spending quiet time by yourself
Reconnecting with friends and family
Listening to “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter4 (YouTube, Spotify)
Settle into practice. Find a comfortable, stable position. Decide whether you'd like to close your eyes or keep them open.
Reflect on your ability to notice ordinary perceptions. Take a moment to appreciate how amazing it is that you can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, think, and feel emotions. Children naturally explore these senses, but adults need to remember to practice.
As your attention shifts to sights, sounds, and sensations, notice how it feels to recognize the abilities that let you experience the world through your senses.
As you do this, loosen your definition of gratitude to include whatever it feels like:
pleasant
unpleasand
mixed
neutral
Practice this type of emotional flexibility and openness with all the reflections in this exercise.
Reflect on cherished possessions. Call to mind some of the objects in your home without the need to explain or defend your appreciation for the role they play in your daily life.
Reflect on meaningful places. Where do you feel safe? Where have you experienced joy, vitality, and connection? Where have you discovered what you’re capable of doing, creating, and being? What places feel or have felt sacred to you?
As the poet Wendell Berry reminds us:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.5
Reflect on the people you care about. Invite the faces of people you care about—and those who care about you—into your imagination. Picturing them and considering what you might say to each other can evoke deep feelings of appreciation, joy, and pain. Feel what you feel. In this moment, gratitude feels like this.
Expanding the scope to include difficult people, for the invaluable lessons they unintentionally teach us, simultaneously requires and builds courage, generosity, and resilience. Include one or more of them if you'd like to.
“Gratitude” by David Whyte, from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (author, library, Instagram, Waking Up app)
Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.
To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witnesses all at once.
Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.”
Barrett, L. F. (2020). Seven and a half lessons about the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. https://a.co/9ddJIah
“How to Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry
