Each November I begin what I call the month of gratitude. Each day, I post a gratitude on my social media. This year, I am doing the same on UCCEG’s social media. My hope is that this 30 days of gratitude will realign my mind heart spirit soul toward living a life steeped in gratitude and God’s superabundance.
Somewhere around February, I begin to sink back into the scarcity mindset of our culture, of capitalism, of the day to day world we currently live in. I don’t know what it is that knocks me out of the place of gratitude. My gratitude practice dwindles and by Lent, it is done.
One year, one of my spiritual directors suggested a gratitude practice that might challenge me when I began to notice my heart shifting away from gratitude and God’s superabundance. She suggested 100 gratitudes.
It is a simple practice that is extremely challenging.
Simply put: through the day, every day, name 100 Gratitudes. Somehow before you crawl into bed each night, you will have noticed and been aware of 100 things in your day you are grateful for.
I took it on.
The first week was a nightmare! I was ready for bed standing at my window saying quickly:
I am grateful for that blade of grass, and that leaf on a tree, and that…. And that….until I got to 100. Then I would fall into bed exhausted from the effort of naming 100 gratitudes.
It got easier. Over the next 6-8 weeks, I began to get into a rhythm and find tools that helped me name the 100 gratitudes.
I pulled out 2 decks of cards and removed 4 cards plus the Jokers from the deck. Those cards would sit on my island in my kitchen. Each time I would walk past the deck, I stopped, picked up a card and spoke a gratitude. Then I put the card in the discard pile.
When I returned home from running errands, being out, or working, I would spend a few moments flipping cards so that I knew how many more gratitudes I had in the day to go.
I began to notice that gratitude was becoming a habit. I would stop on a walk to notice the beauty of the desert and my heart was filled instantly with gratitude. Someone would hold the door open for me and my heart was filled instantly with gratitude. I would hold the door open for a stranger with my heart filled with gratitude – grateful that I could hold the door for someone whose hands were full.
This is a powerful practice.
What I learned was I did not need to do it alone.
When friends would come for dinner, I would pick up some of the cards and put them on the dinner table. We would spend a few minutes flipping cards and naming our gratitudes. It became grace, especially for my friends who did not have grace as a spiritual practice.
I noticed that our table conversations were different after naming gratitudes for 5 minutes before eating. We tended to speak of what brought us hope. We shared our struggles with each other so that all around the table could companion that person toward wholeness – not through advice, rather through listening and being. Our conversations shifted from anger and frustration at the politics of the world or all the bad things that happened during the day, to sharing how we were noticing beauty in the world, where the Sacred was present, our struggles in healing, where we needed prayer. There was more laughter, authenticity.
This practice, practiced alone is powerful. Practiced in community, it is transformational.
I invite you to give it a try.
It is okay if you are naming separate blades of grass and specific houseplants as gratitudes at the end of the day. Notice, as you practice it, how the number of gratitudes you have to name at the end of the day shrink because you are actually finding and experiencing them during the day.
100 Gratitudes to change your life and the world!
