#35 A different kind of gratitude practice
It's weird, it works.
One thing about me: I don’t like gratitude lists.
That changed when I found Melody Beattie’s book, Make Miracles in 40 Days: Turning What You Have Into What You Want, in 2018. While I think the book is worth reading, the basic practice it outlines can be spelled out just a few sentences: For forty days you write a daily gratitude list, but instead of saying just the good stuff you’re grateful for (like kittens and lavender candles and pumpkin spiced lattes and your child’s little warm hand), you increase the scope of your gratitudes to include both the wanted and unwanted. Every day for forty consecutive days you are to write at the top of a blank page “Today I’m grateful and thankful…” and below it list out everything that is happening to you, good and bad and wonderful and awful. One might be thankful for the raise they got at work or the flower that blossomed in their garden. One might be grateful they went bankrupt, that their partner cheated, for their bulimia.
I’ve done this pra…