I’ve kept a gratitude journal on and off for several years, and I’ve found that it’s not hard to come up with five things I’m grateful for every day…

I do vary in what I write down, with some selections of a more superficial nature like an awesome pair of shoes I just found on sale, or deeper things like my friends and family. But what I have found in doing this practice for a while now is that it doesn’t matter what I write down at all, and it doesn’t even matter what I remember in my head as things I’m grateful for. What it comes down to is how grateful I feel.

It’s a very different thing to make a list of things you’re grateful for as a cognitive exercise, and to truly feel grateful down to your bones. But it’s the latter which is really life-changing.

Obviously, the point of the gratitude list is to hopefully inspire the feelings of gratitude. After all, you need to conjure up the name and image of what you are grateful for in order to fully acknowledge it. But once you’ve got that, I think it’s worth a few minutes of truly connecting to what gratitude feels like in your body. For me, I immediately feel a “swelling” in my heart area (gratitude-induced thoracic edema?) The feeling expands in my chest and rises into my throat, as if I am on the verge of crying or laughing. That makes sense to me, as often the outward signs of our somatic emotions is either laughter or tears. Beyond that, I find myself smiling and feeling a loosening of my muscles all over. I take deeper breaths, my shoulders relax and quite often I even feel a jolt of energy like I just drank a cup of coffee. Being relaxed and energetic at the same time might seem paradoxical, but this is a common effect of balancing out our emotions. When we connect inwardly to those things that uplift us, our bodies can release tension that we have been unconsciously holding onto.

Knowing where you feel certain emotions within your body is very important. Your body often reacts to your emotions before you might even be consciously aware of them. This body map shows the different areas of the body that are implicated in different emotional states. Every cell in your body contains receptors on its surface that receives information based on your feelings, and we tend to feel certain emotions in different parts of the body. By mapping out where you feel emotions in your own body, you can begin to reinforce the positive effects of positive emotions, and minimize the negative effects of negative emotions. (Although I use the words positive and negative as it pertains to emotions, I don’t mean to call the positive ones “good”, and the negative ones “bad”. Negative emotions like anger, sadness and frustration have their uses and are healthful to experience, but when indulged in for too long or too frequently, are associated with prolonged stress states that eventually wear down the body through excess inflammation).

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1. Find a comfortable seated position, preferably sitting upright with your feet on the floor or cross-legged. You can also lie down if you prefer.
2. Take three deep breaths to center yourself, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth.
3. Focus on one thing you are grateful for today. Pick something that is more concrete (for example, a pet or family member, rather than an abstract idea like being grateful for your awesome sense of humor).
4. Spend several minutes really visualizing in your mind’s eye this object of your gratitude with all of your five senses.
5. When you start to feel grateful, shift your focus to your own body. What region of your body captures your attention first?
6. Open your eyes, and mark on the body map where you feel this feeling and what it looks like. Use shapes or colors if they feel right to you.
7. Close your eyes, and now focus on this region of your body. If you need to, call up the image of what you are grateful for again.
8. Where does the feeling travel to next? Follow the feeling with your mind.
9. Open your eyes, and mark on the body map where the feeling moved to. Again, use colors and/or shapes if they feel right to you.
10. Continue this process until you sense you have completed your body map. You might want to add the date and make a note of what image you were focusing on.

This is a powerful exercise because it creates a multi-sensory experience of gratitude and provides ourselves with feedback. It fosters the mind-body connection, and allows for a more intuitive understanding of ourselves and how our emotions affect us. If you are up for a challenge, do this exercise daily for a week, and keep track of your body maps. See how they may change each day, or based on what image you are grateful for. I will be posting my gratitude body maps on instagram (#gratitudebodymap) starting today, so feel free to see what mine look like, as well as post your own!

And remember, as we (finally!) head into Spring…

“Gratitude is the fairest blossom, which springs from the Soul.” – Henry Ward Beecher

There is only one question you need to ask yourself when you consider making any change to be healthier.

Is my desire to change based on fear, or love?

Many of our attempts to eat well, exercise, and to generally live a healthy life are actually based in fear when we look closer. I’ve found that the more time and effort someone puts into a health endeavor (such as finding the optimal diet), often the more motivated they are by fear. If you follow some popular health and fitness blogs, the messages are clear: Eat (insert optimal diet here i.e. vegan, low-fat, etc) to prevent chronic illness and disease. Exercise (insert activity and intensity) to prevent dying early or debilitation.

The problem with coming from a fear based perspective is that you are setting yourself up for added stress even as you attempt to live a healthier life, with all the benefits it has to offer. Being fanatical about a strict diet or exercise regimen is identifying with a certain set of behaviors so much that without them, you don’t know who you are. There are all kinds of programs out there to help you stick to positive changes, and many focus on learning to identify yourself as “someone who doesn’t eat cake” or “someone who loves to be active”. But the problem is that if you do end up eating that piece of cake, or staying at home to watch TV instead of hitting the gym, you end up feeling like you did something wrong that you have to make up for the next day. How many times have we all thought that working out extra hard the day following an indulgence would counteract it? Not only does our metabolism not work that way, but that mindset reinforces our fear that there is always a perfect decision we should have made, that we failed to make.
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It’s a life-changing and literally brain-altering experience to come from a place of love when you make your lifestyle choices. If you choose to eat healthy, do so because you love the flavor of the food and how it nourishes your body. When you decide to lift weights at the gym, do so because it exhilarates you to witness your own strength and progress. Find joy in each healthy behavior, not because it is helping you change how you look physically or is preventing a disease, but simply because each of these behaviors is an expression of self-love. It’s no different than reading a sweet child a bedtime story and tucking him in with his teddy bear. That’s how loving you want to be with yourself when you are on a journey of healthy living.

When you do experience a “setback” or “relapse”, which is essentially engaging in a behavior that ultimately does not serve your higher purpose, do it with love. This sounds somewhat paradoxical, because how can it be self-loving to indulge in a behavior you have pre-identified as harmful to your health? The answer is that no single behavior in and of itself is healthy or harmful. Every choice you make occurs in a context. Eating spinach is healthy, but only if you are eating plenty of other things as well. A spinach-only diet would lead to malnutrition pretty quickly! Eating birthday cake might lead to some unfavorable hormone and blood sugar fluctuations temporarily, but if this is an occasional treat then you can trust your body will recover and suffer no ill effect from a once-in-a-while indulgence. As long as your overall context for your choices is love, you can feel comfortable that any choice you make will be aligned with the healthy life you truly want.

I encourage you to evaluate your health behaviors and investigate whether you tend to approach them from love or fear. For those that are rooted in fear, how can you be more loving towards yourself as you make a change? Apply this question to other areas of your life, and you might just find that health is the natural outcome of love itself.

When babies cry, they put everything they’ve got into it. They wail and moan, the shed huge alligator tears and it doesn’t matter what the situational context might be. They don’t care who hears them. They don’t care what they sound like or what their crying face looks like. When things aren’t right, they cry and hold nothing back.

The same thing is true when they laugh. We all know those contagious deep belly laughs babies are capable of. Babies never lower their heads when they laugh, or move to cover their mouths. They laugh with gusto, often squealing with delight.

What is it that occurs during the normal course of growing up, that so many of us start to hold back? As adults, it’s often rare to see each other sob with grief, unless it’s with a few close friends after a catastrophic event. I’m sure most of us have experienced embarrassment, not to mention tightening of our throats, when our efforts to stifle tears failed. We are more likely to laugh with each other than to cry, but again, where is the completely unabashed squeal of delight and deep guttural laughter? There are those of us who restrain ourselves in public places for fear of offending the ears of our one-eyebrow-raised disapproving neighbor. So many of us are self-conscious about expressing these very human emotions. This is unfortunate, because weeping and laughing offer important emotional releases that as adults, we must continue to experience if we want to experience optimal physical health.

Our emotions are an important link between our psychological selves and our physical selves. The paradigm for understanding physical illness is changing, and we now know that our emotional health (of which a big part is emotional expression) is closely linked to the physical illnesses we may tend towards. Gone are the days when you were doomed to get a disease because it was “in your genes”. Now, more than our genetic susceptibility to disease, understanding our emotional susceptibility to disease may provide the most life-changing information.

What does emotional susceptibility to disease mean? This means that when unhealthy emotional patterns are continually reinforced as we age, we began to effect physical alterations in the actual tissues of our bodies. These changes accumulate if we do not address the emotional cause, until a critical threshold is reached and a “disease” can develop. Emotions are well known to create physical change in the body, such as a the rise in heartbeat before speaking before a group of people, or the relaxation of our muscles when we are held by a loved one. There is no question that each one of us has felt the physical manifestations of our emotions; indeed, it is often how we identify the emotion being felt. What has been less well understood, is how chronic emotional patterns affect tissues over time, especially when those patterns become dysfunctional.
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It is not a far stretch to suggest that different emotions can be felt in different parts of the body. We can feel anxiety in the gut, love or heartache in the chest, and rage in our head and neck. The more we feel certain emotions, the more our nervous system efficiently communicates to our cells how to behave. This process is all normal and part of the intimate interaction between our tissues and our feelings. The problem arises when we reinforce dysfunctional pathways between our emotions and our cells. For instance, if someone has been mistreated by another in the past, and felt anger at that mistreatment, the body will have actively changed to accommodate the anger. There will have been a tensing of muscles, a spike in heart rate, maybe even dilation of the pupils. If this emotion is not dealt with when it occurs, then each time this memory even flirts with the conscious mind, the body will react in the same way. And the more the body becomes used to reacting to certain emotions, the more “muscle memory” is developed, making it easier to react in similar ways in the future. It therefore becomes absolutely necessary to the health of the physical body (as well as the mental, spiritual and emotional body) to process the anger, learn whatever lesson there may be to learn in the broader context of life, and then move on. This will prevent a dysfunctional pattern from settling in.

Strong negative emotions are likely the ones that may be the hardest to release, but the most necessary to do so. Becoming comfortable with emotional expression requires a state of mind free from judgement, so that a full release is possible in whatever way feels natural. Releasing negative emotions is not the same as ignoring their existence; rather, it is a full respect and acknowledgement of them, allowing the emotion to take its course. These emotions need to be felt when they arise. Negative emotions themselves are not dysfunctional; it is the reinforcing of them at later times that creates the dysfunctional pattern. If they can be fully felt, processed and then released, there is less of a chance that the intensity of that emotion will continue to play out in the tissues.

As for positive emotions, in general, their effects are favorable on tissues so the idea here would be to feel them as much as possible. This doesn’t necessarily imply that their frequency should increase, although many of us would benefit from more positive emotional experiences. But we must be in a state of mindfulness to extract the richness from the moment to get the full benefit. In an era where multi-tasking and information overload has lead to an ADD culture, this can be difficult. If we can stay present and open our hearts fully to the experience, we can know a far greater degree of satisfaction than we have known up till now. Imagine that everything that gives you joy right now could be magnified ten-fold, just by paying closer attention. It is certainly worth it to put down our camera phones when we encounter something exciting we want to remember, and to fully immerse ourselves in that experience, as this is the only way we can absorb it fully.

Even though I use the words “negative” and “positive” to describe emotions, truly no emotion itself is negative or positive. It merely is. It is a movement of energy through us, enriching our lives and allowing our soul to communicate to us in a conscious manner. So the next time you feel the urge to cry, go ahead and open your throat, open your heart, and cry. Give it everything you have, and wail like you have never wailed before. And when you want to laugh at something silly, laugh your hardest, all the way down into your toes. Grab your belly, slap your knee, and laugh until cry. Allowing yourself to feel and express your emotions physically gives others permission to do so as well. And we could all benefit from a little more emotional freedom.

Creating a vision is an important coaching tool that helps each client connect with their innermost values and desires, and links it to their motivation to make the vision a reality. Some may find this exercise easy, while others will struggle with visualizing clearly what it is they want most for themselves. It requires a shift in thinking. The center of the vision is ultimately you, after all, and no body else. Not your family, friends or significant others. This vision is all about what you want in life, and this can be a hard shift to make for those who have spent much of their lives focused on the people around them.

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