On gratitude - by Clare McLusky

This week's blog has been written by Clare McLusky, Trustee of Yes to Life and trained mindfulness teacher with a Masters in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University. Today Clare shares with us some simple and helpful tips on gratitude... 

Whenever I am struggling and stressed, and life feels just plain challenging, I tend to stop doing all the things that help resource me, like exercise, mindfulness, seeing friends. It can feel hard to focus on organising or doing anything. At these times, I have discovered that doing a gratitude practice really helps and soon begins to change the quality of my day. It is a quick and easy practice to do and simply involves bringing to mind things you are grateful for that day. I find I start opening up to all the things that are good in my life and I regain my perspective.

When you are living with cancer and going through tests and treatment it can be all consuming and over-whelming and it is helpful to remind yourself of what you can be grateful for like supportive family and friends, a team of practitioners you trust in, the nurse who smiled warmly at you today and seemed to understand, the comfort of the bed you sleep in, the flowers bursting forth with colour in the garden, the birds singing. The difficulties and challenges are still there but you begin to notice the good things in your life too, particularly the small pleasures that may come your way.

Recently, I taught a mindfulness course to a group of 14 wonderful people who are living with cancer. I decided to introduce a simple gratitude practice - The Five Finger Gratitude Practice. We had a go experiencing it in the session and if you feel like it, you could give it a try now.  Just sitting here, ask yourself what am I grateful for in this actual moment? As you hold the first finger and recognise something to be grateful for, be curious as to whether there is any resonance in the body. Perhaps there is a sense of warmth, of ease or of opening. Then holding consecutive fingers find 4 more things. For me now, I am sitting comfortably for which I am grateful, I am warm, the sky is blue, the sun is setting, and the train is lulling me into a soporific state. Five things I feel grateful for. 

The invitation to the group was to do this practice at the end of each day, reflecting on what had happened during the day and feeling again the pleasure or enjoyment of it.   Some people experienced it as quite transformative “it made my whole week more pleasant”. One member found that she was beginning to “collect pleasant moments during the day”. As they continued with the practice over the 8 weeks of the course, they too felt it helped put things in perspective.

It can be helpful to aim for a Ten Finger Gratitude Practice which really pushes us to bring to mind the perhaps small and often unnoticed things that happen or the things that we take for granted, like a safe and comfortable home to live in, a warm bed, food on the table.  

The fact is that we are hard-wired to notice the negative; what’s wrong, the problems and what feels lacking. The psychologist Rick Hanson says, “attention is like Teflon for pleasant experiences and Velcro for unpleasant experiences”. The good news is that we can train ourselves to pay attention to the pleasant experiences in our lives and as we do so, we start to notice more and more positive things. As the saying goes, what you choose to focus on becomes your reality. Give it a go!