I think expressing it out loud solidifies and anchors the feeling, enhances the experience, helps it linger and then radiates out more life-affirming energies to others — all Life and beings on this planet, helps to create a continuously encircling energy of light and gratitude. And I don’t think it makes any difference if one expresses to another person, to one’s beloved pet, to one’s special tree or simply out loud to one’s self. Bearing witness to Gratitude outloud just magnifies it.

And thank u for this insightful question as I didn’t realize the truth, to me, of what I just wrote until the question was asked and brought forward this answer. THK U!

I lie in my bed. It’s nearly 11 a.m. and I’ve been awake mostly lying in bed since 8:00 a.m. except for preparing my cat’s medically needed meal. I’ve gotten into a daily rut for a long time of lying in bed sometimes til the afternoon, feeling so alone, isolated and fearful. Not from COVID, except to the extent its social/economic impact has so fundamentally altered everyone’s world. But just depression I’ve grappled with completely alone without any other people in my life and with an out of the blue recent diagnosis of an extremely rare and aggressive form of cancer for which I’ve had, as turns out, very successful surgery and feel comfortable with my long-considered decision not to, at 70 yrs of age and devoid of any human connections, have any chemo/radiation. Surgery and final path report went so well that my oncologist is actually ok with my choice.

I say all this as a prelude to answering this question bcuz it’s been very, very much like this for a very, very long time bcuz of intense and prolonged life-situation stressors which have zapped all desire to stay alive, participate in life and so each day I’d lie in bed for hours grappling with the internal anguis fear and self loathing for being like this. Having shame. Fighting fiercely against this insidious malaise and then ever so slowly learning from different meditation sources from this site that struggling to push it away only pulls me in further akin to what happens if one is in quicksand.

So slowly I’ve been learning to accept, embrace and be grateful for the wisdom of my amazing body and the healing message it has been trying to get thru to me by sending this depression, this forced time off to heal emotionally and energetically from years of living engulfed unknowingly in the place of fight flight freeze due to pro bono helping/protecting others thru private solo litigation practice.

In learning to accept my current state of depression and anxiety as an emergency healing response of my body and to stop seeing it as personal failure/shameful I’ve learned about gratitude for what Life brings us and to work *with* it to ultimately heal.

So today, I will again come here Gratefulness.org. I will open my fearful and armored heart just a little tiny bit more. I will accept what unbidden tears may come and not push them away as being weak or feeling sorry for my ‘worthless’ self; I will honor and embrace my Self’s need to feel grief knowing in that, in trusting my divinely-engineered body’s wisdom in what it needs to heal the life long, bone-deep traumas of constant, recurrent, life-threatening childhood neglect. And the blessing to have the time now to trust the Process and let it unfold and be gentle and loving towards myself instead of critical and emotionally bullying.
So, today, in my surroundings and my slowly emerging clearer perceptions I do not see the bright sunny blue sky with puffy white clouds of yesterday, I see cold, wet, blustery remnants of winter’s passing, grey-white skies and the naked trees pressed pressed against them AND I perceive the deep just different beauty of that. AND I see my closest, dearest, most innocent and devoted family members/BFFs cuddled against me in bed, my awesome, affectionate calico cat and my standard poodle

And this is the first morning in as long as I can recall since dealing with this emotional state that I have been to truly perceive the beauty that is constantly there no matter how it may be obscured or made intensely opaque by life circumstances, pain, dark clouds instead of sunshine and puffy-cloud laden blue skies. All is needed for wholeness and all is a gift just in different ways.

Wow…yesterday and many days for me, especially first thing in a.m. are so frightening and often I don’t want to come out of the cocoon of sleep then or ever again. I try to check in with my daily Gratefulness.org email and any new blog posts here. I came thru yesterday with a break in the internal darkness around 6 p.m. which was late in this frequent journey I take. In trying to learn acceptance of fact that this condition will be with me for the rest of my life, I try to sit with it even on more challenging days before resorting to meds that usually help for a time but are only a bandaid. The real answer is in finding gratitude, gratefulness for the ineffable miracle of life in all forms and transcend the immediate “difficult”, painful experience, be grateful for lessons it brings.

Today’s message and this blog post particularly helped me face this morning’s fear. It is my dearest wish to also be able to live with boundless optimism as does Laura Grace and others here but any optimism is so slow in coming. Still, this blog post so embodies the practical experience of today’s daily message and it is helpful. It is warming. Thank you.

I’m sorry to be such a “downer” in comparison to so many of the blog postings and the comments I read here at Gratefulness.org. But I don’t know *how* to get to a place of gratitude in the face of really very scary things in my life and I am alone, aging and have no family/friend support system.

This is a marvelous blog post. To quote one passage: . “I have slowly started to shift my attitude from the anger, fear, and loneliness brought on by the Parkinson’s and the grim predictions of a Parkinson’s future to a more body-based feeling of gratefulness for the wholeness of life as I experience it second by second.”

But *HOW* … where did the fear and anger go? What exactly does one do to slowly shift focus to gratitude?

So many blogs and comments on this site do the same thing – talk about “embracing” gratitude or “have come to learn the way of gratitude” and the resulting balance that has ensued.

My life situation is one of being in the midst of losing my home to foreclosure after spending 15 yrs as a solo private practice pro bono litigator protecting the indigent from illegal attempts by giant banks to collect money from people in court without *ever* having sufficient proof that my client owed anything. I worked so hard and so long going days and weeks with little sleep bcuz there was so much work on my plate that I finally had stress-induced mini-stroke and was forced to retire.

How does one go from where I’m alone in the world, facing such scary stuff, have major depression episodes and then just start to develop gratitude.

Please help me understand how it’s done, how that magical path is actually embarked upon,..PLEASE…

Thk u for listening… and for this wonderful blog post.

Oh, Ana Maria. I cannot say how deeply ur reply touched me. I am tearing up as I write this. So few people in day to day life really know anything about ACES even tho ther phrase, psychological testing protocols have been around for such a long time. It’s SO difficult to try to connect with others who do not understand and so ACE experiencer’s must try to appear happy and cheerful when they are not. And, in time, the effort of hiding it and even feeling great shame is just SO not worth the effort, so one ostracizes oneself. And that increases the isolation and perception of “otherness” and the shame –when really SO many are in denial like I was, hiding almost manically in anything in order to function and not feel the pain. And if that artificially safe place is irretrievably withdrawn and one can never bring it back, OMG, it’s literally terrifying and I wake up feeling like that instantly every day. And there’s no longer any happy denial place like save-the-world, perfectionism, workaholism to distract oneself or huddle in and one is just stark naked vulnerable.

It’s almost been too hard to weather this growth and face this new Birthing. For quite a few yrs I’ve only barely hung on rather than just ending it all, giving in to my dearth of hope, my aloneness in life and sense of self-blame, not seeing ANY way out going forward. But now I’m seeing just slimmest path and it’s due in great part to people here like you who do “get it” and tangibly show support and are not frightened off by it. And, the thing is, SO many people have experienced ACEs and don’t know about how harshly that continues to impact them and they still run away from knowing, run away from that part of themselves and strongly flee anyone who may remind them. I think that is why I’ve lost friends — because in time they can’t evade their own dark places any longer when they get too close to someone in the process of seeing & taking on the the painful emergence from the tight cocoon. So they leave what scares them about themselves. I feel pain at that but am learning to let go without blame and wish them well in my heart. But then in my life I am at least in a practical, human form way am alone even if that’s not necessarily true in spiritual/metaphysical sense — but you can’t go to a movie with or out to dinner with or hug that metaphysical presence.

So ur reply and that of others here, real live people, has been so heartening. My deepest gratitude to you, Ana Maria. Blessings.

Yes, Ed. U have well-expressed the principles, Universal, cross-cultural/ social barriers, truths I am coming to embrace. There is a core design in all Life that has endowed our physical bodies, indeed endowed all of our Universe, with the power to self regulate in support of health — the gazillion natural laws weaving the harmonious coordination of celestial bodies for time immemorial so we never have to wonder if the sun will arise on time in the East or if the moon will run 28.4 day cycle or if the cut on our finger will heal. All things are naturally in motion without our having to direct our immune and healing systems to begin to mend the cut or release natural defense mechanisms against infection. But we can easily get in the way of that harmonious dance by what we do, try to do, believe and/or what others do that expose us and our mostly electric-impulse bodies and nervous systems to foreign elements [high levels of RF/EMF exposure in order to have the advanced communication systems we have for instance] or that we do, albeit well-meaningly, by using or ingesting highly toxic healing modalities like chemo. We do have power within ourselves by grand design to heal IF we can learn to access and/or just relax and get into Flow and Know we are Divine sparks of the Creative Energy of the Universe.

My body absolutely Knows whether cancer is still present or may be metastisizing but mostly cannot communicate that clearly to my conscious mind in a way I can consciously Know that. But subtly I can bridge that communication gap, learn to relax and learn how to feel true intuition and develop trust in it. It’s an amazing very subtle, quiet inner journey as I become more skilled at quieting all the monkey mind inner chatter of my ego and hearing the message and Truth in the Silent/Still place, the true Present moment.

Thank you for ur reply. In the loneliness of where I now am in this life, it SO helps to find kindred spirits here with all who have replied when I thought I was really just creating static-bandwidth. Thank u for “getting it”.

Thank you, Vincent-edward for reply and encouragement. I really thought as I was writing that this morning that no one would notice and if they did, it would just to others as self pity and whining.

So it was heartening to see ur encouragement. To clarify just a tad in case u thought I was saying in way that I was giving up (not sure what u meant by struggle, per se). I am not giving up at all but I am giving up struggling and choosing a path where I work with the flow of love and energy and acceptance of my perfectly imperfect self and the “rightness” of that as the best healing tool. Kind of analogous to Gandhi’s or Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s peace and social justice paths were – I choose to stop perpetrating and perpetuating emotional/psychological violence on myself or, actually I guess, anyone. Which, btw, presents its own intense struggle but towards unconditional love and respect, not something I ever experienced and so did not learn how to show myself those and not something our society or the world in general shows much of. So, yeah, that up-stream path is a struggle worth perpetually engaging in.
Again, Vincent-Edward thank u so much for ur supportive reply. It was an honor to receive it, my brother-in-gratefulness!

Butterfly, OH MY so kind of u to reply and I’m going to clarify my post b4 I leave the site. But I think u may have been referring to my decision not to do chemo/radiation as meaning I have a significantly shorter survival prognosis than I otherwise would have. But in all likelihood, I don’t. I personally and deeply/intuitively believe I am cancer free and the VERY left-brained docs pretty much agree. And certainly the final path report shows absolutely no sign of any cancer left or any metastasis. But their ability to really detect such things is not that refined. Still I see no reason to destroy the quality of my life and add any burdens the magnitude of chemo and radiation would bring when I am so alone in life and without any help or people to whom Im close at all…don’t even have a name I can put down to contact “in case of emergency”. There’s no reason to believe that my choice of refusing chemo/radiation will shorten my life span at all. And it assuredly means that the years I do have left –and really at 70, how many yrs do we have anyway– will not be spent dealing with the terrible side effects of those protocols. The only thing I firmly believe/know is that if I dont become far more gentle and learn to replace the shame and self-hatred buried for almost 7 decades that I denied and ran from and hid from in being addicted to perfectionism, performance and workaholism/saving the world…If I don’t learn to turn that around and accept and embrace who I really, who we ALL really are, inside, then the cancer will come back. Then those perfectly healthy cells that went rogue and started to mutate and over-reproduce in the first place will do so again. The cancer was a GIANT wake up call to stop the overload of self-hate, seeing myself as never being good enuf…And start seeing myself as beautiful and perfectly imperfect just like everyone. And gratefulness is a core key in growing in that direction.

OH BUT thank you SO much for wonderful, heat felt response. Butterflies are such majestic, magickal, and courageous little creatures – always highly symbolic to me. Thank U Butterfly! Namaste, peace and presence be urs.

Dear Sheila,

I had never heard/seen that quote and it is so warming and gentle. Thank u so much. Im wondering how one gets such warming ways of looking at things, or the world in general, to sink into their heart and their self, their being from their head…much less how gets to a place where they generate for themselves and then can share with others such concepts like Ram Das or Br. David. Maybe it’s not something one “wonders” (like in their heads) about but something one feels instead. Thx for sharing, tho. It’s very enlightening. Maybe I need to learn better how to practice staying out of my head so much. Much love and appreciation.

Thank you SO MUCH Serafina. Ur reply was so kind and gentle. I am not accustomed to being treated in such a way perhaps bcuz I’ve unwittingly isolated so much apparently in an attempt to protect myself.

I will review the sources you so generously list here as soon as i possibly can. Thank you and I guess u r right, I’m starting to “get it” about practicing gratitude. That is, I see how thankful I am, how I “SO MUCH” appreciate that anyone even noticed, much less so kindly and helpfully, lovingly replied as what I see here and with other replies after yours.

I need a way to replenish my self-parched soul to become increasingly grateful, to develop a practice, a daily lifestyle of gratitude and begin to truly see all that is truly around me in Nature, in being as much as possible in Pesence (ie, Tolle’s words in today’s Gatitude daily posting.

Thank you… I am ‘grateful’ for ur help here and even more telling, I’m finding a way to trust here a bit again. Namaste & blessings be yours. C