Everyone is talking about gratitude this week, and I love that. But when I sat to write my post this week, I didn’t want to just rehash what everyone was saying. I wanted to come to gratitude from a different place, to really understand exactly what I believe gratitude to mean. Here’s what I’ve been pondering.

This unusual twist on gratitude has been tossing around in my head since before Thanksgiving. It feels like a ping pong game in there. It really has to do with altering how we perceive gratitude with a bunch of different feelings that seem to often go along with it. It’s Gratitude with Flavors.

Growing up in a Catholic home with 12 years of Catholic school under my belt, I heard a lot of phrases like, “How can you be such an ingrate?” or, “How dare you feel X. You should just be grateful you have a roof over your head.” Those comments always made me feel terrible about myself. I agreed that I wasn’t being truly grateful, and that I was, in fact, “bad” for not feeling gratitude. (Or maybe I just rolled my eyes…) I mean, how could I NOT eat what’s on my plate when children were starving elsewhere? (yes, I heard that.) But honestly, it was confusing. I was a certain flavor of grateful. Wasn’t I?

So, it seemed like being grateful was somehow tied up in being bad. As I look back on that, it seems to me like that bite of gratitude was coming from a place of lack and very tied to guilt. Is that gratitude or guilt? That is not the gratitude I’m talking about in my life, to my clients and students.

Another way I hear the word gratitude used comes from lack, as well. When we are in lack, gratitude can come from a place of fear. “I’m grateful because tomorrow, Lord knows, what might happen!” While that may be true, where is the focus? It’s on future fears, instead of present moment. If we fear we will lose what we have, we are not living with an abundant consciousness. (and thereby just attracting the very thing we fear!)

Have you ever called an elderly person, to ask how they were and you heard, “Well, I’m grateful I woke up this morning.” I’ve not been 78, but I pray that that won’t be how I feel when I wake in the morning at that age. I hope it will be a focused on love of the daily moments I get to experience (I’m sure peppered with some grumbling here and there.) So what does it mean to say you’re grateful you’re alive – not because you’re loving life, but because you’re not dead?

So, I’ve decided that true gratitude comes when you are really present. (Doesn’t it always come down to this?) When you can look at your past with dispassion, and acknowledge your growth, you can feel yummy grateful. When you look back and then worry that it might happen again is gratitude with the tang of worry and fear. And, it means you are not being present. Do you see where I’m going here? It’s not simply a matter of degree. It’s a matter of focus. Conscious, deliberate creating. And, while you sit in gratitude, the universe is preparing to give you more of that delicious gratitude you’re wallowing in.

If we are consciously aware of what is in our life that we are grateful for – not because it might be taken away, and not because we should feel guilty, but because our hearts and souls sing when we think about and feel it, then that, to me, is gratitude.

True gratitude feels good. It resonates with our entire being, and vibrates at a very high frequency.

I have so many things to be grateful for right here, right now, regardless of anything else. And THAT flavor of gratitude is delicious.