Mindful March: Hug your brain

I’m currently working through The Art of Stopping Time by Pedram Shojai. It’s a book structured in one hundred days’ worth of mindfulness prompts and reflections.

This is what came out of day two.

Today, on the day of the full ‘Worm’ Moon, we are being grateful and positive.*

*Also a Blood moon, but that felt less grateful and positive than worms. I mean earthworms specifically, of course, the most grateful and positive of all worms.

Gratitude, says Shojai, is a great way to “relieve stress and build positive energy, and it gives us a great perspective on life.”

The exercise in today’s chapter was to make a list of all the things I am grateful for. I thought it would be easy peasy, but then my brain got in the way.

I went to write my first gratitude list item. I planned on writing something along the lines of: I am grateful for my wife and the support she provides.

What came out was:

“I am grateful for my wife and the support she provides, despite the fact that I am unemployed and unable to help out financially.”

Hmm. That didn’t feel as positive and grateful as it could have been. Let’s try again.

I moved on to number two on the list. I am grateful for my health, but what came out was:

I am grateful for my health – especially as I am too anxious to call the doctor sometimes.

Huh.

It became clear quite quickly that I was struggling to be grateful for something without beating myself down at the same time*.

*Yes, I am talking about this with my therapist, and it does not come as a total surprise.

In the end, I ditched the first list. I took a breath and tried again. This time, I focused on the positive:

I am grateful for my wife and her love and support.
I am grateful for my health, allowing me to navigate this world without pain.
I am grateful for my brain and for how unique and creative it is…

I kept writing for ten minutes. By the end, I had filled two pages of beautiful, positive gratitude.

Sometimes it works right away. Sometimes we get it wrong and need to try again.

To quote Marshall Rosenberg from his podcast Nonviolent Communication: “We never try to be perfect, just progressively less stupid…. Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing poorly.”

It’s good, in a way, to see it. To see how my brain tries to turn the positive into a negative.

I see you, brain. I hear you. You need more hugs and love.

Come ‘ere.