Transform Your Perspective with Gratitude Now

(air whooshing) (mouse clicking) (bright gentle music) ♪ Headspace Studios ♪ (bright gentle music) Hi there, welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Tuesday. It's Dora. So I often think that gratitude gets a bad rep only because it feels very topical. Sad? Well, what are you grateful for? Angry, well, practice gratitude. Lonely? Be grateful. And what I've been realizing is how many of these feel-good practices need to be applicable to our own lives. We need to go beyond the intellectual understanding of them and connect to the felt sense of gratitude. As I always say, "It's one thing to understand something, and it's a totally other thing to really feel it." Case in point, instead of leaving gratitude to the mind, it must also be felt in the body. When you think of all the other thoughts that are competing for your attention, it's no wonder that gratitude can be hard to find. But if we can intentionally shift our focus to choose gratitude and appreciation in the moment, and also be aware of its presence in the body, our ability to connect to it on a deeper level grows. Similar to when we begin to live more mindfully, when we practice gratitude, we have the ability to see and experience life from a different perspective. So last December, I decided to go to Kenya for a month and a half, recovering from a season of fatigue and exhaustion. One of the side effects of me being tired is I complain a lot. In those moments, gratitude seems like a far away place, and it felt like instead of working through this complaining and finding the root of my exhaustion, I decided to go to a far away place instead. As if my complaining mind wouldn't follow me wherever I went. Now, being that my mom's side of the family's from Kenya, I was able to get the experience of a local and really immerse myself in the culture. While I was there, I was also training for a marathon, so I was connected to a local running group and began training with them. One morning after a night of heavy rainfall, we set out to do our long run. As we turned the corner on a residential street to a more urban area, we jogged past a family who was fetching water and bathing in one of the potholes in the road. Now, intellectually, I know that there's millions of impoverished people on this earth, living in conditions that I could never even imagine, but to see this in person a few feet away was overwhelming. And even now as I write about this, I have chills down my arm. This moment left an imprint on my mind and my heart, all that complaining I had been doing, which is human, but not always helpful, took a backseat in that moment. I thought to myself, if I can hold onto this memory in my mind, whenever I...