Gratitude in light of darkness

Some reflections on the most potent type of gratitude

Every year, Thanksgiving serves as a great opportunity to reflect on what we’re grateful for in life. We don’t do it enough, even though it’s been proven that practices such as gratitude journaling make people happier.

I’m a big fan of The Five Minute Journal, which prompts you to note down three gratitudes every single day (not just on Thanksgiving).

Gratitude is helpful because it reminds us of all that we already have, connecting us with abundance, which is the opposite of the ego’s comfort zone, scarcity.

Most of the time, it’s easy to find gratitude for friends, family, the roof above our heads, food, and all the good that exists in our lives. While it’s great to remind ourselves of the abundance of love and resources that most of us have, I’ve found a special type of gratitude the most helpful, however.

I’ll call it gratitude for the nasty.

I’ve been feeling pretty nasty for the past few weeks, but today I want to tell you why that’s a good thing and how you can find gratitude in light of darkness, too.

Healing and the Journey to Return to Wholeness

Turns out, you can heal all your core wounds and feel free, and still find yourself pulled back into dark, deeply uncomfortable places. Ugh, who would’ve thought.

Wholeness is such a mundane lesson, but I keep forgetting it until I find myself in circumstances that serve to remind me.

Wholeness does not mean we never experience darkness again. It means that we’re able to hold the full range of the human experience — the light, the dark, and everything more ambiguous and grey in between. Holding the full range means we notice an experience without judging, and we hold space for ourselves to let it move through us in whichever way it needs to. Like children, we let emotions move through our system without judging any part of our emotional experiences.

A balanced inner system is equipped to navigate whatever it may birth. Wise, nurturing parts within us have the capacity to re-parent the inner child (which will become activated over and over again, so we better get really good at this process). A balanced system recognizes patterns before we’re overcome by them.

This is different from not being triggered or not having heavy, dark emotions.

And boy, was I triggered these past few weeks. I didn’t feel very whole, either.

Novel circumstances in my life activated old wounds that I hadn’t gotten to in that variation in all my medicine and integration work yet, and it got pretty nasty for a few days. There I was back in the darkness again, thinking “of course, this freedom that I’d gotten used to was too good to be true”.

As I indulged in the familiar feelings of brokenness, I forgot my wholeness.

I let the darkness swallow me for a hot second.

Thank god I did, though. Turned out it was just was I needed to return to myself.

Why Gratitude for the Nasty Will Accelerate Your Growth

There’s a popular saying — sometimes, things have to get worse before they get better.

We may ask ourselves why some people embark on the healing path and transform, while others don’t. Some of us get sober, end toxic relationships, and stop self-destructive habits while others live in their misery for the rest of their lives.

In my experience, most of those who drastically change their lives only do so after they’ve hit rock bottom. Change is hard, and more often than not, we’re only going to pursue it if the alternative is unbearable. That’s why it will always be easier to live with a baseline level of anxiety, stay in an emotionally abusive relationship, or continue to numb ourselves just a little bit (but not too much) with work, alcohol, shopping, or food than actually put in the work to escape our inner prisons.

It’s only when we have raging panic attacks, relationships become violent, we suffer from burnout, or find ourselves in credit card debt that change becomes urgent.

Only then do we embark on the journey of taking ourselves apart in order to put ourselves back together.

The nasty is what puts us on the healing path. The nasty is what starts the process. The nasty decomposes us so that something new can emerge.

To this day, I’m deeply grateful that I had such a severe eating disorder. It’s easy to live with disordered eating for your entire life, many unfortunately do, and use your relationship with food as an outlet to cope and control. Luckily, it got so bad for me that I had no option but to get help. The nasties days of my life created the urgency to transform my inner landscape, and I’m forever thankful for that.

Thanks to the nasty, I embarked on the journey that would reconnect me with my body, soul and nature, heal my inner child, develop true self-esteem, become more confident, creative, and joyful, and create a fulfilled, authentic life.

Similarly, the nasty days this past month finally revealed to me the slow but undeniable disconnection that I’d slipped into over these past few weeks. Pushing down emotions that felt too uncomfortable to witness, not holding space in my consciousness for some very raw, sensitive parts of my human experience, not speaking up for myself when I knew I should have.

Until my entire system began to shut down. I began to experience pain in different areas across my body, fatigue that felt like a daily defeat, and brain fog that prevented me from functioning. Poor coping mechanisms I thought I’d long left behind crept back in again.

Today, I find myself at peace with how these weeks unfolded. There is no shame or judgement because I went through exactly what I had to go through to remember the work I need to do, to remember my wholeness. I have a clear path forward.

Experiences that trigger and activate the most vulnerable parts within us are the greatest teachers after all, if we are able to hold them.

So if you’re in the nasty right now, or you just got out of it, or you feel like heading there — the path forward relies on only two questions:

1. How can you shift your perspective toward how this will transform you?

2. How can you expand your capacity to hold your experience in wholeness?

Just like the lotus flower that’s growing in the mud, something is growing from within you as you find yourself sinking deep into the dark, muddy waters.

Be patient and observe.

Cultivate gratitude, and soon enough, your lessons will reveal themselves to you.

---

I hope you had a wonderful holiday week if you’re in the US. If not, I hope you’ll still use this occasion to reflect on what you’ve been grateful for — the beautiful and the nasty.

With love,

Julia