Flow Study: Yoga Is a Practice of Gratitude

“Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.”

—David Whyte, Consolations

I’ve always loved Thanksgiving—the food (and the leftovers), the family, the not-quite-winter-but-still-cozy feeling in the air. (Plus, my daughter was born on Thanksgiving Day in 2022, so I have a really good reason to love the holiday even more now.) But mostly it’s the spirit of thankfulness that has always endeared Thanksgiving to me.

Now, thankfulness—or gratitude—is not my natural state. I tend towards rumination and fixating on what might possibly go wrong in some hypothetical and terribly imagined future. An anxious mind can get so busy fretting over uncertainty that it rarely has time to be thankful.

But, paradoxically, getting stuck at a low point—whether from bouts of sleeplessness and sicknesses with toddlers, or ruminative obsessing over the latest subject of my worrying mind—has continually led me to an unexpected place. Sometimes I arrive there through purposeful practice, but more often I arrive by burning out. In these moments, the only place to land is simply noticing and appreciating what's right in front of me. After dwelling so long in the land of “what if”—by grace, time, or just exhaustion, I end up coming home to “what is.”

That's gratitude. 

The active practice of gratitude doesn’t require conjuring up positive thoughts, or sugar-coating things that are, in fact, wrong. Instead, it’s the real-life mindfulness practice of noticing what is good and right, right now. It is appreciating what we have, and paying attention to what’s not wrong in the present moment. Gratitude is both the spontaneous upswelling of a feeling, and the active recognition of what’s right in front of us.

Yoga + Gratitude

Through the years, the place where I have most consistently found gratitude is on my yoga mat, and that is not an accident.

A yoga practice is a little laboratory where we move mindfully, breathe deeply, come back to the present moment, and settle into rest. It is a time set apart, a time to  practice what matters. Our yoga practice does not take the present moment, the next breath, nor the body for granted, and in doing so, it is a recipe for finding gratitude, regardless of whether we came to the mat looking for it. 

Fittingly, gratitude has a long lineage in yogic philosophy; the niyama of santosha, or the purposeful, personal observance of contentment, is central to the Yoga Sutras. It is not always an easy observance, though. If we’re not careful, the busy, worried, and striving mind can dominate our yoga, too. We get stuck on what we think is wrong with our bodies. We begrudge them for not making a pose “perfect.” We strive to be completely free from distraction, and get discouraged when our minds wander. 

What if instead, we approached our practice in the spirit of gratitude and contentment?

Can you ask yourself, in any given pose, with any given breath—what’s not wrong? 

Ask yourself, is there a part of your body that you take for granted that you could instead be grateful for? 

Maybe you’re wobbly on your feet and your balance isn’t what it used to be. Can you notice where you feel strong, capable, and rooted?

No matter how busy your mind is, can you locate your breath in the busyness? Feel your next inhale and exhale, never to be repeated just like this. Find the breath, thank it, and then begin again.

Gratitude, if you let it, can become an expansive practice that colors any given moment.  (Indeed, “given moment” implies that it has been given; that we don’t necessarily deserve the object of our gratitude, but we can be all the more thankful for the giftedness of it.) And though paying attention to the “given things” begins as an inward project, it does not end there. 

Ultimately, gratitude connects us. It lifts and opens our hearts to life and our place in it. It compels us towards compassion, to seeing what is wondrously not wrong in others and the world around us. When we practice gratitude, we recognize the ways in which we are reliant upon others and connected to all living beings. And when we act from a place of connection, and of having received, then we have enough to share. '

Join Lara for two gratitude-focused classes this month: Thanksgiving Day at 9:00 AM, and Sunday, November 30th at 6:00 PM.