Week Two: Gratitude for Relationships

In this week's theme, Gratitude for Relationships, we'll focus on how the inner practices bridge the gap between what we experience within and how we relate to others.

Here’s how to engage with the theme this week:

• Daily Journaling. We have new prompts for you! Set aside 3–5 minutes each day for your gratitude journal. You can stick to this week's theme, or just let the gratitude flow...!

• From the Inside Out: Practicing Gratitude in Relationships. How does inner awareness become the ground for gratitude between us? Learn how mindfulness and embodiment can deepen our capacity for gratitude in relationships, transforming appreciation from a conscious act into a natural expression of connection.

• Tonight! Yoga for Grief and Gratitude with Alissa. A supportive, holistic practice to honour the natural waves of grief and gently invite gratitude. Through yoga, somatic movement, Yoga Nidra, holistic nutrition, and journaling, you’ll be guided to nurture body, mind, and heart with compassion and care.

• Nerding Out: The Neuroscience of Embodiment, Empathy, and Gratitude. Neuroscience reveals the body’s role in empathy and gratitude, and how mindfulness tunes the rhythms between self and other.

• This week's Guided Meditation and Breathing are coming to your inbox tomorrow!

• An Intentional Act of Gratitude. Think of an act this week that expresses care and appreciation for someone in your life! More about this in our mid-week check-in.

• Videos for Gratitude Practice. Yoga practices, breathing and meditation to help connect to gratitude.

Daily Journaling Prompts

Here are a few prompts to inspire gratitude journaling about relationships. You can follow them, adapt them, or use your own.

• Reflect on one small, everyday way someone shows up for you, a gesture you might overlook. How does this support your life?
   
• Bring to mind a relationship that has challenged you or stirred discomfort. What growth or insight into yourself has emerged from this relationship?
   
• Reflect on a relationship that feels balanced and reciprocal. How do you each contribute to one another’s growth, and what qualities in this person bring out your best self?

From the Inside Out: Practicing Gratitude in Relationships

A healthy relationship is sustained over time by expressing appreciation. It’s a heartfelt, non-transactional way of affirming the importance of a person in your life. And yet, when we grow accustomed to the other's presence and roles, we tend to see them as a fixed parameter.  Our attention is not easily drawn to what we assume to be static; it naturally flows to what we anticipate will change. So when we take someone for granted, we are likely to overlook their actions. Moreso, we may even overlook the changing nature of who they are, another being navigating the transformations of life, just like us.  

Welcome to this week’s theme: Gratitude for Relationships. We’re going to go beyond remembering to say “thank you” and explore the question: what are the grounds for gratitude to flow naturally?

It might seem paradoxical that turning inward, through practices like yoga and meditation, can strengthen our outward relationships. But at its foundation, gratitude requires awareness. To experience feelings of gratitude and express them, we first need to be aware of what is happening within and around us.  If we are distracted and desensitized, then we don’t have the bandwidth to be mindful.

One of the first gifts of yoga and meditation is the space to feel the intricate and ever-changing connections between things. By clearing our mind and resting our attention on the steadiness of breathing and sensations of the body, we gain the capacity to be curious again. The web of relationships that sustain us is dynamic, continually forming and reforming through our actions and energy. By tending to our inner state through practices like yoga, we become better able to perceive those connections. I’ll discuss the neuroscience behind this further along (for those interested). But in brief, the connections between self and other, held in our mind and heart, are not as distinct as we may assume. As the sense of separation weakens, gratitude becomes less of an effortful transaction (“I thank you”) and more a feeling of resonance (“we exist together”).

In addition to developing our attentional capacity for gratitude, introspective practices also help cultivate the emotional capacity for gratitude. The grounded practices of yoga help balance our mood and replenish our resources, so we can be vulnerable and steady enough to feel again. Off the mat, when we are energetically restored, we are more likely to listen and engage with what actually matters in relationships rather than react defensively.

Nerding Out: The Neuroscience of Embodiment, Empathy, and Gratitude

I’d like to highlight an area of the brain that sits at the intersection of embodiment, emotion, and empathy, which has helped me understand the physical basis for the relationship of gratitude practice in yoga. It’s the insula, which you’ll find by resting your fingertips on your temples, then imagine you were able to press them in about an inch deep into your head, on each side. The insula is involved in interoception, translating signals from inside the body, like heartbeat, breath and gut sensations, into an overall felt sense of how we are.

But that’s not all… the insula is versatile! It’s a key part of the brain’s salience network, which decides what is relevant and meaningful by promoting those signals to the forefront of awareness. This includes events within the body, as well as what we witness around us, such as an expression on another’s face or the sound of a child crying. Essentially, it decides what we should be giving our attention to in a given moment. Given the overlap among the insula’s roles in embodiment, emotion, and attention, it’s no coincidence that when we feel something is important, it's not just a mental pursuit but a visceral response with emotional tone.