Greetings From Rock Bottom a.k.a. Gratitudes

When everything falls apart and you have nothing to hold onto, I guess there is nothing left to do but be grateful. Counter intuitive, yes. Counterproductive, no. See here is the thing, when you struggle with depression mild or other wise, or heck even if you are just plan human, our minds have a tendency to focus on the negative. So while I'm rolling around down here in the mire of rock bottom I was trying to figure out how to get a leg up and start pulling myself out. Not easy, because my sad little brain only sees all the things I don't have around me. My sad little body only feels how tired it is from all the effort (seemingly in vain). And my sad little heart is just plain broken. Now seems like the perfect time for gratitude, I shall elaborate.

This is a little practice I have done throughout my life when I was feeling overwhelmed or just plain unmotivated and sad. It's a tool to help teach our brains to stop focusing on the negative parts of a situation and be thankful for the good things in our lives. Good things don't have to be directly linked to the situation at hand because once you start finding good thing somewhere then you can start seeing them everywhere. Basically you are training your brain not to slide into depression (which for some of us we are simply genetically more susceptible to), you are actually breaking down old "negative" neural pathways and rebuilding more positive ones. It's science, it's faith, it's whatever, it's really really cool. It can also be really easy, easier than making a grocery list, just list 5 things. My 5:

1. My dog is happy and healthy and did the best happy "i thought you were dead but you came back!" dance EVER yesterday when I got back from Chicago.

2. I took a really fantastic yoga class Sunday.

3. My car is still getting almost 30mpg on the highway!

4. I got to hang out with my cousins kids yesterday morning, 16months and 4years old, both boys in my lap, coloring, and cooing, le sigh.

5. I have a pretty stunning family of friends.

So those are my 5 right now. In the past they've even be so mundane as "I could afford to make my car payment this month!" or "the homeless guy didn't harass me on the way to the train today." I think my dog is always number 1 though. Also, you don't have to write them down, at one point I had a gratitude journal and ever Sunday I would write my list down, that way I could see my progression of thought. But these days I just make a quick mental list of 5 things to remind me that no matter how dark it is out there I can see at least 5 little twinkles to keep me moving forward.