Speaker #0Hi and welcome to Prescribing Possibility, conversations that inspire us to grow, heal, and live with harmony. I'm your host, Dr. Dympna Weil. Thanks for joining me, friends. Hey, welcome back to Prescribing Possibility. I'm your host, Dr. Dympna Weil, and today I want to honor something we don't talk enough about during the holidays. This time of year can feel like a lot, especially for the people who... tend to everyone else. For the caregivers, the over-functioners, for the steady ones, responsible ones, and the ones who hold up the entire emotional ecosystem without applause. Thanksgiving often comes with this script. Be grateful, be joyful, be present, be thankful. But what if you're tired? Or what if you're stretched thin? What if you've had a year that ask more of you than... you ever intended to give, today's episode is for you. This is not a storybook gratitude practice. This is gratitude for the whole human, the tired heart, the person who shows up even when the well feels low and dry. So I would love to explore three forms of gratitude that we rarely name, but they might be the most important ones of all. They are the hidden labor of gratitude, slow retrospective gratitude, and gratitude for what we've released. Let's begin. So I think we'll start with the hidden labor of gratitude. There's a truth that no one really says aloud, but gratitude as a practice can seem exhausting. And not because we don't want to feel it, or because we don't. have that experience, but because gratitude in some ways has become a form of emotional labor. It's like a performance, this kind of quiet expectation that caregivers in particular must express thanks while juggling impossible demands. And by caregivers, I do mean, I use that term quite broadly. So I'm speaking about anyone who feels they give and care for or tend to another person in their life. So these are teachers, social workers, parents, adult children caring for their parents. So I use it a little more broadly. And I feel like for caregivers in particular, gratitude often becomes like another thing to remember, another item to manage, or an emotional responsibility. where you feel like you need to just kind of hold it together. So in that sense, we have people who may identify with balancing those aging parents, parenting children, managing chronic illness. Maybe you're working in systems that are stretched to their seams. You're perhaps holding the emotional pulse of an entire household. Maybe you're tending to patients or clients or students or communities. And then somewhere between all of that, you're told, be grateful. And that it can feel like just another thing to do. And that's where kind of our nervous system comes in because our bodies don't experience gratitude on command, right? The parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest, digest, restore system, it needs to feel safe and grounded. and supported before gratitude can rise naturally. So what I want to share is that if gratitude feels hard this year, nothing's wrong with you. Your nervous system is just telling the truth and your heart is telling the truth. Maybe you've carried a whole lot more than most people will ever see and that matters. So I'd love to just pause here for a moment because I'd like to invite you to consider like a little mini reflection. So ask yourself, what is one moment this year where you carried something silently? And I'd love for you just to recall it. You don't have to relive it, but just recognize yourself. This practice is the beginning of self-gratitude, which will lead me to Part two, or the second type of gratitude, which is that slow gratitude, or gratitude that arrives, maybe not so on time. Some gratitude does not appear in real time. Sometimes gratitude arrives late, or after the fact. And I think we tend to speak about gratitude, like it should be immediate, like everything else in life, right? Instant gratification, as though The moment something challenging happens, we're supposed to say, oh, I'm grateful for this lesson. I'm grateful for the growth. I'm grateful for the opportunity. But that is not how our human nervous systems work. It's not how trauma works. It's not how heartbreak or caregiving works. Gratitude often requires hindsight. It requires reflection and a little distance and a sense of safety, So perhaps you can think back to a time this year when everything felt chaotic, confusing, upended. Perhaps you weren't grateful then, right? You were just surviving. That's totally okay. Makes sense, right? Survival isn't the sense of just surviving or survival isn't a failure of gratitude. It doesn't mean a void of gratitude. That experience, it's the prerequisite. for gratitude. So sometimes gratitude is like a slow burn. It only takes shape after your feet find some steady ground again. And for example, when I think about my own journey, my illness, my loss of balance and loss of identity, I don't feel grateful for the collapse of all of those things itself, but I do feel grateful for what I could see. afterward. For the clarity, I couldn't access necessarily when I was in the immediate thick of it. But the gratitude that came with grounding and feeling safe and really being able to kind of take a step back, right? So that's slow gratitude. It's retrospective. And it expands only when the heart is ready. It can't be forced. It's not. performed. It's a well-deserved and well-earned exhale. And that brings me to my second mini reflection. So I'd love for you to consider, well, I invite you to consider what experience from this year are you only now beginning to appreciate? Not because it was good, but because it brought you some sort of wisdom or truth or clarity. Don't feel the need to force an answer. Just allow that question to be and just notice what comes up, if anything. And now we will move into our part three, which is gratitude for what we have lost or released. So interestingly, this time of year around Thanksgiving, we're asked to name something we're thankful for. But I'd love to offer a slightly different question. What Are you thankful to have finally let go of? So this year, let's maybe try considering what did we stop carrying? What's a role maybe you've outgrown or an obligation that you inherited or gained without choosing it that you let go of? How about a relationship dynamic that was draining you that you let go of? Or a belief that harmed you? Or maybe you're like me and you're... a perfectionist or recovering perfectionist, and you let go of that perfectionistic expectation of yourself. So is there a version of yourself that you no longer need to be? What is that thing you stopped carrying this year? How I see it, our culture celebrates accumulation, but there's something beautiful and liberating. um, about letting go, right. Of letting go of the things that don't serve us anymore. So one of the frameworks, one of my frameworks that, um, I kind of have created and use myself and with clients, it's called the heel. Um, it's called heel and it's H E A L. And it's a journal prompt exercise that kind of helps us reset. and In HEAL, H is for honor, E is for empathy, A is for alignment, and L is for liberate. And that final pillar, liberate, is not about fixing yourself. It's about freeing yourself. So every time we set something down, we create space for us to breathe, for expansion, for clarity. Releasing things that don't serve us opens up. opens up a window or it makes room. It restores harmony to our lives. So I'll invite you at this time to consider what are you grateful to have released? And you can say it out loud or to yourself or write it down. This is where real gratitude often lives. It's in the way we soften or we loosen or the way we surrender. And so As we approach this holiday, I'm going to invite you now to place a hand over your heart or on your abdomen. Let your shoulders drop. Take a nice, slow, deep breath in and a long exhale out. Let your jaw relax. And if you feel comfortable, consider... Seeing this to yourself or out loud, I've carried so much. I honor myself and I release what no longer belongs to me and let this be enough. So as kind of wrap up this solo holiday episode, I have a few things I would like to share. It's kind of like a little bit of a poem or a blessing. um, that I hope serves you. May you honor the unseen work you do. May gratitude find you gently in its own time. May you be proud of what you set down this year. And may you feel, even briefly, the grace of being held by your own tenderness. Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. I am so grateful for your presence here, for your heart. And I'm so grateful for the possibility we could share with you. Today's conversation offered you a breath of fresh air, a new perspective, a wonderful holiday, and we'll chat soon.
