Giving thanks for the Shit in life

I had wanted to post every Sunday, but the second Sunday has passed and I have already fallen short on my unspoken promise. I am absolutely forigving myself for this, since on Sunday I was preoccupied with an extreme sickness bug that chose an apt moment to spring up on me – during a 14 hour night bus journey. I am now at the coast, slowly regaining my strength and watching on as all the other backpackers make friends and get drunk together amongst the palm trees and deck chairs. With a bowl of home-cooked plain rice in hand (when I say home-cooked, I mean cooked by me using my hostel’s greasy pans), I am pining for the life I was once pining to get away from. I feel homesick, nauseous, insecure, and oh so grateful.

Following the breakup of a long-term relationship just over four years ago, my mental health took a dive. It was during this period that I started two practices that remain central to my wellbeing all this time later: yoga and gratitude. I hear the questions come up from those of you who perhaps just mooch through life feeling grateful when the feeling calls you - how can gratitude be a practice? For me it started with a small journal, about the size of the palm of my hand, and a deep desire to find some good somewhere in my experience.

Each night before I went to sleep I would write 3 bullet points of something that I was grateful for about that day. Perhaps I’d put something really significant, like “I won the lottery” (ha), or perhaps it would simply be “I had a delicious coffee”. Sometimes, when everything feels really shitty, you have to comb through your day searching for any single glimmer of light that might have made getting up that morning slightly less of a waste of time. That’s a worthwhile exercise too. Through doing this simple daily practice, I found that it helped me to spot the glimmers of light more readily. Things that I otherwise might not have noticed, never mind appreciated, started appearing to me as a sign of the universe’s innate kindness. I would turn up for my bus, my bus would come, and I would think to myself “my bus came”. I would smile at a stranger, the stranger would smile back, I would take an extra moment to feel the benefits of that brief connection. I would find something cool lying on the street. I petted a cute dog. You get the picture. Mundane things didn’t stop being ordinary, but the ordinary things made me happier than they used to. They became things I could be grateful for.

I have since found out that this practice is used by many across the world (come on Grace, you don’t need to claim the discovery of gratitude) and that gratitude has been proven to influence more positive emotions, improve sleep, help us to express more compassion and kindness, and even boost our immune systems. Through the times since then that I have perhaps been ‘too busy’ to write three little bullet points, I really felt the difference, perhaps not quite in my immune system but certainly in my outlook on the everyday.

I recently took part in a temazcal ceremony; a traditional Mexican cleansing ritual that takes place in a sweat lodge which is heated by steaming-hot volcanic stones, more of which are added at intervals to further increase the temperature of the temazcal. It gets bloody hot. The leader of the ceremony said that the best way to cope with the intense discomfort that many feel in these ceremonies is to give thanks. The message: when you feel the sweat dripping in your eyes, the heat pushing into your temples and the panic rising in your stomach, express your gratitude and when the feelings become even more uncomfortable, keep expressing your gratitude. It may seem a little ridiculous, but I have since had a chance to feel the power of this technique for myself. This weekend, on a night bus, hunched over a rusty toilet with bile dripping down my chin.

I boarded my 14-hour night bus from San Cristobal, southern Mexico, to Puerto Escondido, slightly less southern Mexico at 10pm. On my way to the bus station I had stopped off for dinner at a local food vendor. At around 11:30 I awoke from a short nap feeling extremely sick, and before I could get to the toilet at the back of the bus I had a mouth full of vomit. I don’t know how many times I had to run to the little rickety toilet that night, or how many times I struggled my hoodie over my head between sweating and shivering. A lot of times. And yet I watched myself notice the small mercies that were scattered through my night from hell, and felt the lightness that saying thank you afforded me.

Don’t get me wrong, I still felt pretty damn sorry for myself; I craved a friend to tie my hair back or to help me move my things to the back of the bus so I could have easier access to my seat when I wasn’t puking or shitting. I wasn’t exactly smiling my way through the experience, saying thank you for the writing material or the fact that it was distracting me from what might have otherwise been a very boring journey. Maybe that’s the goal, I don’t know. But some little things did reveal themselves to me as small blessings, and it was absolutely crucial to my survival of that night that I noticed them. I was so very grateful that nobody was sat next to me. I appreciated the fact that there was tissue paper for me to wipe my chin and anything else that had been splattered in the messy process of throwing up into the toilet of a moving vehicle on the bumpy roads of rural Mexico. I was happy that my bus should have two toilets, meaning that I always had access to one of them when I needed it without having to wait.

As I sit here, at a beach bar in southeast Mexico, to many it might seem absolutely obvious that I would be grateful for my circumstances, for my life. As you sit there, reading this from somewhere dry and reasonably clean, it might seem absolutely obvious that so too would you be. However, true gratitude is not circumstantial, or conditional on things being perfect. Real, deep gratitude can encompass even the darkest of human emotion as a mere expression of our shared aliveness. It is not about feeling absolutely fantastic all of the time but rather about feeling something and accepting it as part of your lived experience; this weird life that you alone get to do, make and be for only a very finite time. Gratitude may not make you happier, but it can make your sadness seem a little lighter in the knowledge that life is richer for having it there.

*Photo is street art by Carlos Cea in San Cristobál de las Casas. Thought it looked kind of shitty, in the best possible way.