Expanding gratitude

Reviewing some final things from Health At Every Size, I noticed some interesting similarities to The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

It was a phrase that had not suck out to me before, about thanking your appetite. 

Again, a big part of the book is listening to your body's signals, which want to tell you what your body needs. We can be very good at not listening, letting others tell us what we should want and need and deny.

Because we learn to think of our appetite as the enemy, thanking it sounds counter-intuitive; that appetite is what makes us want unhealthy, fattening food... except there is a lot of conditioning that goes into that. There can be wisdom in listening to your appetite, though it may take some sussing out.

It can be an interesting process anyway, to take something internal that you have tended to look down on or resent, and then appreciate it instead. It can set the stage for a major reset. 

And it was also a new thought, whereas I have thought many times about Marie Kondo's advice to thank the objects you discard.

There is a lot in her work that lends a certain energy and dignity to all of your possessions, including the ones you are letting go. There may very well be some shinto influence there, but it has occurred to me that it could function an important step for alleviating the guilt of getting rid of things. 

Most people end up discarding bags and bags of stuff that they don't really want or need. 

This gets criticized a lot, but the problem is not that people are not holding on to things that they don't want or need, but that they bought them in the first place. That may be more of an issue of a capitalistic, materialistic culture with its own issues (and certainly take advantage of ways to donate and recycle as much as possible), but going through and seeing all of that extra of yours can easily make people feel foolish and wasteful, and many other negative things.

Thanking these items -- for pleasure they brought at the time of purchase, or for representing a relationship if it was a gift, or even for teaching you what you don't want -- may be the step that heads off a shame spiral and simply moves into acceptance and forward in a process that is liberating.

We often talk about gratitude as helping with happiness, but that is often specifically gratitude to God or to the universe or something more general. As valuable as that is, there can be other types.

Extending appreciation to things you own and things that are part of you can also be transformative.