Where You Feel Gratitude Can Help You Identify Why You Feel Thankful
You can use somatic theory to deepen your practice of gratitude
The research on how emotions activate muscles and organs in the body is still in progress. But based on the first studies, it seems that people feel the effects of emotions in the same parts of their bodies.
The areas of the body activated change with each of the 13 emotions studied. So, for example, fear and anger both activate the head and torso. But anger also activates the arms and hands.
Gratitude or thankfulness was not one of the 13 emotions studied. And I suspect I know why. Gratitude shifts its location around your body depending on what you’re grateful for.
Try it now.
Think of something you’re grateful for. Deeply feel the gratitude. Really experience the fullness of the emotion.
Now see if you can pinpoint where you feel it.
Is it in your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Your feet?
Unlike other emotions, I cannot predict where you might feel it.
And that’s a good thing.
Deepening your gratitude
Many people have a daily gratitude practice. If you do, locating the feeling of gratitude can help you deepen your practice. Instead of being grateful for a single thing, you can trigger many related reasons to be thankful.
A simple example
For example, my husband and I take many supplements before bed and first thing in the morning. Usually, we make them up a week at a time. But sometimes, we are busy and don’t get to them before we run out.
The other night, we’d run out of supplements. Yet when I went to bed, there was a neat little pile waiting for me. My husband had gone through all the bottles and taken out the right number of pills for me.
My heart swelled with gratitude at his thoughtful and considerate gesture. And yes, that is literally how it felt. The gratitude was located in my upper chest.
This is the same place that the emotion of love is located in the somatic mapping.
There were many reason I could have been grateful for his gesture. I might have appreciated that I’d sleep well and painlessly, or that now I didn’t have to put together pills.
Neither of those feelings would translate to the somatic feeling of love. The reason I was grateful for his thoughtfulness is because it made me feel loved and cherished.
So if I was journaling my gratitude, I would not simply say, “I’m grateful my husband made up my pills.”
Instead, I could say, “I’m grateful my husband made up my pills, and all the other ways he makes me feel loved and cherished.” I might even be prompted to think of one or two ways he’d made me feel that way recently.
A more complex example
Another thing he did the other day for which I was grateful, was washing the dishes. We have been doing dishes by hand as a result of a recent kitchen flood. While the dishwasher is functional, it’s not bolted in place and is missing its baffling, so it’s very loud.
Since I lived in a house with no dishwasher for 20 years, I am the expert on handwashing dishes. He usually just puts away the dry dishes.
But this particular evening, he washed the dishes. He knew my neck was still bothering me from my meditation accident, and didn’t want me to aggravate it.
When I felt where in my body the gratitude was located, it was a burning line from the back of my skull to my midback. Those were exactly the muscles involved in my meditation muscle spasm.
Standing over the sink with my head bent would have been a strain. He’d known, and acted to ease the pain before it even happened.
So I was grateful for his action. But even more, I was grateful that he’d anticipated a problem and acted to prevent it. I was grateful that I wasn’t going to need pain medication that night to be able to sleep. I was grateful that I wasn’t going to feel ashamed for yelling at him for something trivial when I was in pain.
Saying thank you
Even if you don’t have a gratitude practice, locating your feeling of gratitude can still help.
When someone does something nice for you, don’t simply say, “Thank you.” This can feel automatic. While it’s always nice to be thanked, people tend to dismiss formulaic thanks.
They respond, “You’re welcome.” Or, “No problem.” And the whole thing is forgotten.
But if you locate the feeling of your gratitude, you can give thanks in a meaningful way.
“Thank you for making up my pills. That’s just one of the many ways you make me feel cherished.”
“Thank you for washing the dishes. I’m so glad you’re helping to keep me out of pain.”
These sorts of thanks make the person stop and really take in what you’re thanking them for. It makes them feel recognized, validated, and appreciated. That would be a glow of happiness felt throughout the body, but most intensely in the torso and face.
Conclusion
Recent studies have shown that people tend to feel emotions in common areas of the body. Each of 13 different emotions mapped to different areas of the body.
Gratitude is not one of those emotions. The feeling of gratitude moves around, depending on why you’re grateful.
This can help you to deepen your practice of gratitude. Knowing why a certain thing makes you thankful can trigger many other thanks.
It can also help you to say “thank you” in a more meaningful way. Your thanks are less likely to be brushed aside as formulaic. They will mean more to the person you’re thanking.
So the next time you’re feeling grateful, find out where you’re feeling it. You’ll be thankful you did.
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