Tool of the Month - Grateful Flow
CUE: You’re worrying about the future. You’re noticing flaws in how things ought to be. Your fault-finding abilities are overwhelming your gratefulness.
RESPONSE: Grateful Flow.
Step 1: Look around you and check in with all 5 (or 6) of your senses. Ask yourself, “What am I experiencing in this moment. Right here. Right now.” The answer could be something like “I’m seeing a ray of sun come in through the window and cast a rainbow diffraction pattern on the wall.” or “I can smell the aroma of autumn in the air, dry leaves, wood burning, cookies baking.” or “I can hear my dog breathing.” When you notice what you notice, you can now advance to step 2.
Step 2: Ask yourself this sad question, “If I lost the ability to have this experience… If it were suddenly and permanently taken from me… would I be bummed?” If the answer is yes, you can advance to step 3. Otherwise begin again at step 1.
Step 3: Ask yourself this last question. “Can I take credit for the experience I’m having?” If you can take any credit, then start over again at Step 1. But if you recognize your experience as a gift, nothing you did yourself, then congratulations, you have distilled your thoughts into pure gratitude.
These rules are rigid enough that this exercise should feel like a strain. It’s a mental and emotional bench-press. If it feels uncomfortable at first, you’re doing it right.
Here are some additional tips on how to master each step of Grateful Flow:
In step 1, don’t tell yourself a story about the past or future. This isn’t about “the cool concert next weekend” or “the nice dinner I had last night”. Stop storytelling and savor what’s happening right now, right in the very place you are. If you start telling yourself how much you love your job, or your truck, or the price of soybeans, you’re doing it wrong. Start over (unless you’re actually eating soybeans in your truck while on the job, then by all means… continue to step 2).
In step 2, now you get to tell yourself a story. A sad story. A story of losing your capacity to have the present experience. If you really don’t care about losing what you’re experiencing, then you have to start over at step 1, or tune in deeper to the experience. You’ll likely land on basic senses like hearing or sight, or the sensation of your lungs breathing freely. Let the imagined loss of such commonly enjoyed abilities increase their preciousness Stay in that world of loss for a minute and imagine how much you’d be willing to pay just to be returned to this present moment.
In step 3, if you can take credit for the thing you are grateful for, then start over, or dig deeper to discover some part of this present moment you really can’t take credit for. You might be grateful for your internet connection feeding you all those reels of delicious images to scroll. And you might take credit for so much of it, too: buying the phone, paying your phone bill, posting your clever memes …But did you invent the HTTP protocol? Did you devote your entire life to harnessing the flow of encoded data over electromagnetic impulses in radio waves and copper wires? Did you invent photography?
Now Imagine this…
You are holding a beautiful stone of gratitude in your hand. You’ve strained to unearth this precious stone, which was buried under layers of familiarity, entitlement, and fault finding. Imagine you throw this stone up into the air and it crashes through the ceiling of low-hanging clouds over your head. Clouds of despair, negativity, and day-to-day worries now have a hole broken through them. Sunlight is streaming through the hole you created with your gratitude stone. The sunlight hits you in the chest and melts your rib-cage. Your heart is exposed and warmed by the rays of the sun. Your head is buoyed by the light entering your circulatory system. You’ve just drawn closer to the source of this light; the source of every good thing you have ever experienced or could hope to experience. (This is not a metaphor. Just look.)
Testify!
This edition of Testify! is brought to us by… me. If you’d like to have your own testimony added to next month’s final newsletter of 2025, let me know.
Phil Stutz and Barry Michels, at one of their workshops, got me to practice Grateful Flow with the extra rules for the first time. And since then, I can remember a few moments where drilling down a little further on some mundane experiences seemed to reveal a deeper reality that had once been so easy to overlook. Here’s one that blows my mind, especially because, as a “talk therapist” it’s the most common and easily taken-for-granted experience a therapist has day-to-day, and that’s the phenomenon of listening to a person talk. In a moment of Grateful Flow I really noticed that it was impossible for me to prevent speaking-sounds, once they’d impinged on my eardrums, from blossoming into images and numbers and cognitive concepts that thoroughly replaced my own thoughts. Look at all the improbable events coming together to make such an experience happen. Someone is making noises with their tongue and teeth and throat and face, and I am being touched by it; literally touched. Air compressions are rippling in waves across the room and colliding with a membrane of skin inside my ear canals. These impacts are conveyed (somehow) into my consciousness and the noises are transformed into complex mental concepts and vivid images. I realized none of this required conscious effort on my part, in fact I couldn’t stop the pulsing noises from being decoded into clear and meaningful cognitions if I tried. Try it sometime. Make someone’s speaking noises pass through you un-recognized. See just how much of what you’re doing as a listener is already done for you in each moment. What a strange magic this all is. The idea that any of it (complex thoughts being transmitted through the air from one brain into another and blooming into meaning and emotion) exists at all can start to feel absurd if you stare at it long enough. It seems far more likely that we should find ourselves in a world with no such ability. But here we are, together in this world of logos. And we seem uniquely designed to detect and decode it coming at us in each moment from within and without. We really are exactly where it’s at. Or did you think “it” has been happening somewhere else, or that you’re missing “it” somehow. I’m not sure we could miss it if we tried. I’m so grateful to get to share this inheritance with you.
May you discover the relentless stream of gifts flowing through you every time you peer through the lens of gratitude.
Don’t stop,
