How can we be grateful when we don’t feel grateful? – When we strive to cultivate gratitude, we often find it elusive. At one moment, we feel grateful; sometime later, we feel the opposite: fearful, fretful, resentful. Such emotional swings may dishearten us

How can we overcome such discouragement? By learning to differentiate between gratitude as an emotion and gratitude as a disposition. Our emotions are by nature fickle – sometimes, they reflect our values; sometimes, they don’t. But we don’t let them come in the way of our important obligations and aspirations. Suppose a parent has a newborn baby who starts crying in the middle of the night, after they have had a long, hard day. Despite their exhaustion, they will wake up and take care of their child. They may not feel love for their child, but their action reflects their loving disposition. Disposition refers to an underlying attitude, a foundational way of looking at things.

Pointing to this emotion-disposition difference, the Bhagavad-gita (14.22) urges us to observe with a dispassionate disposition the arrival and departure of various emotions from our consciousness. The more we see such emotions as circumstantial, the less we will let them deviate us from our intentional pursuit of important things.

How can we apply the emotion-disposition differentiation to our cultivation of gratitude? Even if we don’t or can’t feel grateful in some situations, we can still take steps toward cultivating a grateful disposition by consciously appreciating and articulating the value of the things we cherish in our life. Such regular appreciation and articulation will nourish the nascent gratitude in our heart. In due course, the emotion of gratitude will become steadier, stronger, sweeter.

One-sentence summary:

Even when we don’t relish the emotion of gratitude, we can still nourish the disposition of gratitude.

Think it over:

  • What is the difference between emotion and disposition?
  • Is there any area of life toward which you maintain a steady disposition even when your emotions become unsteady? What inspires such steadiness?
  • How can you bring that inspiration to your cultivation of gratitude? 

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14.22: He who does not hate illumination, attachment and delusion when they are present or long for them when they disappear; … – such a person is said to have transcended the modes of nature.