Fostering Gratitude in Times of Uncertainty
By Taylor Bourassa, DTATI (Cand)
Ottawa, ON
Last year I collaborated with a recreation therapist at The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre to facilitate a hospital-wide, three-week long exercise in gratitude (Bourassa, 2019). Since completing this project, and reflecting upon my experience in facilitating and participating in it, I have implemented gratitude and aspects of positive psychology in my work as an art therapy student.
When COVID-19 left the country locked indoors, paused with bated breath wondering when things would return to normal, I decided to revisit the idea of gratitude. Where could it be found in my life? Could I foster more gratitude by searching for it? I invited myself to complete a 30-day gratitude challenge, using photography and reflective journaling. The task was to take a picture of one thing I was grateful for each day, and to spend five minutes journaling about my gratitude. Below are some of the results of this challenge: an image for every day, paired with a few short phrases pulled from my reflective journaling process. The beginning of this challenge was easy to complete: I explored areas of my life I already regularly acknowledged with gratitude. As time wore on and it became more challenging to find things to be grateful for. The difficulty in finding new things to be grateful for invited curiosity and openness into my life. I awoke each day with a new purpose: to find something I am grateful for. I started to explore my house, my relationships, the way I communicate with friends and family with a more mindful attentiveness. Each day offered me an opportunity to explore and re-visit my own needs, my own pace of living, and my goals. I started to explore more intangible things to be grateful for, noticing that all of these things I have shown gratitude for are interconnected and play some part in the gestalt that is my life.
I noticed a few re-occurring themes throughout this project: nature, art, mindfulness, relationships and self (self-exploration, development, and physical self). These are interesting themes that have shown up time and again in my artwork, and I will continue to explore these themes more in depth in the coming days and weeks. These themes, interesting as they are, also tell me that I have a wealth of gratitude inside of me that I can tap into in the future. This project was inherently a practice in mindfulness, and it has shown me that each day, and each moment, can embody positivity if we let it.
References:
Bourassa, T. (2019). Gratitude Graffiti: Using Art to Explore Gratitude. Envisage, 2(3), 30-31.
Yeats, W.B. (2011). Those Dancing Days are Gone. In The Winding of the Stair and Other Poems: A Facsimile Edition (p. 80). Scribner. (Original work published 1929).
Whitman, W. (2015). O Me! O Life! In Leaves of Grass (p. 252-253). Canterbury Classics/Baker & Taylor Publishing Group. (Original work published 1892).