by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Gratitude Shows Us that Acceptance, Not Resistance, Brings Us Back to What’s Real
One of the most important things we can do if we genuinely want to stay real and to keep going deeper into realness is to cultivate habits that help us override the promptings of the ego.
The reason this is important is because the ego can seem so familiar and subtle to us that it just becomes our default mode of operating in the world (even though the ego is the opposite of reality):
It doesn’t always scream for our attention but just hums beneath the surface of our lives, whispering to us in our own voice unreal thoughts of comparison, dissatisfaction, urgency, judgement, and a low-level sense that something about this moment isn’t quite ‘enough‘ – left unchecked, it distorts our perception of reality and pulls us away from truth and wholeness.
This is why staying connected to our realness isn’t something we “figure out” once and for all but is something we have to live into daily, moment by moment, through the practice of consciously CHOOSING the real over the unreal.
Personally, in my own ‘battle’ with the ego, I have a handful of habits that I make sure I do every single day so I can keep my focus on what’s real about myself and my life (to stay on track with them I use the free app Loop Habits – not affiliated, just genuinely useful).
These habits act as regular check-ins throughout the day so that my focus stays on reality rather than whatever story my ego happens to be telling me that day.
Of all the habits I cultivate, though, one stands out as absolutely essential no matter what:
A daily gratitude ritual.
If I could only do one of my daily habits a day for whatever reason it would be this one because – every single time – it reminds me how blessed my life actually is, energises me, and lifts my internal state – most importantly, it moves me out of resistance and back into a real, receptive relationship with life.
This article is about why gratitude is so important when it comes to growing real and how you can begin cultivating it through the same simple daily ritual.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Gratitude & Realness: What We Cover in This Article
- Gratitude Shows Us that Acceptance, Not Resistance, Brings Us Back to What’s Real
- Gratitude is Your Natural State
- Gratitude and the Body: More than Just a ‘Nice’ Theory
- Gratitude as the Foundation of Acceptance
- The Ache, the Void, and the Endless Search
- How Gratitude Soothes the Ache and Helps Heal the Void
- The Shift That Gratitude Makes Possible
- The Daily Gratitude Ritual
Gratitude is Your Natural State
Gratitude isn’t something we practise just because it might help us hit our goals, manifest outcomes, or help us to feel a little bit more ‘positive’ – it’s something essential to our nature:
If we’re being real with ourselves, gratitude isn’t optional.
As dramatic as it might sound and at the most basic level, every human being is temporary in their current form (who knows what happens next?) because every one of us is hurtling inevitably towards death.
What this essentially means is that life is finite which means it’s also precious because every single one of us is a limited edition.
Every breath, every conversation, every ordinary, unremarkable moment that we barely notice while living inside our heads instead of the present moment is a kind of gift and gratitude is simply the honest recognition of this truth.
Really, it’s just about appreciating the sheer wonder of even being alive in the first place:
Of having a body, of being conscious, of getting to experience joy, pain, love, confusion, beauty, and meaning however imperfectly it all might seem or how little ‘sense’ we might be able to to make of it all.
The bottom line is that when we cultivate gratitude, we stop taking our own existence for granted and – when we stop taking life for granted – we naturally become more receptive to experiencing it fully.
Gratitude and the Body: More than Just a ‘Nice’ Theory
Gratitude isn’t just spiritually sound – it’s also something that affects our quality of life from the most basic level of our biology.
This isn’t just some pseudo-profound, woo woo theory – it’s a measurable reality.
For example, psychologist Robert Emmons who is one of the leading researchers in the field, has shown that people who engage in regular gratitude practices experience all kinds of tangible health benefits:
- Improved mood and emotional wellbeing.
- Better quality of sleep.
- Reduced stress and depressive symptoms.
- Stronger immune functioning.
In one well-known study by Emmons & McCullough (2003), participants who kept weekly gratitude journals reported higher levels of optimism and life satisfaction compared to those who focused on hassles or neutral events (another example that what you focus on grows).
A similar powerful example comes from Martin Seligman’s research on positive psychology:
In a 2005 study where participants wrote and delivered a gratitude letter to someone who had positively impacted their life, there was a significant increase in happiness and a decrease in depressive symptoms – lasting up to a month after the exercise.
(Over time, happiness levels went back to ‘normal’ which shows that doing a regular gratitude ritual can sustain the benefits over time).
All of this is to help demonstrate a simple fact about the human experience:
Gratitude changes our internal chemistry in a real way.
It shifts our nervous system, alters how our brain filters information without distortion or resistance, and it moves us out of survival-based threat scanning and back into safety, connection, and coherence.
All of this brings us back to REALNESS:
Gratitude as the Foundation of Acceptance
If realness is about aligning ourselves with truth rather than distortion (ego) then acceptance is the ground we must stand on (and – at the end of the day – without acceptance, nothing real can be built).
Acceptance doesn’t mean ‘liking’ everything, it doesn’t mean passivity or resignation – it means seeing clearly.
Acceptance is linked to gratitude in this sense because, when we practise gratitude, we stop fighting reality and stop arguing with what already is as we stop filtering life entirely through opinion, judgement, and interpretation – most of which are extensions of the ego.
This is important to know because ego thrives on resistance as a way of avoiding the underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma that have caused us to ‘split’ from our realness and hide behind ego in the first place (which causes the creation of the shadow self).
When we’re operating from this split, we don’t see reality but instead see a distorted projection shaped by fear and unmet needs.
Gratitude interrupts this pattern and starts to return us to truth by saying:
“This is real and there’s something here worth appreciating”.
…and this alone is enough to begin restoring wholeness over the fragmentation of ego.
The Ache, the Void, and the Endless Search
When gratitude isn’t actively cultivated, we become preoccupied with desire:
Instead of actually being present in our lives, we start living in an imaginary future and become fixated on outcomes, achievements, relationships, money, validation, or meaning that we believe will finally make us feel whole.
We treat all of these ‘good’ things as the ULTIMATE thing in our lives (because we think they will finally ‘fill’ us) and this creates what I call The Ache:
The Ache is that subtle, restless sense that something is ‘missing’, that we need to keep searching, and that fulfilment is just one more breakthrough away if we can just search and seek in the ‘right’ way.
The Ache feels deeply human and is often romanticised as being an intrinsic part of the human experience but it isn’t our true nature – it’s what we feel when we’re DISCONNECTED from it:
The Ache is just the sensation of living in the Void – a state of disconnection from truth, driven by unresolved shame and ensuing fragmentation.
No amount of ‘success’ can fill it, no relationship can ‘fix’ it, and no identity can stabilise it because the Void isn’t external – it’s just a loss of contact with what’s real.
How Gratitude Soothes the Ache and Helps Heal the Void
The long and short of all this is that gratitude ‘works’ because it brings us back into an acceptance of what’s real and real always works:
When we slow down and genuinely feel into what’s already present in our lives like the relationships, opportunities, lessons, comforts, and moments of fully feeling ALIVE, then we stop abandoning ourselves and lives so we can trust both.
Believe it or not, even when life “sucks”, there is still something real to be grateful for because – like we said above – life is always going to be a gift and so when we accept ourselves and our lives as they actually are, something profound happens:
We reconnect with our ESSENCE – the deeper foundation of realness that was never missing in the first place.
From here, life stops being about compensation for the underlying shame that led to us identifying with the ego and starts being about expression instead:
What this means is that we don’t try and bring things into our lives to soothe the ego but we we bring them in because they allow us to express even more of our realness.
If you’d like to go deeper into overcoming the Void and finding your realness then check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace (there’s a whole chapter on gratitude).
The Shift That Gratitude Makes Possible
When gratitude is felt in an embodied way (“embodied” meaning that we accept the truth about something and live accordingly) – not just thought – then it creates real internal shifts that affect your whole life.
You can go:
- From Tension to Trust: So that you don’t have to weigh yourself down with holding onto tension and doubts and can trust yourself and life.
- From Force to Flow: So that you can stop trying to make life conform to the ego and can work with life instead of against it.
- From Scarcity to Abundance: So that you can stop focusing on what you don’t have or don’t want and start expressing more of what’s already real and start bringing more realness into your future.
- From Fear to Assurance: So that you can stop worrying about things and rest assured that things will always be real if you stay focused on what’s real.
These aren’t affirmations (though you could use them that way if you really wanted)- they’re natural consequences of returning to wholeness and living according to your realness.
The Daily Gratitude Ritual
So having said all of this, the gratitude ritual I use every day is intentionally simple and is something that any of us can do without much fuss.
It goes like this:
I keep a notepad on my phone (paper works too, but digital makes it easy to build a record) – personally, I use Google Keep which is great (I only use it about 789749872 times a day).
Each day, I write TEN things I’m grateful for and -most importantly – WHY.
The format is always the same:
“I am really grateful for [THING] because [reason]“.
The reason I write the thing I’m grateful for in CAPITAL LETTERS is so I can scroll back through previous entries and reconnect with the feeling later.
The reason (everything after “because”) also matters because it anchors the gratitude state in reality and shows the nervous system that the appreciation is justified and true instead of being forced or abstract (this isn’t a “fake it ’til you make it” type thing – it’s about genuinely tuning into feelings of gratitude).
After writing each entry, I pause, breathe, and let myself feel the gratitude in my body – really, that feeling is the point because what we’re really cultivating isn’t a list but a state of BEING.
If you do this daily, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll notice something shift – maybe not all at once (because of the reality lag) but steadily and in increments.
You’ll feel less resistance, more acceptance, and more trust as you develop a deeper relationship with what’s real and start getting RESULTS in your life that are aligned with this inner state.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start focusing on your REAL life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to find a way forward (and keep you accountable).
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
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