Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara.

And in today's episode we're going to talk about the vulnerability of gratitude.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so we're going to talk about gratitude.

We've talked about gratitude on this podcast in different ways.

I do think it is a really powerful mind state and we could say heart state to cultivate.

If the experience that we're having is the food that we're tasting, we could think of gratitude as our taste buds.

It's the thing that really sensitizes us to the goodness of what is here.

We could even say it's the thing that gives us fulfillment, the bridge from our experience to fulfillment.

And there are a lot of ways to explore cultivating gratitude.

A lot of studies talk about keeping a gratitude journal or even before going to bed, writing down three things that you're grateful for.

Exercises like that have been well studied and can work.

But I want to use this episode to talk about a different kind of gratitude.

One that I perceive as more full and an organic expression of being deeply attuned to the human experience.

And if the gratitude that comes up through something like a gratitude journal would be considered prompted gratitude,

this would be what we might call unpronged gratitude.

And this is more of a spontaneous appreciation for the bigness and the complexity of being alive.

It's a kind of gratitude that can only come from having our hearts tenderized, from enduring pain, struggle, confusion, or from being deeply connected to the pain that is inherent to the human experience for ourselves or for other people.

Because this kind of gratitude emerges when our defenses are down, when we've surrendered, when we've been brought to our knees, and the armor around our heart has just melted,

because there's no more utility for it anymore.

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