What are you grateful for this Thanksgiving season?

Laura Bengel • Nov 15, 2021

"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."

William Arthur Ward

As we prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, our minds tend to move toward gratitude. Perhaps our reflective capacity brings us to those people who have influenced our lives or those we love. Maybe we think of items we have saved for over several years and have finally purchased. Perhaps we think of acts of service we have been fortunate to have offered others. Gratitude can bring us in many different directions and for as many reasons.


Sometimes we forget that gratitude makes us feel something within us. Gratitude is an experience. Let that sit for a moment. Gratitude is an experience. We feel something deep inside when we experience gratitude. Mind-blowing, right?!?


As you continue to reflect on those things you are grateful for and have those family and friend’s gratitude conversations over Thanksgiving gatherings consider asking, "How did you feel when you received that gift from your grandfather or How did you feel when Uncle Peter complimented you?"


Connecting to the feeling is often the missing piece of gratitude. As adults, we work with our children on the societal expectations of social grace that accompany giving expressions - saying thank you, smiling, writing a thank you note, and such. How the gesture makes us feel is often left aside to meet the unwritten social grace. Young children experience gratitude first before they learn societal manners. Let's not be so busy focusing on the societal expectations that we neglect to feel the experience of gratitude. After all, it is the feeling we experience with gratitude that is the overall human connection.

A few years ago, I read a study titled Raising Grateful Children conducted by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and it forever changed my response to gratitude. You might just find it will affect you deeply, too. Here is a link to a helpful page by Andrea Hussong, UNC- CH, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience - https://hussong.web.unc.edu/drrl/rgc/


At Montessori Center of Our Lady, we work with gratitude daily. We do this both as a Felician Sisters Child Care Center and a Montessori school. We do this because a foundational piece of our curriculum is grace and courtesy. What we have added is the feeling gratitude gives us first. We are addressing the experience we feel as an individual. We are acknowledging that the feeling is uniquely ours. We are doing so to keep the experience of gratitude first and foremost in the children we serve every day and reconnecting that feeling within ourselves as adults.


It might feel like a small thing to you as the reader. Perhaps it will always feel like that to you. However, we challenge you to be present with the feeling inside you the next time a kind gesture comes your way or a gift is handed to you. We automatically want to say something like, "Thank you so much!" Instead, be still with the feeling, letting it surface. Express your gratitude with that feeling leading the way. You might just surprise yourself with a long-lost childlike part of you that has been longing to surface. Go with it and embrace the "gratitude experience."


We are Montessori Center of Our Lady and we are grateful you stopped by to read our blog. ♥

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