What if gratitude wasn't about pretending everything is fine — but about finally seeing clearly even when life is hard?

Kimberly Rash gets refreshingly honest about what gratitude actually is and what it isn't. She unpacks the difference between genuine thankfulness and toxic positivity, shares the science behind how a consistent gratitude practice can reduce stress, lower anxiety, improve sleep, and even reduce inflammation, and walks through the real-life ways she cultivates gratefulness (from morning office rituals to prayer and worship). Whether you journal, meditate, pray, or sing, Kimberly makes the case that finding your own gratitude practice isn't just good for your soul… It's backed by research.

Gratitude doesn't ask you to ignore your reality. It invites you to stay grounded in it - and from that place, real change begins.

Find Me Song: https://open.spotify.com/track/21OhodGkkUaRf3rRDAgFSA?si=56396ba19e384c62

Kimberly Rash: Hello, and this is Ru Terai. I'm Kimberly Rash and I'm your host. I just wanted to talk today a little bit about gratitude, right? Some people say, Ooh, the attitude of gratitude, and I used to think that gratitude meant being thankful all the time, looking for the positive, even when things didn't feel good, and I'm, if I'm being honest, sometimes that just felt forced to me.

How am I supposed to be thankful when I'm walking through something? Because there were seasons in my life that things were just hard and where I wasn't okay. And the last thing I ever wanted to hear was just be grateful. Just be grateful for what you have, which is great in theory, and it's a little harder, to put it out there when you're walking through it.

But what I've come to understand over time. Is that real gratitude isn't about pretending everything's okay or that everything is super positive and good. It's about learning how to see differently, a different shift in your perspective, even if it is mucky in the middle of it. And that's what I wanna talk to you guys about today.

I think there's a lot right now. You know, you, everywhere you turn, you listen to things that are about gratitude. There's gratitude meditations, there's, and let me preface this. Gratitude is thankfulness. So if you're in church and they're talking about being thankful, same thing. I think there is ways to be grateful that just don't seem so forced.

because I feel like it can easily become toxic positivity, and I am one, so I will be the first to admit when someone starts speaking negatively around me or over me, I stop them. I stop them. I'm not participating in that. So You're not speaking death over my life. You're not speaking negatively over my life.

And you can ask people at my work, people at my home, like it's, it is just not something that I am going to allow you to speak over me or around me, and it's just not my bag. So. Toxic positivity. I'm not trying to be like, oh, let's all be joyful all the time and everything will be just dandy. Like that is not, that's not what I'm doing.

That's not what I'm saying. But I am very aware about what I allow in my space and my brain and my life over my health and emotions and mental clarity, and that was a long time, 50 freaking years of walking through a bunch of stuff to finally love me enough to say. I don't care what you're going through, I don't care what you're, what's happening right now.

I don't need to hear those negative things of my life. So I choose, to be around thankfulness. So example, at my work in the mornings, not all mornings, but a lot of the mornings I walk into work. And I look at the girls and I just say, you know what? Most of the most often, everybody's up at the front.

Like at some point when I enter into the office space and we're all saying good morning to each other, and especially if I have some EO or like just Debbie Downers. Yeah. Like the, I'm not doing my whole morning like this. We're just not. So what we do is we will. Go around in a circle and we will just talk and say one thing that we're grateful for that morning, and everyone starts to shift.

We start to laugh a little bit. You know, some are harder to move on that, that scale, but eventually when everyone else is grateful and happy and peaceful, the essence of the office becomes that way, and we all become just better for it. So we do gratefulness. And you know, you can't really have a bad day If you're grateful in the moment.

Bad things are gonna happen for us and I, in my profession, you're gonna have some difficult patients. You're gonna have some hard cases to try to operate through. you are gonna have some irate person about a bill, but you know what? I don't have to live there. I am grateful. I have a job.

I am grateful that I love the people that I work with. I am grateful that I've had the same job for 21 years and I've had job consistency. These are the things, that's what I mean by being grateful. Forcing gratitude is not what I mean either. I don't mean to be like, Hey girls, you're all negative, so hurry up and I'm gonna make you be grateful for something.

But I feel like innately we can all at least be grateful that we have air in our lungs. We can all at least be grateful, for the things that we do have if we don't have handicaps. And even people with handicaps can find ways to be grateful in that too, you know? Everyone has a way to be grateful in the life that they lead,

and I don't think people should have to feel guilty for not feeling grateful, but it would be my heart's desire for you would be that you can really look within your life and find things to be grateful for, because. Your life won't always look so bad when you can see the good gratitude is not about ignoring your reality. It's about grounding yourself in it. It really is, and we really can think about it like it. Gratitude has become, or thankfulness has become such a, a hot topic that you know, at least people can understand that even the scientists in the medical field are starting to understand, and psychiatrists too, that an attitude of gratitude, having a, a grateful heart.

Really affects your health, your mental wellbeing, and your emotional wellbeing. It really does. There's actual research out there. You can look them up. There's studies that are done. I really like, this YouTube discussion or presentation that Andrew Huberman does. Um, I believe he's a professor at Stanford.

Does have positive effects on your health, on your life, on your community, and your wellbeing mentally and emotionally, spiritually. And it's not just about the things that feel good, research that shows when we practice gratitude consistently, it actually can change the way our brain works.

It helps reduce stress, it lowers anxiety and even improve things like sleep and overall mood. And physically it's been linked to lower inflammation, which I find really important because. I suffer from a couple of autoimmune disorders, and honestly, I'm changing the way I speak about that as well. I'm grateful for the body that it's working right now and the condition that it's in, but it is in a process of healing.

but being grateful for better health and, and it helps. Get your body regulated, being in a state of gratitude of thankfulness, and I've what I think is the most powerful part, honestly, is what it does emotionally, because when you start to focus on what's really good and what's really working, even in a small way, it shifts your whole perspective.

Not in a way where you ignore your reality, but in a way where you're not completely consumed by it,

you know? And it's. Just one of those things. There's been so many different studies that have been done where people just wrote down a few things. They were grateful for each day, and over time they reported feeling more positive and more hopeful, and even more motivated in their lives. It's just a good thing to do and find a practice that works for you for gratitude.

You know, there are meditations out there that you can sit and be silent and, have, Meditation that's, guided with grateful and positive affirmations and, and those kind of things. I prefer to pray what I am grateful for. I, I thank God. Every day for the things I'm grateful for in my life.

And I'm a worshiper by nature. I am a singer. I love singing to my father, God's source creator. I love singing to him, and that is where I find it the easiest to show my gratefulness. There's so many wonderful songs out there depending on, you know, what your bag is, if you love like old school hymns or you love.

Today's contemporary worship, or you love just a, a folk song or a Blue Hills song, or it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be like a, from church song. but there are plenty of songs out there that help you show your gratitude for nature, for the sun, in the sky, for the air that I breathe.

You know, and there's something about being alone with your creator and being grateful and being thankful and singing and just, just being able to be close. It's the same way as you would as a child, and you were thankful to your parents for something. that's how I feel about it and having gratitude for the things that I already have.

And sometimes I am thankful and I speak into my life and I speak and own the things that I'm going to be grateful for tomorrow and the day after. And in five years. And, you know, and I'll say, you know what? Thank you father for that new, new job opportunity. Thank you father for, the. New people you're gonna bring into my life that I'm going to learn from, and they're gonna learn from me.

And I speak these things over my life. I pray these things over my life, and I am grateful and thankful for these things over my life. And you can speak that however that resonates for you. I am just telling you what works for me. it just works. So I just wanted to say, look up the stuff for yourself.

Don't take my word for it. There's literally so many, studies, videos, all the things that are out there, and if you take anything from this today, let it be this. Gratitude isn't about pretending everything's good. It's not about forcing yourself to feel something you don't, but it is definitely not about ignoring the hard parts of your life.

It's about choosing to see what's still here, what's still good, what's still real, even in the middle of everything else. And sometimes being grateful for where your strength comes from. So today, I don't want you to make this big or overwhelming. thing about this, I just want you to notice one thing, just one moment, one person, one part of yourself, which is kind of what we always come back here.

What is the one step you can make? Well, let's think about that one moment. One person, one part of yourself that you can appreciate exactly as it is. Not like, like, oh, my husband's great, but only if he'd get a haircut. No offense, babe. Exactly as they are. What parts do you love about them or it, whatever it is you're you're grateful for.

And if you wanna take it a step further, write it down. Start a gratitude journal, sit with it for a minute, let it actually register. Because those small moments, they start to shift things quietly but powerfully. from that place, you can begin to move forward, not from pressure, not from fear, but from something more grounded.

And that's where all the change really starts, right? Because as we know, and as I say, you're not stuck, you're becoming,

and let that attitude of gratitude, that heart of gratefulness be something that you start your day and you end your day with, I just keep hearing this song in my head and I may. Totally hack it, but you know, there's just this one line and it's find me grateful, find me, thankful me, and find me, find me.

And that just. It just keeps going over and over in my head. But find me grateful. Find me thankful.

Let that, I can actually link that song in my notes too, if you actually want it. and not sung by me, by, by the actual people, but just find a way, a practice. Something that works for you, that shows your gratefulness. And I am so glad you just opened your hearts and your minds to me today that you let me in your little earbuds or in your car so you could hear me, and I'm grateful for you