We are sharing this chapter of Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat by Katie Hodgetts for members of our Hopeful Book Club.
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Chapter 12
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Audre Lorde
Gratitude often has a bad reputation. It can be misunderstood as toxic positivity, “good vibes only” and a New Age justification to not look at the hard stuff. Yet we’re reminded as a generation to be consistently grateful. We should be grateful to live in a time where we are far less likely to die from tuberculosis, aren’t sent to war and aren’t peasants in feudal times. Rightly so. In 2024, I attended a talk from acclaimed dystopia fiction writer Margaret Atwood. Candidly she said, “Cheer up, it’s been worse – once there were no avocados in North America.” Received with laughter and a huge round of applause, she continued, “The bubonic plague killed half the population of europe, there were European diseases that killed 80 per cent of the North and South American populations, the 1918–20 flu pandemic killed 50 million people. Cheer up, it’s been worse”.42 Atwood is right and it’s a sobering reminder that we should be fundamentally grateful for our access to safety and security. But at the same time, that should not pacify us into accepting how things are.
In movements grounded in fierce urgency, the invitation to pause and feel grateful might be dangerous. My response to gratitude, both in its capacity for tone deaf optimism and its ability to minimize struggle, was a growing distrust. Gratitude felt like an anaesthetic for things we should not tolerate. Too much gratitude will surely deaden our desire to mobilize and campaign against systemic inequalities. Too little gratitude and we close ourselves off to contentedness, perspective and appreciation. But when my physical health became compromised by burnout, I knew that nuance existed beyond the binary, and that gratitude and I needed to have a deeper conversation.
gratitude as Spiritual Bypass
I first became aware of the term “spiritual bypass” in therapy for my eating disorder. Yep, it wasn’t a phrase gently explained to me, it was a diagnosis. Spiritual bypassing was coined by psychologist John Welwood in the 1980s to describe the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds or uncomfortable social realities. Welwood observed this especially in Western spiritual communities, where people would gravitate toward transcendent ideals like love, light, oneness or gratitude as a way of avoiding the messiness of their own pain or the complexity of relationships. In short: narrowing in on the good stuff can protect us from the hard, uncomfortable stuff.
I witnessed this firsthand in spiritual communities during my time living in Australia, aged 20. I had become more interested in meditation as a route to self-knowledge and as I was there alone, I was also deeply in need of some mates. I found myself swimming in new circles of seemingly liberated people, absorbing some of the learnings from their counter-current lifestyles. I did learn a lot, but the honeymoon phase – the singing, the dancing and the joy – faded into frustration. I was rendered speechless when one self-proclaimed wise spirit recommended meditation as a solution to the genocide of Aboriginal peoples. He suggested that if we all meditated then hate would not prevail and when I pressed a bit harder, he questioned why we were spending our energy on “bad vibes”. I understood his sentiment and the deep yearning for a solution to be so simple, but meditation as the only solution is working to a timescale we don’t have, nor does it address reparations and justice.
That experience wasn’t the only one. The phrases “Everything happens for a reason” and “Trust the universe”, and the term “manifestation” seemed commonplace, but they overlooked the asymmetric cards people are dealt all over the world. The final straw was hearing that climate change was the Earth healing itself, without mention of the innocent lives given to generate such healing. It was easier to wish away the climate crisis as a cosmic force than to confront the reality of it being caused by humans and a death sentence for millions. While meditation, dance and yoga felt nourishing for me personally, I grew disillusioned with some of the people I was meeting who were so loud about “one love” but so quiet on social justice.
Now I was sitting in a poky therapy room in Bristol, age 23, with Jeanette listening to my burnout story, cocking her head and cautiously asking, “Have you heard of spiritual bypass?”
“Yes!” I cooed enthusiastically. “Let me tell you about Australia! When I was . . .”
She interrupted. “No. I think we should talk about you.”
Huh?
Spiritual bypassing, while seemingly the realm of New Age spiritualists and men with manbuns, also becomes relevant in spaces of activism and social change. Many changemakers come into movement spaces with a strong sense of responsibility. We’re driven by care, anger and vision. We show up for protests, petitions, mutual aid efforts and organizing communities, though if we’re not on the front lines or getting arrested, we often dismiss our own exhaustion or pain. We tell ourselves we have no right to be tired or upset, that others have it worse, that if we just focused on what we should be grateful for, we wouldn’t feel so depleted. This might show up in narratives like, “Others have it worse so I shouldn’t complain”, “I have no right to feel burned out, I’m not doing nearly as much as others” or, “I live in the UK, I can’t be burned out.”
In the same way that “love” was being used to check-out of the external strife in spiritual communities in Australia, “gratitude” and “wellness” can be used to check out of our internal strife in changemaking spaces. Spiritual tools become a way to override the body’s signals. Tools like mindfulness and meditation are used to nullify and eradicate stress rather than uncover the truths that lie beneath them. Rest gets framed as indulgence. Burnout is seen as a personal failure – you’re not meditating enough, engaging in wellness enough or staying grateful enough – rather than as a systemic condition.
In that room in Bristol, I couldn’t even use the word “burnout”. I felt like burnout didn’t happen to someone like me. Not only did I consider myself as resilient and having a strong wellness practice, but I actually held the title of Wellbeing Officer for my campaign groups. So, when explaining my story, I peppered every bit of my descent into bulimia with addendums that nodded to my gratitude. “I have a lot to be grateful for. I have great friends. I’m not in the countries where rising sea levels are destroying my home. I have financial security. So really, nothing is that bad, I’m just here because of a few minor issues.” While these statements are objectively true and merit gratitude, my overidentification with them was a way of bypassing the truth – that I had to admit I was burned out and my hunger to be the perfect citizen, sister, partner and changemaker was benefitting others more than myself.
When we bypass our own limits in the name of strength
or resilience, we slowly disconnect from our bodies, our boundaries and ultimately from our capacity to stay doing the work. The truth is, you don’t need to be on the front lines to need rest. You don’t need to be publicly leading to deserve care.
gratitude isn’t an Exit, it’s a Doorway to meaning
Routinely identifying the relationships, people and basic human rights that enable our quality of life reminds us of what we are fighting for and what we have to lose. For changemakers, it reconnects us to the “why” of what we do. Rather than soften our edge, gratitude can sharpen our focus. Gratitude is not a thick curtain that hides the challenges we face but a clear pane of glass through which we can see challenge differently.
We sharpen our focus by embracing both/and. Recall Guidepost 3, where emotions can co-exist. We can hold both gratitude and grief, where gratitude doesn’t dilute grief but helps us hold it. Gratitude softens the intensity of grief, and the reality of loss encourages us to appreciate the small things. Rather than opposing forces, they are mutually reinforcing. Sometimes I want to turn away from grief, hide my head in the sand and look
purely at the love I find in my We can hold both little life. I want to bury my gratitude and grief. head in a book and not think
at all about the world. Other times I want to devote my entire life and energy to service, because what’s the point if not to progress? I have found that neither strategy helps on its own. The work is not to look away from all that we stand to lose but to expand our gaze to encompass all that we have, all that we gain. That’s why we have two eyes.
Exercise: Ten-Finger Gratitude
Objective: The Ten-Finger Gratitude exercise is a simple, grounding practice where you pause and, using each of your ten fingers, name one thing for each finger that you’re grateful for, big or small.
It could be the warmth of sunlight, a person, clean water or a delicious meal. The goal isn’t perfection or depth, but presence: to gently shift your attention from stress or scarcity to appreciation, building a daily habit of noticing what’s still good, even in hard times.
Hunt For The Good Stuff
Critical scrutiny is an essential skill, often rewarded at university and praised in the social change sector. Powerful social movements have been built through casting a critical gaze over existing systems, structures and resource allocation. Even neurologically, our brains have evolved with a negativity bias, a survival function that prioritizes threat, criticism and failure so we can protect ourselves. All three of these examples have life-changing potential. But have they become so hardwired that we have lost the art of acknowledging the good? If so, we retrain our attention.
It may seem that there are more things in the 21st century that are wrong rather than right. The idea of Hunting for the Good Stuff, introduced to me by Dr Chris Johnstone, is to resist our negativity bias and to see the light too. Research by psychologist Dr Robert Emmons, one of the world’s leading scholars on gratitude, has shown that people who journal their gratitude regularly experience stronger immune systems, better sleep and deeper feelings of connection to others.
The final step of the eight-week programme is all about reflection and gratitude. At The Resilience Project young people gather in Resilience Circles and retrain their attention, contemplating what they are grateful to this community for, writing each other anonymous love letters. It’s a beautiful practice and some of the most precious memories of my life are of sitting on a hill at our Resilience Residential, listening to young campaigners sharing their gratitude with each other. As Grace said of her 2021 experience, “My life is happier, healthier, more connected, informed and filled with joy, love, hope and strength because of this amazing project and, if everyone got to experience this, the world would be too.” You can feel the impact of gratitude in the exercise below, a variation of the exercise in our eight-week model, but powerful nonetheless.
Exercise: Write A Gratitude Letter
Objective: The Gratitude Letter experiment, designed by Dr Martin Seligman, tests how intentional acts of gratitude affect wellbeing and happiness. The “gratitude visit” involves writing a letter to someone you’ve never properly thanked. materials needed:
- A timer (phone, watch or clock)
- A laptop or smartphone (preferable) or a notebook and pen
Step One: Write The Letter (8-10 minutes)
Think of someone you never properly thanked: an old teacher, a mentor, a friend, a family member, or perhaps someone who has really helped or inspired you during your changemaking journey.
Spend 8 minutes writing a letter that includes:
- What they did for you
- Why it meant so much
- How it affected your life
Step Two: Send the letter (1 minute)
After writing, send the letter. This might be sending it as an e-mail or a text or planning when you’ll go to the post office to send it.
Step Three: Group debrief or solo reflection (5–10 minutes)
If you’re in a group, gather everyone today. If you’re doing this alone, spend some time reflecting in your journal on the following:
- What did you notice? What feelings came up? Did anything surprise you?
- What does this say about how we sustain ourselves and each other?
- How might practising gratitude in this way support your changemaking?
