When Gratitude Becomes Embodied

This guest post is by Mor Keshet, MPS, LCAT. She is an Integrative Eco-Art Therapist and founder of TEVEL, working at the intersection of creativity, Nature, and collective healing.

Digital Collage

Source: Mor Keshet

Earlier today, I walked into my kitchen just as the afternoon light was beginning to fade. On the wall, a soft fluttering caught my eye: a cardinal, prancing and hopping across a branch outside, cast its playful shadows into my home. It was a tiny moment, a quiet choreography the natural world performed without audience or intention. Yet it felt like a sacred gift, and I received it as one.

Once, I might have missed the subtlety of a quiet moment such as this one.

If you think about it, there are so many moments like this one that pepper each of our lives: a butterfly swirling overhead, the singular patterns on a leaf, or the scent of rain descending from above. And, when you’re fortunate enough to receive such a gift – as I was earlier today – then your life feels exponentially richer and deeper.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have reoriented my sense of gratitude to a rootedness in Nature - to the more-than-human world, or the attributes found in all of nature, which includes human beings (e.g. emotion, intelligence, agency). This orientation has widened my perceptive field, to where I now recognize these small exchanges – these fleeting offerings – as nourishment.

But I hardly wish to keep this breakthrough to myself. In my work as an Integrative Eco Art Therapist, I support my clients – as well as communities – in deepening their sense of connection and Earth-centered consciousness.

Gratitude is often presented as a cognitive task: write three things you’re grateful for, recite them before bed, repeat. Sure, these practices can be supportive. Yet they frequently overlook the body, the senses, and the wider world we belong to. Lists alone can feel performative when we’re overwhelmed; they don’t always reach the places within us that most need care.

But in its deepest expression, gratitude is not something we think – it’s something we embody: relational, intentional, alive. And when we extend our gratitude to the more-than-human world – the cycles, textures, and wild creativity of nature – something palpable shifts. We begin to experience a sense of interbeing, a term coined by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, that describes the felt understanding that we are part of a living, interconnected system.

To really help people not just understand – but truly feel gratitude, I’ve created a ritual which I call “Earth’s Gifts: A Creative Gratitude Ritual for Resilience.” Put plainly, it’s an invitation to slow down, notice the sustenance the Earth offers, and engage with it creatively and somatically.

"Holding Pine"

Source: Mor Keshet

As an example, I’ll share with you what a teen client recently shared with me. On a bus ride home from school, they happened to glimpse a spider’s web stretched delicately across a stop sign, amidst shifting shadows in the late afternoon.

How did it make them feel?

“It made me feel bigger inside,” they said.
In an instant, they told me, they felt more resourced, less alone and more alive.

Their words are a reminder that expanding our capacity often doesn’t come from dramatic breakthroughs, but from subtle moments of reorientation toward what is already life-giving. When we allow ourselves to be touched by beauty, we feel spacious where we once felt constrained. We feel connected where we once felt isolated.

This is what Earth-based gratitude offers: not an escape from difficulty but an expansion within it.

Many of us have been conditioned to keep our stories, our emotions, even our joys small. We shrink ourselves to fit expectations, rushing past the world’s offerings without ever truly receiving them.

Yet beneath this conditioning is a deeper truth – what eco psychologists call the ecological self. This part of us remembers that we are nature, too. It longs for reciprocity with soil, wind, water, and light. It knows that connection is not a luxury; it’s a biological rhythm.

Reorienting toward gratitude through this broader lens invites us out of confinement and into participation. Noticing a dancing shadow on the wall or the shimmer of a spider’s web isn’t trivial – it’s a way of coming home to ourselves, and expanding beyond any single story we may tell ourselves about who we are.

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In the Earth’s Gifts ritual, after arriving and orienting to their natural surroundings, participants are asked to gather and then to create – steps that often reveal subconscious truths.

During the gathering phase, we instinctively select natural materials – a cracked leaf, a smooth stone, a piece of bark – not simply for their beauty, but for the way they resonate. A kind of magnetism guides you. What we pick up often mirrors something unspoken within.

Source: Mor Keshet

In the act of creation, we actively create out of our selected natural materials – perhaps into sculpture or collage. Always, a fuller picture emerges. Creativity becomes a language of intuition. Through shape, texture, and placement, we begin to see what our bodies have been trying to tell us.

This nonverbal, sensory form of meaning-making supports emotional regulation, expands perspective, and helps metabolize overwhelm. It is art as listening.

When gratitude is grounded in the living world like this, it becomes a stabilizing force. Noticing beauty and receiving it shifts the nervous system out of threat mode and towards connection. The rich combination of gratitude and creativity broadens our internal landscape – that “bigger inside” feeling my client described.

When we expand our awareness to the more-than-human and allow gratitude to step into this renewed spaciousness, a marvelous thing happens – we become attuned and grounded in what truly sustains and affirms life. This is beyond any material possession – it is receiving Earth’s most abundant gifts.

From this rooted place, a natural question arises: How might I honor what sustains me? What might I offer back?

This is gratitude not as performance, but as reciprocity and relational collaboration with all that is seen and unseen.

To close, let me share one more simple practice with you – one that I often return to called the Breath of Thanks. Here’s how you do it:

Inhale slowly and as you do, think in your mind, “Thank you for…”; When you exhale, in your minds, name something that sustains you. Repeat this flow five times, letting each offering emerge organically.

This is gratitude as belonging – a way of remembering that even in moments of struggle, the world around us continues to give, invite, and affirm life. Gratitude, you see, is all around us, is within our breath and bodies. We only have to tap into it for a precious moment.

Mor Keshet

Source: Donna Alberico Photography/ Huntington NY