Letter of Gratitude
Giving Thanks to What You Have Learnt
It’s hard to let go of the past, but it’s important to remember, it’s all part of your life journey. You wouldn’t be where you are today if not for your past; the good parts and the bad. What is important is that you learn, learn from your experiences, your mistakes, your ups and downs, and your wins, so you know what cycles you’re repeating, what patterns you’re feeling.
Writing a letter to your past experiences and giving gratitude to what you have learnt is a great way to identify and acknowledge your life. It also helps to release feelings, see and stop repeating cycles and patterns, and support the opening of your subconscious mind.
Going through any type of transformation, seeking change in your mindset attached to your life experiences, affects to your way of living; These are not limited to overthinking, limiting self-beliefs, guilt, fear, doubts, judgement, shame, trauma, anger, pain, or grief. Your attachment style addresses parts of your personality that you subconsciously consider undesirable, governing how you live, potentially blocking manifestations, reinforcing cycles and patterns. A highly effective tool is writing a Letter of Gratitude to your past.
Why?
It’s an effective therapeutic contributor to releasing and reprograming your subconsciousness. This method supports working on your Shadow Self by engaging in self-reflection, by growing your self-understanding and awareness. By bringing the unconscious elements of your mind into your clear awareness, you can uncover parts of yourself that you may supress or hide from yourself and from others. You can start to remove the mask you may by wearing.
Writing a letter of Gratitude to your past supports releasing and reprogramming in understanding thoughts that may be set in stone in your subconscious mind, serving as a catalyst in self-sabotaging and repeating cycles and patterns.
What Is It?
It’s a technique that supports the writing and burning of words to help move on from your past, and give gratitude of the lessons learnt. Writing a letter, in any format of anything that expresses your feelings about yourself and how these experiences made you feel.
To start, this can be challenging, but there are no rules in what you write, how many times you re-write, or how you burn your words, your Letter of Gratitude to your past. You can be repeat the process over and over until you start to feel shifts, supporting the reprogramming of your subconscious mind.
A letter reflecting on past experiences can help understand how it made you feel about yourself and how it has become a way of being.
The main importance of the letter, which can be testing, is having gratitude for those experiences that brought you pain and suffering, shaping your self-worth and how you are received by others. For example, feeling life has treated you unfairly, holding onto any type of victim mentality of “why me” that can highlight your attachment and relationship style in how you perceive yourself and feel perceived. Basically, putting out energy to continue to receive the same, going around and around, repeating patterns and cycles.
What Do You Write About?
You can start by writing all the things you find undesirable or dislike about yourself. This can go as deep as you feel comfortable with and just go with the flow. Giving gratitude to what you have learnt from experiences that have wounded you emotionally and mentally can be testing as these feelings are part of your repertoire of self-belief.
Within your letter, you may like to focus on how to stop the repeated cycles, be it in your career, relationships, self-reflection or life.
For example, in your career, you may find you always attract the same narcissistic bosses in jobs where promises are broken, there’s nowhere to grow, or the same toxic cultures that lead to the same outcomes. You’re being a high achiever, a perfectionist that can’t say no with a people pleasing behaviour style of acceptance and approval from others. If you bottle things up it can create emotional and mental triggers and block you from getting ahead. It can be feeling disrespected for your worth that over time lowers your self-esteem, confidence and vitality by being unfairly treated, bullied with your performance always criticised, not being appreciated and overworking until burnout. If this sounds like anything you have experienced or are feeling and you want to cut the cords and claim your power back, then start writing!
Methods to Get You Started
Step 1.
What You’ll Need
Something to write on and with; paper, pen or pencil, a comfortable and private space where you can write without your words being read by others (unless you feel like sharing it).
After writing your letter, have on hand a lighter and a metal or fireproof vessel or bowl like a steel kitchen bowl. Using a bowl is to ensure you perform the process safely, adhering to any fire restrictions in your area. See more on the burning process below. I also recommend always burning outside and with respect.
Step 2.
How to Start
Write in any way you wish, be it a scribble, calligraphy, caps, tiny writing or barely legible. The way you write doesn’t matter, the spelling, grammar are insignificant. What matters is that you start and just let the words flow.
Your letter can focus on specifics like a relationship, a childhood trauma, or something that happened at work, or it could be a general letter about how you feel, again there are no rules. Check out the examples below.
Step 3.
How Long to Take
When you first start out, it’s good to dedicate time to the practice. Allocating the time will help you complete the task, avoiding apathy and prostrating. Lets say set yourself 5 minutes with the intention of the next letter spending 10 minutes and so on.
You can write as many pages as you want and spend as much time as you want, again, there are no rules.
Step 4.
What to Write
Whatever you feel you need to write about, write it. A moment, a past experience, your feelings. Work, relationships, love, trauma, feelings. There is no right or wrong, good or bad way of doing this.
Don’t be obsessed about what you write, but how it makes you feel, the process of writing it down to be able to burn it later. It’s about the acknowledgment, clarity and the cathartic process.
The more times you write, the longer or shorter the letter may get as you dig deeper.
Step 5.
When to Write
You can perform at any time of the day, many find at night is more effective or resonates better, as you may be in a more relaxed state.
Most powerful energy for writing and burning can be around the full moon; the days before, the day of and days after the full moon.
Even if you have completed the writing and burning process, performing any writing and burning is a great way to check in on yourself and release any baggage of anything after it happens and feelings that may be trigger that you are holding onto.
Step 6.
How to Burn It
Burning should be completed straight after writing your letter – IT IS NOT TO KEEP!
Be safe! Always adhere to the rules and regulations where you live; This is at your own discretion, like in Australia adhering to total fire ban days.
How you burn the pages is how best it feels to you; it could be ripping up each page and burning the pieces, burning the letter as a whole or in a ball. I recommend getting your letter and screwing each page into a loose ball to burn.
Take you bowl outside to a safe area that does not have trees above or around it. If you can’t take it outside, I recommend doing it in your kitchen sink.
Place your the pages of your letter into the bowl and light it. If you have a number of pages, you may wish to alight it in a few places. Just be safe!
As the flames are burning, look at them and into the sky, especially at a full moon with an intensified energy, say out loud any intentions or just feel the weight of release as you give it out to the universe.
Step 7.
What to Do After Burning
Once the paper is burnt with the ashes all that remain, empty the bowl of ashes into the garden or in the soil of a potted plant and cover over.
Now you forget about it. Go inside and give yourself a reward – rewarding ourselves for doing things motivates us and supports acknowledgement. Your reward might be to watch Netflix, have some chocolate or just relax.
Step 8.
When to Know it’s Working
You may feel a release almost immediately after, but if you don’t that’s okay. Don’t give up. Do it again and again (not straight away), and get deeper and real with yourself, be intentional.
You may feel calmer and like your brain has just had its own release of built-up overthinking and hyper-focusing.
You may have a feeling of peace with the past and seeing and feeling it differently without anger or self-pity, regret or confusion.
You’ll become more mindful in your behaviour and what you are attracting, being more intentional, having peace with the past and not bringing into future situations.
You may feel better about yourself and naturally start to feel at ease at being able to shake things off like holding onto things, people and places that no longer serve and being in a state of gratitude for what you learnt.
You’ll have a better mindset to how you feel about yourself and living more aligned authentically with self-acceptance, self-love and self-empowerment.
You’ll feel ready to claim your power, shifting from a place of lack to one of more, from less power to more power over your life.
Practising can help you start to feel a shift in your energy and be more positive and grateful.
Examples to Kick You Off
Career
How I Feel:
I hate my job as it is going nowhere, and I get no support. I am not good enough and my work is never perfect. I hate that I allow others to take advantage of my skills and take credit for my work. I hate that I don’t know everything and that I can’t ask for help for fear of losing my job or being talked about. I hate the company culture and the lack of accountability. I dislike my boss as everyday he picks on me and criticises my performance, even when I have overachieved.
Experience:
Waking up I feel dread having to go into the work place every day that makes me feel anxious, depressed, trigger, guarded and I just wait for each day to end. After having my annual review, I was told I would not be receiving any promised bonus for achieving my budget and KPIs (key performance indicators). Getting the courage to ask for feedback, I was “shot” down in flames and told, no one got a bonus, and you are lucky you have a job. Now all I can do is think about it every day is all the projects I managed and wins that my boss never appreciated or acknowledged and replaying over and over to the point of making me feel sick as to what I did wrong. Finding out others received bonuses, knowing my boss lied and that he got a boss, makes me feel anger and resentment that have replaced my positive attitude and love of what I do in my job. I know my boss is going nowhere as he is a great politician in the workplace, and I feel trapped as my boss been told it will be hard for me to get another job.
Giving Gratitude:
I give gratitude for having the experience in the workplace with a boss that I now understand that is jealous of my skills and wanting to protect his position with a behaviour style that is not a leader. I give gratitude to lessons learnt on what kind of leader, manager I want to work for to be inspired and mentored and what type of leader be I want to be and how I treat my staff, to making them feel supported with a positive attitude to enjoying their job and feeling appreciated. I give gratitude in knowing that I am good enough to get job I love by acknowledging all my achievements that will support my resume.
I give gratitude to the processes I worked with that were full of gaps, forcing me rely on myself to solve problems. I give gratitude to learning from this experience what a bad culture is to avoid repeating by researching companies that I have opportunities to get a job with that align with my own core values.
Love
How I Feel:
I hate myself inside and out. I am not worthy of being loved. I am not smart or good enough to be loved. I am not pretty/handsome enough. I am not tall enough and I hate parts of my body and don’t look in the mirror. I hate that I can’t say what I feel. I hate feeling always on edge. I hate my mood being affected when I don’t hear from my person. I hate that I feel that I have no control. I hate that I allow someone to mistreat me and that I put up with it. I hate that I let my person be inconsistent and pull-away, ghost, gaslight me and give me the bare minimum. I hate the fear of moving on and starting again or that I won’t find anyone.
Experience:
I am so in love with my person, but they make me feel miserable as their actions do not reflect how they feel, but then again, they never tell me how they feel as they are emotionally unavailable. I am constantly on edge waiting for them to contact me and analysing every word and what it means to how long should I wait to reply. They never ask me questions about myself or how I feel or what I like but I know everything about them, like their favourite colour, movie, song, food; what they like and don’t like. When I hear from them, I am so excited and then when I don’t for weeks, months on end I am overwhelmed, overthinking, self-isolating and unable to talk to anyone about how I feel as I know my friends would judge me. What did I do wrong, what could I have do, or said or texted better, what, if, what if, what if. When they do contact me, they gaslight me by making up excuses versus any type of apology or accountability and how they can make it up to me. I have accepted the behaviour because it’s easier than having my heart broken, although it is already broken from being treated like an option.
I burden the responsibility for everything on my shoulders, and they don’t even seem to care and only contact me when it works for them. They make comments on my appearance, and as they breadcrumb me, coming in and out of my life, I think about other people they would rather be with, as I am not good enough looking, my body is not good enough as I start to break down pieces of myself and it unravels into self-sabotage. I am unhappy and know the cycles and patterns of being love bombed, then later treated inconsistently, receiving the bare minimum; like being on a merry-go-round as I have cried and now just makes me feel numb as I’m not in control and feel like I have no power.
Giving Gratitude:
I give gratitude to the good times and memories and love that I experienced. I release this attachment to this person and this style/attachment to break cycles, patterns and generational curses and chains and give gratitude to the experience of feeling love, proud of putting myself out to receive. I give gratitude for understanding I deserve more and that no one holds power over me and my thoughts about myself. I give gratitude that understanding the behaviours from the person I am ready to release and to have learnt so much on what I don’t want or want to accept or be treated. I give gratitude in understanding it is not about me but potentially my person’s own generational trauma, affecting their ability to be emotionally available, loved, worthy and consistent. I give gratitude to being able to have loved and to the knowing that rejection is protection and recognise that divine intervention may of prevented us from being together, like karma, that may have had negative long term consequences, now released. I give gratitude to be able to release what no longer serves me in my current timeline and for my universe fulfilment. I give gratitude to myself for the resilience and self-development on understanding what I am worthy of receiving and giving love to a future relationship and in claiming my own power by self-love.
Personal
How I Feel:
I hate my body. I hate myself for the anxiety I feel from others as I feel like I am being pressured to explain myself. I hate that I don’t have friends that understand and support me. I hate myself for allowing others to disrespect my feelings. I hate that I feel anger and like I have no control in expressing myself towards people who have hurt me. I hate I have expectations of people and that I over give to be accepted. I hate that my closest friend makes me feel unworthy and I allow them to put me down and feel bad about myself.
Experience:
My closest friend who is really skinny and does heaps of botox who is very sensitive to criticism, I now argue with and no longer can tolerate as I no longer want to feel manipulated. A friend that loves to be doted on, with everything all about them, disregarding my feelings and needs. They ridicule me in front of others and justify in “gaslighting” by thinking it is funny and that they are being a good friend, whilst I am unable to say anything that may make them erupt or bruise their ego about how I perceive the way they have to look on the outside as a joke. As a repeated pattern, happening for so many years, I accepted it and even believed it, walking on eggshells, feeling paranoid to always pleasing my friend, enabling their behaviour in with disrespecting me and my boundaries to avoid losing them. Everything gets turned around and I always overcompensate based on their needs, disregarding my own for their approval and acceptance. It makes me question my self-worth completely from how I look, feel and act.
Giving Gratitude:
I give gratitude to all the years of friendship and memories I have shared with my closest friend. I give gratitude to the phrases of life we shared and how we got through life situations together, being friends from a young age. I give gratitude that I am strong enough not to have to rely on being accepted or feeling worthy of their friendship to feel good enough. I give gratitude to being able to move forward and form new friendships without judgement, that are more aligned to who I am. I give gratitude in understanding that they have deflected their own unresolved trauma/issues onto me and that it’s not about me personally. I give gratitude that I no longer want to accept allowing someone to have control over any part my life and I can now release them with love.
It’s all up to you. Whatever you do, and however you decide to go about it is a personal choice. Do what makes you feel better, helps you find clarity, helps you acknowledge your past so you can better move towards your future. The power is yours!