12/01/2025
Nourishing Through Gratitude:
A Return to Community & Connection🙏🏻❤️
As we continue in the season of nourishment at InnerJasmine, I’ve been reflecting deeply on what it truly means to feel grateful—not just as an idea, but as a lived and embodied experience. Gratitude and nourishment share an essential truth: both ask us to take in what supports us and let it fortify the places that have needed tending.
What Is Gratitude, Really?
Gratitude is often defined as a heartfelt recognition of the goodness in our lives—an appreciation that arises when we acknowledge that some part of our experience has been enriched by something outside of ourselves.
Gratefulness, a related but subtly different expression, emphasizes the capacity to notice and receive life as a gift. It is the inner posture of willingness to be touched by what is meaningful, beautiful, and sustaining.
In many wisdom traditions, including yoga, gratitude has long been seen as a nourishing practice—one that softens the nervous system, strengthens resilience, and reconnects us to what is life-giving. Historically, gratitude was not just an expression of thanks, but a communal ritual: a way for communities to affirm their shared joy, survival, abundance, or healing. In that sense, gratitude was never meant to be experienced alone.
The Power of Community in Feeling Grateful
While gratitude can be deeply personal, it also becomes amplified when we experience it alongside others. It is often in the presence of community—whether that is a family, a circle of friends, a class of yogis, or even a gathering of strangers—that gratitude becomes more vivid and more real.
Yoga is a perfect example of this. It is meaningful as an individual practice, but something profound happens when we breathe, move, and rest together. We begin to feel the subtle truth that we are not meant to do life in isolation. Even those who identify as introverted or independent often feel nourished by the right kind of community—sometimes a large group, sometimes a small circle, and sometimes just one or two people who feel safe and supportive.
Human beings are social, relational, and communal creatures. We thrive in connection, we regulate our nervous systems with one another, and we experience more happiness when we are part of something larger than just ourselves.
OM: The Primordial Yes to Life
This brings us to one of the most universal expressions of community in yoga: the sound of OM.
One of my yogic facilitators Lorin Roche once described OM as the “primordial shout of joy at saying yes to living life and experiencing it.”
This has always stayed with me. OM is not merely a sound; it is a vibration, a frequency, a unifying pulse that runs through all of us. When we chant OM alone, it creates a sense of grounding. But when we chant OM together, something bigger happens:
• Our individual vibrations synchronize.
• The nervous system shifts toward safety and connection.
• The room becomes cohesive, attuned, alive.
The vibrational frequency of OM—roughly 136.1 Hz, often linked to the Earth’s natural resonance—mirrors the effect we feel in communal settings like concerts, chanting circles, worship spaces, festivals, or yoga classes. When groups gather and create sound or movement together, our bodies and brains begin to harmonize. Mood elevates. Connection strengthens. A sense of unity emerges.
This is why chanting OM with others often feels like nourishment in its purest form. It reminds us that even if we arrive to our mats with our own stories, struggles, or healing processes, we are not alone. We are saying yes together.
From Individual to Collective Joy
The deeper beauty of gratitude is that it moves us from the “I” to the “we.”
It shifts our orientation from self-preoccupation toward connection, compassion, and shared humanity. When practiced within community, gratitude becomes less about what I have and more about how we uplift one another.
And the more we do this—the more we step out of isolation and into collective experience—the more nourished we become. Gratitude expands. Joy becomes communal. The weight we carry becomes a little lighter. And the whole, in turn, becomes stronger.
This is the heart of nourishment:
to receive support, to reconnect with others, and to remember that our lives are enriched not only by what we cultivate alone, but by what we experience together.
A Living Example: Community in Lakota, Michigan
This weekend, we witnessed a beautiful reflection of this truth in Lakota, Michigan.
Each year, the entire community comes together to create Christmas wreaths. There is one simple request: if you make one for yourself, you also make one for a veteran at the local cemetery.
And so they do.
Families, friends, neighbors, and strangers set aside time to honor those who served, crafting wreaths with care before the community gathers to place them at each gravesite. It is quiet, humble, and profoundly generous—a collective act of remembrance and gratitude.
It is also nourishment in action.
The kind that feeds the heart, restores connection, and reminds us that life becomes more meaningful when we shift from the individual to the collective.
As we move deeper into this season, perhaps we can each find one small way to step toward community—
to try something new, to show up somewhere we haven’t before, to offer a gesture of connection, to give our presence, or simply to say yes to being part of something larger than ourselves.
Because nourishment expands when we share it.
And gratitude grows when we practice it together.
