🧘‍♀️ Is all gratitude created equal? 🧘‍♀️

Gratitude is one of those concepts that are thrown around left and right these days. And one of those concepts I fail to fully fathom.

Every Monday morning I do yoga. Every yoga class ends with the following instructions from the teacher:
1. Thank yourself for this practice;
2. Thank this space that made the practice possible;
3. Thank the people around you who shared the practice with you;
4. Thank all your yoga teachers.

Sounds good, right? But I have questions.

1️⃣ Should I really be grateful to myself for every single yoga practice? To be brutally honest, sometimes I drag my feet just because I have a non-refundable membership card. And sometimes -- often, really -- during practice I think about my classes rather than my breathing (like I'm supposed to). Why should I still thank myself for this atrocious betrayal of the spirit of the practice?

2️⃣ Isn't thanking a space a weird thing to do? It didn't do anything.

3️⃣ Why should I be thankful to those I shared the practice with? A yoga class is a silent class. No one speaks (but the teacher). I barely even see the other participants (or I see them from weird angles, like from my downward facing dog). I don't think I will recognize them if I see them in the street. And yet, I should be grateful to them. What is more, they should be grateful to me too despite my utter indifference to them.

4️⃣ My yoga teachers... I haven't had many. I am grateful to all of them. But one absolutely stands out -- Anna. She made a difference. Should I be thanking her only? Or should I be thanking all of them to different extents? Should I be thinking: I am somewhat grateful to Viktoria, very grateful to Nikita, and eternally grateful to Anna? It feels counterintuitive to assign different gratitude values to different people, but lumping them all together is unfair to the teacher who stands out (or is it?).

5️⃣ Finally, is it real gratitude if it is given on cue? Is automatic, mechanical gratitude still better than no gratitude?

Being grateful sounds like a great thing to be. And I am - for things that helped, for things that mattered. Not all gratitude is created equal.