Gratitude and the colors of the rainbow

Mindfulness and gratitude are closely related. There is much that we have to be grateful for, yet we often lose touch with our many blessings as our attention becomes occupied by the stressors and demands of daily life.

In this month’s column, I share a practice for cultivating gratitude through a daily exercise and for bringing moments of gratitude into the day.

Lawyers spend much of their lives focused on problems to solve, conflicts to manage, deadlines, and clients who are often experiencing significant stress. While that vigilance is essential to effective lawyering, it can also narrow our attention and make it easy to overlook the people, experiences, and moments that sustain us. Practices that intentionally cultivate gratitude can help restore perspective and provide a sense of connection amid a busy practice.

The Colors of Gratitude

Summer is here, and with it comes the brightness of colors in the natural world around us, from blue skies to vibrant flowers and butterflies — reminders of a world we often find beautiful and wondrous, yet at times take for granted.

The practice uses colors as reminders of the people, places, and experiences for which we are grateful. While you can use as few or as many colors as you wish, I will use the colors of the rainbow as an example because they are relatively easy to remember and lend themselves to a natural progression, the duration of which can vary depending on how you feel and how much time you have.

Creating Your Rainbow

The idea is to come up with an association for each color that is easy to remember and connected to an area of your life that feels meaningful to reflect upon with gratitude.

Below, you will find each color with a space next to it so that you can begin developing your own practice.

To help you begin crafting your own practice, consider the following examples as possible areas of reflection. The examples below are simply starting points for developing your own practice.

Red: ______________________________________

Your Childhood: Parents, grandparents, or siblings.

Orange: ___________________________________

Love and Caregiving: A child or person for whom you care deeply and may protect or support.

Yellow: ___________________________________

Health: Your body and the many ways in which it functions and serves you.

Green: ____________________________________

Self-Care: A place, whether in your backyard or across the globe, where you have taken time to recharge, experience serenity, or heal.

Blue: _____________________________________

Purpose: Your work, faith, calling, creative pursuits, or another aspect of life through which you find meaning and fulfillment.

Purple: ___________________________________

Love and Friendship: Your life partner, a close friend, or another person with whom you share a deep bond of care and affection.

The Practice

The way the practice works is that you find a reliably available time of day to sit down, close your eyes, and move through the colors of the rainbow, working from red to purple.

As you come to each color, pause and reflect for a few moments on the association. This can be done briefly, or you can reflect for longer and deepen the experience. I find it helpful to imagine a particular interaction or memory associated with it. Whether drawn from the past or the present, doing so often brings the association to life in a way that enriches the experience and deepens its emotional tone.

As I have practiced this regularly over the last 25 years, the colors have become connected to particular memories. For example, the color orange reminds me of the sunrise I used to watch with one of my daughters each morning on the beach when she was a little girl, and the color green reminds me of the very green grass in an open space in Big Sur where I have gone to recharge. In this way, the color is not randomly associated with the memory. Rather, over time, the color and the memory become intertwined.

Upon reflecting on the color purple, the practice comes to a close. You may wish to end then and there or, if you would like the practice to take on a more ritual quality, you can close with a meaningful reading, reflection, or other practice.

Bringing the Practice into Daily Life

As you move through the day, you will encounter these colors again and again, and such moments can become opportunities for gratitude.

Sometimes this may be deliberate. If you are feeling worried, stressed, or overwhelmed, you can intentionally look around and settle on a color — perhaps a flower — and allow it to remind you of something for which you are grateful. The richer the recollection, the more it can shape the emotional tone of the moment.

At other times, it may be more spontaneous. You may simply be walking outside or looking through a window when something catches your attention — perhaps the greens of a tree or a blue shirt someone is wearing. In that moment, the color can invite a brief moment of gratitude. I think of these as punctuated moments of practice.

A Final Reflection

The feeling we experience when we are in the midst of gratitude can be profound and deeply affirming. Many of us would welcome that feeling becoming a more frequent part of our lives.

Part of what makes mindfulness and gratitude such natural companions is that mindfulness helps us become more fully aware of the many things for which we are grateful. This practice creates opportunities to bring them more readily to mind. In this way, it can foster a more mindful and connected appreciation of our life.

If the number of colors seems like a lot, or you wish to take your time developing your practice, begin with fewer. You can still move through the rainbow, reflecting only when you come to a color you have identified. The remaining colors can simply become opportunities to visualize or otherwise sense the color itself or take a slower, deeper breath.

The possibilities are endless because the practice draws upon your own intuitive and personal relationship with gratitude and the life you have lived. Over time, the richness and abundance of your life in its many shades and colors may become more fully known, more often.

If you are like me, you may discover that the practice evolves over time and becomes a meaningful part of your day. I hope you find it useful.

Scott Rogers, M.S., J.D., is a nationally recognized leader in the area of mindfulness in law and founded and directs the University of Miami School of Law’s Mindfulness in Law Program where he teaches mindful ethics, mindful leadership, mindfulness and negotiation, and mindfulness in law. He is the creator of Jurisight, one of the first CLE programs in the country to integrate mindfulness and neuroscience and conducts workshops and presentations on the role of mindfulness in legal education and across the legal profession. He is author of the recently released, The Mindful Law Student: A Mindfulness in Law Practice Guide, written for all audiences.