Oprah Reveals the Daily Gratitude Practice That Helps Her 'Feel the Abundance' of Life
When you hear people talking about “practicing gratitude,” you might picture long journaling sessions or silent meditations: introspective, deep, self-reflective, and honestly — as awesome as journaling and meditating are — more than a little bit intimidating. There’s definitely a stereotype around how you *should* practice gratitude, and it can scare away those of us who don’t have the time or energy for 30 minutes of journaling every morning.
But turns out, there’s really no single way to practice gratitude — you can do it however feels right to you, and Oprah Winfrey (who knows a thing or two about mindfulness and self-reflection) has a routine that proves it. “Gratitude really is my religion,” says the media mogul in a new People cover story. “It is the the thing that I base my everything on.”
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Winfrey’s routine is simple: in the morning and at night, she repeats the words “Thank you.”
“When I wake up in the morning, it’s the first thing I think,” she explains. “I train myself to say, ‘Thank you’ first.” Winfrey acknowledged that it’s easy to jump into the stresses of the day and start parsing through your to-do list as soon as you open your eyes. The practice is about centering yourself and bringing yourself back to the moment with gratitude. “That is my deepest, greatest spiritual practice,” Winfrey said. “If you train yourself to do that, you walk through life feeling the abundance instead of the scarcity.”
Winfrey also keeps a gratitude journal and wrote in it daily for a full decade, she explained in Oprah in 2012, noting down five things every day that she was grateful for. When she lapsed in the practice, it took a toll on her mental health. “I had accumulated more wealth, more responsibility, more possessions; everything, it seemed, had grown exponentially—except my happiness,” Winfrey wrote. “I was stretched in so many directions, I wasn’t feeling much of anything. Too busy doing.”
Of course, Winfrey said, she’d been busy in those journaling years too; “I just made gratitude a daily priority. I went through the day looking for things to be grateful for, and something always showed up.” She returned to the practice, she wrote, making sure to make a note every time she experienced a “grateful moment.”
When you truly appreciate “whatever shows up for you in life” instead of focusing on what you don’t have, Winfrey observed, “you radiate and generate more goodness for yourself.”
In the People interview, Winfrey also took a moment to reflect on the sheer distance she’s run in her life and find gratitude in the incredible things she’s accomplished. “I think about [gratitude] every day because I live in Montecito, which is about as far from rural Mississippi as Mars is from here,” said Winfrey, thinking back to her difficult childhood. “Physically, emotionally, spiritually, dynamically, just what happened on that dirt road in Mississippi versus where my life is now feels like an impossibility.”
Another thing to be grateful for: the impact she’s made. “When I think about the millions of people who heard something [from me] that opened up the aperture of hope, of possibility, of yearning, of consciousness, just even a little bit, that’s a life I touched,” Winfrey explained. “And you can’t get better than that.”
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