Thank you for today’s online qìgōng practice with Jasmine, Liz, Debbie, and Penny. Inspired by daily online meditation practice by Mary Stancavage and Undefended Dharma, we closed with an embodied gratitude practice. I felt the calm. I felt the connection. I felt my relaxation response of the parasympathetic system drive my brain and body.
18 months after the car accident, I am still recovering from the concussion and hit a lull that has been frustrating where I feel trapped at times.
On the one hand, I have made substantial progress over these 18 months. I no longer wake up with curled toes. I have not fallen and hit my head like I did 5 months after the car accident. I can read and write light emails for an hour now. I can enter a cafe and not have a searing headache from the background music and people talking in the background. For the last few months, I now can experience colors, smells, tastes, words in real time for an hour or so whereas before everything was fuzzy.
On the other hand, I have a ways to go. I can’t work for more than an hour without my brain and body shutting down in freeze mode. My energy is low and my brain tires easily and so I can only do one main cognitive activity a day. This narrows the life in many ways.
But today, I was given a gift. During today’s online drop-in practice, I was reminded of something.
When I went to the brain clinic over year ago after the concussion, I did a pre and post functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) at the beginning of the clinic and at the end. During the fMRI, they gave me 3 cognitive tests and measured brain activity. During the post fMRI, I was exhausted from 8 – 5 p.m. rotation of exercises for 10 days.
During the first cognitive test during the fMRI, I tried to rally my brain and strove to push through the exhaustion and craved improvement. Then at the break between the first and second cognitive test during the fMRI, I remembered what the clinic told me about leading with the relaxation response and the parasympathetic system allows the neurons to speak to each other effectively. So for the second and third cognitive test of the fMRI, I attempted to complete the tasks while doing deep qìgōng lower dan tien belly breathing. I was slower completing the tasks and did not finish them but I was calm, grounded, and embodied while in the giant tube with all sorts of loud mechanical sounds.
After today’s qìgōng, I remembered that the fMRI showed a difference between the first and last two images of the post. This is not a scientific study and evidence based assertion. It is a memory and looking at the images.
The memory water the seed of curiosity.
So here is what I gathered in 10 minutes with my human brain (not AI search) about gratitude and the brain from studies that used fMRI.
“In the 2017 study by Keyong et al., their gratitude intervention was observed via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to strengthen the participants’ ability to regulate emotions (e.g., focus on specific emotions or rethink/reframe a situation in a more positive light). The study used fMRI to observe the activity of the brain during a rested state.
Specifically, the activity of the amygdala, a region of the brain known for its role in processing emotions, was observed to be impacted by the gratitude intervention. The amygdala is an almond-shaped piece of tissue located on the sides of our brain, otherwise known as the temporal lobes, and it is part of the limbic system. When practicing gratitude, the amygdala’s activity under the limbic system—responsible for processing emotions and memories—seems to be positively impacted.” (Khorrami, 2020 in Gratitude and Its Impact on the Brain and Body)
“Neuroscience research using fMRI reveals that gratitude activates two key brain regions. Dr. Glenn Fox at USC conducted a landmark neuroimaging study (2015) showing that when people experience genuine gratitude, the ventral striatum (reward center) and medial prefrontal cortex (value assessment) light up — the same regions activated by food, sex, and social bonding. Gratitude literally activates your brain’s reward system.
Additionally, gratitude increases production of dopamine and serotonin — the neurotransmitters targeted by antidepressant medications. A 2009 study by Dr. Alex Korb at UCLA noted that the act of searching for something to be grateful for — even before finding it — stimulates serotonin production. The looking itself changes brain chemistry.” (The Psychology of Gratitude- Why Thankfulness Changes Your Brain, 2026)
The Science of Gratitude (Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley, 2018)
So, we might find a movement or a gesture such as hands on the heart or the belly and breathe 3 – 5 times with a gratitude that bubbles up?
What are you grateful for? What beings are you grateful for? What communities and places are you grateful for?
Dr. Kathy Yep 