Gratitude Practice for Stress Relief: Louie Schwartzberg on Heart Coherence, Beauty, and Healing

Nov 19, 2025

Louie Schwartzberg, an award-winning filmmaker known for his stunning time-lapse work, dives into the transformative power of gratitude. He reflects on his upbringing, shaped by Holocaust survivors, and how that awareness of appreciation led to his film, Gratitude Revealed. Louie shares techniques for interrupting negative thoughts with gratitude, emphasizing its role in resilience. He also introduces a new film focusing on beauty as a counterforce to fear, highlighting how beauty can foster connection and flourishing in life.

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ANECDOTE

Lifelong Roots Of Gratitude Revealed

Louie Schwartzberg traced Gratitude Revealed to lessons from his Holocaust-survivor parents and decades of documenting resilient, joyful people.
He compiled archival vignettes and interviews over 40 years, then completed the film during COVID when travel paused.

INSIGHT

Gratitude Is A Network Of Values

Schwartzberg frames Gratitude Revealed as integration rather than definition, exploring values that compose gratitude.
He emphasizes forgiveness, creativity, wonder, curiosity, and compassion as parts of a lived gratitude.

ADVICE

Use Gratitude To Interrupt Rumination

When you notice rumination or negative feelings, ask yourself, "What can I be grateful for?"
Use immediate, simple anchors (breath, fingers, light on leaves) to pause the negative spiral and shift direction.

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Guest: Louie Schwartzberg

Ever wonder what happens to your physiology when gratitude goes deeper than just “thank you”? Discover a space where gratitude becomes an experience—an uplifting feeling, an intuitive compass, and an antidote to our anxious and fear-saturated world.

In this special Add Heart Podcast episode, Deborah Rozman sits down with acclaimed filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg, known for his amazing time-lapse photography (e.g., Fantastic Fungi), to explore what was behind his award-winning film, Gratitude Revealed.

Louie shares how growing up with parents who survived the Holocaust imprinted a lens of everyday thankfulness—roof, food, family—that later shaped four decades of storytelling focused on resilience, wonder, and joy, and culminated in Gratitude Revealed. He discovered how pausing for just a few minutes and finding things to be grateful for can quickly interrupt rumination and reopen your heart.

You’ll hear from Louie how Gratitude Revealed weaves values like forgiveness, curiosity, creativity, and compassion into a living portrait of what it means to integrate awe into daily life.

Louie introduces a captivating idea that is behind his next film, which will be about beauty. He sees beauty as a counterforce to the “attention battleground” going on in society today. When fear or anxiety hijacks our nervous system, beauty can meet it and help release it—by shifting us toward coherence, connection, and choices that make life flourish.

Deborah guides a brief heart-focused practice on gratitude that you can use anytime—which synchronizes heart, mind, and emotions to lift your vibration.

In this episode, expect fresh, science-based insights (why gratitude builds resilience and bigger picture thinking), practical micro-moments of grateful experience you can have on a walk, and a renewed way of seeing life: from the light on a leaf to the miracle of your moving hands.

If you’ve ever thought you “should” be grateful, this conversation shows you how to feel it—and carry a gratitude card in your back pocket, ready whenever you need it.

About our guest:

Louie Schwartzberg is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist known for pioneering time-lapse cinematography and capturing the beauty of nature. His acclaimed films include Fantastic Fungi, Gratitude Revealed, and Wings of Life for Disney. With over five decades of breathtaking imagery, his work spans IMAX, Netflix, and immersive experiences around the world—from The Sphere in Las Vegas to the Vatican in Rome. Louie’s Moving Art series is praised for its healing impact, and his mission remains to inspire wonder, deepen connection, and protect the planet we call home.