Category Archives: gratitude

Asking for what you need, seeking work, and Integrative Chakra Breathwork

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On day 8 of the 21-day gratitude challenge, I am grateful for two dear friends who have asked me for love and support because they need it now.

I don’t know why, and I don’t need to know why. They will share when they’re ready. That’s beside the point.

These friends are people whom I’ve asked for support from when I’ve needed it, because they have an abundance of love for people.

I feel deeply honored that they can ask me when they need it, and that I have it to give. Blessings on you both, and may angels wrap their soft wings around you, carrying you in love, as I do.

***

I am grateful for my skills and abilities to make myself useful. Today, I will be asking for what I need in terms of a temporary/contract job. I do technical writing, editing, training, and a whole slew of other things.

Please ping me if you hear about anything. I’m also updating my LinkedIn profile. Please feel welcome to link to me if you like!

***

Today I’m grateful that I attended an Integrative Chakra Breathwork session last night. This is the creation of Ed Buresh, whom I just met in person last night, and it is a journey through the chakras with sound, breath, and movement.

Ed created the sound, which is marvelous: a heartbeat, a swirsh, and a tone for each chakra based on the earth’s vibrational frequency. I went into a deep theta trance during the 6th chakra and emerged as the sound was receding. It felt like I was working something out that was mostly unconscious.

I plan to return for more sessions.

(Another friend was teasing me about going to this, saying that “integrative chakra breathwork” hit all the New Age buzz words! Not quite. If you add “channel” and “angels” and “purple” and “bio-energetic”, then you’d be pretty close! That angel photo just makes this post complete, does it not?)

Don’t fall asleep!

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Saw this sign backstage at the Jason Mraz concert at the Erwin Center.

NLPing, challenges and choices, my toolbox of resources — and a proposition for a new challenge

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I’ve got to be out of my house in an hour for a realtor to show it to a prospective client, so here goes!

I feel very gratified about a phone NLP session I had last night with someone I’ve never played in this way with before. I’m not going to betray any confidences, but the process worked! She made several shifts, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

I believe that the thing she was stuck on has opened up in a beautiful and remarkable way. Excellent work — you know who you are! It was such a pleasure for me. I hope it was for you too.

I also got an email from a friend whom I did a session with about three weeks ago — the session that inspired me to offer free sessions for a week. She’s sailing on the project she was stuck on — fulfilling her creative vision and finding collaborators who rock deeply. She wrote:

Your NLP with me was such a help. I may need more soon.

I still need to schedule three more free sessions with people who claimed their spot before January 12. I’m looking forward to it — and I will be offering sessions on a sliding scale or donation basis very soon! Stay tuned!

I feel grateful for life’s challenges. I didn’t sleep well last night — issues with getting my car repaired, selling my house, my present and future work, and of course, my identity, all came to a head, leaving me restless, in my head, and full of what ifs.

Once I considered all the choices I have, I felt better. Got some good quality sleep for an hour or two and woke up ready to face the day. I did Dene Ballantine’s Tap Away Pain (TAP) version of the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) just to really get it at a bodily level that I have many choices about how I face what life presents.

I also feel grateful for my considerable toolbox of resources. Yoga, TAP/EFT, pranayama, sitting, Reiki, NLP — all of them come in handy for getting me centered and helping me operate from my center even more deeply.

I add to that list of resources the trauma releasing exercises, which I haven’t done for awhile.

Last night I was inspired to get that book down off the shelf and find out how often you can do them, because I had a brainstorm.

What if after I/we finish our 21 days of gratitude (we’re one-third of the way through today), I offer an opportunity to join me in doing the revolutionary trauma releasing exercises every other day for a month and twice a week for the next month?

By that point, we will be so unstressed and relaxed that it will be easy to recognize when we need to do them, and it will feel so good to be unstressed and relaxed that we will be motivated to do them when we need to!

Sometimes stress can be such a part of your life that you don’t even know who you are any more. I’ve been there.

This is a way to recover your true relaxed self — without having to go on an expensive island vacation or get frequent massages! (More power to you if you can do that!)

We can share our experiences here. Think of it as a public service: a lot of people find this blog searching for information about the trauma releasing exercises because I’ve written about them before, and there’s not a lot of first-hand reports out there yet.

Look in the tag cloud on the blog and click “trauma releasing exercises” to read those posts if you’re curious.

I decided to mention it now so you’ll have time to order the book and/or video if you want to participate.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Some days gratitude is harder to find than others

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Today I am grateful that committing to writing about three things I’m grateful for (and why I’m grateful for them) for 6 days so far has focused my attention on gratitude!

Energy flows where attention goes, and what this has opened up is more awareness of how connected we all are. Imagine a web of energetic lines connecting you to others you’ve connected with (seeing, hearing, or feeling, directly or indirectly), and lines connecting each of these others to those they have connected with, and so on.

Everyone is connected energetically, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Facebook, cell phones, television, email, or technology (but they have made the world a lot smaller than it used to be).

We don’t do anything, exist, survive, thrive, learn by ourselves, but we each do have a self.

So what is a self? More and more, I understand my self as an energy center, always changing, and experiencing life from the center of my self is like plugging in and recharging my batteries, reconnecting with the mysterious Source.

…

I’m working on finding the gratitude in the fact that I picked up my car from the mechanic shop where it’s been for the last three weeks, and a dashboard light is on that shouldn’t be on. I’ve got to take it back in, and I’ve got Hannah with me today while her mom works this holiday.

Sigh. I’m not grateful for this inconvenience, although I will take it in stride.

I am grateful that I have a car, that I have insurance, and that mechanics can fix things. And I am grateful that no one — and I mean no one — is perfect, including me.

Now impeccability, that’s something anyone can inspire to, and the topic of an upcoming blog post.

…

I’m grateful for a day with Hannah! What adventures will we go on? What fun will we have? How many slugbugs will we see? Tune in tomorrow and find out! (That’s her photo at the top of this blog.)

Generosity, root vegetables, and an offer on my house!

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Today is the fifth day of my 21-day gratitude challenge. It’s still raining! I mentioned my gratitude for that yesterday. Another day of rain in January translates to more wildflowers in April in Central Texas. Plus, with the summers we have here, variety is welcome!

Here’s what else I’m especially grateful for today.

Generosity

Today I’m feeling especially grateful for the generosity of friends and strangers. Since my car has been disabled since Christmas eve (but ready tomorrow — yay!), my friend Thomas has twice let me use his car while he was traveling.

I have appreciated that, and his friendship, very much. The car loan has helped me out tremendously, since I didn’t have rental coverage on my insurance (do now!), and he hasn’t had to pay for long-term parking. I’ve picked him up and dropped him off at the airport (with my daughter filling in once when I had a yoga workshop), returning his car with a full tank of gas. Thank you, Thomas!

I also appreciate my friends letting me bounce my ideas about creating my right livelihood off them, supporting me and sharing information about possibilities for training and people they know who have an inside scoop. I’m mulling over a lot now, and I recognize that my friends have a lot of resources, wisdom, and connections to share.

This last anecdote falls into the category of random acts of kindness, a form of generosity. Who isn’t grateful for those? My friend Victoria shared a story about how she (currently carless) accidentally left her bag with the extra layer of clothes needed to wait at bus stops in January at her workplace, and how a woman waiting behind her in line at a coffee shop offered to drive her back there to get her bag. The woman refused any compensation, as she had had the experience being a carless bus rider herself. Victoria felt supported by the Universe and appreciated having that extra layer of clothes as she went about her day.

Root vegetables

I just made a big ol’ pot of borscht, with parsnips, carrots, red-skin potatoes, and most of all, beets, among the ingredients. Red beets and orange beets and sliced beet greens.

Beets and rainy winter days go together really well. The jewel-like color of borscht made with lots of beets is a warming, heart-opening color to nourish you during these days of low gray clouds and cold dampness. Beets have an earthy taste like no other vegetable I can think of. If you need grounding, eat beets.

Negotiating

I got an offer on my house yesterday, and this time it was in the ballpark! Yay! I’m feeling very grateful. It’s been six weeks since it was first listed, and to tell the truth, it’s been a tiny bit nerve-wracking. It’s not the best time of year to sell.

So I am grateful that a prospective buyer and his realtor are taking my listing seriously enough to make an offer.

I met with my wonderful realtor/neighbor today, and we made a counteroffer. This could go back and forth several times, and it could also fall apart, with one or the other of us walking away. I’m asking what I want, having already come down once, because if you don’t, guess what? You won’t get it!

She’s letting another couple of very interested prospective buyers know that I’m currently negotiating, so if they want to make offers, now is a good time!

Keep ya posted!

Water falling from the sky, Mexican food, and saying no

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I am grateful for rainy days, specifically for today’s drizzle and forecast of rain for the rest of today and into tomorrow. After I post this, I’m going back to bed with a cup of tea and the wonderful novel I’m reading.

Isn’t it somewhat miraculous that we live on a planet where water falls out of the sky from shape-shifting beings called clouds? And that water soaks into the earth to nourish plant life, which feeds all the animals, including us, and also — by seeking the lowest place — that it runs off into streams and rivers and seas? And that water evaporates back into clouds to start the cycle over again?

(If it’s flooding now where you live, I hope you feel grateful for the evaporation and the gaps between rains.)

I feel gratitude for Mexican food. I just made myself some migas for breakfast. If you’re not familiar with migas, they’re scrambled eggs with salsa, grated cheese, and crumbled corn chips mixed in. Very popular in Texas!

I love the mouth-feel (the soft warm cage-free farm eggs and cheddar cheese contrasted with the crunch of the corn chips), the flavors (bland eggs, piquant salsa, sharp cheddar, salty chips), and the colors (especially if you use the baked blue corn chips). Migas made with high-quality, healthy, fresh ingredients are quite appetizing, and it’s a fun, creative way to gussy up scrambled eggs. (Try some smoked goat gouda sometimes in place of the cheddar. Yum!)

I feel gratitude for being able to say “no”. My friend Katie just called about meeting up with her and other dear friends today for an attractive adventure.

I declined, telling her of my plan to read in bed today.

She liked that I was doing that for myself, and I liked that she and Glenda and Vee were doing something they wanted to do. We left off agreeing that either I’ll call her when I’m ready for something else, or she’ll call me when they’re ready to do something else. Everyone is happy and fulfilled and flexible.

Easy peasy, huh? Not always, for me. I’ve learned how to say no without feeling like I need to apologize, and for that I feel very, very grateful.

On the third day of gratitude…health, a car wreck, and the best novel ever

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I am grateful for my health. I know that is a “typical” thing to be grateful for, and that people often compare themselves to those who are having serious health struggles, so they feel grateful and somewhat guilty.

I like comparing present to past in my own life, since health struggles are inevitable, seeing that we are all mortal. It’s more useful.

In my past I’ve neglected my health terribly and suffered from it. Smoking, drinking, eating crappy processed stale food, shorting myself on sleep, being stressed for prolonged periods of time, not exercising, being depressed or resentful or numb.

Mostly that was due to my own ignorance about how to improve and maintain my health.

I lacked awareness that what holds us in life are chemicals and electricity operating within a narrow bandwidth, and when our bodymindheartspirit systems go outside that bandwidth, life fails and we die.

To be truly healthy means attending to and nourishing our bodies with the food we eat and the water we drink, using our bodies with physical activity, and letting our emotions become trusted messengers doing their jobs, helping us make decisions and connect with others and fulfill our destinies, no more and no less.

I woke up this morning feeling really great. My bodymindheartspirit feels flexible, fierce, capable, loving, playful, and resilient. I loved on Mango, my cat, who has been feeling a little under the weather the last few days, keeping quietly to himself. He loved receiving a long, gentle massage. My health overflows, and I am grateful.

I am grateful for a car wreck that I had in 1996 that changed my life. I know it seems like an odd thing to say, and I wasn’t grateful for a long time afterwards. I felt like a victim (and technically, I was driving completely appropriately, hit by someone who was driving inappropriately, speeding, drinking, and passing on the right as I made a right turn, who left the scene, never to be held accountable by law or insurance — luckily I had uninsured motorist coverage). I had to give that up to God and focus on my recovery. God has taken care of it.

In hindsight, what that car wreck did for me was set me on the path to health. I had to set some new boundaries based on my limitations. I started seeking relief from the damage to my body, which outside of a few stitches on my head, was soft tissue damage — my musculo-skeletal system was seriously out of whack, stretched this way and that by the impacts.

Healing has taken years and money, and in the process I’ve learned of other long-standing health issues and worked through them.

I got serious about doing yoga. I experienced chiropractic of several kinds, myofascial release work, and so much more. I got a fabulous first-hand education, and now I am moving in the direction of becoming a healer myself.

Today I also feel grateful for Michael Malone, whom I have never met, but whose novel Handling Sin is the most entertaining novel-reading experience I’ve ever had. Thanks to Cate Radebaugh for recommending it. I trust your discernment about fiction, Cate!

I tell you, this guy is a born storyteller who has crafted a fabulous tale about the responsible misfit in a large Southern family from the small town of Thermopylae, NC, accompanying him on an incredibly improbable and hilarious roadtrip, meeting colorful characters that will make you laugh and weep (in fact, one character, a tiny aged Jewish career criminal, is named Weeper Berg) as you and the hero recognize truths about human nature.

Michael Malone has me in the palm of his hand, and I’m grateful for everything it took for this book to be written and published and get into my hands.

Gratitude for my daughter, women friends, and skilled intuitive healers

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About gratitude journals

From googling “gratitude journal,” the practice apparently began in 1996 when Sarah Ban Breathnach created The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude as a companion to her popular book Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy.

Here’s a blurb about the book:

“Gratitude is the most passionate transformative force in the cosmos,” promises author Sarah Ban Breathnach (Simple Abundance) in her introduction.

I believe it, Sister Sarah!

Sarah asked journalers (journalists?) to write five things every day that they felt grateful for and said they would feel their lives shift within a couple of months.

In 1998, Oprah Winfrey had Sarah as a guest on her show, and as we all know, Oprah just knows goodness. The gratitude journal took off.

I missed out on this back then. It was in the early days of the world wide web (remember that?). I was working at a computer all day, and in my free time, the last thing I wanted to do was be on a computer. (My, how Facebook and blogging have changed that!)

I was raising an adolescent girl going through her most difficult period, in an often-strained relationship.

Actually, looking back, keeping gratitude journals would probably have been a fantastically wonderful practice for us to share back then, if she had deigned to share anything with me.

Hmmm. She’s changed, and so have I.

What I feel grateful for today

Today I feel grateful for my whole experience of motherhood. From pregnancy (easy), through childbirth (difficult), to the moment I held my new baby in my arms for the first time and she wrapped her tiny fingers around my little finger (instant love), I have been blessed to have had a child, a daughter, and specifically my daughter, Lela Rose, who is 29 years old now.

Lela at her Dec 2010 graduation from nursing school, with her women friends.

I watched and helped her grow up, even as I grew up more myself, and she has turned out to be a mensch, a true human being. I see her in her young adult years now, a mother herself, starting her nursing career just this week, moving through struggle to accomplishment. I see her self-esteem, her worthiness, her competency, her intelligence, her endearing goofiness, her wisdom, her discipline, her caring, her limits too.

What I am most grateful for about being a mother is the personal growth that raising her brought to my life — the growing up that I had to do, the inner work of exploring my values, learning when to be flexible and when to stand firm, the changes that being her mother brought to my life.

Today I feel grateful for my women friends, in particular Clarita and Linaka, whom I spent time with last night. We go way back to 1995 when we began ecstatically dancing together. That is 16 years of knowing each other, talking, coming together and moving away, seeing each other through difficulties and joys and sharing them, traveling together, cooking and eating together, always laughing together, and lately doing NLP with each other.

I feel blessed to have so many women friends, new and old, near and far. There is something about the friendship of women that is so nurturing. I think we let our hair down when it’s just us, in a way that we don’t or can’t with men, because we share the lifelong experience of being women in this culture. And when we have common interests and affection for each other, the connecting is abundant.

Today I feel grateful for those people I’ve encountered so far in my life who are skilled intuitive healers. I’ve mentioned Patrice, my acupuncturist, and Chandler Collins, my chiropractor, on this blog before.

Yesterday I had a heart-centering bodymind session with Bo Boatwright, who is a chiropractor but who has learned and developed a method that one could do with just a massage license.

Having experienced one session with Bo, I’d say his work with me on the table was a combination of massage, chiropractic, myofascial release, rebirthing, and visualization. He rolled me and moved me to find the stuck places, and he dug into the stuck places, having me breathe all the while, until my body spontaneously began to release stress/tension/stuckness in the manner of rebirthing and trauma releasing exercises.

After my body quieted down, I felt sadness arise in my heart chakra. I cried, and Bo asked me about my relationship with my parents, who died in 1984 and 1997 (but of course one’s relationship with parents doesn’t end with death). I opened my heart to them, forgave them, embraced them, kissed them…

A couple of hours later, in a moment of quiet stillness, I noticed a new space in my heart center, an openness that wasn’t there before.

Thanks, Bo. I’m grateful for you. And heads up, you are teaching me.

Gratitude, day one: Mango, my house, the Internet

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Today I start the 21 days of gratitude challenge by writing three things I’m grateful for and why.

Here goes.

Today I feel grateful for Mango, my cat. I feel grateful for him for many reasons. First, he was a neighborhood cat who adopted me — a pet in search of an owner. He began coming over to my house to be petted when I was outside, and I’d give him massages, which he loved. He was so adorable, seeming to ask permission before he jumped into my lap, that I began feeding him and later took him to the vet, sealing the deal. He is a true gentleman of a cat with very good people skills, and I appreciate that very much.

At this time in my life, I am the only human being in my household, and Mango is the first other being I encounter in the mornings and the last I see at night. I miss him when he decides to spend the night outside. He loves snuggling — next to me in bed, on my belly when I’m lying on the sofa reading a book — and he often curls up next to me when I’m writing. He’s family — a true familiar in the old sense of the word — and a cherished companion.

Today I feel grateful for my house. I am not working outside my home much these days, so I spend a lot of time here at home, soaking in the ambiance, while I wait for it to sell.

I appreciate the feeling of spaciousness since I decluttered it. It is a major luxury in my life to have so much space to myself, 1130 square feet, to be exact, with 9.5 foot ceilings. I appreciate the long Victorian windows letting in the winter light and giving me views of bare branches and gray clouds and the moon, the hardwood floors, the symmetries of the rooms.

Today I feel grateful for the Internet. It provides me with a way of connecting with so many people (the 4,299 views of my blog, 405 Facebook friends, 64 followers on Twitter), an outlet for my thoughts and questions and experiments and yearnings, and access to unbelievable realms of information, all available at my fingertips.

It is an amazing web of interconnectivity. Having grown up long before it was developed, I see how it has changed people and society. We are so much more connected now, for better or worse. And I can do so much more on the fly — find an address instead of needing a large paper map, for just one example.

And I need to do that right now — look up an address and go there! Bye till tomorrow!

21-day gratitude challenge starts tomorrow

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A recent NLP explorer wanted to experience more gratitude in his life. That’s been inspiring to me, too. Who among us doesn’t want that? Gratitude feels good!

So I’ve been reading about gratitude. According to Wikipedia, gratitude is:

a positive emotion or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive

People feel the emotion of gratitude after they have received help when the help is perceived as valuable to them, costly to the benefactor, and well-intended by the benefactor. However, people who experience more gratitude in life habitually interpret help as more valuable, costly, and well-intended.

Therefore, gratitude is a habitual bias. And you know what that means. You can develop habits. It takes three weeks to cultivate a new habit.

And so… ta da! I am inspired to cultivate more gratitude in my life. Starting tomorrow, January 12, and ending on February 1, every day I will write down three things I’m grateful for that day and why I’m grateful for them.

You are welcome to join me in this challenge — for all of it or any days you want to participate. Feel free to use the Comments feature on this blog or to respond on Facebook — whatever works for you.

Each day, I’ll also include links to good stuff I find on the Interwebs about gratitude.

If you need more motivation, consider this, from Wikipedia:

A large body of recent work has suggested that people who are more grateful have higher levels of well-being. Grateful people are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives and social relationships. Grateful people also have higher levels of control of their environments, personal growth, purpose in life, and self acceptance. Grateful people have more positive ways of coping with the difficulties they experience in life, being more likely to seek support from other people, reinterpreted and grow from the experience, and spend more time planning how to deal with the problem.  Grateful people also have less negative coping strategies, being less likely to try to avoid the problem, deny there is a problem, blame themselves, or cope through substance use. Grateful people sleep better, and this seems to be because they think less negative and more positive thoughts just before going to sleep.

Could you use some more of that in your life? If so, join me!