Category Archives: heart

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.

Now offering private yoga classes

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I now offer one-on-one yoga classes. I can teach, coach, and help you develop a yoga practice, meeting at my home or traveling to your home.

I love working with beginning students interesting in discovering their “yoga bodies.” I’m good with alignment, having practiced Iyengar for years and taken my teacher training with an Iyengar-certified teacher. I can teach you the preliminary poses that prepare you for more difficult poses.

If your goal is to get stronger,and/or more flexible, to have more fluid movement, to release stress, to develop a daily home routine, or just have more yoga (in the largest sense of the word, connection between your bodymind and the Universe) in your life, I’m available.

I always work with where you are now and move toward where you want to be, adjusting for any issues that may arise.

I love working with beginning students of all ages, conditions, and sizes. That includes true yoga novices as well as those who have had a few studio yoga classes or who have practiced a bit with videos at home at home who want some one-on-one attention.

Because I’d like to get more experience, my rates are very reasonable — $30 for one hour or $120 per month for weekly one-hour sessions, and we can adjust time to more or less than an hour and more or less than weekly. (Traveling to your home costs more to cover the fuel and time.)

Private sessions through Yoga Yoga are $85 per hour, so this is bargain. See the Contact page of this blog for my email address, or call me if interested.

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!

Let’s get this party started! Free NLP sessions to get you unstuck!

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I’ve been having a lot of fun lately doing NLP sessions with people I know. Since a lot of people are confused or intimidated about what NLP is, I’m offering a special, time-limited offer for the next week, until January 12, 2011.

If you are feeling stuck in some aspect of your life — moving ahead with a project, making a decision — and you are ready for some movement or maybe even a breakthrough, email me at the address on the Contact page.

We’ll seek a time to meet for an hour for an NLP coaching session (which is really just help getting unstuck).

The first session is on me, and sometimes that’s all it takes, just one session to get unstuck. You can take it from there.

In exchange, I ask that you either write a testimonial (can be anonymous to preserve confidentiality, and kindly convey any negative feedback in private) or give my business card to three people you encounter who are stuck and tired of it.

I don’t know the answer. You do. And by the way, the best definition of NLP is this:

NLP is what works.

How do you experience and cultivate gratitude in your life?

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When do you feel gratitude, and what happens before it?

It seems to me that there are two kinds of gratitude: the you-should-feel-grateful kind (because you have food to eat while the starving children of X don’t) and the kind where you actually feel grateful to be alive.

One is imposed and is tinged with guilt, while the other arises from inside. I’m more interested in the latter.

I’m thinking of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. He goes through an ordeal where he sees life as if he had never been born. He sees the people he knows, but no one recognizes him. Clarence the Angel shows George how the people of his town are worse off for not having known him. George is so miserable, he’s about ready to do away with himself, when…

Watch George’s gratitude in this YouTube video.

That’s some gratitude, huh? What’s your favorite movie depiction of gratitude?

Many many years ago, during a crisis, I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. It seemed that life was closing in on me, and I did not have the resources to handle it.

Then one day I realized the pressure had lessened. I was handling it to the best of my ability, and I wasn’t alone. Some of the weight lifted, and I felt tremendous gratitude.

That gratitude was not just an attitude, but a deep reconnection with life as it is (was) that permeated my whole being. It was like being smitten with the present moment, and with everything that crossed my path. That gratitude had a large measure of joy in it.

Yeah. That kind of gratitude. If you could bottle it up and sell it, you’d make a fortune.

Do you cultivate gratitude in your life? I do. I can close my eyes and ask myself:

What if I didn’t exist?

When I open my eyes, I feel grateful. I am in the right place at the right time. I am here now in this brand new moment.

I also believe that another side effect of sitting is that I experience more gratitude/joy. (Really, could you have one without the other? I think probably not.) Since sitting is really about fully getting present with yourself, I guess it’s not surprising. I just didn’t know that’s what sitting was all about when I started.

How do you experience and cultivate gratitude in your life?