Tag Archives: gratitude

Is anyone else doing the trauma releasing exercises?

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Just checking. I’ve taught them to one person so far during this challenge and am curious to learn whether anyone else is doing them or has tried them at least once or intends to do them.

If so, would you please comment? I’d just like to know someone’s there.

Last night my releasing was mild compared to the previous wild session. A little shaking in my left hand, but not my left shoulder this time. Mostly my legs shook. I experienced some mild, gentle pelvic rocking. Lasted about 10 minutes.

~~~

This morning I went to Appamada Zen Center for the Sunday service. I got there just as the clappers signaled time to get seated before the service begins.

Had a nice practice inquiry session with Peg Syverson, my teacher. So much has changed since I saw her last, which was maybe in early January. We had a really good connection. She asked what stays the same while so much of my life is changing — selling my house, moving out, doing temporary work — and advised to notice it all.

During the sitting parts of the service, I noticed tight places in my body. I attribute it to the kettlebell swings I’ve been doing to strengthen my body. I’m working my way up from 10 swings with a 15 lb. kettlebell. Right now I’m at 20, and I feel it slightly afterwards.

Then I had tea afterwards with some sangha members, and we chatted about the revolution in Egypt, Islamic finance, the environment, and people’s difficulty in dealing with long-term incremental change like climate change, among other things. Some of my sangha read a lot.

I haven’t been to Appamada for weeks. I’ve been spending time with my granddaughter while my daughter works at her nursing job on Sundays. She had this weekend off, and I got to sit with my sangha.

I’m grateful to have my daughter and granddaughter in the same city as I and to be able to spend time with them.

I’m grateful for Appamada, Peg, the Buddha, Zen, the sangha, and my zafu.

I’m grateful to be exploring the trauma releasing exercises.

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.

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.

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!

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?