Most of us think of gratitude as being thankful or appreciative. But it’s deeper than that definition alone.
There are lessons in gratitude that help you build better relationships, improve your own mood, increase your happiness, and much more…
Everything is working. Irrespective of how you feel about it, or what your opinion is on it, everything is working. Your life is working . . . you’re alive! Our collective evolution is working . . . we’re alive! Everything on the planet is working . . . everything is alive.
Life is fulfilling its promise to you. But beyond keeping you alive, life doesn’t owe you anything else. That means that everything that happens today, beyond what life is supposed to do, which is to keep you alive, is a bonus .
Gratitude is an incredibly important part of living an abundant and fulfilled life. It’s easy to get disheartened, overwhelmed and stressed out about what’s happening in your life and so gratitude can often get overlooked. The implementation of even a few consistent gratitude practices is a powerful way of bringing us right back into the present moment and seeing our life through a different lens.
To understand how to achieve gratitude, let’s look at what it means. Gratitude is a more layered concept than simply saying thank you. It creates a positive emotional response and this is a core part of shifting the energy within the body on a physical and emotional level.
Being alone is a challenge for many people. This challenge may loom especially large during the holidays if you are single or newly divorced and without family around you. Holidays are a time to share love, and many people end up feeling depressed when they do not have people around with whom to show their love. If you are in this situation, what can you do to make the holidays joyous rather than depressing?
The key phrase here is SHARE LOVE.
Pause for a moment and ask yourself, “Am I regularly allowing love to be bigger in my life? Am I allowing my own inner voice to matter more? Am I migrating toward or manifesting the deep desires I dream of?”
If you answer yes (or even consider a yes), your mind is likely starting to get afraid. It gets afraid because when you say “yes,” you are recognizing more of your bigness. When you see from a larger, bird's eye perspective, the mind gets nervous.
What I'd love for you to know is, when your mind gets nervous, it's a good sign. This is a quantum flip that can change your life.
During this season of gratitude and beyond, I invite you to make a quantum flip and be grateful for your mind when it gets nervous.
When the mind senses there's something more manifesting and “I'm not in control anymore,” it gets nervous. This “something” is more of you, the Soulful Self, embodying.
The cool, quiet room was overflowing with the grieving faces of friends and family as the funeral director invited Mrs. Lee up to the podium to speak. The petite, elegant widow walked slowly to the front of the small chapel and calmly began her eulogy.
“I am not going to sing praises for my late husband. Not today. Neither am I going to talk about how good he was.” Mrs. Lee’s eyes flashed.
“Enough people have done that here.” She took a deep breath, allowing the air to fill her lungs before she continued. “Instead, I want to talk about some things that will make some of you feel a bit uncomfortable.”
Several people stopped fanning themselves and sat up a little straighter. “First off, I want to talk about what happened in bed.” She paused dramatically, shifting her weight from side to side. A crow cawed outside the chapel window. She watched it perch itself on a nearby tree.
“Have you ever had difficulty starting your car engine in the morning?” She carefully studied the faces about the room. With a loud, grinding sound, she snorted and rumbled, violently shaking her tiny frame.
“On a clear day, you can see forever.”—Burton Lane
Several years ago, after a somewhat worrisome eye diagnosis, I had the extraordinary experience of looking out my window and seeing the external world moving in perfect synchronicity to the Andrea Bocelli music I was listening to. Every detail—people walking, cars passing, tree leaves in the wind—was part of a divinely choreographed dance of deeply connected oneness. And I too was part of it. There was nothing in the universe that sat alone on the sidelines within God’s creation. And I could see this so clearly that the power and beauty of it moved me to tears. Infinity vision, beyond an eye diagnosis.
The Higher Self is our connection to Divinity – to God, Spirit, Source, the Universe, or whatever you choose to call it.
You can think of the Higher Self as your soul – the Divine part that chooses us and chooses to experience life through us. Through our personalities. This higher consciousness is the part of us that doesn’t fall prey to fear, scarcity, comparison, othering – or any of the things that cut us off from one another. The Higher Self recognizes that all life is sacred.
Although this Higher Self is the true essence of who we are as Spiritual beings, over time and through our life experience, another part of us forms as well – the smaller self or the ego.
The ego or the small self tends to think it’s running the show, although it really isn’t at all. This part of us sees the world through a lens of limited or false stories about reality. Things we’ve decided are true about ourselves or the world through our conditioning and the beliefs that have been passed down to us from our ancestors. Through these stories, we create an idea of our “self,” an identity we attach to.
This part of the self is necessary to our quality of uniqueness, but can also tend to trip us up. It’s a very triggered view of the world that is shaped and formed and also influenced through our wounding. And it has very little to do with our true, Divine self.
When you’re coming from a place of woundedness and you need to heal, it’s very hard to connect to your higher self or to find Spiritual growth.
My spiritual path began over 35 years ago when I first got clean and forgiveness is the road to freedom. Pain, resentment, shame, and anger can hold us for our entire lives if we never take the time to dive in and find compassion for ourselves and those who have hurt us.
The tricky thing about resentment is that it isn’t about the other person at all. In fact, the person you resent may not even know you resent them! But because you hold onto the stories from the past about people who have done you wrong, you keep an energetic tie to them.
Healing your past hurts begins when you look at your life with radical honesty. You have to take inventory of all of the places where you feel you were hurt, victimized, or taken advantage of and be willing to see your own part in them.
The struggle to love and forgive is a heroic struggle. It will affect every other relationship in your life. And guess what? For me, all movement comes from forgiving and loving myself. Go figure.
I wrote some of this piece years ago, while visiting my mother in upstate New York. I wanted to be the perfect daughter. But there’s something about dealing with our families that’s like taking acid. You go on a trip. Things come out of the blue. People sprout extra heads. Then you come back and you think-- what was that all about?
“Those who see themselves as whole make no demands,” teaches A Course in Miracles. Well, clearly, those who seem themselves as threatened wildebeests act accordingly.
Being with my mother, I can’t believe how quickly I am triggered. I teach workshops in A Course in Miracles , a form of spirituality which emphasizes choosing love instead of “being right.” But as I hide away upstairs in the cutesy, cluttered guest bedroom of my mother’s townhouse, despising every artificial flower I see, I consider a different line of work. Maybe I could be the anti-Gandhi. Because my blood pressure is definitely higher than my consciousness.
Music always gave me comfort through challenging times. Music was my constant companion and soundtrack to life. I consider junior high the cruelest time of life. Surviving bullying and the rhythm of growing up and falling down.
At age 17, after graduating high school I moved to Santa Monica, CA with my best friend Mike to become a Graduate Gemologist.
We lived in a small apartment so we couldn't listen to music too loud without disturbing our neighbors. We made an agreement that we both had our "Loud Song". If our favorite song came on the radio we could turn it up as loud as we want for that one song.
My loud song was "Roll With The Changes" by REO Speedwagon and Mike's loud song was "Dream On" by Aerosmith.
A year after we got home to Minnesota, Mike was killed in a head on car crash. His spirit continues to stay with me, knowing he lived his life by his loud song. Somehow his song made the deep loss easier for me.
When you are in your teens and 20s, life seems to extend into the future like an endless expanse of potential experiences. You can’t imagine not having the opportunity to visit places you love again or see friends and family regularly. As you grow older and encounter both loss and change, life takes on a quality of uncertainty, sweetness tinged with sorrow. A favorite uncle or a parent dies, friends move away, you yourself may move multiple times. The tapestry of life is always shifting, and we too shift with the changes. At a certain point, you may realize that the years ahead are possibly fewer than those behind. It may awaken a deep sense of appreciation for every moment you are given. This is how our lives teach us gratitude. Yet now, at this time on the planet, that lesson is coming up in unexpected ways.
I remember the exact place I discovered my FORMULA FOR LIFE.
I was walking across a small wooded field near my house when I stopped and noticed how I felt peaceful and calm but not particularly happy. As I contemplated the feeling, I became grateful for the experience of being peaceful. This expanded into overflowing joy.
From that day, over twenty years ago, this simple formula has been a guiding principle in my life.
PEACE + GRATITUDE = JOY
Many people today in America are sitting in front of their phones, TVs and computers in mere despair. All are feeling so surprised that our Capital experienced such violence and ignorance, and that adversity is being expressed in a country that quickly defines itself as the land of the free and of democracy.
The truth of the matter is we have not been free for a very long time. We are enslaved to greed, enterprise, pharmaceuticals, false prophets and so much more. The Declaration of Independence had possibilities yet required each individual of such creeds to grow into them. Most never have and sadly many never will.
Our country is one of the most desired in the world for the illusion that we have it made, dreams come true, you can be a celebrity or better yet, you can be rich. Yet the deeper truth is behind the illusion we are still working from a place of darkness into the light. We are still rewriting false stories and untruths even as simple as how we were discovered. We are still retrieving our souls for we have lived behind so many false lies told by the white man and retold over and over again.
There is one thing in our society and our nation that is self-evident today. We are craving leadership which stands for all of us and sees beyond our shadows and brings us to the new hope of glory which is US. Not me and only me but WE.
“Did I miss something?” asked Martha, her hand raised in the Hollywood Squares of my Zoom mindfulness class.
“What do you mean?” I inquired.
“Well, we were having this relaxing and lovely meditation experience and now we are all of a sudden talking about death and dying, so I want to know… did I miss something?”
Wow. I looked at the faces of the human beings that have grown so close these last nine months as I listened to Martha’s question and imagined fear, maybe even anger arising in her. Although I had compassion for her discomfort, I had no problem answering her by saying, “Yes, actually. You missed loving connected presence. You missed the fact that we are here to support each other for whatever comes up.”
First off, in whatever time frame you are reading this … Have you at this point today, laughed yet? Laughed. Have you laughed yet today? Have you done something today that has gotten you excited, made you kind of giddy, have a big smile on your face, and feel joyful from the inside out?
How many of you know, feel, recognize, understand that you need more of that? You need more laughter. You need more joy. You need more play. You need more fun … that you desire happiness, light-heartedness, connectedness.
Do you recognize that? Even if you’ve had it, do you invite more joy, more play, more fun into your life?
It is the highest expression of love there is.
I want you to think about the ways we were taught to express love and the way that you experienced joy as a child. You might not have been allowed to have joy. A lot of people didn’t.
