Beautiful parking lot roses at the local grocery store…taken with my phone camera.
I know I’ve written many times about how important the practice of gratitude has been for me but I’ve recently been having a lot of light bulb moments and one of them has been about gratitude and what it's really all about. (I feel so excited about gratitude that I want to shout it out in caps but I’ll refrain! I’ll just use lots of exclamation points and italics…lol)
In the past, I’ve understood gratitude from the perspective of appreciating the positives in my life; the things that make me happy…almost as though by counting up the positives, I cancelled out the negatives. If I focused enough on what was positive, then I wouldn’t obsess think about the negative. And that’s true…to a point.
I’ve recently begun to understand that feeling gratitude includes being grateful for everything….everything…even those things that are unpleasant and not what I want in my life.
My life is my creation and it’s all here “for” me (rather than being done to me) and with my awareness of this, everything is leading me to where I want to be. Every aha, every understanding, shifts me…either slightly or profoundly…with a new course direction. If I can be grateful for it all, there’s no resistance…and we’ve probably all heard that “what we resist, persists”.
These thoughts have been swirling around in my head for the past several weeks, and I love how the universe lets me know I’m on the right track…
- Yesterday I listened to an interview with Lilou Mace (of Lilou’s Juicy Living Tour) where she said exactly the same thing. At a time in her life when she was out of work and her fridge was empty, she learned to be truly grateful for her empty fridge. She found out then, who she really was at her core and what was important to her.
- Today when I checked in at Roxanne’s blog In the Transition (you might know her from her Vlog Beach Walks With Rox) I found more of the same in her most recent post…Grateful for everything....yes, everything.
My understanding of gratitude; what it really means and what it requires of me, has shifted profoundly and in that shifting, my life is also shifting...away from the good/bad, better/worse, right/wrong mindset to appreciating and loving all of it.
Of course, the moment I think I’ve finally “got” something, I’m immediately tested with all kinds of buttons being pushed and yes, there are times when I simply forget all of this and “react”, but…as soon as we’re aware of something, it’s easier to pull back and remember there’s another way.
It’s a new paradigm…and it’s our choice. The rewards for choosing gratitude-for-all-of-it, are pretty amazing.
All that we behold is full of blessings.
William Wordsworth
(we’ve been away this week with our oldest grandson…who at nine has brought us up to date with Angry Birds and electronic gaming…who knew that the Nintendo ds has a built in camera with the capability of manipulating photos! We’ve been visiting my dad (and grandson’s great-grandpa) and heading back to the coast tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who stops by…I am truly grateful for you all…blowing kisses!)
