My Journey of Gratitude - Day 25

The more time I spend in gratitude, the less I have to say. After a while it is the state of being in gratitude that becomes the norm and words seem to pale in comparison.

The holiday season is in full swing now and my journey with gratitude has changed how I feel about this time of year and how I plan to celebrate it. This year I hold a deeper send of joy and peace within myself than in years past. It is a peace and joy that no longer needs the frenzy of shopping or trying to find just the right gift for someone to make their Christmas special.

That is an old trap that keeps me focused on being perfect and feeds the erroneous belief that I am personally responsible for the joy of the season. And that is a path that robs me of the joy, peace and magic that is meant to be part of this year.

This year, using the state of gratitude, I am opening the doors to expect and experience magic and miracles to show up in my life in wonderful new ways. My focus for this season is different. I will be spending more time in joy-filled activities with those I love and very little time out in the crazy chaos of shopping.

Instead, I will take pleasure in making gifts for loved ones as I used to do many years ago. To create, bake, simmer, sew and knit for others has always brought me great pleasure. Thinking of the person as I create something just for them keeps me in that state of gratitude; I can pour my love and best wishes into everything I make.

This time in gratitude has rearranged my priorities and shown me what is truly important in my life--and 'things' aren't it. Spending time with those I love, creating new memories and new traditions and engaging in activities that make us laugh and appreciate life more--that is where the magic of the season is.

In each other.

As my 30 day journey of gratitude draws to a close this week, I feel the shift from "I" more and more into 'we' and 'us'. My sense of 'I' is so filled with gratitude as a way of living that it can't help but spill over to others. This journey really is not just about me; it is about 'all'.

As I prepare to re-enter my life differently, I am grateful for each new understanding and each new event that comes my way.

In gratitude for all,
Bonnie

The remains of yesterday's turkey simmering on the stove on its way to becoming tomorrow's soup, I allowed that delicious aroma to take me deeper into my state of gratitude this morning. Thoughts of yesterday's time with family floated across my mind until I had given thanks for each person, each bite of food and each memory.

Then a deep sense of inner peace flowed through me, and there I stayed, floating in peace and feeling at one with the world.

When I finally opened my eyes, 20 minutes had flown by! I realized that while life has its ups and downs, it also has its times of peaceful plateaus.

Today I am grateful for my plateau where I can simply relax in peace and love for the day.

All is well--and for that I am most grateful.

Please feel free to share your experiences! I welcome knowing how you experience gratitude and all that you are grateful for in your life.

In gratitude,
Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 21

This morning's journey began with frustration.  Frustration because some things I'm working towards are not happening, or at least not happening at the speed I want.  So my meditation began with a bit of cursing the challenges I face.  Why me?  Why not me? What good is it to be grateful for my troubles and challenges?  That just smacks of my old religious upbringing to be grateful for what little God gives me!

So there I sat with my questions and gave thanks for them.  Even if I couldn't feel grateful for the challenges, I was at least grateful for the questions.  It didn't take long for the answers to move through me.

Gratitude must come from the inside.  When I look outside of myself to what I do or do not have, it is easy to lose that sense of gratitude because gratitude will never come from outside of myself.  It is an 'inside job' and that's where the powerful of gratitude lies--within each of us.  Not out in the world we experience, but within each one of us is the seed of gratitude.

'Challenges, problems, troubles, difficulties, not-enoughness'--are words we have assigned a negative meaning to and they come with energy that contracts us rather than expands us. 

What if I shifted my perspective and thought of them as 'opportunities'?  After all, isn't that what they really are--opportunities to take action, make a new decision, re-evaluate, let go, embrace, to say yes please or no thank you to situations in our lives.  How would that change my feelings about what happens around me?

An instant internal shift happened and I again slipped into that gentle warmth of gratitude.  Thankful for a new understanding; thankful that I asked a better question and received a better answer.  Thankful that by simply changing my perception of words I shifted from contraction into the expansive energy of gratitude.

So now I understand that the situations I face are opportunities for me to re-think and re-choose the direction I want to move on this journey that is my life.

That is a powerful understanding to receive!

And it makes all the difference in the world to me.  Instead of contracting into frustration and old patterns, gratitude expanded me into new ways of thinking about my reality.  How 'real' do I want this situation to be--and what do I want to be real for me instead?  Again--a better question yields a better answer.

I am grateful for the opportunities to succeed that are now open before me. I have some re-thinking and re-choosing to do today!

In gratitude,
Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 19

Gratitude leads to inner peace and that is how I awoke this morning, with this deepest sense of inner peace as my first awareness.  So instead of getting up to do my 10 minutes of gratitude meditation in my usual spot, I allowed myself to shift into gratitude right there, lying in bed all snuggled under the blankets on a dark, cold morning and had a very different experience of gratitude.

Usually it is my mind that guides me through the meditation; my mind that consciously takes me into gratitude.  This time, maybe because I was so relaxed, it was my physical body that took over the reins, guiding me ever deeper into what happens to me physically when I am in a state of gratitude.  An odd experience certainly and I'm not quite sure if I can describe the difference. 

Always before my mind told me what my body was feeling; whether it was about gratitude or anything else, the understanding came through my mind.  This morning, however, the knowing came directly from my body--and I understood it.  Instead of gratitude flowing from my thoughts down into my physical being, it was my body that flowed gratitude to my thoughts.  My body was reflecting back to me its new state of being now--a state of physical being that carried, held and flowed gratitude.  No longer was my body being fed gratitude, it had become the state of gratitude.  Something had shifted within the physical and it all feels different.

Curious now to see what was next, I relaxed into this new experience and allowed it to unfold.  At first I thought my mind was wandering and I'd try to bring it back to the present.  But then I realized that my mind wasn't wandering because my mind was not controlling this experience--my body was.  Old memories would pop up--what use to be very painful memories from childhood.  Instead of the feeling of pain and woundedness that always accompanied these memories, a feeling of warmth--that new state of gratitude I have--flowed through each memory, dissolving it. 

It took a few minutes to realize that the intelligence of my body--and make no mistake our bodies have an intelligence of their own--was using gratitude to heal the pain in my past.  So I lay there, open and allowing this process to unfold as memory after memory was released from my cells and healed.  Past memories and future worries, all healed in the same way--with gratitude.

As a medical intuitive I am use to entering the body and taking a look around, but that is my mind controlling the process.  This experience was entirely different.  I could actually feel my body healing itself and it was doing it consciously, wanting me to know and understand what was happening.  Gratitude has become so much more than a feeling I flow through my body 10 minutes a day.  It is now a state of being that I live in and that my body responds to. 

As the body is a reflection of the mind, I saw a new reflection of myself this morning.  And I am grateful for who I am and who I am becoming.

In gratitude,

Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 18

The more time I spend in this state of gratitude, the more I learn about who I am and who I am becoming and that leads to feeling even more gratitude.  And I continue to fall in love with myself more every day in new ways.  What an incredible Being I really am--amazing how I never saw that before.  Amazing how we forget to remember how amazing we each are.

As I keep my focus on gratitude, I notice subtle shifts within.  Increasingly I am more open to seeing life as a journey and less needing to try to control my outcomes.  What a relief that is!  To begin giving up controlling my life and how it turns out and relax into the moment as it is--priceless.

I already know my eventual destination, so why not be open to the journey itself and enjoying the outcomes rather than fearing them.  That is a huge shift for me.  I've always been a destination kinda gal--focusing more on getting to the finish line and forgetting to notice the cool things along the way. 

Other changes are beginning to show up in my life as well--physical changes.  As I physically relax into this journey of gratitude I am sleeping more.  Never realized how wound up and constricted I had become the past couple of years with trying to do things the 'right' way and control the outcomes. The more I relax, the slower my pace the more I actually accomplish.  Seems counter-intuitive I know--but it's real.

And I am physically detoxing a bit as the energy of gratitude floods my body, flushing out the old 'not enoughness' that was trapped.  A bit uncomfortable certainly, but also refreshing as my body continues to let go of what it no longer needs to hold.

My outlook on life is definitely brighter--this attitude of gratitude is becoming a constant presence in my life.  More and more when an old habitual thought of worry or fear arises, I am flooded with feelings, images and thoughts of all I have to be grateful for.  A new habit of gratitude as my natural state of being is arising.

I find that I'm walking around in love with people and with the world instead of shrinking away from the chaos and pain.  All good and all bad still exist out there.  We do live in a world of polarity, but the difference for me is where I now place my focus.  Gratitude is not only a state of being, it is also a choice.  A choice that I make every moment in my life.  To choose gratitude over fear.  To choose to focus on all that is good in life and allow my experience of life to be simpler, happier.

I no longer feel the need to save the world. Did I really believe that I could? Loving myself and my life one day at a time is enough.  If we each do that, the world won't need saving.

In the meantime, life is meant to be an adventure and we are meant to enjoy the journey--living full out to the best we can.

Cue the Hawaii 5-0 theme song and my Inner Chicken riding the waves of life!

In gratitude,  Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 17

It seems that the more time I spend in gratitude, the less I have to say.  There comes this tipping point where the experience becomes so deep that words cannot capture the essence of what is felt.  And I believe I may have reached that tipping point.

Normally it would take me a few minutes to settle my mind enough so that I could step into the state of gratitude.  Today, however, I gently slipped into it and was feeling it before I was even aware of being there.  That was an interesting experience in itself!

I sat in the new experience of thankfulness, a gentle warmth glowing through me and felt my outer world swirling around me-forming, dissolving and reforming itself over and over again.  It was like sitting safely by a warm fire with a storm raging outside.  My inner self is calm, peaceful and safe while my outer life is changing into something not yet seen.

When I look around my life everything looks the same, but my internal experience is so different that nothing feels the same. Normally that would make me nervous and scrambling for some stability, but instead today I am feeling calm, peaceful and trusting.  There is deep within me a knowing that all is well.

Today I am grateful for what is and curious about what will be.

In gratitude,

Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 15

Before I begin talking about my experience this morning with gratitude I'd like to answer a couple of questions that I've received from people following my journey.

How do I get started and what do I do once I've started?

I always start my 10 minute mediation by closing my eyes and taking a few deep breaths.  Then I begin with my gratitude prayers--thank you for my life, thank you for my ability to breathe, and then I move through gratefulness for my husband, children, grandchildren, friends and opportunities. After that I take another deep breath and quiet my mind and allow myself to feel the gratitude for all those things.  Some days it flows smoothly and other days it's more challenging.

Just like today--I had a few false starts and had to start over again.  It's a journey, not a destination I have to remind myself.  Simply a journey.

OK.  On to my experience this morning. And an interesting one it was as I mark the mid-way point of this 30 day journey.  A bit of a challenge to settle down into gratitude.  My conscious mind was running wild with thoughts of today's 'to do' list and I even found myself worrying about getting my Christmas shopping done.  Lots of resistance for some reason.

At first I tried reining the thoughts in, which of course did not work.  So I allowed them to scurry across my inner vision unhindered, like clouds being blown across the sky by a strong wind.

Then it happened--I felt a sudden, subtle shift and my mind went completely still and time seemed to stop.  All sounds silenced and my outer world ceased to exist.

I sat in this profound silence and felt myself floating in what felt like a primordial soup of everything and nothing.  Of course, the moment I was aware I popped out of it, but then would fall right back into it again.  So there I sate, blinking in and out from what felt like existence to non-existence, from particle to wave to particle again.  Back and forth, in and out, feeling gratitude in both states of being.  But gratitude in a very different way that is difficult to describe.

I've had this experience before when in deep meditation, but this was the first time I blinked back and forth, bringing gratitude with me.

Instead of experiencing the feeling of gratitude, I believe I experienced the knowing of it--the true state of it.  I believe I tapped into that place where all things manifest--the unified field that exists all around us and I felt a presence of something very wonderful.

And for that I am most grateful today.

In gratitude,

Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 13

A funny thing about opening to feelings--you can't just pick and choose which feelings you allow.  It's not possible to say "I will only feel the 'good' feelings today."  That's because feelings are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong.  They are just feelings brought on by your thoughts.

So the other day when the dam burst open and everything that was backed up came pouring forth, I understood that would mean that all my feelings were free to express themselves.  And they certainly have! 

Yesterday was my impatience and today my sadness made its appearance. Not the profound sadness of years past, but the sadness of unanswered prayers, missed opportunities and things I have done or left undone. 

Earlier this morning I read a passage that fit perfectly for this moment.  "Bask in the luxury of feeling fully understood and unconditionally loved."  So I did.  As I stepped more fully into that state of gratitude feeling fully understood and unconditionally loved, I allowed the sadness to flow through me, freeing it from the prison of my body.  A sweet gentleness flowed in to fill the empty spaces where sadness had previously lived. 

The more I let go of what no longer serves me and what I have imprisoned in my body, the more free I am to fully live the life I love.  I begin my day in a place of serenity and knowingness.

Today I am grateful for my ability to fully experience all my emotions and to bask in the luxury of being fully understood and unconditionally loved.

In gratitude,
Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 12

Gratitude was a bit harder to come by this morning.  Lack of patience though showed up in abundance.  That great yummy feeling that I normally slip into, that fullness of the heart, was a no show today.  I stuck with it though because this is, after all, a journey not a destination.  Just because I'm not feeling the gratitude in any given moment doesn't mean that I'm not grateful, just that I'm not in the feeling of it.

I'm imperfect.  Oh no--was that my outdoor voice!?  Parts of me were horrified at that admission while other parts relieved that I finally got it.  It really shouldn't have been such a big surprise--because we all know that no one is perfect.  But it was that sudden 'knowing' that took me by surprise.  You know that moment when you really get it--and once you truly know something you can never again unknow it.  Obviously some part of me thought my imperfections were a well kept secret, though I'm sure if you ask my husband or my kids they'd just roll their eyes and snort.

So I sat in gratitude with my imperfect self.  I sat with the shame that came bursting forth from that admission and continued to give thanks for this journey of getting to know myself in deeper ways.  I was really clueless that parts of me were still trying to be perfect--and successfully failing.  Trying to be perfect is just an old survival strategy from childhood that was waiting for an opportunity to be healed.

And like a dam bursting as the seams, the shame, blame and guilt bottled up inside came flooding out in a torrent.  Instead of being met with resistance or denial though, I allowed those feelings to flow up and out in a state of gratitude.  Because, really--who needs to keep those 3 feelings as a constant companion? 

To be honest--today was really uncomfortable for me; not the happy love-fest I experienced at the beginning.  But it was real, it was honest and it quickly passed, because I stayed in gratitude for the experience.

Every journey has its wonders and its trials.  There are days of ease and days of effort.  Yet with each step on this journey I move forward and each day holds something to be grateful for.  That is what I hold on to when gratitude is not so easy to find.

I am grateful for the gift of my imperfections for they remind me to love myself even more and they remind me that we are all just doing the best we can with what we've got.  Embracing my imperfections allows me to let go of who I think I'm suppose to be and appreciate the fullness of who I actually am.

And that, my friends, was worth the 10 minutes of uncomfortable gratitude this morning.

In gratitude,
Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 10

Ten days into my 10 minutes of gratitude and my mind is telling me how bored it is already. Because of my commitment to these 30 days, I decide to sit in gratitude for the boredom--and so I do.  I'm just so grateful to be alive that 10 minutes of boredom doesn't seem so bad.  And I was curious as to why today my mind was bored.  Why not yesterday or why not next week.  What was it about today in particular that I was bored.

Wasn't very long before I had the answer.  My mind began running funny images through my mind to distract me from thinking.  Images of the Stay Puff marshmallow man from the movie Ghostbuster, images from other funny movies that I love, and then drifting into childhood memories of fun and playfulness.  Playing 'kick the can' with all the neighborhood kids in the summer just as the sun was going down.  Softball in our backyard, catching minnows in the creek that ran behind our property--many times of laughter and fun. 

I realized my mind was showing me that there is more to Life than just sitting in my head--that living in gratitude means LIVING--as in being outside of myself and actually living in the world, not just my head.  So as each image, each memory flashed through my vision I felt something heal within me and replaced with something new and fresh within.  It was like each happy thought opened a door to more freedom and my desire to allow my inner life and outer life to be the same increased.

For those of you who know me, you know that I tend to be on the serious side and don't 'let my hair down' very often.  Not that I'm a stick-in-the-mud or anything, but I guess I had separated parts of my life from other parts and kept the playfulness and fun for only certain times.  That all changed as I saw the dam that separated my inner and outer worlds burst open and, once again, my Inner Chicken surfed the waves with the theme song to Hawaii 5-0 blaring in my head. 

The only appropriate response was to laugh out loud and be thankful for my life because--really--how many of you have an Inner Chicken?

So today my Inner Chicken and I are grateful for Life.  And I think we just might spend the day surfing the waves of gratitude and seeing where it takes us.

In gratitude,  Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 9

My vulnerability is my strength and I am grateful for that realization.

A couple of things I want to talk about today.  For years I've been meditating and all those years I always needed to hold a pillow or cover my solar plexus up in someway.  Couldn't meditate without that.  This morning during my 10 minutes of gratitude I noticed that I was not covering myself up and hadn't for the past couple of days.  That is a huge shift for me.  To be open and vulnerable with no need to protect parts of me.  It became so natural to not put a pillow or blanket in front of me that I didn't notice it for 3 days.  For this new openness I am grateful.

Until yesterday I didn't realize how vulnerable being in gratitude makes you.  In fact I hadn't even thought of myself as being more vulnerable until an experience yesterday with a person who made a few mean-spirited remarks to me for reasons of her own.  My first reaction was to feel hurt and shut down, but that is now such a foreign feeling that I was immediately aware of the shift from open gratitude to fear.

You see to me being vulnerable use to mean being weak, helpless and open for hurt. It meant that I was allowing anyone to come along and behave badly towards me, so no way was I going to be vulnerable! 

My experience with gratitude this morning showed me the true meaning of vulnerability--being fully present in my life, in my body and in the moment.  Fully present with myself and for others.  My vulnerability is my strength, my gift to myself and to others.  For only in the present and in my presence do I allow myself to be known.

Being vulnerable is my strength.  It is what makes me the healer and teacher that I am.  This journey of gratitude has shown me how I have closed myself off in the past and how much more Life and Light I have when I am open, vulnerable and present.

There will certainly be times when I run into people who behave in unkind ways; we are all doing the best we can with what we have and so many people still live from their pain rather than their true nature.  And I accept that people just do what people do and it is never personal really.  There will be those times, but the difference today is that I know and understand that in any moment that I lose my presence, I will remember that I now have a higher value on living from a state of gratitude and can return to being present with a simple decision.

So to the person who was so unkind--I am grateful for your presence in my life and the gift of understanding that I received through your action.  And to my friends that I turned to when I felt misunderstood, I am most grateful for the mirror you always hold up so that I can see my true reflection of who I am as a woman, a friend, a healer, a teacher.

My vulnerability is my strength and for that I am grateful today.

In gratitude,
Bonnie

My Journey of Gratitude - Day 7

Wow--a week has gone by already?  I guess that's what happens when you can step outside of time for a while.  In some ways it feels like just yesterday I began this journey and in other ways--by the changes I'm experiencing--it feels like ages ago.  When you step outside of time and into that state of Gratitude, you open to so much more than your conscious mind can imagine.

And speaking of conscious mind--that is what came up for me this morning in my gratitude time.  I slipped into gratitude gentle and easy this morning.  No resistance, just thankfulness.  Yet as I sat there breathing in, breathing out and focusing on all that I'm grateful for,  I felt something missing.  A part of me not there.  So I waited--in gratitude.

And who shows up but my ego mind.  Also known as beta mind, conscious mind, personality self and a myriad of other names.  Letting me know that I have left this very important part of who I am out of the equation of my life way too long.   

You see, as a medical intuitive and teacher I work with the subconscious mind because that's where the belief systems are held.  But I have ignored a part of me that also plays an essential role in who I am and what I do.  My ego.

Ego has been given a bad rap for a long time, being treated like an unwanted, troublesome, and annoying child.  And it is anything but.  While the ego/conscious mind is only 15% of our reality, 15% is a very big deal and I have spent years pushing it aside, even trying to defeat it as if it was bad.

So we sat together, my ego and I, as I listened to what it needed from me.  Acknowledgement, acceptance, love and...wait for it....gratitude.  It is that part of me that discerns, makes quick decisions, makes sure I pay my bills on time and even gets me out of bed every morning.  And she is the 'gatekeeper' to my subconscious mind. Everything that comes my way that doesn't already fit with my subconsciously held belief systems gets deleted or blocked.  The positive intention--and our ego/conscious mind always works from a positive intention, no matter how weird that might seem.

So why is this important?  Because the changes I've made internally--in my subconscious belief patterns no longer match what my ego/conscious mind believes.  For decades I have believed that struggle, strain, suffering and lack was the only way to live--that's neither good nor bad, that's just what I was trained as a child to believe about life.  My life reflected that core belief and I can look back at every situation in my life and see how it played out exactly that way. 

Now here I go changing everything subconsciously, but not updating my conscious mind.  It's like changing someone's job description after years of doing the same tasks every day, then being being angry because they aren't doing their job! 

No wonder I have been experiencing conflict in both my inner and outer world.  I now believe something new, but my ego mind is still functioning from old programming.  That explains why when I get close to a goal, something happens and it falls short of my desired outcome.  Not because anything is wrong with me or not because I can't get what I want.  But because I have not let my ego mind in on this new gratitude 'thing' where everything is ease and flow.

I sat there listening to this conversation in my head and my only response finally was....oh...duh.

So I sat in gratitude of my ego/conscious mind, thanking her for all the wonderful, amazing things she has done for me over my lifetime.  And I brought her up to speed with my new belief systems.  She's on board now--in fact she's REALLY on board.  The vision I received was a baby chick riding the waves on a surf board yelling "Ride the waves baby.  Ride the waves."

In gratitude,

Bonnie

What is Your 'I Am'

Bonnie and I are active in several Yahoo groups, including the Gratitude yahoo group.* In our Yahoo groups we often offer challenges for a better life and one of them is the monthly I Am challenge. It means, what is the aspect of your life that you want to emphasize most during each month? What aspect of your behavior do you want to support and expand?

For the month of November:

My I Am is clearly Gratitude - and it is a part of my entire psyche that I want to keep next to my heart and embrace for all the years I have left in this particular existence.

I am so grateful for the family I had, and for the family I have - my friends - the ones who are new and wonderful and the ones who have had my back for a major part of my lifetime.

I am grateful to be here on the planet as there we some 'iffy' moments that made that questionable - major illnesses, a sky-diving accident, moments in time that I gratefully transitioned through to stay here.

I am grateful for the joyful 'work' I get to do, helping others find the meaning and purpose in their lives, which they already know, and just need to uncover, My first area of study was cultural anthropology and it helps me remember that communities create together and we all make life choices within what we know from others but also from our deepest spirit.

So what is your I Am this month - what part of who you are will you acknowledge and love this month in particular?

Love and blessings, Katie

*contact Bonnie to join the Gratitude Yahoo Group