I hope you, your family and loved ones continue to enjoy the opportunity for spiritual reunification this holiday season. It’s a special time to celebrate — allowing tradition’s outer rituals to symbolize cosmic and microcosmic rebirth.

It’s a time for quiet reflection. Time from work and the bustle of holiday preparation to maintain a spirit of overflowing gratefulness.

Sort of an extended Thanksgiving.

Because you really don’t have to wait for the holidays to take this time to marvel at creation. This beautiful opportunity called life.

Allowing overflowing gratefulness to seek its own level

Wait a minute. All this is nice.

But what if you’re having trouble finding gratitude?

Because, face it, it can seem almost trite sometimes to be told to be grateful. Especially when faced with overwhelming opposition.

Or even grief.

Yet it’s not trite. Just asking a bit much if you’re in pain.

And that’s just the time to stop and reflect on even the smallest amount of happiness. Even being happily discontented with things the way they’re showing up. That slight adjustment can be just the lever of consciousness you need.

Gratitude can be a secret way to ‘prime the pump’

A little gratitude gets that overflowing gratefulness going again. It’s a way to energize yourself into making needed changes.

Even when change seems impossible. Or the desire to change and the hope that things can be better seem out of reach.

When you recognize your limitations, you can use gratitude for your discontent with life — just as it is — to lift into a higher awareness.

And then use that awareness in practical ways.

So if your habitual state of mind is gratitude for blessings as they are, you can be happy. Even with discontent. Because discontent can spur you to become more alert for ways to improve your circumstances.

That’s kind of a backdoor approach to the subconscious. Helping it to help the body-mind embrace gratitude a little more consciously. And consistently. No matter what seems to be going on.

Clearing the way to overflowing gratefulness

One more thing: Sometimes you — or someone you know — might need help when the holidays bring up old energy blocks or records. If so, I still have openings if you would like to clear the old energy. In preparation for the holidays. And even beyond into the New Year.

Click here if you would like to contact me about scheduling a session.

Overflowing gratitude is evident in nature

Today I found a video that is just plain beautiful.
An inspiring gem that reminds us about the power of gratitude as a daily state of being.

Nature. Beauty. Gratitude. from giancla on Vimeo.

Related posts

• Appreciating yourself as you are
• Journaling as a way to mine the wisdom that otherwise eludes you
• Gratefulness leads to happiness
• Teaching Kids the Importance of Gratitude (everydayhealth.com)
• “Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.” – Doris Day (myorbit365.wordpress.com)

If I asked you, “Do you reject prosperity?” you would most likely reply, “No, of course not – at least not consciously.”

And that’s true. You might be worried about finances, but you believe you wouldn’t reject the answer to improving them. Or you might feel that at least you are trying to learn what to do in an unstable economic condition.

The same is true about issues around lack in other areas of life. You wouldn’t consciously reject real solutions to concerns about health, love, joy or fulfillment either.

Just like the world economy didn’t come to it’s present condition overnight, you also have had an active role in creating your present state of energy, your feelings of self-worth.

How is that? If you have been engaged in the following practices over the years, they might well have be the core of what has ‘eaten away at your store-grains’, and decreased your personal power, your energy and feelings about having your true desires.

Short little self-examination exercise

Here’s how that might look: if over the years you have been telling stories about your hopes and dreams, you are verbally giving them away.

Or if you’ve been making public your opinions about yourself and others, or in the habit of making snap-judgments, you’ve also been giving away your power.

The same is true about declaring you will do something, and then never doing it. Or engaging in chit-chat about others. Focusing on the evening news, which is almost always negative, is another guaranteed way of wasting your energy or using it to form stumbling blocks on your own path.

What do you really want?

When people come to me to help them energetically heal issues around money or self-worth, I ask them what they do want. They don’t purposely evade the question, but they don’t tell what their dreams are either. Not because they don’t want to, mostly it’s from being out of practice.

So instead, their habit is to say something vague like, “I really do focus on thoughts and feelings of wholeness and worthiness.” Or, “I already have been working on attracting abundance (or care, comfort, good health).”

Then I ask them to tell me what that would look like, to have those things in their life. And, usually in great detail, I hear all about the things that are not happening instead of what they would like. What a pickle.

Small potatoes – don’t leave them to rot

What about you? Are you growing pickles, potatoes or dreams?

Before you decide what you do want, or to refine what you’ve already determined, let’s use that gardening analogy to first do a little ‘weeding’. A real key for anyone looking to heal their energy around having vs. lacking is to also look at their feelings of self-worth.

This is a large part of that energy, sometimes hidden, often blocked (by ‘weeds’ if you will). Because the storing of all those details about either your fears of the future, worries about what has already happened, or disappointments about what’s not happening now, are resulting in a lot more of those small potatoes. Not the tasty kind, either.

So what’s all this hoopla about then, if it’s just small potatoes?

Energy robbers are like imaginary fears:

“I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do! I do! I do!” ~The Cowardly Lion, Wizard of Oz

When you let the imaginary spooks of fear and the small potatoes (rotten tomatoes?) of energy-robbing behaviors drop into your plans for a better future, you’ve gone into the wrong kind of farming business. The kind where status quo, and mediocre dreams (nightmares?) abound.

So don’t keep planting the seeds of your dreams along with your fears about the ‘no-things’ that could become those dreaded ‘somethings’. Or out of that compost heap will grow distorted results.

And that, my friend, is exactly what gets you down, even when you know better. It’s the inspiration behind the idiom, ‘the devil is in the details’.

And you say, “But I planted dreams!’”

Did you?

So what’s good about these reminders?

You’ve heard this before, I’m sure, probably in other ways. And maybe you’ve taken similar inventories, over and over again. So what do you do if you find you are (still) engaging in energy-robbing behaviors?

You could take comfort in the knowledge of, ‘well everyone does that.’

But don’t be that person. There’s something more you can do that helps you sort out not only the puzzle of your own life, but also how you see it fitting into the larger picture. Because it’s precisely at this point that I recommend taking a new, or renewed, tact.

The staff of your word

Whatever you do, don’t use this exercise to now feel lousy about all that energy you’ve drained, all that fear you’ve entertained! Instead, determine to hold firm the staff of the word–your word–in all it’s glory: your word in thought and feeling, and your spoken and written word. Therein lies your true power.

Decide now, that as far as you are concerned, your word is law.

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Here is a video on the finer points of the kind of personal integrity that grows your dreams into reality: