Today I am grateful for my body.  Over the last six weeks I have worked extraordinarily hard on my body, my overall health, my strength, and my perseverance.  I have lost nearly 23 pounds and I feel fantastic.  I feel the way I used to move again.  The pain is gone.  Beyond that I feel connected to myself again.  I remember what it feels like to feel sexy, confident, wanted, in control.  There really is something to be said about the discipline of self care.  While it may feel difficult at first, with time we see it is really the most freeing way to live.  When we practice self-care and health care consistently, we understand our bodies and minds better and we are better able to identify issues before they really start.  We are able to apply ourselves better.  I am so grateful to feel the weight of my body as it sits here, as I lay in bed, as I walk the Earth, because that weight doesn’t feel oppressive anymore.  When we reconcile the mind with the body, we aren’t carrying any excess.  We are present, we are collected, we are together.  And we feel good.  It feels good to feel good again.  To feel my skin and not want to climb out of it.  To be me.

Today I am grateful for discomfort.  There has been a lot of discomfort lately.  Changes, waiting, everything and nothing all at once, opinion, decisions, progress, delays.  I am grateful for the discomfort because it means that I’m moving.  For too long I’ve been standing still and it is nice to make progressive momentum rather than just movement.  The climb doesn’t feel as arduous and it certainly isn’t as cumbersome as the decisions become clearer—the discomfort is better than the comfort of no movement at all.  I can’t blind myself to the things I didn’t want to see or feel.  I can’t pause this time in hopes that it all goes away or that I figure out some way to avoid it.  I am grateful because I am fortunate enough to be able to make progress with the things I want to do.  Now I work on instilling the belief in my movement.   

Today I am grateful to release.  Who I was isn’t the person who can handle where I’m at now.  Who I was wasn’t able to shut out the noise, to put away the opinion of others.  Who I was wasn’t able to love herself fully because she thought that had to come from someone else.  In the blink of an eye I realized that I needed to be who I am and not who I used to be.  There is a feeling of complete release when we simply accept.  We don’t need to wallow in pain that we create or in pain that was handed to us.  We are able to let it all go and redefine ourselves.  We are allowed to become the best versions of ourselves, to love ourselves, and to apply our talents and gifts to the world to make it a better place.  We can lovingly accept who we were and be grateful to that version of ourselves for getting us where we are today—and we can also decide that we still need to put that aside and become something else. One decision doesn’t have to determine everything even though it is often one choice that sets the ball rolling and creates a moment that we can’t look back on.  But that doesn’t have to be a scary thing.  It can be an awakening, an allowing, and a becoming.  I look back at the winter of my life and I am still pained and saddened at times.  But out of that winter comes this spring, and it is in full bloom.

Today I am grateful for forgiveness.  I have a lot of things that I needed to come to terms with as far as forgiveness.  The stories told, the things I’ve felt, the things I’ve witnessed, the things that have been done to me, the false beliefs, the inherited fears, the lack of self-belief bound up in a firestorm of constant motion.  While the responsibility for our position in life will always lie with us, there are always outside influences and they have an impact on how we feel and how we make our decisions.  In the process of forgiveness we learn to understand that people are the sum of what has happened in their lives and their environment and then we learn that no matter what has happened they are ultimately responsible for their decisions.  And so are we.  We can accept that we are all flawed and we can make the choice to not tolerate it.  We can say we understand why a person behaved as they did and we can say that it wasn’t ok.  There is loving kindness in that act—and love for ourselves as we decide who and what we allow into our lives.  We can forgive ourselves for not allowing what we deserve into our lives.  And I am working on that a bit more every day.  Learning to forgive myself allows me to forgive others—and it allows me to keep the boundaries, to let go of co-dependence.  So I forgive. 

Today I am grateful for the promise that the work will show us what we need it to.  The more I put my effort into the projects that I have going, the more I see results.  The more that I become clear on the action and what I want to do, the closer I get to the goal.  The clearer the goal gets.  It isn’t about the work necessarily, and it isn’t about the result.  It’s about the impact.  We become different people when we put in the work for the sake of doing good, for the sake of creativity, for the sake of curiosity.  We learn and we develop and we grow and we help others.  The whole point of this world is to be able to share our gifts, to make things better.  The money and material things will all go away eventually.  We certainly can’t take it with us when we die.  But what is left behind is a legacy, a memory of who we are and what we did that has the potential to ripple through time.  We have some thing like 4,000 great-great-great relatives, without whom we wouldn’t be here.  There are stories we will never hear, yet each one of them is entwined in who we are—I want my story to be shared with the world, I want it to be felt because I know that we are not alone.  I know that we are all doing what we can to bring our best selves to the world and to feel our best.  Know that what we do makes a difference.  That impact is felt deeply in the energy of the word.  Do good work and the world returns that good. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.