“You will never get what you want until you’re grateful for what you have,” Ironwill project.  This is a tough one for some people to swallow.  The distractions and consumerism and even selfishness of this world tells us that we always need more, that we always need to be going for the next thing.  It doesn’t teach us to be content with what we have let alone grateful for it.  We are brought up to compare and to see where we lack.  I don’t ignore the primal purpose of that which is that we need to survive and if we aren’t aware of where we need to improve, then we will fall behind.  But what we need to start emphasizing is that we don’t all need the same things to survive.  I know that we know this on some level, but most people allow themselves to fall into the habit of comparing and we competition and we think we need the most instead of what is the most of who we are. 

I’ve worn a thousand different skins in my life, believing that each one was the “real” me, that the next one would feel better, that the next one was right.  I’m not saying that I’m any different than any other person who went through phases of trying to find themselves.  But my home, my entire life, is indicative of all the ways that I tried to be something other than who I am.  I’ve held onto the success and the pain.  I’ve clung to the ways I lived, the ways other people wanted me to live, the ways I allowed others to tell me who I was…and I have the pieces of all those stories.  The thing is I got really good at telling stories—better at telling them than living them, and I realized that it’s easier to tell a story than it is to live it.  Wearing the skin of who we are and learning to be comfortable in it takes far more grit than we give people credit for.  I continue to stand by the importance of standing in our truth, but even I admit that I’ve been relatively flippant about it over the years—it truly is easier said than done at times.

As I look around me, trying to piece together exactly who I am, trying to clear the clutter, trying to understand what works and what doesn’t, I do see where gratitude comes in—and that is something that I practice every week.  I focus on one day of it in particular because I can quiet my mind and really share it.  But gratitude is something we need to practice every day.  There are things we need to be grateful for simply because we have the opportunity.  There are moments we need to slow down and be grateful for who we are, grateful to understand who we are, grateful to breathe, that our bodies function.  When we start there, we build momentum because we create an energy of attraction not only to the life we want, but to the source of that life.  When we are connected to that source it’s easier to understand and bring in what we want—and when we are connected enough we better understand what it is that we want rather than what other people want or what our culture of comparison tells us we should want.   Gratitude is so much more than saying thank you—it is a state of being that opens doors to who we are and what we are meant to do.