Today I am grateful for giving.  Admittedly I spent a lot of time worrying about making sure I would get what was mine.  I spent a lot of time giving to others, being taken advantage of, being bullied, and when I was old enough to start building something for myself I approached it with self-doubt instead of confidence and that led me to fear—which led me to looking at my life from a place of lack.  It’s incredibly easy to look at the absence in our lives we believe that one thing may turn our life on it’s heels, one thing may be the ticket, that we have one chance.  I believe in the power of magic so the truth is I do tend to believe it may only take that one moment to change things and I was/am dramatic enough that I feel the pressure to get those moments right or it’s gone—maybe I’ve watched too much drama in my life.  But the truth is for as much drama as I’ve witnessed and created, I have learned that there are many chances to get what we want.  Yes, certain doors close if we don’t act, but other doors open and we can’t ignore that.  Sometimes we aren’t being taken advantage of, we are being asked to expand our skills.  Sometimes we need to get to give and sometimes we need to give to get. I used to count what I was losing in giving, fearing I wouldn’t get mine if I gave too much.  But the truth is there is power in giving, there is learning in giving, and there are new worlds opened for all parties in giving.  Giving stretches our muscles, our hearts, and it opens the doors to creativity.  It’s a privilege to be able to give and I am grateful to be part of that cycle.

Today I am grateful for power.  Today’s society seems to be stuck in the premise of victimhood.  We wear our traumas and our pain points and where we’ve been hurt like a suit of armor.  We use those past events to justify treating each other like crap, having unrealistic expectations, and forming crappy boundaries (too much or too little), under the premise of being strong and standing our ground.  Boundaries are always necessary, but using our past experiences as a means to build a false sense of power through controlling others or as an excuse to ignore someone else’s experience isn’t power.  Real power comes from being still, learning who we are and our skills, making decisions based on love not fear, understanding where we are going and our impact on the world.  Power is about honing our skills and sharing them while keeping our boundaries.  Power is about deciding.  Making choices is one of the most powerful things in the world.  To make the right choices we need to know who we are and understand that the “right” choice is a combination of knowing who we are, faith, and understanding the big picture.  When we embrace our power, magical things happen.  Magic that opens the doors to the life we are meant to have rather than wasting time hoping someone comes along and saves us.  Power is an awareness of who we are and what we can do.  We need to be grateful to that power because it does, indeed, make the world go around, because power makes us move.  We are not victims, we have choices—choose to use our power to move forward and create new rather than repeat patterns.

Today I am grateful for excitement.  We are in a month of Thanksgiving, not just the month of Thanksgiving, and this is when we start to review the year with new eyes.  This year has been a mixed bag and it has been emotional.  There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of waiting, a lot of loss/near loss, a lot of pressure, a lot of fear, a lot of speculating, a lot of sad, and a lot of growing up in understanding exactly how things are changing—and all of that is in reference to my personal life.  I started this year explicitly hopeful that everything was going to turn around, that this is the year I’d be able to make some really big moves and then, as things progressed, bump after bump hit and confusion set in.  With all of those events, some creating their own type of trauma/psychological impact, I haven’t felt excitement in a while—uncertainty, questioning faith, fear, yes, but exciting no.  It felt like I was buckled in on a ride that lost its track in certain places and I couldn’t stop it let alone exit.  I knew I didn’t want to continue to feel like that, I didn’t want to be a victim, I wanted to embrace my power and understand what I COULD do even if it wasn’t everything I wanted.  For months I vacillated between excitement, anger, love, and fear, and now that we are approaching the end of the year, I’ve somehow managed to pull things together enough and have been granted some miracles.  I’ve made the choice to change, I’ve regained my health in a lot of ways, I’ve taken massive strides forward in my projects, I’ve decided to engage with people differently, and I’ve been gifted the means to give generously this coming season.  It feels good to be excited, to find some hope, to let go of fear of the future and to want to participate in building it.  Excitement includes hope, and even if I don’t know the outcome, I am hopeful. I am grateful to feel that. 

Today I am grateful for perspective.  We’ve struggled with many of the changes the family has faced this year, everything from health scares, to death, to the fear of losing sanity/cognitive ability.  The world changes in ways we don’t understand sometimes but each day, especially as we enter my favorite time of year, I’m seeing little miracles and reminders along the way that everything works out as it should, in its own way.  I have made no secret of the challenges at my 9-5 and I had a realization this week that I’m tired of managing people in the corporate environment.  Its been nearly impossible to leave because I’m fixed there, I’m used to it, I genuinely do have some nice benefits for having been there so long, and frankly, I like my house and have nothing else lined up at the moment.  I’ve told you about challenging weeks before but this past week and a half has been a doozy after a few months of already being put through the wringer. My personal life and the contradictions and fears and being left out didn’t give me much solace at home either. Quite frankly I started questioning my faith again.  And right in the middle of frustration with helping my parents I was not understanding what the hell was happening—I felt crazy.  My uncle (who lives with my parents) has been officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it has been hard for me to even look at him—that’s for a lot of reasons, not because of the diagnosis—walked out of the room after a minute and then beckoned me right before I was leaving.  He handed me a beautiful study Bible.  So look, I’ve been looking at my faith differently since over the summer, and the fact that right as I was about to concede and feel angry again, this man who barely recognizes his own family, comes in with a gorgeous tome as a direct reminder of connection to source.  Even if people don’t seem to understand, they understand our energy, and on some level he knew what I needed—and as difficult as my feelings are for the man, there is something there.  Sometimes perspective is having faith that we are understood more than we think. 

Today I am grateful for the next steps.  I am approaching the next phase of my creative journey and it feels surreal.  I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to have experienced moments of pure alignment where the doors just seemed to be open for me and these things I wanted simply appeared.  It was effortless.  I’ve had this dream of sharing my words and my story for so long, I’ve had this knowing that I NEEDED to share this story forever, and I had a particular knowing that this was the time it would all come together—when I was learning to be at my strongest.  And very shortly (incredibly shortly, actually) I will be taking my next steps in that journey.  The beautiful part is how easy this has felt.  It has been a ton of work, a lot of effort, years of pulling this together—but it has been so easy.  The flow of putting this together has been unlike anything I’ve ever done.  I was trained to fear easy, to distrust easy, to be waiting for the other shoe to drop.  In this case, that isn’t happening.  This feels like everything is exactly aligned as it should be and I’m ready to move forward.  This is positive momentum and I am going with it.  The next steps arrived at exactly the right time and it is time to move to the next phase, the next steps, the next location and accept the gifts I have, to receive the life I have been envisioning.  It’s here and ready for me.  And now I am ready for it.  I am grateful to be one step closer to that vision every day—and I have every intention of living it to the fullest.  Sometimes it takes time to get to where we need to be, things happen for a reason—we just have to trust that all of those things make us who we are so we are able to handle the things we have been asking for.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead