Today I am grateful for resources.  I used to be afraid to spend money because of previous traumas surrounding family habits and loss.  I always thought I was being practical in saying I couldn’t afford things, that I couldn’t spend a certain amount of money, or that I didn’t have money to do certain things and I never considered that was demonstrating lack.  I needed to understand that, in all truth, money had very little to do with anything I wanted to do.  I had to learn that the resources we need to make things available to us and to make things happen are always around us.  By saying we couldn’t afford something, we were telling the universe we couldn’t do it and we inevitably never did.  But I’ve learned to reconsider my relationship with the resources available to me including money.  It comes down to understanding the energy we put behind our actions.  I’ve had to invest in my business several times to keep things going and I’ve seen people come and go from the business it was terrifying each time I had to make a large purchase while seeing people leave.  But every time something came through, I felt better.  Every time I invested in myself and something worked, it felt amazing.  It had nothing to do with what I was spending, it had to do with how I felt about what I was doing because THAT energy is where the real return came from.  Every time we need something, there is a way to get it, the universe always comes through.   

Today I am grateful for standing my ground and accepting who I am.  From a social aspect, most of this summer has been spent dealing with some people who have proven to NOT be who we thought they were.  We had to set some tough boundaries and accept some choices other people made in regards to our character and that meant the dynamic of the relationship changed for good.  When people show you who they are, believe them.  I’d put in a lot of effort to making the relationships with several of these people work because I am the type of person who will fight for what I care about.  I cared and I thought they did as well but it was proven again and again that they do not.  I have a rule of 3 where I will forgive a first mistake, I can even forgive a second mistake but I may not trust you, but I will not forgive a third mistake, especially after we’ve had the conversation multiple times.  I reached out to 3 of these ladies 3 times each basically to be told to deal with how I was feeling.  I ended up having a conversation with one of them and I believed it was truly productive but when I walked away I said to myself that I would believe it when I saw it.  Something was telling me to keep my guard up.  Sure enough, a few short weeks later, the EXACT thing I had said multiple times hurt me happened again.  You can’t say you care about someone and then continue to do exactly what they said hurts them.  It doesn’t work like that.  They are telling themselves a story about me that I know isn’t true.  Before I would have cared and cried, trying to make them see the truth so they would accept me.  I’m too old for that shit and the truth is, I knew what they were doing from the beginning.  So instead of playing small, I am standing firmly in who I am and I am FINE with it because I am fine with who I am.  

Today I am grateful for how I was raised.  I was raised to understand what it takes to be a good person up to and including admitting our faults.  Granted I may have taken the extreme on that one and saw fault with all I did, but I have never shied way from admitting when I was wrong.  It took one time in teen-dom of me NOT admitting what I did and seeing how badly it hurt the other person for me to know I would never do it again and my parents were right.  I carried that guilt with me for decades until I was able to apologize directly to that person.  Regardless.  We are human and none of us do things perfectly but it amazes me every time I’m around those who so blatantly hurt others yet still see nothing wrong with what they do—some of them even play victim.  So I was invited to a party hosted by someone who was essentially ostracized from our friend group and had other similar experiences to what I’m going through now and she has been the bigger person and opened her door to us and all the other people involved.  So I thanked her and her husband and told her I was sorry for what she went through at the time.  I remember in the heat of it, I had told the other people involved that they needed to speak to each other and communicate what was actually going on and no one listened and I was given the opportunity to tell her that.  The other people involved in this story who were also invited to this most recent event treated us like crap and I knew that even after the conversations I’ve had with them about how I feel and how I want us to move forward, nothing was going to change.  I can hold my head high because I know I’ve done my part to admit wrong doing and to repair it—they have not and that is on them.

Today I am grateful for witnessing who people are.  I want to add an additional piece to being grateful for how I was raised because, along with knowing what it takes to be a good person, I also learned to be really observant and understand who people are when they show us.  I can’t say I always believed it when they showed me because I was hopeful they’d live up to who I thought they could be so there were many incidents when I stuck around when I shouldn’t have.  That is part of why I became so selective and protective as an adult—I cut people out as quickly as they came into my life as soon as I saw that things weren’t going to change.  If I took the time to tell people I cared about what I felt and they dismissed it, it became easier to just let them go.  So I know the effort I put into my relationships and if you still want to show me that I’m on the other side somehow, that I don’t matter to you, so be it.  I’ve seen you, I’ve given you the chance, you decided to continue on.  I want to share that I understand this might sound like I’m expecting others to live up to my expectations and this is far from it.  This is me understanding that relationships take two and if that relationship matters, we don’t do things that hurt the other party.  When one person says they are hurt, we do what it takes to repair and avoid hurting them again. If they continue, trust that is their character.  I am grateful for witnessing it firsthand because there are people who have the chance to do things behind our backs and I would much rather know the truth—always.  It makes me feel safer knowing the reality even if it’s painful.  So I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to see for myself and to make the choices on what to do next. 

Today I am grateful for health and healing.  Staying the course on doing what is right for ourselves is often more challenging than we think.  If we aren’t raised with health and wellness as a priority, it’s challenging to make that a priority.  Every step I’ve taken on this path to healing has felt like truth for lack of a better way to describe it.  There are layers to healing, there are cycles to it where we repeat behaviors we know are wrong, which became frustrating for me because I felt like once I had made it through something I was working on it was done.  We are never done but that isn’t a bad thing.  Evolution seeks the best outcome and we are evolved to a point where we can decide what we want our story to look like, how we want to feel, what we do, what we want to change.  We are evolved to steer our own course and that means everything from our mindset to what we eat.  Health and healing are the singular most important things we can do because until we are healed, we will continue to hurt.  Once we realize that the hurting is a choice, we can choose differently.  No, I don’t believe people consciously choose the pain, they choose what they know because it is familiar and comfortable, not understanding it causes pain.  When we know who we are and we know what’s right for us, the choice isn’t even a question.  I am grateful to be me and to have my mind and body and to be the person I am.  I am grateful to know I am not perfect and that there is work to do because when I can say I’ve done the right thing to the best of my ability, I can also say I’ve done my part.   

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead