Focusing on gratitude can be like gold panning. The pan is filled with dirt and water a lot more than filled with gold. The focus determines what is seen…

I am in class, stretching my comfort zone, changing. It’s gritty and muddy. And I am grateful for the awarenesses I receive from all this. 

What is your gold today?

I am grateful for meeting new amazing beings and practicing playing with new energies.

I was pondering on gratitude and nothing was coming up. So I asked my roommate: what are you grateful for today? She replied and her replied inspired me and allowed me to connect with what I am grateful for. So I wonder who could you ask what they are grateful for to, in order to increase gratitude for you?

I love being inspired. To me being inspired is like being deeply, truly alive. I am grateful for those inspiring words from Christel Crawford:

“As you are trying to expand the visibility of your business, what can you contribute to people to actually give them the tools to be more of what they’d like to be… … What can you put out there that would contribute to people having what you’re having?”

I am not exactly expanding my business other than the business of my happy life. And what Christel wrote makes me notice when I share the things I know with people. Like talking about communicating with our body with the person sitting next to me on the plane. I wonder what that will create in his world… Even if nothing shows up for him, for me, the expression on his face when his eyes looked like saucers was priceless!

Happy, thank you, more please!

I am excited. I love being excited. I didn’t use to get excited about stuff. I am so grateful this has changed!

In the plane, I watched the movie “about time”. At the end of the movie, the main character who can travel through time, relives his day a second time exactly the same but while appreciating every little details more. And then he learns to appreciate the little details the first time around. I am grateful for this inspiring movie. 

What little detail can we appreciate today to add to our lives?

My heart feels tender: I am leaving France. 

At the same time, I am excited to be coming home. 

I am grateful for the nostalgia in my heart because it means my heart is open. I am willing to experience this as it is from all the wonderful moments I have spent in the last 10 days connecting with family and friends. 

Yesterday, I was noticing how privileged I am. That led me to research the guilt of being privileged. 

I get stuck in trying to justify being privileged while others are not. I realized that no matter what I come up with as an explanation to privilege, it doesn’t matter. What matters is “acknowledge it, appreciate it, don’t judge others, and do the best you can with what you’ve got.” (Pete Michaud)

I am privileged. I can choose between feeling guilty about this or just accepting and appreciating so that I can have a positive ripple effect around me.

I am still feeling guilty for being privileged sometimes but I am working on it. 

I am grateful I am privileged. 

One of the reason behind my gratitude posts is that I want to enjoy my life more. In the last few days, I have been around a lot of kids and I have watched them play. And similar to the pedal boat adventure, I have noticed all the excuses I use to stop myself from playing. At the same time, I made a point to do what the kids around me do to test it and see if I like it. 

So I got to jump in the swimming pool and get out over and over and over and over again. And I had forgotten, but there are many different kind of ways to jump in a pool! How does it get any better than that?

I was talking about gratitude with a friend of mine and she mentioned the Coué method. It is a method of conscious autosuggestion, famous in France. I wondered: how is gratitude journaling different from auto-suggestion?

Maybe for some people it is the same and for others it isn’t. 

The way I see it, gratitude is just one tool to increase my well being and it is not the only one. It is important to me to use as many tools as I can and to keep looking for different tools that work for me. In the end, gratitude may work better when used together with other well being tools. 

And gratitude journaling may work some days and not work others. But when we stop on the days when it seems like it is not working, it makes it harder to use on the days when it would work.

What other tools could you discover to bring more magic into your life?