2024 - Week 8 - Be Grateful

Why Struggle? Podcast w Barbara J. Faison

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Week 8 - Be Grateful

This is an episode about how I believe being grateful is an attitude and a practice.

A few weeks ago I talked about the The 40 day plan my friend, Regenna London created over 16 years ago. It’s a journal with questions, reminders and encouragement to focus on what you desire for 40 days. One thing I love about this plan is it gets the momentum going for me and I usually continue beyond the 40 days.

It is day 52 of 2024 and I’m still reading, writing & journaling, doing qigong daily and really grateful that I am. Sometimes we need a little boost or encouragement to get started and to keep going. Regenna and I chatted earlier this week and we are both still doing what we started on day 1 of the Forty Day Plan. Yay, us! Please remember to patch yourself on the back! Mom taught me that.

I believe gratitude is an attitude and a practice. Most days I wake up with immense gratitude. Grateful for another day to be here. Grateful for good health, my family and loving relationships and much more. This week I restarted a few other practices that I haven’t done in a while. Morning pages and EFT- Emotional Freedom Technique also known as tapping.

I used to do morning pages back in the last century, lol when I was writing more regularly over 30 years ago. I learned about this practice from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. My version of morning pages is to set a timer to write for a specific period of time and write out what comes up. I set my timer for five minutes and today what came up was immense gratitude. It was a stream of conscious flow of the things that I am so grateful for in my life. In addition to what I mentioned earlier, a few other things I feel grateful for in this moment:

• Drinking a hot tonic from my mom‘s china cup

• Listening to the birds as I journaled at my kitchen table

• Having practices that sustain me

• My beautiful home

• Friends I’ve known for over three decades

• An interesting life

• Breathing through both of my nostrils lol

• Recognizing that the word evolve has the word love in it

• Dear friends that keep me smiling and laughing

Doing daily writing or journaling feels great right now. I’m telling you, for me, discipline and commitment beat motivation and inspiration every day. I talked about that and the 40 Day Plan in episode six, Be Yourself.

I hope you enjoy the Be Grateful excerpt from my book/eBook/audiobook, Why Struggle? Life is too short to wear tight shoes.

Practicing gratitude for me is often just saying thank you all day long, silently and aloud. I can feel my body surging with such warm feelings when I do this simple practice. Writing down these gratitude gems was an additional surge of energy that started my day off just right.

What do you feel grateful for right now? You can leave a comment wherever you are listening to this podcast. If you’d like to share your thoughts with me - [e-mail] is the best way to reach me. And if social media is better for you, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, are best.

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