Celebrating and Rejoicing. Your gratitude practice in hyperdrive.

You can never have too much gratitude right?

In fact, usually we have the opposite experience of either not enough or just not practicing it consistently.

As humans, we are wired to see the negative first. In our earliest existence, it was our way of staying safe, when danger lurked just around the corner.

Now, we know there is not a tiger, at least literally, waiting in the brush to get us. But we still have a brain that looks for what might happen or what is happening that is not what we want.

Enter, gratitude. A revolutionary practice in many ways that engages our brain and actively sets us on a path of seeing the good, the positive, the divine lessons encased in our experience.

The caveat is though, that we have to choose this practice and actually practice it!

You may already practice gratitude consistently or maybe you have never thought about it as a practice or maybe you think about what you might be grateful for every once in awhile.

Today, I want to give you a simple way of really embodying gratitude. To really take your gratitude into hyperdrive. Kinda like in Star Wars when they are in the Millennium Falcon and they push that lever forward to go into light speed. 🙂

When I work with a client or lead a women’s circle, we always begin with celebrations.

Celebrating what’s going well sets you up to view your experience through a lens of what is going well, which in turn, begins to rewire your brain to see what is working well first on a regular basis.

It’s a muscle you have to work, before it grows strong.

I want to share with you a way you can take this gratitude practice to a place of celebration and rejoicing!

Gratitude practice exploded, if you will. 🙂

This practice has been a lifeboat for me these past months navigating so much hard and at the same time so much beauty all at once.

Since we moved to TN, life has exploded with goodness and beauty and new opportunities and has also brought a new diagnosis of being on the Autism spectrum, what was once referred to as Asperger’s, for our 9 year old son.

His life came apart if you will, when we transitioned here and all the ways he was getting by or managing in CA, were not accessible any longer. All the change and all the new situations sent him past his threshold of what he could handle and it opened up our world to everything we had seen him struggle with over the years, but didn’t have the entire picture.

We are all learning how to live, as my husband says, with a unicorn. This brilliant, bright, beautiful, magical boy who needs so much to feel safe and finds it difficult to live in the world, but sees and imagines things most people can’t. It’s all hard and special and there is so much for us to learn.

Now, with so many new challenges in our lives with our son, I truly celebrate every single tiny moment in a way that I didn’t before.

The hard stuff of our lives does that right? Puts life into focus. Changes our perspective.

That is the beautiful part of the hard.

What can you do to embrace the beautiful parts of the hard?

Celebrate and Rejoice.  🙂

Begin right now to think of what you are celebrating in your life (or grateful for).

Or share with a friend what you are celebrating and listen as they share their celebrations.

Your celebrations can be as simple as getting out of bed this morning. It could be that you had plenty of rest all week, that you reconnected with a friend, that your son or daughter made a new friend that brings them joy.

The point is to focus in on these things first, not after all the things that aren’t working or aren’t great, come flooding in.

That’s why I do this often first thing in the morning. It shifts my entire day. I hear this from many of my clients as well.

The second part, is rejoicing. This is where you can explode your gratitude, your celebrations.

Often times for me, this act of rejoicing naturally becomes a prayer.

When YOU hear the word rejoicing, what do you think of?

To me, rejoicing is embodying celebration.

How do you embody celebration?

It’s about dialing up the feeling of celebration internally, allowing it to fill and expand your heart and then take you up and out of your seat to your feet. It’s then letting this energy move through you even more as your arms reach high to the sky or your body begins to move, set in motion to a dance, fueled by your dialing up this internal celebration.

As this expansion in your heart space gets larger, allow it to literally move through you. Rejoice as you think about or speak out all your celebrations, all the things of beauty that have touched your soul. You can close your eyes, turn on music and just let it flow.

Embody your celebrations.

The sun that never stops warming the earth.
The moon that bestows its energy and light.
The friend who reminds you what love is.
The moments your child feels confident and safe.
Music and the healing and joy it brings you.

You can get the idea. These are things that are all around you everyday, you just need to give them life. Celebrate them. Rejoice over them.

It may sound silly and feel super weird at first, and that’s totally ok. Create your own private sacred space just for your daily celebration & rejoicing practice if needed. 🙂

I would love to hear your celebrations. If you desire to share them with me, send me an email. I am always here to celebrate with you and to see you.