Is Gratitude the same thing as giving up?

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!!!

I hope you are having an amazing day with your loved ones.  My mother’s whole family is gathering at my grandparents’ house in Scarsdale, NY to celebrate the holiday.  There’s a good chance my grandparents will show up in full Pilgrim costumes at dinner this evening.  God, I hope so.  My ancestors were at the first Thanksgiving after their long trip on the Mayflower, so we always go all out!

Here are my grandparents dressed in their get-up from past years.

Today is a great day to talk about gratitude, and to be honest with you, I used to think gratitude, and gratitude practices were the same thing as giving up and living a complacent life.  I just wasn’t into it.

I was WAAAY more into dreaming big, manifesting and thinking about all of the love, prosperity and adventures I wanted to experience in the future.  Why waste my time in the here and now when things didn’t seem all that great?

Well here’s what went down… because I was only focused on what I wanted, I felt like I didn’t have what I needed.  I felt like I needed to have a bigger house, a smaller butt, a larger wardrobe, more clients in order to have what I needed to be happy.  This kept me in a constant state of hustle, anxiety and lack.  Not fun.

When my anxiety was at it’s peak, and I was wracking my brain to understand how I could manifest MORE, FASTER I called my most trusted, spiritually minded friends for advice.

All of their answers were the same: Gratitude.

Ugh.  Fine.

So I decided to sit on my bedroom floor and list off in my mind all the things I was grateful for: having a roof over my head (even though it wasn’t the 4 bedroom Victorian I wanted), having a body that worked (even though I wasn’t a size 4), Jonathan, being able to pay our bills, living in a beautiful city, having great friends, being part of an incredibly loving and fun family, etc., etc.  After just 5 minutes of rattling off this mental list, I felt a completely foreign and orgasmic feeling come over me…

Relief.

Relief that I had everything I needed.  I felt a sense of deep relaxation and space to just be.  The rush and the anxiety to go out and get all these things I thought I needed to be happy went away in that moment.

The biggest aha for me after I started actively listing what I was grateful for is that you can be grateful that you have what you need, and still work towards what you want.  Tweet it. In fact, creating, manifesting and hustling for what you want is a lot more fun when you are intimately aware that you have everything you need because you can clearly see that you have nothing to los

So here’s what I want you to do:

1.     Write, or mentally recite a list of things you are grateful for.  Don’t forget the little things we take for granted.
2.     Bask in the relief that you have everything you need.
3.     Make a list of all the things you want, that would add fun and sparkle to your life.

In the comments on the blog I want to know how you felt after making your gratitude list, tell me how your needs are currently being met, and what you want for your future that you’re excited about.

Happy Thanksgiving!  I can’t wait to hear from you.

Love,

Sarah