Exploring Gratitude (Always!)
As current Chair of the Yoga for Health and Education Trust, I have been given the task to write the first ‘live’ blog for our new website. No pressure, then! I have given myself 24 hours to ponder the request and try and decide what to share and I feel I must continue the theme we had at our recent Sedgebrook House event of Exploring Gratitude.
I have so many reasons to be grateful in and with my life:
🙏🏻 I life in a lovely area of the country which is currently enjoying some glorious autumn sunshine. A blessing.
🙏🏻 I have hung out two loads of washing on the line which will dry in the sunshine and smell so lovely when I bring it in later to put away. A blessing.
🙏🏻 I have wonderful family and friends around me who care about me. A blessing.
🙏🏻 I have wonderful friends and family who tell me to wind my neck in when I am losing perspective. A blessing.
🙏🏻 I have good health. A blessing.
🙏🏻 I don’t own an ironing board and gave up ironing anything 15 years ago, when we moved here. Not only a blessing, but a release of time that can be filled with so many other more enjoyable things!
🙏🏻 I have the joy of living my life in yoga. A blessing.
🙏🏻 I have experienced the benefits of yoga in my life for 25 years and know how to breath to feel better, how to act on the small niggles before they become bigger. A blessing.
🙏🏻 I have a bottle of gin in the cupboard from our local distillery which is my favourite of all the gins I have tried over the years (and I have tried many!). A blessing.
🙏🏻 I work with some truly glorious people at the YHET. A big blessing.
I am so very blessed and it is so important to recognise that for the most part, most of us are very blessed indeed.
It has become more fashionable in recent years to keep a gratitude diary and write down three things at the end of the day that make us feel grateful. This works for many, but I suspect doesn’t work for many more, including me. Instead, I try to stop and be in the moment, sometimes. It’s hard when there are so many demands on our time and energy and so many other things that need to be done.
But stopping and being, rather than doing allows us all to pause and take stock.
Does this make life perfect? Of course not.
But it does help us to recognise the small things that give us moments of happiness and all these little moments make up a life of joy and contentment, a blessing in itself.