Grateful Sunday – March 14, 2021

I’m grateful for one full week of check ins with my youngest daughter. This has been a way for us to stay accountable with our goals for the day (she really needed to catch up with some past due homework and I had a ton of old boxes to go through that I got when my ex and I closed down the storage unit we shared). The storage unit is one less bill I’m grateful I no longer have to pay. Due to being accountable with my daughter, I was able to finish going through my boxes, got rid of a ton of stuff, donated a lot to charity, and put all the boxes up on the shelves I had built in summer. Such a feeling of accomplishment when I have a clean garage.

Speaking of my garage, I’m grateful for jury duty this week. Ok, let me rephrase. I’m grateful for the jury duty protocol during a pandemic. To maintain social distancing, there was a limited number of people that were required to show at the courthouse at one time. Instead of sitting at the courthouse all day waiting to see if I was going to get called, I knew the night before if I had to show up or not. I wasn’t called in, so spent that entire time working on my garage. And this is why I no longer have to worry about that chore. Oh, so nice! Thank you government!

I’m grateful my girlfriend suggested gratitude for International Woman’s Day. There are days when it’s easy to forget the important people in your life and to allow the faulty belief that you’re alone sneak in and take over. Sitting down and really thinking about the women in my life who support me is such a blessing and helps keep those negative thoughts at bay.

Speaking of women. I’m so super excited that Natalie Brobin’s book, Everyday Self Care and Your High-Needs Child was published this week. I had the honor of meeting Natalie in the writing group I joined almost a year ago. As a Recovery 2.0 Coach, she joined Tommy Rosen’s 8-Week Awakening Course and we joined another writer in our group plus an amazing man on the east coast as part of our accountability pod. Such a tight bond we’ve formed holding everyone accountable with Tommy Rosen’s Love Missions. I have enjoyed watching Natalie’s growth as she went through the writing process from draft to publication while also struggling with a divorce and moving from Minnesota to the west coast. I really appreciate her friendship.

This week I’m so, so, so grateful (I can’t say it enough) with Heidi Le. She works as a project manager at Launch Pad Publishing, runs our Inner Circle writing group that we do each weekday morning for an hour, as well being an incredible life coach. My girlfriend and I signed up for a Transformational Challenge Heidi organized with another great group of people. Each day we watched a video, had a homework assignment, then met with her individually on Zoom to talk about what we had learned. This has set me on a path to have a vision board made next week and a set of goals to meet in six months. As I mentioned, I work better in a group and being challenged. In addition to everything she does, she’s an AMAZING singer. Check her out on Spotify. Or better yet, grab her book Confessions of the Broken, which talks about her journey of recovery from codependency and explains the meaning behind the songs from the album of the same name.

I’m grateful for the Walletpalooza Playshop, a three hour workshop, put on by Ilana Kristeva, another inspirational woman in my life that I met at a retreat four years ago and has always encouraged me to continue writing. She was the one who had taught me the importance of gratitude every day and the muse behind my Grateful Sunday posts. In this workshop I learned about Feng Shui, which is the Chinese practice of arranging objects in living spaces to create balance and harmony. We used this to find our “yuckies”, those negative thoughts that don’t serve us and to list our “yummies”, the positive strengths we have that we can give others. We also focused on breath work and tapping. I had forgotten how important tapping can be when we have limiting beliefs. Using our work with the Feng Shui, we made a collective Trauma Tree followed by tapping together to release these negative beliefs. This was the perfect transition between the Transformational Challenge I’m currently doing and the Blog Challenge I’m starting next week. I’m glad I was reminded tapping was available to help me as I start pursuing the goals I’ll be making for the next six months. In addition, I will be using the Feng Shui technique to create balance in my vision board assignment for my Transformational Challenge that I will be sharing with my group next week.

I’m grateful my phone and computer automatically keeps track of daylight savings time. This makes it easier when it’s time to change the clocks. I already have one that’s accurate. Yay! And, I’m so ecstatic I had a couple of hours alone in my house this morning. The garage was done. I was in this really excited, happy mood. I mean, the little kid in me was just dying to come out and play. And play he did! I danced around the house blasting music and singing at the top of my lungs. It’s been a while since I’ve just let go and let him play.