Each Day In Life Is Gratitude Training
Are you in gratitude training yet? Not sure? Consider how important is it to you to be in the moment. Do you think about every day like it’s a training day for living your best life?
Can you graciously enjoy your day, or do you find yourself in the evening wondering what happened?
It almost seems a paradox to not be present in your day; to me, being present means that there is hope. And with hope, I can take one more step. I can do the hard things that arise. I can breathe, take in the perspective of others, and make good choices.
Each day in life is training
Training for myself
Though failure is possible
Living for each moment
Equal to anything
Ready for anythingI am alive
I am this moment
My future is here and nowFor if I cannot endure today
When and where will I?~ Soen Ozeki
I’ve been journaling my entire life, filling boxes and boxes with spiral notebooks, clothbound mini-books – even notebooks scorched and burned from when my house burned down at age 16. They’re some of the only remnants left of what I was thinking during my school years.
I started gratitude training about eight years ago, trying to get out of a slump that was driving me further and further away from living the life I wanted.
It was hard. Some mornings I’d struggle to find three things I was grateful for – outside of my relationships with my children, life sometimes felt a bit like I was wandering around, alone.
My children remain a staple on my gratitude list.
But eventually, with diligence to reflect on what was gracious and kind in my days, I managed to write more. My gratitude training entries became longer than a few words scribbled because I had to – I wrote and wrote about WHY I was grateful.
Some days the entries made me push myself – coffee with cream, candles, a quiet home repeated over and over.
But I kept writing.
I learned how to twist the challenges into gratitude, the fears into faith, to remind myself that I am alive. I am here, now.
I made myself write, to subscribe to feeds for sites like gratefulness.org, so every day I’d be alerted to phone reminders with prompts to help me think, to keep my gratitude training strong.
Questions like, “What relationships am I thankful for right now?”
And words for the day, like “Stay true to your deepest intuition that an extraordinary and miraculous life is possible” – Craig Hamilton.
There’s nothing wrong with needing (and accepting) a little nudge from the Universe.
No one said gratitude training was easy – but I’ve found, pages and pages later, that it’s definitely worth it.
I found this mindful poem by Soen Ozeki
Jennifer Wolfe
Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.
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