You always hear people talk about the power of gratitude. As a life coach, it is one of the first things you learn about. While my head could understand it, (I mean logically it makes sense)…I never really got it on a heart level. I definitely felt grateful for my life, my job, my friends and family but I couldn’t quite understand how this emotion was supposed to be so powerful. I had tried various methods in the past to help manufacturer this emotion more in my life..you know:
“Write three things you are grateful for every day and fill up a jar”-(frankly, I got bored and I don’t think I got past a
week.)
“Keep a gratitude journal” -(it just felt superfluous and inauthentic.)
I am definitely not saying these things don’t work…because I know there are millions of people that have used these methods and they have had astounding success with them. But for me, they didn’t work. In hindsight maybe I hadn’t hit my rock bottom yet? Maybe I needed to be so desperate to want to change that there was no place to go but up? Maybe I just didn’t believe enough that they could actually work?
So last year was my rock bottom year. At the beginning of 2016 before Anna had died and my mum’s brain tumours had been diagnosed I had reached a pretty good place in my life. I had finally made the decision to study further. I was doing my honours in learning support. My end goal was so that I could increase my earnings enough to consider adoption. I had been volunteering at a baby home for just over a year and I had fallen in love with a gorgeous little girl. I absolutely adored that child. Her face used to just light up whenever she saw me. So I had come up with a plan.😉
The day my mum went in for her surgery to have the tumours removed I sat on her hospital bed and told her my plan. I told her she had to survive because I needed her for my plan to succeed. She needed to be the granny. My mother, at that time, suffered from aphasia as a result of the pressure of the tumours on her brain. Aphasia is essentially the
inability to understand or produce speech. She could understand what was being said to her perfectly. She also knew what she wanted to say but her brain would mix up the words and she wouldn’t even realise it. (Random story: my mum’s friend Charlotte said that whenever my mum heard my car coming home from work in those last 3 months her eyes used to just light up with excitement and joy. Once she turned to Charlotte beaming and in all seriousness said: “Here comes my ‘breakfast’ “😂) When she spoke in those early days, her aphasia wasn’t that bad and she kind of sounded a little like Yoda..it was very sweet and she giggled a lot at her inability to get the words out.
Anyway, my mum’s simple reply to the declaration of my brilliant plan was this: “Not your plan. God plan.” I have to admit I was a little irritated. I didn’t want to hear that…I just wanted to hear that whatever Gods plan was, she would be there.
When my mother died it felt like my plan died with her which only intensified my grief. I felt like I barely had the energy to look after myself, let alone another human being. On top of that, I got to see first hand how my friend, whose daughter had recently come to live with her, was struggling. It opened my eyes to how incredibly difficult and lonely being a single mum really is, especially if you don’t have the support structure of family to help you. I realised that as much as I wanted my children – my biggest and most heartfelt desire has always been to find their father first. I honestly couldn’t even bare going to the baby home anymore. I tried a couple of times but it just hurt too much. I felt like I had deserted her and all I kept praying for was that someone else would adopt her.
Grief really and truly is a horrible necessity. It can strip you to the core but at the same time force, you to eventually start taking action. The only things that got me up and dressed in the mornings were ted talks and
She really and truly is the most beautiful and powerful storyteller. As she had suggested I immediately wrote out a reminder note to stick next to my mirror:
“Gayle, I am proud of you for…..”
“I forgive you for…”
“I commit to you… “
Needless to say… I saw it daily…😬but It did nothing! I was still stuck in a help resistant mode, not able to step up and simply do something. When I started keeping my ‘ morning pages in February this year…I finally started to take the ‘action’ that I so needed to change my mindset and pull myself up. As part of my writing, I began including Lisa’s three mantras every day. I finally started to understand that the reason I couldn’t genuinely feel the ‘power of gratitude’ was that I had no self-gratitude. How could I possibly be grateful and happy about external things when internally beating myself up, was my full-time job?
As things slowly started to shift within me I began to have a deeper understanding of gratitude, especially when it comes to people. Maybe it took me losing my parents and my Anna to help me appreciate the beauty and value of all the people in my life. This is the reason that so many of my post are about other people. There are so many millions of people in this world that never feel valued and that breaks my heart because quite simply I was one of them. I so desperately don’t want to be a part of that cycle anymore. I read an article a while back along these lines. How society is set up to value people who are in the limelight. A full-time working mum, for example, can achieve great accolades for her excellent work in the company, she can be praised for being a wonderful chair lady of the PTA and admired for doing all of this while still raising a family (oh so effortlessly). But so often very little thought goes to the people that helped her make success possible…the grandparents that perhaps pick the kids up from school every day, the char that does all the housework the gardener that keeps her gardens immaculate. If our life is our movie then surely we can’t just congratulate and hand out awards to the actors or directors that portrayed us so beautifully. Surely we need to remember the Aerial Camera Assistants, the Lighting Technicians, the costume design team, the accountants, the hair and make up people because honestly if any one of these (or any of the other hundreds of movie set jobs out there) where to be left ‘undone’…that highly successful movie could just have easily been a flop. Just imagine how amazing the world would be if we all just made the effort to stop and tell one person a day:” Thank you, I appreciate and value you being part of my movie. You are doing such an awesome job” And even better yet, imagine if we simply started by saying this everyday to ourselves. This is how I have come to understand the power of gratitude.😄
So I would like to end by giving gratitude to my beautiful Zukie. She usually works every Saturday and quite honestly I would be lost without her. Because she helps me with my home I have time to teach all my students and do all the other things that keep me balanced. She cleans around me on Saturdays when I am teaching, she lets me tell her about all my epiphanies 😂( and my dating horror stories😱) and most especially she loved me last year when I could, at times, barely even say hello to her. Because I love her I have tried to become more conscious of my messiness and have learnt to be (a little) tidier. My movie is better and more enjoyable because she is in it…and I just wanted her to know that.😍😘
Much love
😍😘🤗🎠🎡🎢🌅🐝
Ps BTW my beautiful little girl got adopted in December by an amazing family in America. She has a mother and a father who adored her and the video clips that I have been sent of her smiling and happy make me think that maybe my wise mother was right after all. 🤗
In Gods time ❤👣