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Three Steps to Living A Life of Gratefulness (dailygood.org)

 

An act of gratitude is a living whole. In any process, we can distinguish a beginning, a middle, and an end.

To be awake, aware, and alert are the beginning, middle, and end of gratitude.

Step One: Wake Up

To begin with, we never start to be grateful unless we wake up. Wake up to what? To surprise. As long as nothing surprises us, we walk through life in a daze.

Step Two: Be Aware of Opportunities

You will find that most of the time, the opportunity that a given moment offers you is an opportunity to enjoy–to enjoy sounds, smells, tastes, texture, colors, and, with still deeper joy, friendliness, kindness, patience, faithfulness, honesty, and all those gifts that soften the soil of our heart like warm spring rain. The more we practice awareness of the countless opportunities to simply enjoy, the easier it becomes to recognize difficult or painful experiences as opportunities, as gifts.

Step Three: Respond Alertly

Once we are in practice for being awake to surprise and being aware of the opportunity at hand, we will spontaneously be alert in our response, especially when we are offered an opportunity to enjoy something. 

This recipe for grateful living sounds simple–because it is. But simple does not mean easy. Some of the simplest things are difficult because we have lost our childlike simplicity and have not yet found our mature one. Growth in gratitude is growth in maturity.

To read Brother David Steindl-Rast's article, please click here.

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Hi Dana,
Thanks for clarifying. Yikes! Looks like I had been signed up for just
about everything. Perhaps thats an auto setup. I should've scrutinized when
I signed up. My apologies. The same night I signed up I sent a private
message to... hmmm I can no longer find it in my outbox so I don't remember
who. I never got a response, unless it got lost in the flurry of blog post
emails. The message I sent was to let y'all know that I live on a ranch 20
minutes east of Austin, I have cPTSD due to childhood trauma, I write books
and essays about trauma, grief, and healing, and I lead memoir writing
workshops and host grief dinners. Point being, though I'm not formally
trained in an grief/trauma work, I have spent a couple of decades sharing
my own experiences with the hope of serving others.

Toward that end, and also mentioned in my original note, I would be very
open to hosting an ACEs group for the Austin area. I have a reception
hall/meeting space on my ranch that comfortably holds around 75 people, I
have a four-bedroom BnB, and I also have a couple of Airstreams. So I can
accommodate ongoing weekly/monthly meetings that run 2-3 hours and I could
also potentially host weekend retreats.

To be clear-- I'm not seeking any rent for the property or compensation for
myself. I just am a big fan of promoting healing through sharing, this
ranch was an amazing gift to me, and I like to share it. I'm about to head
to England until the end of the month, but when I get back I would love to
talk to you to find out if there are any ACEs groups/facilitators in the
Austin area who might want to use the space.

Thanks very much,
Spike

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 2:14 PM, ACEsConnection <
communitymanager@acesconnection.com> wrote:

Hi Spike,
Please find how you can change your notifications on your membership. Please share how we may support further. Please know you can also do for any of the interest based and geographically based groups you've chosen.

How-To: Customize your email notifications for ACEs Connection main site

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how do i unsubscribe? i don't see a link in the email and my inbox is just
overflowing with y'all's mail. i didn't realize when i signed up there
would be quite so much mail. i would prefer to read posts at the website.
thank you.

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 1:45 PM, ACEsConnection <
communitymanager@acesconnection.com> wrote:
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