An email will go out tomorrow creating a game for filling the next two cohorts of this program—and where there is a game, you know there are prizes!!! 🙌🎁💥 Look for that tomorrow. In the meantime, to help you help me, I am going to start posting about this on The Facebook (which is where you came from). Let me know if you are okay with me tagging you in the posts (no more than every other day or so). You can forward it to people, and you can add comments that support whatever I am asserting in the post if it feels true to you. I can certainly tag you at whatever frequency feels right to you (including not at all, obviously), and I will not tag you without express approval here. Here is a sample of the type of thing. Each post will include a meme (duh) and tie it into the work we've been doing. This is tomorrow's post with the meme: In today's hyper-distracting world managing our attention feels like a superpower - sometimes it feels like it would be easier to learn to fly. That's one of the bigger, unsung outcomes of my mindfulness course, How to Live a Grateful Life in a Fcked Up World. Our ability to experience gratitude is directly proportional to our ability to direct our attention where we want it. By default, we are pulled to focus on the problems (of which there are more than a few these days), and besides being exhausting, it takes us out of the opportunity to sit with what's beautiful, what's working, and what we love about our lives. Imagine taking back the reins of your attention so that when you're with your family, you are fully with them. Imagine the increase in performance at your job if you were able to fully be present with what you were doing (and who you were doing it with) when you were doing it. I am offering new cohorts of this free mindfulness training: one for real estate and sales professionals on Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00 starting March 11 and one for Normies (everyone else) on Wednesdays from 6:00-7:00 p.m. starting March 5th.

This is a conversation about something sneaky and difficult to pin down. I occasionally catch glimpses of it from the corner of my eye and want to see if I can capture it here. I will have to say it several times because as hard as it is to capture, it's harder to hear. It's very much outside the current frame of reference in which we live. This is for everyone and is essential for anyone who is entertained by the thought that they aren't participating enough. Maybe you haven't been to every call or don't practice reliably enough (based on something you made up). You need to deal with this fact: you signed up for Living a Grateful Life in a Fcked Up World because of something you thought was important. That would make a difference for you. You wanted to practice, show up, be more present, grateful, and awake. And maybe—like so many of us in so many areas and so many ways—you haven’t participated as fully as you wanted. Maybe you’ve missed a session, meant to do the practices but didn’t, told yourself I should sit and practice, and then... didn’t. And now? Maybe there’s a little voice saying you’ve fallen behind or that you’ve somehow failed at gratitude or you've been doing it wrong (again), or, or, or... We all have our own personal hater chorus ready to let us know we are not getting it done—nobody escapes this life without these inner critics making themselves known. But let me tell you something: you’re doing it right. And I don't mean this in some rah-rah- you-can-do-it-keep-going-you-go-girl-bullshit way. The fact that you even noticed that you wanted to practice is a win. It's THE win. The fact that you signed up at all is THE win. The fact that you’re reading this right now, thinking about gratitude, about waking up to your life, is the whole damn point. Literally, that's the point. Rather than beating yourself up over the "failure" to do it "right," why aren't you celebrating the moment of awareness, the actual fucking goddamn moment of enlightenment that came upon you when you had the thought, "I should practice today"?

I just wanted to acknowledge you for where we are and to add some context to the frame this training provides. First, to define training the way we did yesterday: "Training just means doing something over and over again with an open heart and a willingness to learn." This is sooooo important. There is nothing rigid about this course. I know many of you come from more rigid practices. This is not that. I don't care if you missed the calls or haven't practiced "enough" - you are, without doubt, exactly where you are, and the moment you acknowledge, allow, and accept that singular fact, you have started practicing mindfulness. And the cosmic joke is there is nowhere else to get. So just breathe. You put yourself in this to get exactly what you are getting. Breathe. Sit. Smile. This is it. As for the frame or container we are in. The first third covers the basic building blocks of mindful practices. Breath, body, metta. Beathe, sit, smile. The basics. Next third, we build from there. If this were a garden, I'd say we've prepped the soil, planted seeds, and watered. Now, we start to deal with sprouts, weeding, and tending. If it matters to you, and you should tell me if it does so I know for future programs, the next weeks look like this: Week 4: Eating/Walking meditations - demonstrating for yourself what operating mindfully feels like off the cushion. Week 5: Labeling meditations - starting to train yourself to notice exactly the way your mind talks to you. Week 6: Open Awareness/Focused Attention meditations - learning how to control your awareness so you're not obligated to chase every damn squirrel. In the final third, there's a large enough background of presence that conversations for gratitude make sense (that's the harvest and eating stage of gardening). Anyway, I wanted to give you all the encouragement (literally: to instill courage) to keep walking this path and to find those places where the path is rocky - go slowly enough, and you can get over anything.

In preparing for Sunday's Session, I started reading Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. The confirmation came in Chapter Three, where she says, "We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll become more awake to our lives," which, if it's not exactly what I said yesterday it's really close. If I can come close to thinking the way she does, I have achieved more than I ever could have dreamt. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for you all giving me the opportunity to explore this with you. While I trust it's making a difference for you, I want you to know it's transformational for me. Keep sitting. It has no choice but to work on you.🥰

It was my first time since we met last week… it seemed like I didn’t remember about it until it was nighttime or I was out and about. I was also traveling Thursday - Monday and travel tends to challenge my routines. Lesson learned: meditate first thing in the morning.