Hi everyone!
What are you grateful for?
I think of November as the month of gratitude and giving. With all the pain happening in the world right now, this has been much harder for me this year. I woke up this am with more heartbreaking news and decided to do a gratitude practice before getting out of bed. Here is what I felt myself grateful for this morning:
Cold air
My daughter’s college application process
My family
Linen sheets
Tears
My clients, old and new
My time in Southern California
Fragility
Breath
Dr. James Gordon
I instantly had more energy and more readiness to start the day. I also realized that there was something I could DO. There is a non-profit organization I love. They go into war-torn areas, prisons, and traumatized communities post mass shootings. They have had several trips to Ukraine. They have worked in Israel and Gaza. They go where trauma support is needed. They bring a set of (evidence based) very easy to teach trauma skills and educate a handful of people in the community who in turn can teach the skills to the rest of the community. It is so simple and so scalable and always strikes me as utterly genius. During a hard time in my life, I was gifted a book written by the founder and just the act of reading it shifted my entire perception of the world. My gratitude practice reminded me that I had been meaning to make a donation to this organization. In the wake of the horrors in the news, I had forgotten that I could take a small action.
I felt alive and hopeful again. The news hadn’t changed, but my mindset had.
I invite you to ask yourself: What are you grateful for? What organizations do you love that you want to support? Or what small action of giving do you want to do for your community?
With love and hope,
Tara
P.S. If you are interested, this pdf shares more info on the work of Dr. James Gordon and his non-profit, The Center for Mind-Body Medicine.
Our last Connection Cohort of the year will be starting on November 27th. We timed this to fall between the holidays as it is one of the times when we can fall out of connection most easily as we navigate the pressures of family and expectations of the season.
This will be the last cohort until March of 2024, so if you've been waiting to join us, now is a great time to do it! Enrollment closes on November 21st.
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