There is what you might call an abundance of chat out there about gratitude and abundance. Sometimes it makes me want to punch people. Being grateful can sometimes seem so effing tedious and meaningless.

Obviously when I feel like that is exactly when I need to be finding things to be grateful for and noticing the abundance in my life the most, but sometimes, you know, just NO.

One thing you might think about taking a retreat from your own life and the usual people who populate it is that you would have heaps of time to waft about appreciating stuff.

That’s proving to be at least half true. I do have a lot of time. I spent maybe 98% of my time alone, most of that in silence {unless I’m watching Netflix}, and not having a nine to five means I can structure my days as I choose. I’m very rarely doing nothing at all but I’m working on that.

I know; dream, right? Well yes and no. It’s coming up for two months of living like this and I’m not gonna lie, a large percentage of those two months has been pretty hideous. Creating a space by removing everything that usually fills it means that everything is going to come up into that space for healing. Everything.

Memories you haven’t thought about in years, old wounds and heartbreaks, conditioning and programming that has been running your life without your conscious knowledge, patterns you don’t know how to begin to dissolve, behaviours you just can’t seem to stop, fear and grief, and let’s not even talk about how ex boyfriends suddenly start contacting you out of nowhere.

It’s intense, painful, frustrating, difficult, lonely, boring, seemingly relentlessly unchanging, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.

HOWEVER.

This is in no way a complaint; I chose this. In a sense I was backed into a corner; the work I’d been doing with Tai Chi, Reiki, and consciously taking steps to becoming more of who I really am took me to a point where living as I always had suddenly became literally unbearable. Hence the time out.

It’s like Real Me stopped whispering and started shouting. So I kind of had to listen. I did choose this but I also couldn’t have carried on as things were without probably having some kind of breakdown. And now of course I can never go back. Not that I’d want to, but walking this path is a strange combination of desire and necessity and knowing there is No Other Way for you to live now. Even though you don’t know what is the way you’re going to live, who you’re going to be. There’s this big old space.

So yeah, getting a bit intense there. Another thing I’m finding on this trip is that words are becoming less and less useful to accurately describe things. It’s like they only stretch so far in their meanings and then there’s this gap before the full extent of their meanings becomes known and understood and experienced.

My point is, {yes, sorry, I forgot there was one for a moment there}, gratitude has not been my favourite tool while all this has been going on, despite knowing full well it is actually an awesome tool for bringing more of the good stuff into your life. Where the mind goes, energy flows.

And then something shifted.

It all feels very fragile and slippery, as if even talking about it might scare it away, but I feel it; something inside me has just moved. And although I’m well aware that appreciating the abundance of goodness in one’s life is much easier when one feels good already, I’m also finding a depth to each little thing that wasn’t there before.

So here is what’s good in a whole new way:

* Waking unexpectedly at 5am and going to the beach before anyone else. The quiet, the waves lapping, the blue sky; it was like being abroad on holiday and going down to the beach before the tourists get there.

* Treating myself to a hammock chair that hangs from a pole for my roof garden. I can curl up in it and swing and look at the sky and my plants and imagine anything I like. Which is mainly how I’m going to revamp the roof garden at the moment.

* Greek yoghurt with honey and blueberries. Cold and smooth and crunchy.

* My azalea plant that has busted out some serious magenta blooms; just a quick look gives me a happy.

* A bluetit that landed on the railing; tiny and quick and so perfectly blue and yellow. Birds don’t tend to land on the roof garden because I’m there so much. I gasped and clapped like a child.

* Leaving some extra baking I’d made on a friend’s doorstep and her genuine delight in receiving it without needing anything further from me {she understands I’m still on retreat. Doesn’t mean I can’t share though}.

* Meandering along the shoreline picking up treasures; a piece of sea glass, a heart stone, a glimmering shell.

* Just sitting.

All these little things, suddenly not just a list but genuinely rich moments, like a really good chocolate mousse that has depth to it.

I’m changing on the inside; there’s no point even trying to say how but it’s happening. Maybe I just needed to note this down to refer to in the event of a slip. I’ve made my peace with this retreat perhaps lasting many months more than I’d initially imagined, and maybe that’s allowed me to begin to relax into what is. There is a lot of letting go, a lot of acceptance, a lot of being present required. And at last, the continuous daily practise ~ the seed that seemed like it was never going to sprout ~ is starting to become a lived experience. So yeah, I’m grateful.

***********************

Edit:

I just found this quote and it feels very appropriate ~