Holidays and Gratitude!

As we come into the Holiday Season, which is always a Magical time for me, I want to offer a way for us all to BE Grateful for all that we have.

October was a very challenging month for me and November allowed me to uncover new ways and new perspectives to come into alignment with my Health and Well-Being. I am feeling better than I have in years and my energy and health have improved significantly. What changed? Well despite two mega doses of antibiotics and some natural health supplements to super charge my immune system perhaps what changed is that we are in the end of the nine year cycle (As previously discussed, 2016 is a 9 year in numerology and after Sept 9^th [9-9-9] to Jan 1^st, 2017 [1-1-1] when we begin a new cycle we will be releasing a lot of ‘things’ that are no longer necessary in our lives; from people to beliefs.) and I believe that cycle is what has been holding me in a certain pattern that is finally ready to be released. And in this ‘feeling good’ phase of my life I now feel like I have outgrown the limiting aspect of this cycle!

So, I have a lot to be Grateful for!

I came across this beautiful interview with Buddhist Monk Phap Dung in response to the question about what people can do who are feeling very fearful and uncertain about America and the planet. His response was beautifully worded! [For the full interview go here… http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/11/22/13638374/buddhist-monk-mindfulness.]

“We see the mind like a house, so if your house is on fire, you need to take care of the fire, not to go look for the person that made the fire. Take care of those emotions first; it’s the priority. Because anything that comes from a place of fear and anxiety and anger will only make the fire worse. Come back and find a place of calm and peace to cool the flame of emotion down.”

 I felt this quote was especially pertinent to all that is going on this last month and how we can take time this Holiday Season to take care of Our House and not project our fears, anxiety and anger onto our friends and family. The holidays can be particularly stressful for many people and emotions come up. And these emotions come up for us during the Holidays are often triggered by something related to what occurred during the first seven years of our lives. With the added anxieties that many are experiencing – especially in this season – we have an opportunity to ‘Remember the Magic’ and be in charge of how we want to BE and how we want to respond instead of directing the fire outside of us!

Taking responsibility for our reactions and emotional fears is something that isn’t always easy and is something that we would rather blame on someone else. These reactions and fears are the triggers that our egos would rather not deal with nor take responsibility for. Holidays often dredge up some of our worst fears and reactions – our disappointments, feeling alone, feeling unsupported, sensing unexpressed anger and sadness – that we often don’t acknowledge as they lie deep below the surface of our unconscious until triggered. Our families often take the brunt of these reactions.

However, this time of the year has another energy available to us. It is the Magical Beauty of Giving and Loving, the True Spirit of Christmas. I like to remind my listeners and readers every year that the Magic of the Holiday season is beautifully powerful. It exists because of the underlying energy available around unconditional giving and sharing. It exists because of the saying that is so prevalent everywhere: “Peace on Earth and Good Will towards Men”. I prefer to believe the use of ‘Men’ is a general statement that doesn’t reflect which gender we are and that this statement offers a Blessing for everyone. This Blessing forwards a prayer into the world that is sacred to those we love as well as to the planet and reflects an energy that we can tap into.

Gratitude and the Magic of the Holidays are similar energies that we can tap into if we remember and uncover the child-like innocence of our youth. When we can find the ‘gift’ in all our experiences and the Higher Purpose that is always present – or accept that there is a ‘higher purpose’ even when we can’t see it – we can tap into Gratitude and further the Magical energy of Unconditional Love and Sharing in the Holiday Season. When we can tap into the child-like exuberance of the innocence of our youth before love became conditional we experience similar energies.

To me it is about finding your inspiration. I’m often inspired by magical movies like Harry Potter (the first three movies before the series became darker), Fantastic Beasts, and Christmas themed movies (any time of the year). I’m equally inspired by the magical remembrance of a first kiss and falling in love or the love of a pet. Pets to me are very special. If you have never experienced the unconditional love of a pet before I would recommend it.

I encourage you to find your inspiration and Remember the Magic of the Holidays while BEing Grateful for all that is YOU. And remember that you can Share Unconditionally this Love and Gratitude from within to all that is outside you.

I wish you all the Happiest Holiday Season, full of Magic and Gratitude!

With Love and an Open Heart, Laurie

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This entry was posted in Blog and tagged Authentic Love, Clearing and Healing Techniques, clearing energy, Gratitude, Holiday Magic, Holidays, Intuitive Counseling, intuitive counselor, Laurie Huston, Love, Magic in the Holidays, Spirit of Christmas

Gratitude ~ Can you be Grateful for what you don’t want?

What is gratitude? I just finished listening to Abraham-Hicks video on YouTube and although I don’t particularly agree with their view that The Law of Attraction is the only law that governs our lives, they made a couple of interesting points I’d like to discuss. The first point is to ask yourself, can you appreciate what you don’t want? We easily see the value in appreciating what comes into our lives when it is something that we wanted but what do we tell ourselves about all of the rest? When you stop to reflect on this, you may find that behind each event or happening in your life you have created a story. For example, with almost everything in my life that happens that I don’t desire, I will find a way to add it to my “story” of abandonment. Whether it is on a friendship, intimate relationship or my relationship to money, it is added to my story in some manner. It can be different words, like being unsupported or feeling separate and alone, but it always adds to my experience of abandonment. So what effect does this type of storytelling have on our well-being?

Abraham-Hicks in their discussion on the LOA tell us that we are in control. I believe this is not entirely true. In our world of taking 100% responsibility for everything in our lives we have to remember that we are co-creating with 7 billion other people, and things do happen that are outside of our control. However, we are the ones that interpret what significance they play in our lives and whether we take things personally and what story we will tell ourselves about it. Once you have initially reacted to a situation, you can then choose whether you want to remain in the energy that you initially responded to and adding it to your story about what happened or you can choose to have a new response to an old fear. You could acknowledge that this is not something that has “happened” to me, but just something that has happened and I now choose to be grateful for this new experience in my life, for all the richness it has brought me. Sometimes is it very effective if we dive into our discomfort and lessen its hold of fear over us. Once this is accomplished, decide if it was something that just happened and change your emotional experience of it, or whether our ego is engaged and has made it personal and about US. When our ego makes it about us, it can be much more challenging to shift the discomfort we feel, whether that is rage, anger, frustration or fear. Ultimately, we each need to decide how to “feel” about all that happens in our lives. This is where I believe our control or being in charge lies.

So, back to my original questions, can we be grateful for everything in our lives and what is gratitude? Gratitude is primarily an emotional response to our life experiences, something we experience inside of ourselves that is a state of “BEing” and it is a way to show reverence for what we hold sacred. Often we are trying to control even gratitude by manipulating a situation, by dissecting it to figure out why we responded the way we did. This brings me to the other interesting point that I wanted to bring your attention to from the video. Abraham-Hicks used the analogy of laying new pipes instead of getting stuck in the endless cycle of dissecting every thought and belief we have (at 28min into video). I wonder if our decision to understand why, keeps us always searching for deeper meanings in all of our experiences. This exploration will never end, as it will lead us into deeper and darker areas of our lives. For those of you who have tried, first you look for it in this life then continue your search for understanding in your past lives. This becomes an endless cycle of searching, which prevents us from letting go and moving into a state or emotion of gratitude.

I think that even when something happens that we do not want, the secret often lies in seeing the benefit or to not analyze it all by allowing acceptance and faith that things just are. We try to manipulate everything to our definition of what we want. Instead of just BEing with what happens to us in a state of true acceptance and surrender. Gratitude has the ability to transform us and our situations to the ever elusive “surrendering” that we have been told needs to happen for us to move forward. If we can be grateful, regardless of whether is something we desire or don’t want, then we can truly let it go and lay new pipes instead of trying to figure out what is wrong with us or what we need to fix. (Please listen to the video if you want to understand this deeper.)

So, what are you grateful for, and can you be grateful not just as a mental exercise, but as an emotional response from the heart and also with your gut whose job it is to protect you? What tends to trip us up is that we often understand something mentally, but we don’t integrate it into the rest of our BEing. (mBraining coaching can assist you to fully embrace and come from a higher expression.) Gratitude at the very least needs to be felt in the heart!

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/gratitude