2023 In Review Using GLAD
Arriving at the end of another year invites us to focus on introspection and self reflection.
Rhythms and cycles are woven into every aspect of our lives, from the automatic rhythm of our breath as we inhale and exhale, to the continuous cycles of the sun, the moon and the seasons. We spend our lives entwined in these patterns, many times not exploring the power of consciously partnering with them. (And yes, this might be a teaser of a project I’m working on).
Using the end of a calendar year to reflect on your experiences of yourself and your life, the patterns, structure, choices and results, is a powerful tool for partnering with the ending and beginning of a new yearly cycle. It can also be an overwhelming exercise to consider, with thoughts similar to, “How do I review a whole year? I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning.” Finding a manageable and meaningful way to begin a self reflection process can be challenging.
2023 was a transformational year for me, and even though I have developed introspective and self reflective practices for decades, I was finding that reflecting on my year in a meaningful way felt TOUGH. I kept listing events and experiences, which was helpful in acknowledging the content of the year but it wasn’t supporting my goal to find meaning.
So I pulled out an OLD mindfulness tool; one I included in the first workshop I created years ago, Mindfulness 101. The exercise is called GLAD and is significantly beneficial for general mood management and specifically depressive tendencies. The exercise as originally intended suggests that you acknowledge;
One small experience you are GRATEFUL for that day
One small thing that you LEARNED that day
One small ACCOMPLISHMENT for that day
And one small DELIGHT you experienced that day.
It’s effective when practiced consistently because it broadens your perception of your experience and opens you to notice daily experiences that bring meaning and purpose to your life. I decided to adapt it as a way to reflect on my year. I stayed with the basic approach and allowed myself to be flexible about how I described each category. If I wanted to add it more for each or wanted to summarize a category by describing a theme, then I did that. Here’s a bit of what I came up with.
This year, what I am grateful for is the grounded awareness that I can trust myself to live within my values, even when it is painful to do so. That doesn't mean I make “right” decisions, rather it means that I can trust myself to both be responsible for the decisions I make and change course when my values indicate that I need to. The grounded awareness of that trust has liberated me to take more risks and to be more vulnerable, trusting myself to care for myself no matter what the outcome.
This year, I learned that the love we offer ourselves and others as well as the love that is offered to us, is what can make the difference between surviving unexpected challenges and losses and learning, growing and thriving through those same difficulties. Love as a force, filled in the gaps when I reached my capacity, it lightened my load when I could hold no more, it witnessed with kind compassion, my grief and it preserved my connection to hope.
This year I accomplished a business restructuring to align with my current needs and I was able to make real progress on a decades long whisper in my heart, what I’ve come to refer to as a heart seed, this seed was planted during 2023 and is currently growing. It has stretched me and unsettled me and excited me. As all heart centered pursuits tend to do.
This year I delighted in gathering my first crop of dahlia seeds from my own harvest. I delighted in a few spontaneous and fun trips that made my belly ache from laughing and my feet hurt from dancing. And I delighted in a few new relationships I cultivated this year that reawakened some dormant, neglected aspects of myself that I deeply love.
If you are looking to start a relationship or perhaps deepen your relationship with New Year’s reflection, using GLAD can support you in both broadening your perspective on your year while also helping you to find meaning in your experiences this year.
Looking ahead to what is beginning; in 2024 I’m looking forward to offering a 4 part talk series aligned with each season, the first, Harnessing the Power of Winter Stillness will be offered sometime in late January. Details about the event and how to sign up are on the way!
I’m also looking forward to so many additional creative projects both within the practice and in my personal life, and as always, I’m looking forward to walking alongside many of you as you rediscover your voice and reclaim the power of using it in support of all your selves, past, present and future.
I wish each of you a new year filled with deep authentic connection to yourself and others and real moments of joy as you continue discovering and rediscovering how beautiful you are in mind body and spirit.
Appreciation & Gratitude
As the practice’s theme this month is appreciation, I want to take this opportunity to dive deeper into the concept of appreciation, as well as how it intersects with gratitude. Appreciation involves the awareness, recognition, enjoyment, and full sensory understanding of the positive value of something or someone. This definition shows how important mindfulness is when practicing appreciation, because in order to have a full sensory understanding of why you appreciate the value of something, you need to be mindfully present. Appreciation is a skill set that is developed with practice.
Although gratitude and appreciation are often used synonymously, there are differences between the two terms. One of the most defining characteristics of appreciation is that it is a mindful action, felt in your body with sensory awareness. Appreciation is connected to sounds, smells, things we see that we find pleasurable, and the practice of appreciation connects us with this sensory data in our body. Gratitude is a perceptual habit built on the felt sense of appreciation, when practicing gratitude, you are connecting with the felt sense awareness of appreciation in your body and utilizing that to “think” about how to perceive your experience with a grateful lens.
When beginning to develop a conscious relationship with appreciation a great place to start is self-appreciation. If you find that it can be difficult to cultivate appreciation for others, part of that may be due to the need for cultivating self-appreciation. So often appreciation and gratitude are talked about in the context of feeling positive in regard to someone else, or something someone does for you, but those same principles can be applied to yourself. An exercise that can help begin the path of self-appreciation is when you find yourself with a moment to think at the end of the day, ask yourself, “What do I feel proud of today?” and “How do I experience the felt sense of that pride in my body? Is it warm? Tingly? Where is the warmth?”. Just like self-appreciation, appreciation of others is practiced similarly. Allow yourself some time to think of an event that day involving someone else like, a family member helping with the cooking that day, a friend buying you coffee, or even the bus arriving on time. These are all great calls to cultivate a sense of appreciation. Focus on the sensations of the appreciation, using sight, sound, smell, taste and touch as your guide. Appreciation of others can also be practiced by making it a priority to acknowledge when you feel appreciative of someone in the moment. It is important to remember that this action is a parallel to the personal appreciation exercises in that, highlighting specifics of why you are feeling that appreciation will help foster a deeper and more meaningful relationship with that person.
By regularly practicing appreciation you are allowing yourself to become more connected with what fuels gratitude. Because, once you have a felt sense of appreciation in your body, you can use that to consciously develop the mental habit of using a gratitude framework to pair appreciation with your perception of your experiences, both positive and challenging. Improved understanding of mindful appreciation also benefits your ability to stay connected in the present moment, even in discomfort. When you practice maintaining awareness of what you appreciate in your life you are also building a framework for your brain to stay in the moment and increasing your distress tolerance skills, which can also foster gratitude. Practicing appreciation and developing your understanding of gratitude not only yields benefits of positive feelings and increased optimism within yourself and others, but also has several health enhancing impacts on your mental health as well. Additional benefits related to practicing appreciation include reduced stress levels, increased life satisfaction, lowers the chance of experiencing burnout, improved sleep, lowers levels of cellular inflammation, improves resiliency, increased prosocial behaviors, strengthens relationships, and encourages the development of patience, humility, and wisdom. Ultimately, continuing to develop a conscious connection with appreciation will build a bridge to the practice of gratitude; which can measurably improve your relationship with yourself, your life and with other people.
What Does Support Look Like, Sound Like, Smell Like & Feel Like?
What does support look like, sound like, smell like and feel like?
This is a sensory based question I often ask my clients, because it moves them out of their head and into their body, into the felt sense of support. Typically, it takes them a minute or two, and even some additional guided inquiry by me to begin to open up to that part of knowing. It’s usually there, within them, they just haven’t yet acquainted themselves with it. Uncovering a felt sense of support is powerful because it can help you to recognize care, help and protection in your body before your mind catches up and creates a thought about your experience. The sensory data arrives first and when you que yourself to consciously connect with the sensory data you calibrate your guidance system in accessing support more attuned to your real time needs.
Here is a guided visualization exercise to assist you in developing a connection to your felt sense of support. All you need to begin is a quiet comfortable place where you can be undisturbed for 15 minutes and a little bit of willingness.
1. Find a comfortable seated or lying down position and begin to connect with your body by noticing your breath. Notice each inhalation and each exhalation. Notice the rhythm and process of how your breath moves and lives within you.
2. After a few moments of noticing, allow yourself to remember a time you felt support, support you offered yourself, or maybe support offered to you by someone else. The picture may even be an imagined experience of support, whatever arrives is enough and even just right to use for this exercise.
3. Now drop into your senses; what is the smell or smells in this experience of support? Is it related to food? A place? How does the support in this experience sound? Does it sound like music? A comforting voice? Sounds of nature? Really open to whatever those smells and sounds are and where you experience the sensations associated with those sounds and smells in your body. Next notice what you see? Notice the colors, textures and sizes of the scenery. What is touching you? Even what are you tasting? Follow the same process as above, not only noticing those aspects of sensory information but also noticing how you feel and where you feel that in your body.
4. Next allow yourself to use your breath to breathe in the felt sense of support, expand it as you deepen your inhalation and release any resistance to it with each exhalation. Spend at least a few minutes practicing this, until it feels less awkward and more natural to expand the sense of receiving support throughout your body.
5. Wrap up the visualization exercise by spending a moment in appreciation of the time and effort you just spent in embodying an experience of support. Affirm your intention to remain open to noticing the felt sense of support in your daily life.
Practicing simple visualization exercises like the one above, expands your ability to learn, how you respond to support, what support you may need in various situations and how to benefit more deeply from the felt sense of support.
Do You Have A Generous Mindset?
Do you have a generous mindset?
And really, does it even matter if you do?
Typically, generosity is thought of as how much are you directly giving to others in money and time. Are you donating to causes that you care about? Are you helping a friend by offering your time to listen or to help out with a specific task? If you answered yes to those, then you probably consider yourself to be generous.
...Is that the same as having a generous mindset though?
What I’m referencing as a generous mindset is a little deeper and less concrete (surprising coming from me, right?!) While a generous mindset may include giving financial assistance or giving your time to someone you care about, it's also about the lens or perspective you are applying to yourself and others’ in the experiences you find yourself in. A generous mindset is the framing you place around something or someone. This framing can take the shape of judgement, criticism, opposition, generosity, acceptance, understanding and empathy. It can also vary depending on who’s involved and what the circumstance is at the moment.
A generous mindset matters because it assists you in cultivating safe connection with yourself and others. Giving yourself and others the benefit of the doubt or generosity of intent allows you to stay present, reducing a fight or flight response and increasing empathy, compassion and curiosity, all of which are correlated with resiliency and general satisfaction levels in relationships. So in short, we want a generous mindset; it’s a valuable approach to life and relationships.
How exactly can you figure out what mindset is your default and how to develop more of a generous mindset. I’m going to outline a few key strategies to start you on your way to more generosity for yourself and those around you so you can begin experiencing a deeper connection both with yourself and with others:
Notice key internal dialogue phrases in response to unexpected outcomes? These may be phrases like “Of course she didn't follow through”(insert an eye roll with this one) or “Something probably came up, I’ll check in with her about my offer later”. These thoughts, when approached with curiosity can reveal habits of mindset.
Notice the stories you tell yourself to fill in the blanks as a situation is unfolding. These take the form of “He did that because he doesn’t care about me” or “I’m not sure why he did that but wow, that hurt” Noticing how you fill in the blanks, assigning intent to others actions is a wellspring of important information about your perceptual habits.
Notice if your internal dialogue and the stories you create disconnect you from yourself and others or help you to stay present and curious?
If you notice that your mindset tends toward judgement and criticism you can move toward a more generous mindset by:
Practicing acceptance and compassion. When you notice a mistake or misstep by you or someone else, substitute the fault finding and judgement “Everyone makes mistakes, how can I support myself or them in managing this”.
Responding with open curiosity, as opposed to assigning malicious intent when you notice you are offended by someone's words or actions, for example “I wonder what they are trying to communicate, let me follow up with them so we don’t create a misunderstanding.”
Considering how good you feel when you show up for others that matter to you and extend that opportunity to those around you that are emotionally available. If you are the type of person that instead finds themselves thinking thoughts like, “No one can help me, they don’t care” or “I don’t want to bother them with my needs”.
Learning to cultivate a generous mindset toward yourself and others allows you to deepen the joy you experience in connection not only with yourself but within ALL of your relationships. A generous mindset supports healthy communication, it helps to resolve conflicts and it improves our sense of deep belonging, all of which serve as protective factors for our mental and physical health.
Fireflies, Fear, & Freedom
Summer nights, when I was a kid, were filled with magic. Mainly so, because there wasn’t school, so that meant a later bedtime. It was light out waaaay after dinner, which meant a neighborhood kickball game until the street lights went on.
...And the grand finale of summer nights was the firefly show.
It always began the same way;
First a popsicle, then either a lawn chair or blanket, right in the center of our backyard, (because that was definitely the best seat in the house) and then watch and wait.
Before long the show would begin, it would build slowly, a little glow on the left, then another, then three or four in unison in front of me and before long it was a captivating light show that seemed to fill our entire backyard with magic and wonder. There was no predicting its start, the duration, amount, or the beautiful light patterns that were created night after night.
Anything seemed possible witnessing them, magic definitely seemed real.
Inevitably, I’d want to capture the magic for myself, which led to jars, strategies and hunting them. The more, the better. I generally caught some, and you know what. I almost immediately lost interest in them once they were trapped by me. They seemed listless, the glow was definitely dimmed, the magic all but gone.
Years later as an adult, I wondered about fear and freedom, where magic is and where magic goes to die, both in our individual lives and in our relationships. I thought about the fireflies again, realizing that for me, what motivated me to capture the fireflies was fear.
Fear of not having access to magic, fear of not understanding the beauty of freedom.
In acting from that fear, by trying to “capture the magic”, I actually robbed myself and them of the magic that is inherent in all of us when we are living in alignment with ourselves, our spirit, our purpose. What they offered in their authenticity and what died when I tried to contain and control it is the magic. Witnessing that magic in their freedom could model for me the power of witnessing my own authenticity, which actually is the way to move beyond fearful reactions.
It reminded me once again, of the wisdom in,
Let it come.
Let it be.
Let it go.
Within myself related to goals, interests, pursuits and in relationships with others. Staying grounded in the magic of flow, whether something is arriving or leaving, is always where the magic is at.