A daily magical practice to enhance your life

The Magic gratitude challenge we set ourselves was such a great experience. 

It all started with me buying the book on impulse while browsing in a bookshop (my favourite places are bookshops especially if they have a cafe as well!) . I'd read The Secret and The Power (by the same author) and heard The Magic was based on gratitude exercises so thought it would be fun to try. Also although I was paying more attention to feeling more grateful for things around me I was also keen on trying something more focused and really learning more about how gratitude underpins abundance and manifesting the life of our dreams.

It wasn't always easy to make time for the 10 grateful things we needed to list each morning. I did miss the odd day but always caught up the day after and really, some exercises were worth spending more time over. Particularly the one focused on financial abundance ;) .

But what was really interesting was having to think about the reasons why I felt grateful - because that action made me feel even more grateful! It's important to feel it too, not just say the words. Feeling is everything because this fills your energy field with positive vibrations and therefore helps you to attract more things to be grateful for.

The other useful learning for me was to focus on gratitude at both ends of the day - holding my magic rock before I went to sleep meant I went to sleep feeling good and then started my day filling it with gratitude. What could be better than that?!

One of the exercises I found really powerful focused on feeling grateful for our physical body - from thanking every organ and cell to all the systems in my body that work so hard to keep us alive (life is such a miracle :) )  yet we pay so little attention to our body until there's a problem and we experience discomfort or illness. Or sometimes we're only concerned about the bits that show - what we think we look like to others,  which is so caught up with our self concept. 

Each day's practice builds upon the last and gives you another way of looking at the way we live and what we so often take for granted.

I do recommend using the book as a guided practice to explore the many ways we can find things to be grateful for.   It may unearth some hidden demons which appear for us to let go of but also taps into the powerful inner wisdom we all have access to - so stick with it!   

This is powerful. 

This stuff works.  

It will change your life for the better :). 

Shirley x

~~~ Riding each wave ~~~

I saw something yesterday on TV, a line from a film I think. Something along the lines of 'family holidays are supposed to be chaos'. Which happens to be very appropriate because we have just returned from a trip with the kids to sunny, humid, boiling, wet, amazing Florida!

It's really the only place we've ever wanted to bring them and we debated over whether to come with them so young or to wait. It turns out there's plenty for all ages there and as long as you're prepared to work with their ages and what they can cope with then it's a wonderful experience for everyone!

Even with all this in mind we've had a few stressful moments too. Some involving the kids......some involving getting *cough* lost...! But what I've realised is that at points we were expecting way too much - from the kids and from ourselves. No holiday is perfect no matter the age of your children or whether you are travelling with children at all. It's supposed to be an adventure and on any adventure things will go wrong at times. So many things will go right too! Like meeting your favourite Star Wars character or finding that a queue you were expecting to be 30mins is actually only 10!

And as with everything else attitude is so important. You get back what you put out there. I really believe that. Our flight home saw no sleep for me & a bit of an upset 9 month old at times who just couldn't settle. It's hard...he loves to lay down in bed! My only thought was how bad I felt for the other passengers, there was just nothing I could do to contain his noise on there. He is such a loud, happy, chatty little man who has been adored by so many people all holiday! But you know what? I was met by nothing by lovely, supportive people telling me what a great job I was doing & how the kids had all been brilliant. I can't tell you how much that empathy boosted me. It turns out that people know what it's like. I love that compassion in human nature ♡

Because we're all here, trying to do our best & that's all we can do :-)

Gemma xx