thank You: embodying gratitude
As the season changes from blistering hot days to sweater weather and from iced teas to pumpkin spice everything, soon we’ll be stuffing turkeys and gathering with loved ones for the Thanksgiving holiday. The occasion calls for reflecting on areas of appreciation centered around gratitude.
Gratitude is a practice of finding appreciation for the goodness and fullness that shows up in your life regardless of circumstances. It is a healthy way of expressing affection, managing stress, and processing big changes.
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staying in your lane: trusting your process
There are two types of comparison: one that builds you up and another that tears you down.
The one that builds you up is a source of inspiration + motivation to know that you can do it too and also believe that you can do so much that you begin to take the steps to get there. It’s an attitude that embraces the journey over the destination. This version of comparison inspires you in such a way that you are able to begin believing in something more for yourself. It’s one that acknowledges the discipline + devotion that it will take in your personal journey. It’s one that plays for a team + celebrates one another’s success. Afterall, queens straighten each other’s crowns. Balance is embraced, maintained, and upheld with strong boundaries in place because it’s not a question of if, but when. It’s a faithfulness in your foundational spiritual relationship with Him – a placing of your assurance in Him knowing full well that He always keeps his promises.
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breathe here now
By dedicating time, energy, and attention to the breath, there are numerous benefits to your overall wellness. When you breathe, you learn to exercise your mind just like you would with your muscles at the gym. Doing so builds a greater capacity to focus. This is because when your mind is wandering, the thoughts you have are essentially traveling through time: to the past or the future. Too many thoughts in the past is attributed hand in hand with feelings of depression, while too many thoughts in the future is to be in anxiety. In moments of anxiety, there is unease about future outcomes – oftentimes having to do with situations + outcomes beyond your control. Research has shown that experts of meditation + breathwork have a greater capacity for observing these thoughts over reacting to them and that they encounter mentally stressful situations as less unpleasant in sensation.
You can recall and remember the past. You can envision and dream of the future. However, you can only breathe and live in the present right now.
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on track for victory: disciplined for greatness
Discipline is a practice of preparation and its effectiveness is best proven in the fruits of provision. And it’s those fruits of provision that are meant to be shared as a blessing to others…
When you get in the water, you have to keep cycling your legs to stay afloat. When you want to stay warm in the wilderness, you have to keep rubbing your hands together for warmth. When you go fishing, you have to keep waiting for something to bite. Discipline and the willpower to persevere in the midst of challenges is what keeps you alive, joyful, and abundant.
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inside out: puzzling through emotions
Happiness is fleeting. Joy is eternal. Happiness is circumstantial, joy harnesses the capacity for hope in the presence of pain. Anytime you say you are fine when you are not, you are suppressing how you feel. All too often, suppressing emotions finds destruction in distractions. Expecting and/or claiming to feel happiness when you do not is like knocking on a door when there is no one there. If you’re not there, how can you expect to get back into a place of joy if there is no space for other emotions to exist?
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here for you: presence in present
Have you ever felt just out of it? Like everything could be going swell and yet it’s like all the things that sparked joy seem a bit duller. Energetically lethargic, mentally unchallenged, and emotional spaghetti.
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hearing or healing: did I get that right?
Once you start to enter into a negative thought loop, I’ve found that you’re not only thinking negatively, you’re then more susceptible to begin listening in a negative way. How you respond to stress is the result of a complex, nuanced knot of long-held narratives, belief systems, and ideologies that have shaped your experiences and ultimately– how you may come to view yourself.
Someone’s well intentioned compliment may unintentionally come off as a slap in the face if it happens to hit on a core insecurity or wound more deeply rooted in trauma. A friend sharing an experience could get taken as a personal jab if there’s a difference in lifestyle and values. Someone else’s dreams could seem like a threat when you’re not going after your own. The list goes on.
The Spirit reminded me that this is the difference between listening and hearing. That there’s one distinct letter delineates the difference between whether we’re hearing with an open heart or merely listening from a heart that is bleeding and still healing.
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It’s not me, it’s You: hands that serve
Life happens and sometimes the best response in moments of trial and tribulation is to just let it. Anxiety feels like fear because it means there’s a lack of control rising up. To worry about it is to lose your focus. Jesus tells us that worrying is a waste of time because it’s expending energy over things that you cannot control and only He can.
You can get around the false promise of grind culture by inviting His space + stillness through surrender and meeting yourself with grace. Surrender is a requirement when you notice your agency + freedom depleting or when channels that were once open + unifying now feel closed + divisive. If you’re caught up in burnout, it’s supportive to remind yourself that everything that you are experiencing at this moment is building stronger fibers for His larger plans over your purpose.
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Your yes is your no
Being down and out of commission for two weeks was a blessing in that it reminded me of a very important value of this very company to make space to rest + play. Just the other day, in scrolling through Instagram and being enticed by the ads along the way, I ended up downloading a game called Block Blast.
In Block Blast, you drag and drop blocks of different shapes and sizes to form rows and columns. The objective of the game is to clear the rows and columns through making these lines and combinations. Think Tetris in a more confined space. Rather than being constrained by time and your shape formations hitting the ceiling, you have limited space and so if your block shape does not fit in the limited space you have, it’s game over and you can start with a fresh new game.
Truth be told, I was initially pretty hard on myself for “wasting” several hours playing this game after I had just written out a long list of to-dos to be done before the end of the weekend. And then the Lord ministered this message over me to share with you too.
The Holy Spirit gave me this message for anyone feeling blocked from their blessings.
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Why the stillness can be maddening
That’s stress for you. When your mind is in overdrive, your body will have a difficult time relaxing even when you’re tired, drained, exhausted. AND, if you’ve experienced traumatic episodes and/or environments, your nervous system is likely dysregulated and has a heightened capacity for dealing with unhealthy stress.
Despite my mind’s stubborn insistence to “power through” by plunking away at my keyboard or hammering away at a big project, I have found time and time again that taking this course of action does not always yield more productivity.
The reality is that there is productivity in movement and in rest.
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