planting a thanksgiving tree
As some of you know, I am currently teaching a Creating Abundance class. This class is going extremely well. By the second week, one student has tripled her business, another has reached a sales goal she’s had for a long time, just to mention a few of the successes that have occurred.
I have also been noticing very cool things happening for me as I teach this class, which is based on material developed by a great mentor and former teacher Tish Fleming.
As in any class, there are those assignments that really speak to me, those I understand right away that I will benefit from (and have a pretty accurate sense of how I will benefit from them) and those about which I am more ambivalent. One of the latter exercises was called 'Thanksgiving Trees.'
Gratitude has been getting a lot of buzz in the mainstream media. From Oprah Winfrey’s passion for keeping a daily gratitude journal, to a segment in the popular film 'The Secret' emphasizing the importance of daily gratitude, the message is clear: it’s a great thing to be grateful.
But the Thanksgiving Trees exercise takes gratitude one step further.
I admit that the first two times I took the class, I didn’t take this particular class assignment too seriously. Perhaps it was because the handout for Thanksgiving Trees looked like a page out of a child’s coloring book, complete with smiling cartoon characters.
But the third time I took the class, I noticed I was resisting doing the exercise. And since I know that resistance is a big clue about what I need to explore, I decided to do the exercise, just once.
I made my nightly gratitude list. Then I chose one item from that list to 'spotlight.' It just so happened that I had the perfect item to use for this process.
That day, during a poetry workshop I taught for middle school students, another teacher complimented me on my presentation and the way I interacted with the students. I thanked her for the compliment and felt good about it for a moment, then quickly forgot about it…until that evening as I prepared to do the Thanksgiving Trees exercise.
And it wasn’t until I used the Thanksgiving Trees process to magnify this small exchange, that I was able to truly appreciate the significance of what had happened and own that compliment as a sign from the Universe that I was on the right path, doing the right work.
The process is simple. Start by listing 5 – 10 things you are grateful for each day. Allow yourself to fully feel the gratitude for each experience. Then pick one item from your list to magnify, or spotlight. Usually, for me this item is one that I suspect may be hiding MORE joy, beauty, love and wisdom underneath its surface. Ultimately, it’s the thing on the list that I have the strongest feeling about. Trust your intuition in determining this.
The first step in amplifying this gratitude is to write out what happened.
Then answer the question 'What did I learn from this?' List three things you learned.
Once you’ve done that, answer the question “How did this make me feel?’ List three positive feelings that occurred in response to the event.
The theory—which has been proven right time and time again, by myself as well as other class participants—is that when we identify and magnify the feelings we want to have, we become more magnetic to other things that will give us the same feelings. Simple, huh? This is why gratitude works!
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My next Creating Abundance Class is coming up in January! Stay tuned for more information.
Don’t want to wait until then to Create Abundance?
Call me at (619) 275-1731 to schedule an Attraction Plan Session!
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