Gratitude, Abundance and Prosperity – The seed and the plant
We all want abundance. We all want prosperity. The key to open the door is as simple as gratitude—it shows you what you already have, how prosperous you already are, how supported you are by God and the universe where it really counts. And once you truly feel that in your soul, you open for even more to flow into your space of being. The stories we tell about our abundance now set the stage for what will come. Welcome to episode 18 – where we are going to talk about the seed of gratitude and the plant that grows in to abundance and prosperity.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
We’ve just been through the holiday season. Thanksgiving is a time when we focus, for a moment on what we’re grateful for, while Christmas, quickly on its heels is a time when we shift gears and start thinking about what we want – what gift we will ask for. With January we start planning for what we want to create that we don’t yet have – a flatter stomach, a promotion, more patience, something different than what you have now. I’m all for progression and forward movement, but I’ll let you in on a secret, before we get more, we need to appreciate what we have in the now! And that’s what today’s podcast is about, how gratitude leads to abundance. How being present in the now, and grateful for what is around you at this very moment, is the key to opening more peace of mind, more abundance, and greater prosperity. Let’s get started, because there are really good reasons why life will get a lot better if you make gratitude a constant way of being. Namely: It makes for the very happiest stories.
You’ve heard the saying “You have to know the bad to know the good?” The idea of contrast as a teacher is nothing new, particularly when it comes to gratitude. The moments when the sound track on our lives intensifies because the trauma and drama is about to get amplified is not when we are thinking “Oh yay! I’m about to learn something wonderful.” But, with pain comes the other side of the coin, which is the appreciation for when pain is not present. Let me tell you a story.
When I met death and he stood close enough that his breath was hot on my face, I was left somehow different. With his retreat he took me, with his bony fingers, past the point of the invincibility of youth. I arrived at a place of realization, a state of understanding limits in a way that had previously escaped me. As I lay, unable to move from the pain of broken ribs and punctured lung, fractured skull, deep puncture wounds in my arm, knee, scalp, a broken ankle and fingers, suddenly I was excruciatingly aware of the blessing of a whole body.
I used to rock climb multiple times a week finding a deep fulfillment in disciplining my mind and body to take me one step further than I’d gone before; to feel the rock, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, the finger pockets, the ledges, my aching legs and forearms, the chalk on my fingers and the sweat soaking through it – the adrenalin, the now. You trust your belay partner or you wouldn’t climb with them, so I never imagined I’d lie at the bottom of a cliff victim of human error, ambulance racing to my broken body. These are not the things we plan for.
I had weeks to lay and wait for the world and time to pass me by as my body tried to piece itself back together after the 100-foot fall. This provided thinking time and a profound understanding of a few things I took for granted.
Not being able to lie down or breathe well from the...
