From Grief to Gratitude: The Practice that is Changing my Life

Hello Earth Angels!

I am wishing you a blessed April and hope you are finding joy in the beauty of Spring. Stay tuned to the end for a new gratitude practice! 🙏🏻

I wanted to share my experience of practising gratitude during grief with you. I hope that in sharing this we can all reflect on the unexplainable power of gratitude in our everyday lives, no matter the circumstances.

You may or may not know that me and my lovely husband Ben have recently experienced significant loss. As sadly most of you will know when you experience loss, the grieving process happens by hook or by crook.

We both tried to run away from it, to pretend everything was fine, but as it always does, grief just found us in any moment of rest.

I don’t need to tell you about the pain or grief, we all know it far too well and we all know that it doesn’t ‘pass’ but it does eventually become ‘passable’, allowing us to live our lives again.

A friend asked me recently how I was finding positives in each day and how I could make jokes and smile. At first I didn’t know the answer, but then it hit me like a lightening bolt: Gratitude.

Somehow, in the chaos of grief, we found gratitude.

It started off as gratitude for each other, then it was gratitude for getting through my operation safely, gratitude for being allowed to go home, to eat, to have each other. As with most good things, the more we accepted the presence of gratitude the more it grew.

The stand-out gratitude moment from March was the incredible cheese and pickle sandwich a lovely nurse brought me with a cup of tea a few hours after my operation after a day of fasting!

There have been days where I have been angry at my feelings of gratitude - why should we be grateful right now? So many people aren’t and they still get everything they want… that may be controversial to say but sometimes it feels true.

Before I really took to my spiritual path I struggled with gratitude. I had been brought up to say ‘thank you’ but I didn’t understand that gratitude was much more than that, that it was a feeling, a knowing.

Then, in the time in-between then and now, the Universe had unknowingly created a space for me where gratitude flowed…apparently even when everything was falling apart.

So, no matter what is going on in your life, I wonder if you can find just one tiny thing you are thankful for? Start with the roof over your head or the clothes on your back and move from there.

Our journey into grief hasn’t long started and of course this hasn’t and won’t ‘cure’ it, but I can tell you wholeheartedly that gratitude has made it bearable.

Each night at 20:20 I’ll be sharing a gratitude exercise over on my Facebook page. It will ask you to find the best thing from your day, no matter how lousy your day has been. I’d love you to join us in raising our collective gratitude by adding yours.

Lastly, I want to express our deep and heartfelt gratitude to you for your kind words, healing, hugs and support, we feel so very lucky to have you.

Love and light always!

Chelsey xx