Write with TLC

When I read Johanna Garth's blog post,  What Do Writers Want?, and realized she was talking about her fear of failure, I was struck once again by how I fear success as much as, if not more than, I fear failure. I simply don't consider failure an option for the most part as long as I know I've given the best I've got to give. I commented on Johanna's page, but my comment didn't post for some reason. Perhaps that glitch was the universe telling me to pursue the idea formulating for my own blog post, so here it is. I blogged earlier this year about embracing my own strength, Good Little Girls, Don't Let Anyone Steal Your Strength , and the fear of success goes right along with what I said then. Actually, in a way, that article addresses my fear of success. I guess I didn't quite get the message because a reminder arrived this week. (You may recall I recently wrote about the little nudges the universe sends us...) I'm not exactly sure where my fear ...

This morning I grabbed a pillow from my couch, tossed it on the bamboo floor, picked up the remote, and turned on the fireplace that hardly ever gets used. I stared into the flames for a moment and knew what the impulse was telling me. I sat cross legged on the pillow, placed my upturned hands on my knees and touched my index finger to my thumbs. I took a deep breath. I thought "Gratitude! Gratitude! Gratitude!" Last year I did two to six minute gratitude meditations every morning. Sometimes I did them before I even got out of bed. Other times I did them sitting at my computer, petting Meme, and just breathing. Still other times I actually meditated on gratitude as I did some rote chore I'd done a million times. Sometimes I just found a quiet place to sit and sat. On a couple of mornings, my feelings of gratitude appeared without a conscious meditation. Each morning (okay sometimes it was afternoon) I posted one thing from that gratitude meditation as my Facebook status...

Yesterday completed my year in gratitude. This morning I woke up and started my gratitude meditation without hesitation. It was short but still... I logged on to Facebook and had to restrain myself from typing "is grateful for..." as my first status of the day. I know I can still post a gratitude statement if I so choose, and perhaps I will but I don't have to. And, I'm not sure how I feel about that. I will continue beginning and ending my day with gratitude, but I likely won't do a daily Facebook gratitude statement. I like what focusing on gratitude brings to my life. It makes me feel better. It brings me in touch with love. It reminds me of my inner power. It shows me what's good in my life and what could use improvement. This leads me to realize what I truly want from life. Embracing gratitude doesn't dethorn the roses, but it does help one decide which roses are worth risking the thorns. I begin a new writing project this month as I take my yea...

It's that time of year when people's thoughts turn to gratitude or as many are currently putting it thankfulness. It's nice that Thanksgiving gives people a reason, or perhaps an excuse, to turn their thoughts to gratitude. I find myself wondering why it takes a holiday to get people to appreciate the good things in their lives, but I wonder this every year. I still haven't found a satisfactory answer. At the beginning of 2011, well technically the end of 2010, I decided to spend a whole year focused on gratitude. I've blogged about this a couple of times before, but it feels like it's time to say a few words about it again. Maybe because Thanksgiving is today, and I'm having a harder time feeling thankful than I have all year. I know why and a part of me feels like it's completely understandable, but I don't like feeling like this. I prefer my state of gratitude. I really do. This year has had some strange ups and downs. My life has encountered ...

Yesterday marked the halfway point in my year of gratitude project. At the beginning of the year, I decided I wanted to live in a more positive place. I wanted to focus on the good in my life, fix the fixable bad, and let the rest go. I thought one way to do this would be to focus more on the positive things in my life. In the 1990s, I kept a gratitude journal of sorts. I would write in my journal and then at the end of that, write down a list of things for which I felt grateful each day. It helped me see that there were lots of things in my life to be grateful for, many of them very simple things. Over time as I journaled less, I also quit keeping the gratitude journal. I found myself growing more negative and focused on the problems instead of the solutions in life and in my writing. Last Fall I decided I needed to do something to change this focus, so I started keeping my gratitude journal again. By January 2011, I had some thoughts in place on what I want...