“I feel like I did something wrong,” my client, Sarah, said. “I tried and tried to think myself healthy, but somehow I ended up back in the hospital! I don’t understand!”
She had recently come home from the hospital, after being seriously ill. She wanted to feel better, and was trying to will herself to be better. But one evening, she knew beyond a doubt she had to go back. And so she did.
As her story unfolded, she shared that one evening her husband left, she was feeling a bit sorry for herself. Flipping through the channels on her TV, she came across Joel Osteen, a well-known minister, giving a sermon.
“Bloom where you are planted, “ he said. “Appreciate what is going on around you right here, right now. Trust that you are exactly where you need to be. Be happy about it. Give thanks for everything you can see. Offer your faith to God that your life is just what – and where – God needs it to be.”
She said she felt he was speaking directly to her. In that moment, she relaxed. She stopped trying to will something into being. She just decided she’d appreciate what was going on in her life. She decided to bloom where she was planted.
And so she began, “I’m grateful for the drugs I’m getting. I’m grateful for the nurses. I’m grateful they are figuring out what’s wrong with me. I’m grateful for the care here in this wonderful hospital. I’m grateful for how clean it is here. I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about taking care of anything. I’m grateful that my husband and my sons have come to see me. I’m grateful that I’m so loved.”
And in her relaxing and just “being,” she began to heal. She began to get better very quickly. Within a few short days, she was well enough to be released.
When we talked later, she shared this story with me. She wanted to understand why she hadn’t been able to will herself into being better. And even more, she wanted to understand why she hadn’t been able to avoid it to begin with.
She told me how she had been upset with herself for getting so sick. She couldn’t understand why she had done this to herself. She was healthy, she had a good relationship with her husband and her sons, she had sufficient abundance. What was going on?
I suggested that maybe she didn’t need to know right now about the “why” of it. That, perhaps more than anything, her job was to do just what she learned in the hospital … to simply appreciate what she had right here, right now, and let go of her desire to know why it all came about. And to trust that the “why” would be revealed in time.
Hearing this softened her. She was able to return to a soft state of allowing and trusting, and let go of needing to understand all of the bigger reasons, which often don’t show up in our lives until time has passed.
The irony here is that in the appreciating of those around us, and appreciating the things that are going right and well in our lives actually gets us more of what we want. It acts as a magnet for us to see more – more wonderfulness, more health, more joy, more love, more abundance. But we have to do the work of appreciating. We have to do the work of being grateful.
Our work is to get out of our heads and into our hearts, to stop trying to figure things out and to stop worrying about them. Our work is to just simply be.
Be gratitude. Be appreciation. Be love. Be joy. Be humor. Be peace. Be kindness. Be compassion. Be grace. Be abundance.
Because it is in the being that we then are in the space to manifest what we want. More health, more joy, more peace, more love, more abundance, more ideas, more happiness.
And that is what we all want.
Your Action Steps
1. Look at your life and answer these questions:
a. Where are you spending time and energy?
b. What are you worrying about?
c. What are you making yourself wrong for?
d. What can you appreciate right here, right now?
2. Decide you will start appreciating your life – even the little things that believe me, if you didn’t have, aren’t so little … like your feet carrying you around, or your fingers picking things up, or your teeth for chewing.
3. Say “Thank you!” to everything you can see and to everyone you see (even if you say it in your heart and not out loud).
4. Choose today to be grateful. This moment, right here, right now. Be grateful even for something that you are struggling with. Be grateful for the parties involved. Be grateful for the challenge to learn and grow (because you are learning and growing through it!). Just say “Thank you!”
5. Have fun with it!