Each week in The Wisdom of Change blog series, I share the original artwork and unpack the insights and meaning behind one of the 44 cards in The Wisdom of Change oracle deck.
This week’s card is 43 Gratitude
I’ll own the fact that being told to ‘feel grateful’ as a way to manifest my hearts desires was triggering.
I interpreted the suggestion of feeling gratitude as a punishment. It reminded me of something I was told to do as a child when I was acting in ways that indicated I had forgotten how lucky I was. I didn’t like feeling like a misunderstood child of the seventies again, so as an adult, I petulantly battled against adopting an attitude of gratitude. I’d worked hard to get where I was in life and I believed that I was quite grateful enough for what I’d hard won for myself thank you very much!
No surprises then that I didn’t snatch up my pencil and fervently begin making entries into a ‘gratitude diary’ the first time I heard about this technique. Still smarting from the indignation that my vision boarding ‘hadn’t delivered’ for me (despite it taking up half my bedroom wall), I relegated ‘gratitude’ to the pile of self-help techniques that didn’t work for me and moved on.
And yet this darn gratitude theme just kept presenting itself into my awareness. Book after book, coach after coach, one self-help recording after the next extolled some version of the ‘get grateful’ message. Huh. They say if you hear the same message twice from different sources, you should really take notice, three times and seriously, you need to take action. Apparently, we stubbornly refuse to listen to what we most need to hear, and I had my fingers firmly in my ears on the gratitude front.
There is no quicker way to receive more than to acknowledge what you already have.
I’m not proud to admit it, but this first line on the Gratitude card had me at hello! In the spirit of what’s in it for me, this presentation of the gratitude technique finally caught my attention. Some things we just can’t wrap our heads around until our backs are against the wall. I was wanting something different in my life; something more and no amount of doing things the way I used to was working. I was looking to fast track my progress and ironically, the much longed for ‘turbo boost’ came when I embraced the theme of gratitude.
Gratitude, I learned, vibrates at a high frequency. When we want something we have not yet manifested, we are desiring something that vibrates at a higher frequency than we currently find ourselves. At this point, we are a vibrational mismatch to our desire, so we cannot yet experience it in our reality. Well, this was a new one on me, but I figured in the absence of anything else working, I’d give it a shot.
By the time I succumbed to an exploration of gratitude, I felt pretty down on my luck. The father of my children had left, I was struggling to pay my bills, let alone service my debts. I was working all hours, caring for two small children and grappling with the unknown territory of a new business. I was in a period of profound personal change and healing. There was deep learning to be had in my dating space, drama unfolding in my friendships and overwhelm threatened to take me down on a daily basis. Though I adored my clients, I was attracting towards me a similar level of malaise in their situation that I was experiencing myself (yep, like attracts like).
The thought of diarising what I was grateful for in all this chaos seemed at best counterintuitive and at worst, laughable.
And yet as I scraped around in the metaphorical ashes of my seemingly pitiful circumstances, I was moved to tears by everything I had missed by wallowing in the absence of gratitude. My newly embraced gratitude diary was rich with the beauty of the nature that surrounded me, the exquisite joy and sweetness of my children, the wealth of the insights that were changing my life, the rich lessons I was learning, the incredible clients that honoured me by trusting me with a part of their journey of change. I noticed the unexpected gifts that arrived with me on a daily basis; as simple as someone offering to make me a cup of tea, to a dear friend turning up with a truck full of logs for the fire that he’d foraged and thought I might need.
Little by little I became so steeped in gratitude that every day was nothing short of a miracle to me. As the universe in its wisdom mercilessly striped away everything I thought I previously needed, I no longer felt fear. Gut wrenching uncertainty was replaced with a deeply wry amusement that everything I had ever feared was coming to pass and yet I had never felt wealthier. That tiny seed of gratitude I had experimented with had blossomed into a deep well of inner calm. I had never felt more grounded in my power, more alive, more joyful and full of optimism and hope for the future. Suddenly I knew that no matter what, everything was ok, and it would continue to be so. More than that it was magical, beautiful and deeply transformative.
As I write, I’m smiling to myself at this reminder. What we resist persists and gratitude was not going to leave me alone until I’d experience what it was like to embrace it.
The wisdom of this card has me wondering where else I’m resisting exploring something I’ve been told about many times before.
I wonder if there is anything in this for you too 🙂
I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s connection to your inner wisdom.
As always, I’d love to hear your comments below.
If you’d like to learn more about The Wisdom of Change oracle deck you can find out more here.
If you'd like to find out more about a Wisdom of Change reading with Wendy please click here.