My friend Carol Hinson sends out a daily email with a list of what she is grateful for and what she is attracting or manifesting.  I asked her to add me to her list because I so appreciate this way of starting my day and the simple pleasures that she includes. So with thanks and all due respect, I am going to include my own list here, with a few direct quotes from Carol.

Vipassana meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says that through meditation, we learn to alter the relationship between our consciousness and our experience.  What that means to me at the moment is creating more spaciousness in both my consciousness and my experience – the ability to see the spaces between the layers of whatever is unfolding.  Currently, I am meditating on the back of a horse.  I am letting the horse show me when I have lost my softness, my willingness, my openness.  Breathing room.  Feeling.

Several years ago, around the time of the 2008 mad crash of the economy, I studied Sedona Method Releasing.  I felt that I had to do something to save my life, my mind – to counteract the blinding fear and anxiety that was like a social contagion.  I traveled out to Sedona several times, and took coaching workshops there and in New York.  I loved it.  I still do.  So when a dear friend of mine was in distress, I thought of releasing.  There is a part of the method called “triple releasing.”  It goes like this:

1.  Welcome the thing/situation/emotion itself.  Then welcome anything attached to it:  feelings, images, memories, sensations in the body, stories.

2.  Welcome any wanting to do anything about or with it.  Fix it, change it, understand it, explain it, hold onto it, push it away.

3.  Welcome any sense that it is personal, any identification with it, any feeling that it is about you or who you are.

Then just observe all of that spinning – like clothes going around in a dryer or like a big whirling weather system.

Then ask if you could just let it all go, even for a moment.  Could you let it unravel, dissolve.  If you could look through it, what is beyond?

Then at an Al-Anon meeting last night, someone spoke of a friend from the program who had passed.  She described how this woman would  make an upward gesture of the hands when she spoke of handing something over to a higher power.  Seeing this gesture opened something in me – I felt a tremendous sense of relief and spaciousness.  As I did the gesture last night and today, I felt like that simple opening of the palms allowed all the closely packed mind-molecules of the situation with my daughter to spread and expand, creating space for resolution, for possibility, for me to breathe.