Reflections & Practices: Offered by Shelley Ostroff

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These daily reflections and practices invite you to commune with the essence and vibrations of the theme of the day. As you engage with these essences you are invited to deepen the dialogue with the essence through spontaneous journalling, visual art, sound and movement inspired by the communion. The creative journey with these essences over the week offers a profound portal into the mystery and medicine of "Return to Essence".

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gratitude : An invitation to commune in a quiet space with the Essence of Gratitude and the Gratitude for Essence.

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• Invite into your field the essence of gratitude and notice the feelings, images and sensations that arise as you sit in the presence of gratitude. Connecting to your heart, reflect on what you feel grateful for in your life at this time? Allow images and words to arise as you deepen and expand your experience of gratitude. What arises in you as you give yourself  to the fullness of the experience of gratitude? 

• Sense into the different ways in which gratitude enriches your life and all Life. Allow yourself to offer gratitude to the essence of gratitude - perhaps through silent or spoken words of appreciation or even a spontaneous dance or song celebrating gratitude. How does gratitude feel, speak, sing and dance through you? How can you celebrate the many gifts gratitude gives to the world?

• Bring into your awareness something that you feel grateful to yourself for - a quality, a behavior, an accomplishment that you appreciate. What does it feel like to acknowledge yourself with gratitude?

• Sense into the creative power of consciously celebrating something or someone - of offering a loving mirror for the essence of another being. Sense into the generosity of seeing another in their beauty and reflecting it back to them.

• How do you experience the relationship of generosity and gratitude  ~ and how does this relationship manifest in your life? How does expressing and receiving gratitude cultivate loving sacred relationship?

• What are your inner perspectives and attitudes that nourishes your experience of gratitude? Notice patterns in your own thoughts and behavior that may hinder or support your experience of gratitude in your life. How do you tend to receive gratitude from others? Notice patterns in your thoughts and behavior that may hinder you or and those that support you in heartfully receiving gratitude expressed towards you? How would you like to honor and cultivate the experience of gratitude in your life, and in what ways this would transform your life.

• What are practices that can nourish your capacity to see through the eyes of appreciation, gratitude and wonder? Discover and create practices where you focus your attention and connect heartfully, essence to essence with richness and beauty of the world around you.

• Reflect on the mental, emotional physical, spiritual and energetic experiences and expressions of gratitude. How can this reflection inspire us as we consciously bring more gratitude into our lives personally and collectively?

• One by one, offer your loving attention to the foundations of Life, Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Climate, Biodiversity and the Web of Life. Bring into your awareness the diverse gifts each of these give you. Discover ways of expressing your gratitude to each of these as you discern and acknowledge their unique, diverse, essential gifts of Life. Offer this practice to yourself and to the human and other-than-human kin in your life. What comes alive in you in this practice? How can this practice contribute to personal and planetary healing?

• Imagine a culture that is rooted in generosity and gratitude? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do we consciously cultivate a culture energized by the creative force of generosity and gratitude?  How can the practice of gratitude and generosity realign humanity with  the mutually nourishing primary codes of Life? 

• How is gratitude a powerful guide and medicine in our journey of Return to Essence?