Excerpt by our partner and friend, Hillis Pugh
My story is one of how I learned to be grateful. The spiritual path that I am now on started because of how I learned about gratitude through personal life experience.
The foundation of gratitude was laid in the year 2006. It was in this year where I was laid off from my corporate job and had to find new work. I took some time off before I began my search. I contemplated for a while about what I wanted to do next in my life. There were underutilized skills and passions that had gone unexpressed. It was at this moment of contemplation where I decided to start my own marketing and graphic design business with a friend.
This business was my livelihood, there was so much joy in tapping into a new sense of self. For two years, I helped small businesses see the value of themselves and their products. It pushed me beyond my limits. 2008 started to approach and I then felt a shift in the economy and my clients. Slowly my clients were lessening their involvement in my services, which at the time was considered a luxury for small businesses. I then took a part-time job to help supplement my income. The well was drying up and I didn’t know what to do. Not only was the well drying up, but a romantic relationship was also ending. I felt all was crumbling around me with no clear way out.
I sunk into a depression. The business was done, relationship over, rent due, bills piling up, and barely making ends meet with my part-time job. Being taught to find a way on my own, to make a way, but no one tells you that when you are in a low place, that all you can see are mountains making it nearly impossible to reach them. I was full of pride. Somehow, I found a way to put the pride aside and summoned the courage to ask for help from family and friends.
Family always knows when you need help. When I asked my family for financial help, it was given, and times it was given when not asked for, but knew it was needed. I felt the tide turn in my favor. It was Thanksgiving 2008 and this is when I learned the truth of gratitude.
Upon reflecting on 2008, I paused to realize how important it is to put your pride aside and ask for help, but most importantly the love and support of family and friends to assist me emotionally and financially was invaluable. I was then able to see the same value in myself as I was showing my former clients. I learned that gratitude was not just a once a year event, that it could happen every day. When I woke the morning of Thanksgiving, I wrote a long email to family and friends expressing my gratitude for their love and support in the past year. I didn’t expect any response. Yet the responses I received moved me to tears. This was only the beginning of what was to come.
The responses I received motivated me to share more of what I was grateful for in my daily life. Everything from running water to finally getting a job. The expression of being grateful opened me up to feeling better in my life. I began to share emails about what I was grateful for. Seeing the little things in the everyday life by giving power to them, all the little things once ignored.
By understanding the power of genuine gratitude, I learned that family, friends, and Source, will always give you something to be grateful for. See the gratitude in the everyday. As gratitude is just the foundation to much bigger things. As my own personal lessons have guided me to be a teacher, speaker, and author of gratitude, psychic, soul mentor, and energy facilitator.
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