Being Grateful for Challenges

This week has been overflowing with blessings. On Saturday, I was fortunate to be able to participate in a gratitude yantra-making ceremony initiated by two extraordinary women – Rachel Zinman and Lauren Tober. Seven women gathered

Lisa Fitzpatrick, Ana Davis (Bliss Baby Yoga – www.anadavis.com) and Karen Wightman (Creative Yogis – www.creativeyogis.com)

together amongst the multi-coloured flower petals to decorate and celebrate the seven chakras or energy centres of the body. Each rose petal was blessed and infused with the breath of gratitude symbolic of the each chakra. The connection and deeply nourishing need we have as women to be working together, creating beauty and sharing can be easily overlooked. We have traditionally been the gatherers, the ones who home-make and forage and work in unison. Studies have shown that when we connect with our women kin we release serotonin (that feel-good hormone) that helps to boost our mood and give us our feminine radiance and vitality.

Hundreds of petals were sorted according to colour and then arranged into yantras. The beauty and profound power of yantra is a tactile, sensory experience of shape. Instead of using logic and masculine left brain awareness to create change, the use of yantra is a heart-centred and feminine way to access the subconscious mind to create deep healing and change through the use of shapes.

The seven chakra names were placed in a lucky dip and I was fortunate to draw Ajna, the chakra most people know as ‘the third eye’, the energy centre of intuition, insight and inspiration. Each and every petal was infused with breath and gratitude for all the things in my life representative of these qualities. I realised how thankful I am for the time intuition has guided me to make decisions, especially the life-changing and challenging ones. I am so thankful for the many inspiring women in my life: friends, clients and family. I am so grateful for all the lessons I have learnt from suffering in the past from depression, being divorced and having numerous other challenges because they have all bought me to this place of deep, enduring beauty. It’s not easy to sit in concentration, to be so disciplined that each petal is mindfully placed, but the endless well of gratitude is exactly that – endless and infinite with a resonance that lasts for weeks, months and years after it has been acknowledged.  What we focus on expands, and through focussing on these deep blessings we multiply them a thousand fold, like lotus petals flowering.

Baskets of Petals

Our day of yantra making happened to fall on Lakshmi’s birthday, the Hindu goddess of beauty and abundance. Lakshmi turns up where there’s beauty to deliver her abundance. Abundance can show up in a myriad of ways aside from money. The key is to be open to seeing it when it does show up.

This week, be open to the many visual impressions of beauty and abundance you see in nature. Take time to smell the petals. Take time to notice. Slip from the pointed action-mode of always doing and judging and instead take a mind-nap and relax into the luxury of simply being with something beautiful- a reflection of your inner beauty. Even if it’s just for a moment, it will keep your heart strong and centred. Then count your blessings, by thinking of five things you are truly grateful for. There’s no words to describe how important that is to your well-being as a woman.