Have you had the experience of “waking up” at some point during your day and realizing you hadn’t been fully present until that moment? It can be startling and also clarifying, like when the optometrist clicks that just-right lens into place. Experiencing clear vision brings the realization that up until that point you’d been seeing everything blurry.

In this season of gift-giving, sharing, and generosity, we have an opportunity to practice gracious receiving. Receiving plays just as vital a role in the flow of abundance as giving. Instead of brushing off a compliment, a simple and sincere "Thank you!" fulfills and nourishes the exchange. If someone offers help, notice whether and where you feel resistance. See how it feels to accept the offer at face value without presuming any complicated intentions or consequences.

With Thanksgiving around the corner and the winter holidays looming, gratitude is in the air. And so is fear, anxiety, resentment, judgment...there is just so much fodder for intense emotions this time of year. It's a particularly great time to work with gratitude as a tool for healing. The more familiar I get with gratitude's energetic qualities, the more integral it becomes to my practice.

Myss uses the metaphor of a budget to describe the amount of energy we have for each day's demands. Another way to think about it is like a battery. We charge up our battery over night, and then during the day we drain it bit by bit. Certain activities use up a lot of charge, others less, and sometimes we have an opportunity to add to the charge. To increase our physical energy we eat and sleep and exercise. To increase our emotional/spiritual energy, we need meditation, inspiration, and connection. How do we know when our emotional/spiritual battery needs charging? When we're feeling irritable, low, anxious, and unsettled. Some of the biggest spirit-battery-draining activities we engage in run constantly in the background of our minds, like apps we forget to close.