Good morning, grateful souls,

This morning is cold and blustery, though bright, and I find myself coming in here looking to boost my mood. Rough weekend for me pain wise, especially yesterday. It was the worst I have felt in a month or so.

These episodes are basically like having a severe migraine, complete with nausea from the pain, sensitivity to stimuli, etc. only located in my lower back and radiating up and down through shoulders and legs instead of in my head and neck. Like migraines, it takes a bit to recover from them as it wipes you out.

I had felt like I was making strides with the new therapies, so it was traumatizing to have it happen again as the progress had encouraged me that maybe I was past this sort of thing. Not yet, apparently!

I am grateful for the increasing moments when I have actually felt no or very little pain since starting those therapies. That gives me hope, even in this struggle.

The pain episode coincides with multiple messages coming at me regarding forgiving my parents. Hmm. It would seem my inner child is not ready to do so! She screams through pain, and she was LOUD.

So today I am sitting with the emotions and the residual pain and nausea. I am allowing myself to be where I am and not push myself.

I know forgiveness does not mean allowing them access to me again. Yet some part of me seems to think I need intense pain as a reminder not to go back there again.

So I am working on asking myself what I need to feel safe enough to forgive those who will never see their need for forgiveness and see all as my fault. (That is part of their disorder.) I am so far from the Divine on this!

I am grateful to be able to sit here typing this, knowing the hearts in here are a soft place to land. And if anyone has forgiveness perspectives, I would love to hear them.

Many blessings on you all. I hope this was not too much of a downer post.

I found gratitude as a practice, this site, and some wonderful souls, while clawing my way out of what was probably the hardest period in my life. I was already pretty adept at finding the gift hidden in the mud, so to speak, having had rather a lot of practice, but I had never seen gratitude as a practice. Doing so gave it more focus, more intent, and better results.

In my case, it was the hardship and loss that drove me into the arms of gratefulness, and for that I am indeed grateful.

THenry, I recall a study of 20-25 years ago done at Georgetown Univ. Medical Center. It was on the effect of prayer on recovery. People were chosen randomly, no participants knew who was being prayed for or in what way, and there was no interaction. At the end, it emerged that, yes, indeed, the prayed for had recovered faster and better than the unprayed for!

I thought that was incredibly cool. ????

Of course, now they are delving into the idea of everything as energy affecting everything else, so maybe the idea seems less far fetched now than when the study was done. ????

That sounds wonderful, Nancy! I love to harmonize.

One thing we purpose to do once we move is to nudge ourselves to engage more in community. It is one of our goals, and a university town is a better candidate for that than where we are now, which is mostly made up of people whose families have been going to school together and intermarrying since somewhere around 1823. ???? I came here from an area that was always in transition and very diverse, so this had some culture shock for me.

Good morning, Ose!

Yesterday we had a snow-ice-rain mix that then turned to snow and much colder abruptly. It took my husband half an hour to chip his was through the ice to be able to drive to work. More is set to come Tuesday into Wednesday, which is probably the same storm THenry mentioned.

I love how winter colors allow us to see the architecture of a tree that is hidden when in leaf. Do you have sycamores there? Here, sycamores stand out in winter because of their bark. As they get taller, there is a stark white in the pattern that emerges making a multicolored effect that can be seen most clearly in winter. I was marveling at them the other day as my husband drove us home, though going too fast to take a picture, and thinking of you all in here.

Perhaps we, too, are like trees in that our inner structural beauty is best revealed in those wintry, cold, often barren feeling times of our lives.

How lovely, Ose. Primrose are so cheerful!

The shape of the petals is like how we drew flowers as children only flouncier. ???? It was easier to draw a heart or an oval connected to others, or a ridged bowl like a tulip. It helped ,me since I am not adept at drawing!

A book I found on drawing dragons shows the idea of how drawing is very much about drawing geometric shapes in new ways. Mine still did not look like hers, but at least no one said, “Oh, look! What an interesting cow!” when they saw my first effort at a dragon!

I understand completely, Amor fati. I am sorry for your pain and for Sharon’s as well. I find the return of pain and the fear of its return quite challenging. Nothing can send me spiraling quite as fast as intense pain or the threat of it.

I have been using gratitude practice for awhile now, adding meditation practice last fall, and then hypnotherapy. This is to retrain my brain and heal the trauma damaged neuro circuits. I am seeing positive movement, slow but there and giving me hope.