This past week my husband and I had the enormous pleasure and blessing of being able to visit our dear friends and fellow Work That Reconnects facilitators, Jaime Carral and Ana Karla Enriquez, in their hometown of Valle de Bravo, Mexico.
We first met Jaime and Ana Karla when they participated in my online Parenting in Tumultuous Time Program in 2021. Their effervescent enthusiasm for life and deep commitment to intentional parenting won my heart as soon as we met. Over the past few years they’ve been active in our growing global community of New Paradigm Parents and participated in the facilitator training I offered in 2022 to help parents in our group bring this work to their local communities.
This year they gathered a group of local parents they are close with and began to facilitate a journey through the WTR Spiral, reading my book together and using the practices I’ve designed for parents. During our visit, the group gathered for their session on Grounding in Gratitude. I got to co-facilitate the session with Jaime and Ana Karla, connecting with the parents in their community; crying, laughing and playing through our deep commitment to nourishing a thriving life for all.
At a time when the mounting crises of the world can easily overwhelm us into despair, actively practicing radical gratitude is an essential skill for New Paradigm Parents (or anyone else who is trying to maintain some semblance of sanity). This type of intentional gratitude practice deepens our reverence for the living world, awakens our vitality and strengthens us for the turbulence and challenges of these times.
For this session on Grounding in Gratitude we gathered in the sun with our feet in the green grass and started with a traditional WTR practice called the Milling, then we shared an Open Sentences in dyads to begin to tap into our appreciation. After some group discussion we entered into a gratitude practice that I developed for parents called Count Your Blessings!
This practice is based on the ancient and enduring wisdom that “where our attention goes, power flows.” Gathered around a central altar we share the joys of our parenting experience and celebrate our awesome children while decorating the altar with their photographs and other items of great beauty (in this case fresh flowers). The altar becomes more and more beautiful with each passing share as our hearts fill with gratitude. This practice gives us the opportunity to make the unseen seen. It encourages us to gather up all of the little (and big) blessings that we may typically take for granted and to breathe life into them with our conscious attention by making them visible.
To complete the practice we sang together, allowing the words and vibrations of Florecerá by Paz Shanti to penetrate our beings. “Floreciendo la conciencia, florece mi corazón…blooming (or flourishing) consciousness, my heart blooms”
Some of the brilliant insights that we revealed in our sharing together were…
The kind of gratitude that we’re practicing here is deeply radical. It includes everything; loss and pain, pleasure and delight, the experience of fully being alive and connected to life with profound authenticity. Not glossing over the complicated or difficult parts but really being present to the preciousness of each moment and each connection in awe, wonder and appreciation for all of it.
It requires developing real relationships not only with all the parts of life but also all the beings we share life with – human and non-human, seen and unseen. Becoming intimate with the web of relations that support our lives is a powerful antidote to the separation and isolation that causes depression, addiction, violence and systemic oppression. In these times it is an essential counterbalance to the violent forces that are causing so much damage in our world.
Rooting ourselves in this deep interconnection and modeling this way of living for our children can provide them with the internal resources they’ll need to navigate this complicated world without falling into these traps. It can also teach them to understand themselves within the vibrant living web of life and feel the joyful responsibility of lovingly caring for their/our relatives.
As parents we can stay motivated to do this on behalf of our children and future generations. We can be the example by modeling enthusiasm and appreciation for life through playfulness, curiosity and courage. When we engage parenting in this way we begin to understand ourselves as true elders; holding the long view of Deep Time and our sacred responsibility to care for life across the generations.
Practicing gratitude consciously in this way (especially with others) is a powerful key that unlocks the doors to connection with the vitality of life and the intelligence of the living earth.
This connection fills us with potency and shows us that we are stronger together; not only in the human sense as “the masses”. But in a Family of Life sense. Life itself is tenacious, vibrant, resilient, creative, regenerative and has continued to dance and adapt and endure through countless millennia while human civilizations and empires rise and fall. It is far more powerful than any human forces that attempt to work against it.
Aligning ourselves with the power of Life through genuine awe and intimacy allows that power to flow through us and flourish in the world for the benefit of all beings.
