Barbara Ford, an artist, singer, and seasoned facilitator of the Work That Reconnects, has created a deep dive exploration into the practices of Gratitude that are part of the spiral of of the Work. She offers a model for the creation of emergent practices that will inform those wishing to deepen their grounding and capacity to respond in these times of uncertainty and grief.

Barbara writes:

Radical Gratitude is a stance, a choice, an offering, and a practice. It can be scheduled, like a meditation, or simply arise in a moment of noticing. It can arise out of the familiar, or out of the utterly unexpected. It is available to us in any circumstance. It comes from our willingness to be present to grace on a regular basis.

By grace, I mean the deeply felt/deeply known awareness of our belonging to life.

By deeply felt/deeply known, I mean that we take our awareness beyond simple mental noting, into our heart, our body, our spirit, our intention.

I like to say that we need to take it down a few chakras.

We can explore ideas and practices to do just that- expand and deepen our relationship to gratitude, and thus our sense of belonging to the world. We live right now in a culture of dissociation on so many levels, leading to an epidemic of dissatisfaction and separation. Our consumer culture, in fact our whole economic system, is dependent on that dissatisfaction which fuels our perceived need for getting stuff- more stuff, better stuff, other people’s stuff. It encourages dissociation from our heart, our bodies, our creative energy, as well as the land, our food, our families, our communities, politics, and economic structures. In many ways, the major ills of our time- physical, social, political, and spiritual- are a direct result of this dissociative state.

Thus, paying attention is an act of resistance to a dissociative, dysfunctional culture. Re-inhabiting our life- our body, our heart, our creativity, our relationships, our communities, our earth, our cosmos- is done easily and joyfully through the practice of gratitude.

The practice of Radical Gratitude supports us as we move out into the world, for a being who is grounded in gratitude is capable of generosity, courage, and the resilience needed to be an active participant in the healing of our culture and our planet.

The video of the introductory overview of these ideas is here.

Plans for a 4 week deep dive webinar on Radical Gratitude are in the offing. For more info, sign up on  Barbara’s contact list at https://barbaraford.net