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Nov. 24, 2008 |
Daily Soul Retreat at SoulfulLiving.com |
Vol. I, Issue
491 |
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Heartfelt Gratitude Retreat
by Rachel Harris
 Heartfelt Thanks
Children move easily from feelings of gratefulness to love, to celebration with great enthusiasm. At the moment we see a child's heart overflowing with these feelings, we can receive a spiritual lesson in gratefulness.
If you were lucky enough to have a wonderful teacher in your early school grades, first through third, I'm sure you can remember something from her classroom--her name, the desks, the new boxes of crayons, the decorations, her smile. Can you also remember how you and all the other kids adored her, and how you were so grateful to have a year with her?
Ms. Bidler was just such a beloved first grade teacher. She taught for twenty-five years and was retiring at the end of the school year, so her class had to say good-bye to her not only for the summer but forever. As part of their good-bye ritual, the children made thank-you cards, not on the computer but small works of art, printed by hand.
The drawings on these cards were a child's version of the "Heartfelt Gratitude" retreat in which you do an emotional drawing of what being grateful feels like in your heart. The kids did this spontaneously; they didn't need the structure of retreats as we grown-ups do. As my client, Ms. Bidler brought the children's cards into my office to share them with me during psychotherapy session. It was exciting to see the love expressed so directly and to see how deeply Ms. Bidler was touched by them. The children's cards were all quite different, yet they shared an intensity and openness of expression. They were pure in their expression of loving gratitude.
This is the quality of the the emotional drawings called for in the "Heartfelt Gratitude retreat. This pure expression of gratefulness, even when it's a bittersweet situation like saying good-bye, is incredibly healing...
>>> Continue Reading "Heartfelt Gratitude Retreat"©
Copyright Rachel Harris, Ph.D. This article was originally
published at our website, SoulfulLiving.com, in November
2000,
as part of Soulful Living's "Gratitude & Giving" Issue.
Click to View Our "Daily Soul Retreat" Newsletter Archive
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"The feeling of gratitude opens the heart more than any other emotion except, perhaps, love.
As we practice feeling gratitude, we expand our heart's capacity to experience and express love and joy."
--Rachel Harris |
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