“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” - Anaïs Nin

On the final day of 2023’s #Gratitude30 challenge, we are invited to turn our gratitude towards growth. We are asked to consider how we have grown since this time last year and how we would want to grow in the future.

I will be reflecting on this for the rest of the year as part of how I prepare myself for 2024. I invite you to reflect as well.

For now, I know that this year has been a year of deeper self-understanding, which fits with this stage of life that I am in. I know that I have grown through and because of events and experiences this year. I know that there is still growing to be done.

How do we encourage ourselves to keep growing?

Susan Ashford, author of "The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth", shares four practices that we can use to grow from our experiences:

1. Stay curious. Approach important experiences with a learning mindset
2. Set a learning goal. She shares that there are three different sources of learning goals: pain in our present situation, fantasies of our future and phantoms of our past. Our learning goals are formed from wanting to create change, to work on or improve our situation
3. Experiment. Try new things. Observe what works and what does not.
4. Seek feedback (either directly or indirectly) to gauge your effectiveness and decide on adjustments

I hope that you make use of these practices. They remind me very much of yogic philosophy and svādhyāya. Everything is interconnected, many things that are the same show up in different spaces under different names.

Today brings us to the end of 2023’s 30 days of gratitude. Practising gratitude is one of the tools that we can use for our growth. As we take time to be present, to be thankful, we also take that time to be present and to connect with Self.

Whether you have followed these 30 days or are doing this practice at your own pace, thank you for being here.

~Renee Arundhati

*these posts are also being shared on my social media (Instagram and Facebook) as I have shared there over the past years.