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Portal of Gratitude

written by Maggie Sale Ostara, PhD

Cafe Gratitude

What are you grateful for?

There’s a restaurant in San Francisco called Café Gratitude.  On all of their plates, bowls and cups is this question:  what are you grateful for?  The paintings through the restaurant (and also collected in the book and board game, “The Abounding River”), depict how differences in perception create different realities.  One in particular shows a woman wearing a set of glasses.  She is surrounded by a desolate landscape, but through those glasses she sees a sea of roses.

Gratitude is a portal to a sea of roses.

 “Abundance may be experienced by being grateful for what you have already received,” reads an old Sufi saying on one of the restaurant’s walls.

As one of my spiritual teachers has shared with me, it is the nature of consciousness to seek more consciousness.  Abraham says that it is the nature of the Universe to grow and expand.  The More Life Principle is that Life is always seeking greater expression.  All this is great.  AND sometimes it means that in our desire for expansion, we forget to appreciate what we already have!

What have you received that you have not fully appreciated?  Take a breath, slow down, and notice.  What is present for you, right now, in this moment, to which you can turn the light of your attention and appreciation?  Drink it in.  Allow the cells in your body to open to this awareness.  What do you notice as you do this?  What begins to happen inside?

Your Soul loves to be incarnated, here on the earth, experiencing life with and through you.  Your Inner Being or Soul Self relishes the smell of rain, the beauty of a flower, the touch of lover’s hand, a child’s smile, the majesty of a mountain.  The divine within you walks in appreciation and gratitude in each moment.  Gratitude for you, gratitude for life, gratitude for the All That Is.

And gratitude, too, even for things that your personality self turns away from, disapproves of, would rather do without.  Like when your technology goes awry.  Or a client backs out.  Or you need to get on the phone because you need to generate income to pay your bills this month.

Because this, even this, is part of the miracle of life.  Because everything, everything, everything is for your growth and your learning.  Neither good nor bad.  Just is.  Stop fighting.  Stop struggling.  Stop judging yourself – and judging others.  Be with what is.  Then just take the next step.

Notice your habit of focusing on what is not here. On what you think should have happened but didn’t.  And how you then project that disappointment out into the future.

Expansion and contraction are part of the cycles of nature.  And when in business if you can view this as growth and integration/consolidation you will experience these cycles with more ease and grace.

Breathing in and breathing out.  The gift of the breath.  The gift of Life.
The gifts of growth, experience, and expansion.

What unfolds before you as you open the Portal of Gratitude to experience life through the perspective of your Soul?  What do you see now when you look through your eyes with your Soul’s appreciation?  The portal is always standing at the ready. And when you open and walk through, desolation turns to roses.

And your business expands as you open this Portal of Gratitude.  And even more when you extend to yourself, for yourself, for your own experience of life, for the gifts and talents that you bring, for all that you do and Be.

Only one ever of you.  In any time-space reality.  Only one precious brilliant You.

I am grateful for You.

I have a gift for you that will help you to experience abundance and gratitude immediately.  I’m giving you access to a teleseminar I did on Money Belief Relief, which includes a practice that you can use right now, and repeat as needed and desired.  Click here to access Money Belief Relief.

This is my way of saying THANK YOU for being a part of my Tribe and my Village!  I am so grateful for you, for the opportunity to connect and provide service and value to you.

Maggie Sale Ostara, PhD left her prestigious job as the Director of Women’s a Gender Studies at Columbia University when she realized she’s not built to work for anyone else. Since then, Dr. Ostara has become a Certified Human Design Specialist (Level 4), a Certified Clarity Breathwork Practitioner, a highly sought after teacher-mentor, who teaches high-achieving women how to develop their personal sovereignty, to activate their super powers, and to unleash themselves from society’s prescription of success.

She’s the creator of the Soul Signature Self Awareness Project, the Wheel of Power of the Visionary Entrepreneur, and over 20 educational programs focused building soul-inspired businesses that positively impact the world and taking command of your life through personal sovereignty. She’s hosted 5 multi-speaker online conferences, and spoken on over 15 such conferences reaching audiences of over 200,000 participants.

With two decades of experience supporting 20,000+ students and hundreds of clients through her online programs and conferences, Dr. Ostara teaches how to avoid overwhelm and burnout, how to make reliable decisions, how to create a bigger impact with less effort, and how to transform inner liabilities into powerful assets and allies.