Cafe Gratitude - Episode 164
Who You Are
Hi there, I'm Terces and I want to take a moment and thank you for being a part of this podcast. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had started doing these 30-minute sessions and many of you have signed up, thank you for that.
It continues to be so rewarding to just listen to who you are, where you are in life, and to reflect back to you what I see about you. What I see is that you are so worthy, so beautiful, so deserving, so talented, gracious, loving, and kind.
It's wonderful and I've appreciated the opportunity to do that. You can continue to sign up for sessions. It's on a donation basis and you can learn more here.
So thank you I appreciate you and I'm so grateful for the time in particular the more kind of personal connection that I've been able to have with some of you. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Wisdom Through Recovery
Just a reminder that you know this podcast is really me sharing with you insights from my own journey, bits of wisdom that I've gleaned over the years of my thirty-eight years of recovery from twenty years of dealing with addiction, for me it was an eating disorder.
Again I don't have your answers, you do. But sometimes we can hear things in other people's stories that help us see something in our own story that gives us a little bit more freedom. A little bit more wiggle room and just encourages us on our own journey.
I love that I appreciate that, and it has me show up week after week for the possibility of that. So again, thank you for being here. Some of you are new and some of you have been with me for a really long time and I'm grateful for all of you. So welcome.
Cafe Gratitude
This is the final episode in the series we've been in, where I've been reading stories from my book. Today's story is called Cafe Gratitude.
After this week, I'll be returning to sharing with you day-to-day insights as my husband and I take on this new journey of building a new farm and developing a new community here in Northern Idaho.
This will be the last week that I'm in this log cabin, and maybe one more week actually to record one more episode next Thursday. We actually moved into our camper on the farm. So I'll be recording from a new place soon. Probably in our outdoor kitchen. Okay, so if you're following along in the book, this is on page eighty-two. It's chapter 52 the date is 2004. That's the year we opened Cafe Gratitude.
Celebrating
Standing on the opposite side of the street in the mission district of San Francisco looking at the lit cafe. The night before we opened our doors and I realized I had come full circle.
We were creating an opportunity for people to celebrate with those that they love without feeling guilty about what they ate or what they drank.
They would be able to toast one another with a healthy green drink served in a beautiful wine glass and stay present rather than slowly numbing themselves.
Our handful of new employees were taking on practicing being grateful no matter what the circumstances of their lives were, and being acknowledged as the leaders they had perhaps never known themselves as.
People would be coming in and just ordering a drink or something to eat while simultaneously affirming the best of who they are.
Something to Be Grateful For
It was my way of giving back what I had been given, and the lesson or the message at the bottom of this page says, "There is always something to be grateful for."
So first of all, I also want to share with all of you that I was 54 years old when we opened the first Cafe Gratitude. Which is now eighteen years ago, and so wherever you are in your life, it's not too late. You're not behind. There's still lots ahead of you. And even where I sit today, I can still see that while there's less ahead of me, I can still see that there's plenty to look forward to.
Remember that being grateful isn't based on our circumstances. Being grateful is a way of being that you and I can take on regardless of our circumstances.
Gratitude gives us access to living in Grace, which is the subline of my book, "Living in Grace by Choice". Gratitude is a choice. We choose to be grateful.
I don't know about you. But if you've ever traveled to a developing country, you can see people and children that have so much less that we do, and yet they're happy. They are joyful and they're oftentimes some of the most grateful people I know.
So, if those of us here in the West, where we have so much, could actually practice being more grateful, I suspect nothing would have a bigger impact. Especially on those that have less than us, being grateful for all that we do have.
As I've shared with you before, grateful people do different things with their resources than people who aren't grateful.
Giving from Gratitude
Take that on this week and then look and see how you can serve. How can you start to give back from what you've been given? How can you stay in that flow, that unceasing flow of everything?
Can you practice staying in the channel of exchange and being responsible for giving more, sharing more, letting more in, and stewarding more. The more we give also the more space that's created, that we're able to actually receive more.
If you think about that in terms of love the more you love, the more you'll experience being loved.
So as we wrap up this book, thank you for being a part of it with me. And I invite you to really take on this week, that the access to Grace is the choice to be grateful and see if you can't find all of the ways in which you can be grateful. Be grateful in the ways that perhaps you've never quite noticed before, and in that state of gratitude give generously. Give fully, give wholeheartedly, and have a beautiful week.