The Daily G.I.F.T. from The GratiDude

Being the GratiDude is a Full-Time Job, I know, I got it. Sorry for slacking there for awhile……

There I was, at Kawha Coffee Shop the other day downtown, kicking it with an oat milk cappuccino and  listening to some old school Prince Buster on my Walkman Cassette Player. I was wearing a bucket hat and reading a book by David Byrne on music.

I was approached by a person I didn’t recognize it first, and then they put into context how they knew me and I remembered them immediately as Big Bad Hank from happy hour at Libbey’s on Osprey.

Libby’s was a stop on the way home that was super convenient and they had this incredible wasabi encrusted sashimi appetizer on happy hour and I would throw down a couple of quick fists full of vodka to wash down the fish, as I was only a mile or two from my house from there(I would rationalize, of course. Thanks Tito!). Hank was there just about every single time I stopped in as he lived very close by and that was his daily watering hole as functional alcoholic.

Everybody knows your name….until they blackout, ha ha!

I would stop in maybe once a week when I was in town and we had some interesting compelling conversations back in the day as two relatively bright drunks often do.

Hank is a great conversationalist with a really bright smile but it was clear by his appearance, that unlike Your Boy KC, he had kept drinking. His weight was the same along with the slight puffiness and redness of the face that goes with regular consumption.  He admitted as much.

We got to talking and he asked how was it that “I had it turned into the Benjamin Button of golf, reversing the aging process and becoming more beautiful daily(still maintaining a face for radio tho, ha ha)?”

He didn’t quite say it like that, but he was complimenting me saying I looked 10 years younger than 10 years ago.

I explained my 5 year Anniversary of my Tito’s Breakup was May, and that I had saved myself from myself by forgiving myself for all the shit that was never really my fault in the first place.

We got to talking about what was going on in our lives and it reminded me how easy it is to vacillate between being grateful and thoughtful and appreciative and slipping right back into a victim mentality and seeing that things are happening “to you” vs. just happening.

The super nice guy from Libbey‘s  reminded me of that and it was a great mirror image of myself and how my mind used to work while I was still drinking and I was not yet meditating every single day and getting in touch with my subconscious.

It was Yoga that cracked me, and especially the moments in between the series of poses that they call Shavasana or “Corpse Pose”.  Incorpse pose, your job is to remain perfectly still, and the only thing that moves is the only thing that separates us from the dead: our breath.

Once I started regularly laying in silence I became keenly aware of the tsunami of thoughts that existed that I was trying to ignore and drown out through alcohol consumption.  It was simply an avalanche of often anxious thoughts that you can’t ignore. It is like swimming in a mental riptide emotionally and mentally when you attempt to do so.  

The really important thing to remember is that those thoughts in your subconscious won’t just go away.

They are constantly playing and they exist even if you choose to ignore them. When they are ignored you still feel them as those unhealthy thoughts create interference and static that prevents you from receiving a clear connection to your higher-self, Nature, The Universe, God, or ANYTHING bigger than your ity bity ego.

When you participate in your own mindfulness practice, leveraging gratitude, you literally experience the building of the highways that produce happier thoughts.

This is not woo woo, or my opinion. This is just basic brain

plasticity working for us my fellow Humans.

For all of my adult life, I practiced gratitude daily and had daily mantras and affirmations around gratitude, however, I would also allow myself to have these extreme reactions of victimhood, fits of anger and daily indignation that were all just ego bullshit. I was truly living two different realities in my own head.

I can’t believe I was a part-time GratiDude!

That changed five years ago when alcohol left my life and I started to fill in all of the gaps in my every day life with self-talk, breathwork, meditation and gratitude practice. I could feel my mind becoming more clearly grounded in abundance as I stayed connected to my breath with greater frequency and my heart resting heart rate actually slowed down.

We have the ability to create greater predictability and more emotional stability in our lives so that calm becomes the de facto versus a rare respite or a once in a while experience.

When you understand a little bit about how the subconscious works and learn some tools around breath work and how to cultivate present moment awareness, you suddenly realize that you have a lot more control than you previously knew, and that you’re not a passenger in the mental and emotional vehicle of your life.

You are most definitely the chauffeur, my friend.

Slide on over adjust the seat accordingly, put on your favorite radio station and hopefully you’ve got some comfy clothes and shoes on, because we’re in it for the long haul going Coast to Coast on a Highway of Self-Constructed Happiness with an Attitude of Gratitude.

EVERY DAY:

Love

and

Gratitude

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