Daily Gratitude: This is a process but an important one. As 2025 draws to a close, why not practice going through the doors of your mind?

Scary huh?

Yes but it’s totally worth it and jt becomes so clear when you reach the other side. If you actually can reach that point at least once, the joy you experience might just be the incentive and impetus for doing it again.

Use the visual of being in a room. You feel a draft and you’re not comfortable at all in that draft. It’s cold, it’s windy, there’s allergens blowing into your face and nose, there’s an odor that’s extremely noxious.

You don’t like it, you don’t like how it makes you feel, you just WISH it would stop. “Why can’t I be warm and cozy?” “What can I do?” “This sucks!”

Well, for starters, you can close the door. That’s the door of negativity by the way.

“Wow it’s stuffy in here. What can I do?”

In your mind see yourself walking over to the other door – it’s the one opposite the door you just closed.

See yourself grabbing the handle and turning it. Do this slowly. Now pull the door open. You can be brave and stand right in the middle of the doorway or if you’re a bit timid, you can back away a bit to feel safe.

Open your arms and feel the gentle breeze. Take a deep breath and feel the sweet smell of your favorite flower or herb (or any other odor that turns you on). Feel the warm air in your lungs and imagine the powerful oxygen flowing through your body. Spreading energy to all your organs.

Which door do you prefer and why? One is the portal through which the negativity in your life comes boisterously blowing into and through your life making everything seem yucky and miserable. The other door is the opening that bathes your body in positive energy.

Whenever you have a negative thought trying to take residence in your mind, go to this visualization and intentionally shut one door and open the other. Make yourself think of something that makes you happy or that you think is good!

Keep working at it and eventually your mind will be wired enough that you’ll be able to use the remote instead of having to walk across the room to the doors. Those of us old enough to know will remember that a right of passage in our childhood was “being the remote” – “Joey! Go change the channel”. This is no different

Daily Gratitude: Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I am so thankful for all members of Team Terrie! You have been through so much with me this year.

I have done so well with all the “issues” I’ve run into only because of you all.

What have i learned? That relationships (with people not things) is the most important aspect of your life. Also that often we put our attention into other things because we’re afraid of relationships or of getting very deep into them. I mean God forbid we should let others see who we really are.

People use the phrase Impostor (or for old folks like me – imposter) syndrome. But usually they are talking about it in terms of a career, a job. To me, it’s much more pertinent to look to see if you’re displaying it in your relationships. You know – that old “you wouldn’t like me if you got to know me” ploy.

Yes it’s scary but it’s so worth it. Be thankful for all the people in your life. Let them know that you are. Let them know what they mean to you.

Then go enjoy whomever you’re with today!

Happy thanksgiving

26 Nov 2025 Life’s not a problem to be solved

Daily Gratitude: When things go in a different direction than you would like or you think they should (I avoided saying “wrong” because that’s an interpretation you put on something. You just may not understand it yet), instead of saying “why” start asking “what”

It shouldn’t be “why me?” or “why did this happen?”. Instead it should be “what am I supposed to learn from this?” And it also helps to ask “what gift is hidden within this?”

If you can start altering how you look at things, they will magically shift in your eyes. It’s not really magic, though. What you see outside of yourself is just a reflection of what’s inside of you and what you are thinking. And you know what? You are in control of what you think and you can change what you think. As you begin to do that changing, you will be surprised that you’re looking at things around you differently.

You can look at things as if they are all bad or mostly bad or maybe just somewhat bad. But what if you decided to try to see everything as good – or to find something good, no matter how tiny in what you’re seeing. Then focus on that tiny thing.

Let’s take a maybe gruesome example. You see a bad car accident. You could focus on the carnage; you could concentrate on the traffic back up; you could think about how lousy a safety rating that car has; you could be sad for the injured people. And so on.

How could you possibly find something good to focus on given that scenario. What if you concentrated on giving thanks for an exceptional first responder system – for the police, the fire rescue folks. The EMTs and paramedics, the people in the hospitals nearby, the modern day communications systems that have enabled quick response and cleanup. Why not concentrate and be grateful that it wasn’t you more or your family members.

Then ask yourself what lesson(s) am i being given? Maybe it’s a driving lesson, maybe it’s something you want to share with your children, maybe it’s that you should pay more attention to gratitude. Who knows. But I guarantee there’s a lesson.

“What is this experience trying to teach me?”