WHAT THIS EPISODES ABOUT…
Hello and welcome, I’m Shauna Hoffman.
It’s right after Thanksgiving and I want to keep the gratitude flowing! So I thought it was time I reached out to all of my podcast listeners to say thank you! I have such deep gratitude for you coming along on this journey with me. This is the 46th episode! WOW! That just floors me. When I first started this undertaking I knew that my voice as a speaker, therapist, woman, entrepreneur, and part of an amazing family had so much to say. I didn’t really imagine 46 episodes later that so many people would be listening. Many of you have been on this adventure with me through the name change and rebranding of the podcast. And many of you are my new podcast family. To all of you, I say a magnificent thank you! Believe me, as I have recorded these episodes for you, I have learned so much about myself. For it has also been a journey to awareness for me! When I said take this journey with me I had no idea!
On this shorter than usual episode as I thank my podcast listeners, and family and friends, and my adoring husband, who have all supported me through this I thought I would share some of my favorite books, songs, quotes about life with a grateful heart. This week I want to join you on this journey to that beautiful soft spot in our souls… gratitude!
I’m going to start by sharing with you a book with the same name. “A grateful heart. Daily blessings for the evening meal from Buddha to the Beatles”. Seriously any book with that tagline has already made me grateful for picking it up! It’s edited by M.J. Ryan. The first time I heard about it was on my 40th birthday when my precious friend Dexter read this prayer by one of my favorite writers, Daphne Rose Kingma. And it is perfect to start this podcast. It hearkens back to podcast episode #36 For the love of friends.
Tonight we give thanks for the great gift of friendship. Thank you for the circumstances that brought us together and have bound us together into the sacred bundle of life. Thank you also for the gift of our friendship: for knowledge that comforts, for words that encourage, for insight that blesses, for all the experience shared, for the sweet bliss of knowing each other deeply in so many ways; for history and a hope of the future, for conversation and laughter, for silence, for bearing each other’s witness truly, for holding each other safe in our hearts with great love and tenderness.
—Daphne Rose Kingma ( 28th May)
There are so many things in our lives to be grateful for. Though we are struggling through some of the hardest times of our generation, definitely the hardest times of this century, I can’t help but stress that if we can each find things to be grateful for, no matter how small they are we can give our psyche and our souls a rest… a moment to remember the truth.
So let’s have some fun and see where you can find it. Certainly in books, and poems and quotes. But we also know the amazing power in music to change our moods! So I went searching for music and quotes from great songs. Lo and behold there are so many great sites to help us heal on that journey!