Beltane: A Seasonal Ritual of Becoming
By Mara Branscombe
/ 25 April, 2025
Date in the Northern Hemisphere: 1 May Date in the Southern Hemisphere: 1 November As the earth reaches the peak...
Read More
An extract taken from Florence Given's new book Women Living Deliciously, published by Brazen which is a part OPG, Hachette.
Stop waiting, Start Seeking Gratitude is a habit. It’s something to practise intentionally in small steps. It is a habit we must build, to create new pathways in our minds geared towards always searching for the beauty in life, even when it feels impossible to find it. To find a sliver of beauty does not mean to abandon our harsh realities or be ignorant to the suffering of ourselves or others – to find beauty in something is to create an anchor in our life, that slows us down and reminds us we don’t have to be beaten down and made small by the thoughts in our heads. During a low period of my life, I stopped dancing. I stopped going for walks. Perhaps my body didn’t feel safe to let itself feel free, perhaps it felt unsafe expressing itself and being viewed by others. Whatever the reason, I just ‘didn’t feel like dancing’ anymore. But I slowly realised that I had let go of this life-giving exercise that used to make me feel so vibrant and full of life. I did not consider that the lack of happiness in my life was partly because my mind had convinced me I was ‘too depressed’ to do the things that brought me joy. What if dancing was the ‘thing’ that could hoist me out of the dark? What if going for a walk, even though I dreaded the idea, would provide me with the perspective required to realise my problems were small? So, I decided to try, even if I did it crying and laughing at myself. During this period of healing, my life became a series of daily demonstrations to myself – through one walk, one dance at a time – that I would not allow someone else, or my fearful brain, to tell me my life is over. I did this by putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again. It can be hard to stop our minds from chattering and even harder to separate ourselves from this darkness filling them. But remember, it is not you. You can disobey it. You can object to it. There is nothing wrong with you, darkness is capable of visiting everyone. It has yanked me down into the pit of apparent no-return plenty of times. But there are coping strategies we can develop so it doesn’t swallow us whole. We can use gratitude as our anchor, the thing we hold on to in life’s storms. Being grateful puts us in a direct position to receive more beauty because it means we are widening our perspective, being open to seeing things we would have otherwise not noticed. The speed at which love enters my life when I am fully open to it is ferocious! When my mind is not focused on ruminating, when I use the world around me to pull me into the present moment, love rushes in. When we are fearful or stressed, we become closed off to everything. We cannot marvel at the way the tiny segments of the orange we’re eating burst in our mouth, or the sound of bubbles popping in the foam of our coffee. Not because we’re ‘ungrateful’ but because our awareness is too absorbed by our thoughts. The trouble is, when we stay in survival mode for too long, putting the walls up around us by staying busy, not going out anymore, avoiding intimacy, avoiding life in an effort to protect ourselves from anything bad happening, we don’t realise that nothing good can get in either. Try something as simple as sniffing your coffee before drinking it to appreciate the smell or welcoming the calming sensation of sinking into a hot bath. Gratitude! Complimenting someone’s outfit. Gratitude! Smiling and catching the eyes of the cashier instead of tapping your card and zipping out the door in a rush. Gratitude! Texting a friend or your partner or your mum to say thank you for something. Also, gratitude! When you intentionally incorporate it into your way of being, you will find that there is nothing this love does not touch. It becomes a way of life. Soon you will be saying thank you to the moon when it is out. The sun, just for rising. Your lungs, just for breathing. Gratitude really is infectious. Keeping a diary of these moments is also a great way to keep track of the small things that make our lives feel juicy and luxurious. Their accumulative worth has a profound impact on our perspective of life, not just in these moments of pausing, but as it unravels. When we treat beautiful moments as things to be collected, walking through life like a magpie for beauty, we find that it is actually everywhere. A commute is no longer just a commute, but a scavenger hunt to seek things that light us up. Gratitude in Practice Finding joy in the everyday parts of our lives and writing them down has less to do with ‘scraping the barrel to find enough things to be joyful about’, and more to do with re-defining our definition of luxury to the point where we recognise that it is all around us. Luxury is in the eye of the beholder. - Time without your phone is luxurious. - The sun on your face is luxurious. - Wearing comfortable clothes is luxurious. - The smell of a sea-salt breeze when you walk past the ocean is luxurious. - Birds chirping in the morning is luxurious. - Opening an orange with your fingers and watching the zest squirt out as you rip the skin is luxurious. - Feeling the soft, buttery texture of rose petals on your fingers or brushing them against your cheek is luxurious. - Your pet’s soft paw is luxurious. - Being awake before everyone else is luxurious. - Putting on headphones and watching the world go by around you is luxurious. - The morning dew on grass in the spring is luxurious. - The humid smell of the earth after it’s been raining is luxurious. - The sound of rainfall on the windows when you’re warm indoors is luxurious. - The warmth of another person’s body under yours is luxurious. The thing is, we cannot fake it. We cannot pretend to be ‘completely obsessed’ with the beauty of stumbling upon a vibrant flower if it does not actually delight us. To feel that inner sensation of gratitude, to actually feel these small things as a luxury in every cell of our bodies, we need to shift the way we view life. To see the world differently, we need to get curious about it. The bridge between negativity and positivity is curiosity. Somewhere along the way we learn to shut off our curiosity. We see things ‘as they are’ and don’t take the time to contemplate them more deeply. Curiosity is the bridge that can actually enable us to feel everyday moments of awe, gently uncovering and unfolding new meaning in the spaces around us. So, if you can’t be positive, aim for curiosity! For example, if you feel nothing when you look at that flower, get still for a second. Let your mind wander. Where your mind thinks, That’s just a flower, curiosity asks questions like, I wonder who planted that flower? Maybe you go over to inspect it, touch it with your fingers, delight in its texture. Maybe you discover a bee in its centre, reminding you that flowers help bees to create honey, the same honey you had drizzled over your pancakes that morning. WHAT? THAT’S WILD! Curiosity sets our minds on a delicious frenzy of gratitude, awe and wonder. There is so much more to the eye than what we see, there is a story in everything. This is how we allow the world to delight us. It is how we have more interesting conversations, make better art, become more joyful. We recover that child-like sense of curiosity and allow the world to delight us through it. Stay curious. Never stop looking. Practising curiosity, in the way a child fumbles around the world in awe at the newness of life, can also give us space to consider that there may be something more, something deeper, not just in the world but beyond our current circumstances. Asking questions can give the events in life a new aspect – I wonder what will happen next? or I wonder what this means? – instead of the deflating idea that today’s gloom is all there is. When we can only see what is in front of us – the job rejection, the bad weather, the date gone wrong – curiosity allows us instead to dream and consider that it may be leading us to something, trying to teach us something. What if being late for a flight can teach us patience? What if running into an ex can teach us to remain calm in uncomfortable situations? A great way to accept the things out of our control is through this curious line of questioning: What is this moment leading to? What is it trying to teach me? Click here to purchase Women Living Deliciously . Interested in reading further articles on gratitude, why not click here?
