Too often I see people using their gratitude as a way to hide away from what they really want. To allow others to keep them small and not speak up for what they really want because they “should be grateful for everything they already have”. Honey, this is just self sabotage!
It is time to stop using your gratitude as a weapon against yourself allowing people to screw you over or to overstep your boundaries and your non-negotiables!
You can be grateful AND hold true to yourself, speak your truth AND have iron-clad boundaries! Sometimes when we look at how grateful we are we can see things through rose coloured glasses and see the positives in others to the point that we overlook our own needs. We can easily use gratitude as a way to reinforce our unworthiness.
Can you think of a time when you’ve felt uncomfortable and wanted to say no but felt you couldn’t because you were grateful for an opportunity/experience/connection/relationship and felt so frightened of your own voice that you might somehow fall into a pit of lack? This is just your scarcity and unworthiness selling you old patterned bullshit and you keep on buying into.
You can feel grateful AND still stay true to our own needs. You can say thank you so much but NO thank you. Saying no is not being unkind or ungrateful. Saying no to someone/something else is actually you saying YES to yourself!
Saying YES to your boundaries and you own desires over and above the comfort of someone else is the greatest form of self love and gratitude for your own amazing self that you can possibly have.
You cannot open up the doors to what you really want until you make room by closing the ones of those that no longer light you up. Give yourself permission to have what Danielle Laporte calls both the open gentle heart AND the tall fucking fence! Give yourself permission to use gratitude as a way to love yourself first and foremost; sometimes that looks like saying no thank you. Make yourself a non-negotiable and then (and only then) look at what else you are prepared to let in.