Category Archives: Self-Care & Soul-Nourishment

Meet My New Friend Levity

Levity & Lightness of Being, Resilience & Practice, Self-Care & Soul-Nourishment

Years ago when Gratitude and I were mulling over an appropriate name for our website we landed on Gratitude and Company.  We were tickled by the double meaning of the word company; one being business….or like we prefer saying blissness and the other being about friendship and who you surround yourself with.

At the time, we envisioned other friends joining us on our blissness journey.  It’s has been surprising who has ended up joining us. When we chose the name Gratitude and Company we had thought that there would be a muse friend for each of the inspired nine ARTbundance Principles™  which Marney Makridakis gifted us in the amazing coaching program we had very recently completed.  I just realized that was over fifteen years ago. Time flies when you get to be my age.

As I explored those nine principles Gratitude made herself known and we became fast friends. Gratitude has always felt like the cornerstone principle of the other eight principles: intuition, vision, balance, attraction, choice, action, connection, and service.

Those principles, as yet, have not become muse friends with fully developed personalities.  Much to our surprise other muse friends have chosen to join us on our blissness journey instead.  Presently Detective Why Bother, Steady Freddy, Epithany and our most recent friend Levity are official “members” of our company.

I realize now we haven’t officially introduced Detective Why Bother, Epithany, or Steady Freddy, so we will circle back to this soon.  Today we want to put the spotlight on Levity since she has most recently joined our little circle.

As mentioned in my last post my word for this year is levity.  I decided to create a levity journal to assist me in more deeply connecting with the energy of levity.  I noticed in challenging moments I tended to too easily forget levity could be very helpful.  That’s when my new friend chirped in and made her presence known.

Introducing my muse Levity who is a sweet hummingbird
Meet my newest muse Levity 

She’s helping me to remember to make levity a new daily practice just like Gratitude has helped support me with my Gratitude practice and so much more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Levity Please

Levity & Lightness of Being, Self-Care & Soul-Nourishment, Uncategorized

Earlier this month, during a challenging moment I forgot that my word for 2025 is levity. It may have helped my stress hormones if I had remembered to see the situation with more of a sense of humor.

First a quick note and a little background: I picked levity as my 2025 word of the year because I was feeling a foreboding heaviness and finding it much more difficult to be optimistic about the future as we approached the coming year. More levity felt like an excellent antidote to this heavy feeling.  It has been my natural inclination to take things a bit too seriously. As a kid I was gifted an autograph stuffy called Worry Wart cause I was known to worry way too much. I can seriously identify with the beloved Winnie the Pooh character, Eeyore.  This inclination while still present today at 70 years young, it has been modestly tempered with a little less worry and bit more optimism most days.  My friend Gratitude has helped a lot with that. I’d like to keep it that way if for no other reason than people with a sense of humor and willingness to laugh at life’s absurdities tend to live longer.

My challenging moment was actually a rather silly first world annoyance. Certainly not worth my getting all steamed up about.  I was done shopping way before the other two who were “having way too much fun taking their time to see every item on every shelf.”  I was tired, hungry, my back was complaining, and the store had no place to sit and wait.  And wait. And wait.

In that grumpy moment, I didn’t remember my word of the year. I didn’t remember to consciously invite Levity to come help. If I had, I’m sure it would have played out differently.

Now that I think about it and I’m a bit more rested, fed, and my back is quieter I realized I was likely just earning my karma for making my husband similarly wait and wait and wait while I grocery shopped.  Ha! Ha!  Im sure I will have many more opportunities to practice infusing some levity into these kinds of challenging moments.  Next time Jan!

In the meantime, I believe I will be creating/identifying a muse named Levity who can help me more easily remember during those grumpier moments to find my funny bone, look for the lightness, and see the possibilities.  So stay tuned. Perhaps we will introduce her in our next post.