GAK Club and Community
The Grateful, Authentic, Kind Club and Community:
The Grateful, Authentic Kind (GAK) Club and Community is essentially a quiet movement of people who are committing to becoming their best selves. The GAK Club and Community is committed to working on building the skills of gratitude, authenticity and kindness through daily practice. Whatever situation arises in our lives, we seek to understand it through these 3 skills—how can I find gratitude for this situation?; how can I communicate authentically without being hurtful or mean-spirited?; and how can I find and express my kindness in this situation?
Joining the Club and Community is free and simple. The first step is to make the GAK Club and Community pledge to oneself, because the one we are committed to improving is ourself. The pledge can be printed out so you can write your name, sign it and date it, and then post it prominently, if you like, as a daily reminder. You can also say the pledge out loud to one or more witnesses, and then submit your name to me. I will maintain a list. Alternatively, you could also make a video of yourself saying the pledge and submit the video to me, with permission to post it on the website.
You can think of the GAK Club and Community as the antithesis of today’s social and political climate, where selfishness, fear and blame rule.
The GAK Club and Community seeks to foster accountability by asking each of us to take responsibility for our thoughts, words and actions, and by refusing to blame others for our life experiences and refusing to engage in victim mentality.
No purchase is necessary to join. However, for those interested in a GAK Club and Community membership packet or button, those can be purchased here.
The Four Levels:
I like to think that each of these 3 skills has four (4) levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Mastery. Each level represents a degree of pain we are exposed to, and yet we get to determine whether our pain becomes suffering.
The Beginner Level is when life is going our way. In these situations, it’s easy to be grateful, to speak authentically and to be kind. Although, you may know people who despite getting much of what they seek, still complain. So there is always more to learn, even in an apparently charmed life.
The Intermediate Level is when sometimes things are going our way and sometimes not. In these circumstances being grateful, authentic and kind is more difficult. In order to fully embrace these skills, we have to shift our perspective and understand that things not going our way is happening for our benefit. We need to discover what is this experience teaching us, redirecting us toward, and how is it leading us to deeper personal growth. It’s not a punishment or a deprivation, although it may appear so until we dive deeper.
The Advanced Level is when we are faced with challenge after challenge and maintaining a positive outlook is truly difficult. This requires us to step back and question how these very challenging circumstances are ultimately for our greater personal and spiritual growth. Easier said than done.
The Mastery Level is where we are faced with truly traumatic situations: the death of a loved one, abuse, emotional or physical abandonment, betrayal, etc. Once we have established our physical and emotional safety, set healthy boundaries and have begun to process our feelings, we can begin to examine how even the most horrible situations, ultimately serve our personal and spiritual growth. As the saying goes: what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger. You might wonder, from a human perspective, aren’t you blaming the victim? This is where many of us get stuck. While we are having a human experience, we are actually spiritual beings who have chosen, before birth, to have a human experience with certain challenges or life lessons. These lessons range from the mundane (I spilled my coffee on my pants.), to the tragic (My family member became ill and died too young.), to the traumatic (I was in an abusive relationship or I was cheated on by my partner.). Graduation from earth school, into joy and peace, requires that we master all levels of difficulty and accept accountability for our experiences.
The Alchemy of Emotions:
As we continue to grow the skills of gratitude, authenticity and kindness, you will notice that your capacity to extend compassion, love and forgiveness toward yourself increases. As we become immersed in the skills of self-compassion, self-love and self-forgiveness, we will naturally extend these qualities to others. We will essentially be seeing the divinity in ourselves, despite our human flaws, and likewise be seeing the divinity in others, despite their shortcomings or trespasses.
The more we see ourselves and others as divine, the more we embrace our true nature. While we may have times of anger, blame and pain, we won’t live there, we won’t cling to them. We will become skilled at feeling our feelings, seeing them in the context of spirit, finding the life lesson and then letting the feelings go. This will lead us to embracing what remains—our true nature as joyful and free spirits.
Thank you for reading this far!
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