I am grateful for: choice

(& my magical experience teaching my first yoga class).

The intention for my first yoga class was all about gratitude (shocking, I know). Gratitude is something we sometimes think about in a passing thought and acknowledge here and there either when we travel and take in a beautiful view or when we finally feel better after a sickness and can fully appreciate good health. It’s so easy to take what we have in everyday life for granted because it becomes routine and normalized. And it’s usually not until something is taken away that we realize how good we had it. But what if we showed gratitude for all the blessings in our life? What if we showed gratitude for the people we are surrounded by, the city we live in, the food we eat, the place we practice yoga, and the life we have built for ourselves? What if instead of gratitude being a passing thought, we actually let ourselves feel it? I have never felt a stronger sense of gratitude than I did teaching my first yoga class. I’ve had this thought before, but in that moment, I realized how incredibly important it is to really take a moment to acknowledge the life we have built for ourselves here. While looking around at my beautiful class, I realized that we all made the choice to move to Israel. We made the choice to step outside of our comfort zones to seek a new experience that brought us all together. We should be grateful to even have choice in the first place. I encourage all of us to choose gratitude in every moment. To choose gratitude in the magical, beautiful and special moments but especially to choose gratitude in the painful and challenging moments to appreciate what every experience is teaching us and the growth that will come out of it. I feel so incredibly lucky that my choice to move to Israel led me to my chosen family and to a community of people who are full of so much love, light, support and inspiration. Thank you all (including everyone who couldn’t make it to class) so much for making my life more special than I thought could be possible.