Here is the remarkable truth about focusing your life on gratitude- you attract people who live the same way.   Yesterday, my meetings felt more like the reuniting of my tribe than they did business meetings. The business was the context, but the gratitude consciousness was the true exchange. There was no convincing or selling any ideas,  just a true and resonant sharing that what is most real and precious about life begins inside of us.

This is a seemingly simple shift, this pulling our attention inward to find what we are looking for, but remarkably challenging in a culture inundated and drowning in how it looks out there.  Even our religions largely have us focused “out there” for a connection to the divine that must start inside. It becomes more simple once you start practicing, because you begin to feel both the spaciousness you hold inside and a visceral energy that moves in you.

It isn’t magic, although I know the suggestion sounds like it. If there is any magic at all, it is the wonder of harnessing and directing your capacity of attention. The biggest problem of looking out there is how diffuse and distracted your energy is. Visiting a large urban landscape as I am right now, it is entirely overwhelming trying to attend to the literal millions of interactions happening all around me. It is no wonder that so many humans who live in the density of  urban homes have little recognition of the stillness within them.

Yet there is not a place based access-  it comes from an intention to stop looking outside for what can only be discovered inside. This is the truth that all of the secret powerful societies that have grown up around the globe have transmitted and passed down through generations. The tribes that flourish share a single  path into one’s own heart.  This single intention changes everything and I am beginning to become acquainted with the tribe.

Another key to finding this space is giving up the focus on the how. Clear intention does not lead with how to get things done. The how of it will present itself,  usually in ways that you couldn’t anticipate anyway. This is the essence of the letting go that is at the heart of receiving. It is a magnet of goodness that will bring you deeper into why you are here.