For the past several months, I have been on a mission to spread the word about my attitude of gratitude writing practice. It’s had a huge impact on my life.

While this blog has been going for almost three years and I have regular readers, I don’t have many registered subscribers. Opportunities to guest blog, I decided, might be the best way to direct some new eyes to my journal entries on gratitude and spark interest in my writing and reflection practice.

I started Googling for popular blogs on mindfulness, gratitude, self-improvement, change.  I decided to look for high traffic sites featuring compatible themes and submit an article with a byline that included my blog’s url.

My search introduced me to Tinybuddha.com. I liked the look and the spirit of it. The founder, Lori Deschene, seemed to have actually created a community around her site. It was more than a weigh station for the self-promotionally-inclined. She welcomed guest bloggers, but also encouraged conversations that could be sparked by TB’s content.

I read her submission guidelines. They called for original work, experience stories, relating to well-categorized Tiny Buddha quotes.

I understood that this was an opportunity to write something from an authentic experience. The truth of the experience itself and the vulnerability of me being willing to share it would invite more real connection than anything my audience-seeking brain could probably conjure up.

So what kind of wisdom could I share?  What have I learned lately that meant things were changing in my life, that I was changing for the better?  I looked through the Tiny Buddha Quotes on mindfulness.

The next message you need is always right where you are.  Ram Das   

And I started thinking about how I have changed. I understood that my impulse to keep a blog and teach people what I learned from my attitude of gratitude writing practice reflected a huge change in me, a huge change from who I was as a child when I was convinced no one would care to hear what I thought or had to say.

I wrote about my newfound voice and my newfound belief that I did, in fact, have something worth sharing. This message came out very naturally through a family story; the unexpected reversal of roles between my older sister and me. After she had a small, cancerous growth removed from her right lung last year, she actually looked to ME, her habitually self-unemployed younger sister, to teach her something about mindfulness and living in the present moment.

When the piece was done, I pressed the SEND key with hope and yet with a sort of detachment. I did  my best while staying true to published writer’s guidelines and true to my experience of events. I sent the submission on the appointed date and didn’t check my inbox hourly for notifications.

A couple days later, I got the sweetest most heartening “I liked it, but…” note I could have ever imaged coming from an editor or publisher. Lori Deschene wrote:

Are you open to some revision on the post? … I think it would set the post up a little better if you somehow mentioned the mindfulness theme a little earlier. Let me know what you think!

I re-read the post. Of course she was absolutely right. I easily added two short paragraphs at the beginning and re-submitted the piece.

It was funny, I thought, in retrospect, but it never occurred to me that I was being criticized. The recommended change so clearly came from a good place. Her comments were aimed at helping me be more effective in communicating an experience.  They were not aimed at proving me less worthy as a writer.

Understanding that a suggestion to make a change is not about tearing me down but about making something I value better is no small thing.