If you feel grateful and stand near someone, you will automatically lift their spirits! Please read The Coolest Thing About Gratitude to learn more about this natural human phenomenon.

While acknowledging our shared awareness of international, national, career, and personal anxieties this holiday season, I am also sending the energy of my gratitude into this moment and hope that you feel it. Share your gratitude with others, too. It is the gift that keeps giving and we all need it.

My family and I are strengthened by a sense of hope.

We pray for healing and honor you who are struggling to restore peace and connection to those who are tormented and separated by mental illness. We choose to believe that all of those around us are doing their best with what they have to make this a better world.

We are grateful to you and say, “Thank You, Shukran, Spasiba, and Danke”.


While honoring the healing communities, where we have served for so many decades: Gould Farm, Rose Hill Center, Gateway Homes, and CooperRiis Healing Community, we are grateful now to be six months into the process of developing a healing community without walls.

With my daughter Stephanie’s help, our therapeutic consulting practice has served over 50 families since July this year — many without charge. We are joyfully embracing very complex situations and new relationships.

Please take a moment to view and share a video Stephanie and I put together this Fall, explaining what our therapeutic consulting practice is, whom we serve, and how we work with clients.

This year my wife Lis and I gratefully entered the age of wisdom, evidenced by our Medicare cards and access to Senior Discounts (hooray!). What, retired? Probably never. In addition to launching our new practice, Lis’ creativity is unabated. She is guiding the renovation of our cottage in Monterey, Massachusetts while keeping us connected to community and family life from our southern winter abode in Tryon, North Carolina.

We also gratefully stretched our intellectual abilities this year by reading Moby Dick to one another. (Is Ulysses next?) We trimmed our fleet of cars from 2 to 1 and take long walks together. No, not retired, but taking more time for one another and for family.

My parents continue to inspire me. Robert turned 99 in October and Florence is a mere 88. Their minds are clear and their spirits are strong. In addition to their only child (me), they have a daughter in-law Lis, four grandchildren and their spouses, and seven great grandchildren. Family is their source of joy and gratitude.

What is your source of gratitude, joy and inspiration? If you have read this far, you are in my life and I am grateful for you. I hope to stand with you in the coming year to bring joy and peace into the world of those with mental and emotional distress.


Warm Wishes For A Happy New Year!

Virgil

(828) 388- 4673 or virgil@virgilstuckerandassociates.com