Kristi Nelson

Kristi Nelson teaches gratefulness as a spiritual practice: the habit of meeting each day, including the hard ones, as an unearned gift. From 2014 to 2023 she led A Network for Grateful Living, the nonprofit that grew from Brother David Steindl-Rast's teaching on gratefulness, and she still serves as one of its ambassadors. Before that she spent decades helping organisations working for social and spiritual change, among them the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. With Lynne Twist she set up the Soul of Money Institute as its first director, and she once raised funds for Kripalu itself. She holds a public administration master's from Harvard.

Her book Wake Up Grateful sets out a practice built on a few simple principles, such as treating life as a gift and noticing that the ordinary is extraordinary, and works through ten areas of life with reflections and exercises. A long experience of serious illness shapes her view that no day should be taken for granted. She now teaches through workshops, talks, readings, podcasts and writing, with a growing focus on growing older gratefully, and lives among farmland in western Massachusetts.