Gratitude Assignment #1  –  Live your Life as an Adventure in Gratitude.   Living your life as an Adventure in Gratitude is taking on the challenge of seeing all events, words, commentary and actions are Grace in divine action.  This takes a very advanced soul to walk this path, as it’s about acknowledging EVERY experience is a gift given directly to you from Grace.  You never know what gifts you’ll receive this week, which makes it a true adventure!  Each person you meet is a blessing in disguise from the Divine.  With the right listening, you’ll hear that they all have a special personal message (just for you) to help you awaken to the sacred Truth of who you are.  By seeing gratitude as an adventure you can be open to experiencing all of life, no matter how it shows up.  You can trust that everything Life brings to you is indeed a gift, and something that will enrich your life, even if it does not first appear that way to the mind.

 Gratitude Assignment #2 –   Choose a Daily Gratitude Focus Every Morning.  Every morning before your feet touch the floor, choose one thing that will be your Daily Gratitude Focus of your entire day. Choose that one thing that you’re the most grateful for in your life, and practice returning to the thought and feeling of it all throughout your day.  Simply ask yourself the big question the moment you are awake of, “What am I the most grateful for in my life?”  Your answer may change with each new day, yet keep to the one you started with for each morning.  The more quickly you can dive into this question and remain with it throughout your day, the easier it becomes to slip into a constant state of appreciation 24-7. As you practice returning to your original gratitude feeling, it becomes profoundly magnified and creates a profound shift in your energy and consciousness.  This raises your Manifesting Vibration, allowing you to feel more expansive and easily attract more of what you want in your life.

Gratitude Assignment #3 –  Continuously Check In with your Gratitude Meter.  As many times as you can throughout the day, check in with your level of gratitude.  Ask yourself, “On a scale of 1-100, how thankful am I for everything that is in my life right now?”  If you’re anything less than 100% start making a mental and emotional list of what you are grateful for.  Think of anything that makes sense to you!  The answers might be as simple as, “My health, clean air to breathe, or my heart is still beating and I am alive!”  You can also turn all those things that you’re ungrateful for upside-down by simply honoring them as sacred teachers on your spiritual path.   As you keep checking your level of gratitude throughout the day, you create a higher state of awareness which helps you to move consistently back into that peak state.  Once your mind gets hooked on the habit of thinking about things that it’s thankful for, it will be effortless to remain in at 100% grateful 24 hours a day.

Gratitude Assignment #4  –  Reset the Complaining Mind to Thankful Thinking.  Your mind is probably already somewhat addicted to complaining.  It thinks its job is to notify you of what it believes is missing in your life.  When you try to resist, judge or ignore the complaining thoughts, you’ll find that they resurface again fairly soon.  To free your mind from complaints forever, simply investigate what the mind REALLY needs, wants and desires.  This complaint is actually coming from a smaller part of your mind that is trying to ask for what it wants, yet cannot actually speak it.  So the next time you hear yourself complain about something, purposefully shift your focus INSIDE to what your heart is really truly longing for.  In just those few moments you’ll reset your mind to finding and feeling gratitude in the simple things again.  If you just cannot investigate yourself and find what your heart really wants, you can always retrain your brain to FEEL grateful.  Every time something happens, say to yourself, ” I am so grateful for XYZ”.  If you don’t feel gratitude, just be curious and ask yourself, “What would it feel like to be grateful for this?” Gratitude is like the sun in the sky in that its always present, yet sometimes its hidden from our vision by clouds.  The mind can get very cloudy when we are always focused on complaints.  Find the Light in everything and your mind will be free!

Gratitude Assignment #5  –  Make your Gratitude Commitment your #1 Priority.  Your level of commitment equals the degree of success you’ll experience in anything in life.  A commitment is simply a shift in your consciousness to becoming DEEPLY and consistently aware of what you really want.  Making a constant commitment to gratitude for the next 24 hours can only happen if it becomes one of the most important things in your life.  When something is a priority in your life it takes precedence over everything!  This means you’re incorporating the “no matter what” philosophy.  Meaning, no matter what happens, you are choosing to be grateful.  Your devotion to gratitude acts as an attraction magnet for what is good and beautiful.  When you are 100% committed to living in gratitude, you instantly become a magnet for what you love and desire, which makes it EASIER to remain in devotion.  Being grateful for what you already are experiencing, you are sending out powerful loving energy that magnetizes back to you even more beautiful experiences.   Just focus on being, doing and experiencing JUST this one thing for 72 hours.  You’ll be AMAZED at what happens in your life.

Before you pop open a can of soda — as refreshing as soda might sound — think twice. Why is soda bad for you? Well, you may already know that both regular and diet drinks have been tied to obesity and high blood pressure; colas to bone loss; and full-sugar sodas to type 2 diabetes, lousy teeth (especially citrus sodas), and more. But this next finding may come as a surprise. It turns out there’s something in regular soda that’s particularly bad for women. So, if you’re female, listen up – this article pertains to women’s health issues.

New research shows that just two cans a day make you more likely to add inches to your waist, get into blood sugar trouble, have soaring triglycerides, and develop heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes — even if you don’t gain a pound. Throw in kidney damage, too. It’s also been tied to a soda habit. This isn’t the first time these health issues have been associated with soda, but it’s the first to spot how vulnerable women are. So if you’re a woman, why is soda bad for you? That’s as clear as muddy waters. Maybe it’s because women burn fewer calories than guys, replace more healthy foods with useless fizzy stuff, or always eat sweets with soda. Or: something no one’s figured out yet.

Wondering what to drink instead to avoid the aforementioned women’s health issues? Switch to water (or caffeinated water), seltzer with fruit, hot/iced tea, or coffee, which is giving tea real competition as the world’s number one health drink.