In the 1980s, I started a daily practice that I still maintain today. I was attending an intense personal growth workshop at Deerwood, Minnesota. One night, as I lay on the top bunk in a rustic dorm room filled with a dozen women, someone mentioned her practice of gratitude.

Aware of my natural tendency to focus on the half-empty cup, I decided to try it that night. I did it again the next night and the next. Now, more than 20 years later, I still continue with a gratitude practice each day.

Why? It helps me shift my attention to the positive, improve my perspective, and appreciate what is working well in my life. This, in turn, increases my energy and my happiness. Not a bad outcome for an investment of five minutes or less a day!

Could Gratitude Help You?

It’s easy to drift into focusing on the negative, on problems, and on what isn’t working in your life. But what you focus on expands. So focusing on the negative and on problems gets you more of that, not the enjoyment and fulfillment in life you long for.

If you could use a little improvement in your attitude (and who couldn’t!) gratitude could be very helpful.

Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology at University of California, Davis, says gratitude is “an attitude we can choose that makes life better for ourselves and for other people. I think about it as the best approach to life. . .When things go well gratitude enables us to savor things going well. When things go poorly gratitude enables us to get over those situations and realize they are temporary.”

Psychologists, spiritual teachers, writers, and researchers say that gratitude can:

** Increase your energy and optimism
** Shift your focus to what has gone well or delighted you
** Help you not take things for granted
** Make you more resilient to life’s hassles and stress
** Encourage your satisfaction with life
** Increase your compassion
** Enrich your experience of life
** Increase your happiness and well being
** Improve your health

Who doesn’t want some or all of this?

A Gratitude Practice

So how do you incorporate more gratitude into your life? I recommend a daily practice of some kind. For instance, you could:

– Keep a gratitude journal. Each night write five things for which you are grateful.

Or

– Before you go to bed, give thanks for one thing for which you’ve never before been consciously grateful.

Making the practice a part of your daily routine will regularly focus your attention on gratitude. Knowing you’ll be doing this each evening will raise your awareness and attention throughout the day. “Oh, I need to remember that tonight.” “What am I going to be grateful for this evening?”

Grateful to Whom?

Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity church, wrote “It has been found by experience that a person increases his blessings by being grateful for what he has. Gratitude even on the mental plane is a great magnet. When gratitude is expressed from the spiritual standpoint it is powerfully augmented.”

If you believe in God, a Supreme Being, the Universe, or a Higher Power, send your gratitude in those directions. If you don’t believe or aren’t sure what you believe in, focus more on what you’re grateful for and don’t worry about to what or whom you are grateful. It will still work!

Grateful for What?

In my initial gratitude practice, each night as I brushed my teeth (I couldn’t miss the opportunity to double task!) I’d think of three things for which I was grateful. In the last 10 years or so, I write each night in my journal five things for which I’m grateful.

I’d be lying if I said it was easy every night. When I’m feeling low, it’s tough to think of anything for which I truly feel grateful. Still I persist and eventually come up with five things. Many nights I have so much I feel grateful for that I can’t write fast enough.

Brother David Steindl-Rast says “We go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is, a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them!”

To get you thinking about what you’re grateful for, here are a few ideas taken from my own gratitude journal. Cozy shelter in the storm. My health. Skagit Valley raspberries. My husband. Fragrant lilacs. Driving with the convertible top down. Hummingbirds. Books. Work I love. Toddlers. Samish Island. Feeling peaceful. (Wow, just listing these makes me feel great! I could go on for pages — and I won’t.)

What you are grateful for will differ from me. The gifts and the abundance in each of our lives are so vast that the possibilities are limitless.

In Your Life

To begin playing with the practice of gratitude, here are two suggestions.

1) Start with a big infusion of gratitude. Take 5 or 10 or even 30 minutes right now. Write as many things as you can think of for which you are grateful. Notice how writing this list changes your energy.

2) Choose a daily practice (see ‘A Gratitude Practice’ above) and play with it for two weeks. Notice how this practice affects you. See if this is a practice you’d like to continue or if you’d like to try another one.

Practice gratitude and see how it changes your life.

Enjoy!

If you discover that you have oily skin, you may want to look into using a different facial soap. There are many types of facial soap on the market and many are especially for oily skin.

Allouette has a clarifying facial wash that is good to use if you have oily skin. This facial wash is made for a person with oily skin, especially skin that is affected by acne. This facial wash is good for the cleansing of pores so those pools of oil do not from your face. It will also treat things such as blackheads and whiteheads that appear with the advent of oily skin. You can lift the dirt and oil out of your skin and the facial wash will also hydrate the dermal layer on your skin. The dirt is removed with both Alpha and Beta hydroxides, as they will gently remove dirty and oily skin cells and will not damage the underneath layers of skin.

If you are looking for a natural soap than Burt’s Bees Garden Tomato Complexion Soap for Oily Skin is just what you are looking for. This soap is made from natural ingredients, foremost being tomatoes. Tomatoes are a natural source of both AHA’a and lipocene. Both of these chemicals can help balance your pH level in your skin. This soap also has a toning effect and help with large pores. This is one of the better products to use for oily skin if you are wary about too many chemicals in your soaps.

One of the more trusted names in cleansing products is Neutrogena. Their Dermatological Bar Soap has hypoallergenic properties. This is a good aspect of the soap, especially for people that have sensitive skin. The Dermatological Bar Soap is one of the more popular products with consumers as it really works in clearing pores and helping people with oily skin. There are many unnatural chemicals in this bar soap and if you are wary of that try another cleanser.

L’Oreal has a great answer for oily skin with their HydraFresh Gel Cleanser. This cleanser is great to use with many types of skin conditions, especially oily skin. There are no irritating effects with this cleanser and it is great at clearing your pores. The one main drawback is that if you want the maximum effect you have to purchase other L’Oreal products. This can get expensive but L’Oreal’s products do work if you have oily skin.

The Clinique Derma White Purifying Bar is another option to get rid of oily skin and is one of the more gentle facial cleansers. This soap is great for both oily skin as well as combination skin. Clinique is also one of the most trusted brands when it comes to skin care. This soap will remove dirt and oil from your skin and also moisturize your skin. It will give you a clean and clear complexion and also make your skin healthier.

There are also other natural remedies you can take if you want to combat oily skin. One of the main natural remedies that many physicians recommend is a mudpack. Mudpacks will draw out skin impurities and oil leaving you with healthier skin. You can feel a good mudpack working as your skin will feel great afterwards. The darker the mudpack is the better it will be at drawing out the oils in your skin.

Whatever you use to get rid of oily skin, make sure that afterwards you keep cleansing your skin so it does not return. If you are still having problems with oily skin after using products such as these, you should consult a physician.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines intuition as “the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process”.

Isaac Asimov said of it, “Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.”

How is your relationship with this aspect of yourself? Can you find your own way through a situation with incomplete data? Are you able to balance the left and right sides of your nature–instinct and logic–in order to create maximum persuasion?

We all have the experience of gut feelings, most likely in the form of danger. . . Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is an unpleasant reminder of our intuitive natures. Or maybe you’ve experienced it in a romantic situation. We’ve all heard stories of a man or woman meeting their mate for the first time and thinking to themselves, ‘This is the person I’m going to marry. I can feel it.’

Intuition is a muscle that can be strengthened. It is an aspect of emotional intelligence and with study, attention and patience, can be grown and used to further aid your persuasion skills.

Hunches, gut feelings and intuitions are entirely acceptable to apply in business matters as well as life in general. Following these are signs that our other than conscious Gentle Giant is flawlessly guiding our lives as we’ve requested.

When I experience a moment of intuitive clarity, I feel it in the back of my stomach, radiating sharply. Other people experience it as a jump in their chest. Others still, feel a hardness in the backs of their throats. By paying attention to these physical shifts, the world of self-calibration opens up to us. These shifts can sometimes me huge differences in the things we do and measures we take to close a deal or get out of a dangerous or difficult situation.

As a small disclaimer: Following hunches shouldn’t negate logic and reason, but act in concert with them. The ability to pay attention to hunches and intuition is sometimes relegated to new age followers and is often neglected or mocked in business situations. Think about military personnel or police officers (especially ones in the line of danger) who rely on these abilities to keep themselves safe. Or think about business mogul Lee Iacoca who once said, “The only mistake I ever made was not listening to my gut.”

Think back to times when you had these feelings and didn’t heed the warning. What unpleasantness could you have avoided if you had (a broken heart, a stolen purse. . .)?

By checking in, centering, and gaining clarity, our persuasion is enhanced immeasurably in all aspects of life. A really great resource on intuition is Laura Day’s book, ‘Practical Intuition,’ which contains some amazing exercises to strengthen and stretch the “sixth sense” or really, what I like to think of as our relationship to and messages from our gentle giant.