Reblog: Grateful teens

from CSMonitor.com

It’s not about the money.

A recent study focused on the effect of gratitude on teenagers. There are a lot of reasons teens are grateful. And being rich isn’t necessarily one of them. Similarly, there are plenty of reasons teens might act as if they had a gratitude deficit. Being poor doesn’t necessarily seem to be one of them.

The study suggests that regardless of a teenager’s socioeconomic background, he or she can experience the benefits of a grateful heart, including the benefit of better mental health. Through a few changes in outlook, attitude, and behavior, he or she can make big gains on the gratitude front. Teens who are the most grateful find a number of benefits multiplying. Such as? Things like improved academic performance, a sense of purpose, more hope, and more happiness. As these take root, they grow more common to a teen’s outlook and more natural to his or her life. On the flip side, things like hopelessness or depression – which are at times linked to suicide in teens – grow less prevalent. Read more

Reblog: Reader Responses to ‘The Present Heaven’

In this blog post, beautiful experiences are shared of becoming conscious of our spiritual being here and now (and at a time when it was needed most).

Reader Responses to ‘The Present Heaven’

Reblog: What 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai is teaching the world

by Mark Sappenfield (Reblogged from CSMonitor.com)

“Don’t worry, Baba. I am going to be fine and victory will be ours.”

According to a Monitor report Thursday, these were the words spoken by 14-year-old peace activist Malala Yousafzai to her father shortly after she was shot in the head by Taliban extremists in Pakistan.

In truth, they were words spoken for the entire world… Read more