Live Your Life with Gratitude and Grace: An Integrative and Sustainable Guide for Choosing to Live Well

By Clare E. Steffen Ed.D. BCC

Gratitude and grace may be easier to find in life than we realize. Developing our ability to experience a higher level of gratitude and grace can improve our health and feelings of happiness.

In an inspirational guide, Dr. Clare Steffen relies on her professional experience as a psychologist and natural health professional to lead others down a path of self-exploration to connect to feelings of gratitude, living life with grace, and improving relationships through journal prompts, biblical passages, and secular quotes that focus on brain and spiritual health, diet and nutrition, and exercise. Included is a model of integrative sustainability that promotes a lifetime of resilience; a unique formula for designing healthy relationships with intimate partners, friends, and others; and a cognitions of choice approach that helps anyone create a healthy philosophy for living guided by choice, gratitude, and grace.

Live Your Life with Gratitude and Grace is a holistic guide that shares journal prompts, tools, scripture, and inspirational quotes to help those struggling to heal and set down a new path to attain overall wellness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664279407

Clare E. Steffen Ed.D. BCC

Clare E. Steffen is a psychologist, counselor, educator, naturopath, and natural health professional, drug and alcohol counselor, herbalist, and life, wellness, business, and brain health coach. Over the past thirty years, Dr. Steffen has been offering treatment to individuals of all ages, couples, families, and groups in a variety of settings. Clare has previously self-published five books, the Heal Your Brain: 90 Day Devotional through Westbow Press, and this is a revised edition of Live Your Life with Gratitude and Grace.

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Copyright © 2022 Clare E. Steffen, Ed.D., BCC.

Revised Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV®

Copyright © 1973 1978 1984 2011 by Biblica, Inc. TM

Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-7941-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-7940-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022917966

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/24/2022

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

Brain Health

CHAPTER TWO

Diet and Nutrition

CHAPTER THREE

Exercise

CHAPTER FOUR

Spiritual Health

CHAPTER FIVE

Integrative Sustainability: A New Model for Developing Your Wellness Lifestyle

CHAPTER SIX

The Big Five of Healthy Relationships

CHAPTER SEVEN

Applying the Cognitions of Choice to Create a Philosophy for Living

CHAPTER EIGHT

Conclusion and Final Words of Encouragement

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Preface

T his book is a guide that will help you develop your ability to explore ways to connect to feelings of gratitude, and to live your life with grace. It offers a formula to improve your relationships by following the big five of healthy relationships. You will be provided with the cognitions of choice and encouraged to develop these twenty-four traits that are the foundation for your philosophy for living. Bible passages offered within the book are from the New International Version. ¹ All secular quotes are from Quotationary (2001) which is a Random House Webster’s book. ²

The biblical passages and secular quotes are provided to direct reflection toward brain health, diet and nutrition, exercise, and your spiritual health. Taking a simple holistic approach to creating brain-body-spirit health is meant to keep you on track for life. This guide can be revisited on an ongoing basis, and you can repeatedly take the Creating Confidence Thinking Assessment (available online: https://app.assessmentgenerator.com/assessment/2986) as a way of measuring your progress over time. These tools provide the combination that offers you an integrative and sustainable approach to living and the pathway to living well.

Introduction

W e have more means of communicating than ever before, and yet people are reporting more feelings of isolation and loneliness than ever before. As a result, people are experiencing increased depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental illness. Many rely on medication for relief but remain symptomatic. The answer to this suffering is necessary, and an integrative approach is needed. Taking a proactive stance to heal our pain can help us alleviate and reduce symptoms, but more importantly we can learn to regulate our emotions, change our lives, and sustain a wellness lifestyle that promotes healthy relationships and choices.

Gratitude is easier to find in life than we may recognize. We can become trapped in the social expectations and lose our way. It has been proven that we can reduce our symptoms of depression by practicing gratitude in our daily lives. If we take just minutes daily to document our experiences of gratitude, within two months, symptoms of depression will decrease. Grace is a spiritual concept that is recognized worldwide as being blessed or favored and gifted with the ability to endure or resist temptation and to exercise strength or rejuvenate. We may consider grace as linked to empathy for self and others. The world is sorely in need of empathy and a more gentle and compassionate approach to the human experience.

Live Your Life with Gratitude and Grace will assist you in making the connection so you can find gratitude and grace in your life. It offers scripture passages and secular quotes that focus our thoughts on brain health, diet and nutrition, exercise, and spiritual health to support an integrative approach to healing:

• The model of integrative sustainability is a plan for learning how to be resilient and maintaining that resiliency for life.

• The big five of healthy relationships is a formula for designing healthy relationships with intimate partners, family member, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances.

• The cognitions of choice is a model for developing a healthy philosophy for living.

Combined, these components fill in all the gaps and enable you to complete your healing cycle.

Optimal brain health is crucial. We are bombarded with many challenges that create brain imbalances. The pace we keep places demands that cause many of us to feel compelled to comply with the those fast-paced demands. Resilience enables us to adapt and adjust to these demands, but is it enough? Consider not only how to become resilient but how to maintain and sustain it in an effort to keep your brain in balance.

When our brains are balanced, we are at one with ourselves, and we are connected to God’s love. Living in harmony enables us to become our authentic and true selves. When we focus on productivity and define ourselves by what we do or the belongings we have, we detach from our authentic beings. Learning to focus on brain health daily improves cognitive flexibility; the ability to make healthy choices and the ability to correct errors in thinking and feeling, and integrative holism; brain-body-spirit balance and the ability to restructure unhealthy belief systems that interfere with healthy functioning.

Having command of emotional functioning increases our ability to make deeper connections in our intimate relationships by improving our ability to communicate more accurately and effectively. By expanding our social relationships, we can garner more support. Understanding the abilities and traits that are the building blocks of healthy relationships increases self-awareness, helping us to self-regulate, improve social skills, and increase our chances of developing relationships that are long lasting and emotionally supportive.

As we become more equipped to adapt, we can block influences that hijack our brains and disrupt brain balance. Exercising gratitude in our daily lives improves our moods and enables us to maintain positive attitudes. Recognizing God’s grace within our lives helps us to become more appreciative and better able to understand the meaning and benefit of empathy. Living our lives with gratitude and grace may help us reduce stress and tap into mindfulness.

Every day we make choices, some simple and some complex. At times, we become overwhelmed because there are too many choices. Millions are affected by trauma and grief. People experience loss caused by substance use, divorce, death, and multiple other painful experiences. These life events may result in brain changes and may negatively impact brain balance. Our culture expects our grieving process to resolve in a specified time frame, and when it doesn’t, the grieving process is labeled complex, and a diagnosis is administered. When we experience trauma, grief, or loss, our brains need time to heal. Prayer is healing, and when we combine prayer with an integrative approach to maintaining brain-body-spirit health, we have a formula for healthy relationships and life choices. God has equipped us with the ability to take action and exercise choice. He is always there to guide us, but he also expects that we will use the gifts that he has endowed us with to create a happy and healthy life.

Millions of people struggle with mental health conditions, substance-use concerns, and health conditions that impact their ability to form healthy relationships and a productively functioning life. Prayer is a foundational guidepost that can be relied upon when facing triggers, challenges, or situations that evoke stress. Having a wellness approach in life promotes independence, and Live Your Life with Gratitude and Grace presents biblical passages and other thought-provoking concepts that focus on brain health, body health, and spiritual health. Each journal entry offers a different aspect you can consider for intentionally expanding your perception of self-healing. Becoming self-empowered enables us to take responsibility for our health and promotes well-being.

Religious and spiritual beliefs can be sources of comfort. Expressing our beliefs provides relief from pain—emotional, mental, and physical—and can help us find and restore balance. It has been documented that being prayed for, whether we are aware of it or not, can reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Our definition of family has broadened, and the ways in which we define family have expanded. Sometimes people do not have healthy families of origin, so they need to create family by choice. Attachments begin at birth and continue across the life cycle. Feelings of abandonment, trauma, loss, and other factors can harm attachments and create brain imbalances. Establishing a family by choice when the family of origin is absent, unhealthy, or emotionally unavailable, can give us an opportunity to correct attachment problems and reset brain balance. We must always remember we are never truly alone because God loves us, and even when we are imperfect, he believes in us and will help us find our way,

Everything in life is relational. The field of medicine has moved in the direction of integrative services. Mental health services are a part of the integrative approach. Integrative sustainability offers a new model of wellness psychology that moves beyond resilience and supports the sustainable choice model that reminds us that everything in life is relational and integrated. The shift to this model acknowledges the importance of our spiritual being and reminds us that we must treat the whole person if we are to find health and well-being. Collective and universal consciousness expands our continuum and encourages us to mindfully attract wellness. We cannot ignore the importance of resilience, but to claim total wellness, we must learn to sustain it for life.

Accepting that we are all united in universal love is a starting place for recognizing diversity, equality, and inclusion. The global world in which we live has enabled us to communicate with our neighbors from all around the world. Despite the ability to communicate globally, people are experiencing higher degrees of loneliness and isolation. Knowing that this results in brain imbalances, we can find a remedy in connecting in an authentic and real manner that recognizes that we are more alike than different. Quieting feelings of isolation can reduce brain imbalances and promote healing through acceptance, forgiveness, and love.

The world is struggling, and people are experiencing separation and splits in their world views and perspectives. This fragmentation results in increased stress levels and feelings of frustration, confusion, and agitation. We all must find our places in the world and lead lives of purpose that have meaning. Emotions are universal, and the need to belong and find purpose and meaning is universal. Without purpose, we continue to feel alone and live without meaning. This existential crisis will escalate and intensify our feelings of anxiety and depression. As these conditions are exacerbated, we feel more alone and disconnected. As a result, our brains experiences imbalance. The solution lies in connecting and balancing our emotions and seeking solutions that resolve our insecurities related to identity, purpose, and meaning. Finding our places in the world and coming to terms with this stress while feeling empowered to make a social contribution begins the process of global healing and universality. Existing with this balance enables us to live authentically and to sustain brain balance and a healthy lifestyle.

The problem of brain imbalance is evidenced through increased rates of mental illness and mental health diagnoses. Live Your Life with Gratitude and Grace provides multiple solutions that can help you address brain imbalances and promote wellness and healing. Connecting to our genuine selves and loving who we are must be present in any plan for healing. Engaging in daily reflections helps us to create a philosophy for living and find the path to connect to universal love.

Everything in life is relational, and our brains respond relationally. Recognizing the importance of brain balance empowers us to make healthy choices. Praying for ourselves and others daily provides us with mental, emotional, and spiritual freedom. The gratitude and grace journal is the personal tool we need to reach beyond resilience and live an integrated, sustainable wellness lifestyle.

Appreciating the beauty of the balance of brain, body, and spirit along with sustaining a healthy lifestyle will assist you in creating a wellness philosophy for life. It is God’s intention that you be healthy and happy, and that you live life to your fullest potential. Focus on holistic health through the guided journal themes. This effort will support your wellness intention and offer you a plan for developing and sustaining health. In the busy world in which we live, taking a few minutes each day to pray for yourself and focus on your integrated health is not too much to ask. Give yourself the gift of health. Devote time daily to prayer, health, and reflection, and connect to God’s plan for universal love.

You can choose to live an integrated and sustainable lifestyle by developing a healthy relationship and approach to these areas of your life:

• Brain health

• Diet and nutrition

• Exercise

• Spiritual health

• Living with gratitude and grace

• Designing healthy relationships

• Creating a philosophy for living by choice

This book offers the keys to developing an integrative and sustainable lifestyle. It will also assist you to design healthy relationships with yourself and others. Once you create your philosophy for living by using the cognitions of choice model, you will find it easier to apply, and over time you will experience increased confidence in your ability to make healthy choices. The cognitions of choice promote prosocial traits and skills that form your philosophy for living. When you face a choice armed with this philosophy for living, you will experience increased ease in decision making. It may at first seem complex, but isn’t everything in life worth learning a little unfamiliar at first?

As you change, the quality of your relationships will change. Initially, people may resist your changes and want to draw you back into your old ways of behaving and relating. Stay committed to your growth path, and in time, they will want to know how you did it. You can make your life more enjoyable and easier by not resisting your natural path of health and wellness.

Live with gratitude and grace and spend every day enjoying the gifts that life has given you. As this becomes integrated into your holistic approach to life, you will need to maintain these changes by revisiting what you learned in this book. Reviewing your learning will keep it fresh and help you sustain your new knowledge, skills, and acquired traits. This new philosophy for living will help you make healthy life choices, and over time, as you develop these skills and traits, you will find it easier to apply the cognitions of choice, and this will reinforce your philosophy for living by choice.

CHAPTER ONE

Brain Health

O ur brains control every aspect of our bodies and are connected to all body systems. When something occurs within a specific body function, we look for answers about whatever is going related to a specific body part or system. We tend to focus our healing efforts on the physical realm and pay little attention to mental, emotional, and spiritual influences. Even when brain imbalances occur, we examine solutions to the physical problems, but perhaps that doesn’t give us the total picture.

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have argued over the location of the mind and the seat of consciousness. Some question whether it even exists, but what if we assume that the mind governs the mental, emotional, and spiritual connections in our brains. Does it now become a bit more interesting?

Pain—physical, emotional, or spiritual—registers in our brains, and we feel it in our bodies. Depression, anxiety, trauma, substance use issues, or any other mental health problem create not only an imbalance in our brains, but through our entire bodies. Learning to listen to our bodies quiets our minds and balances our brains, and this enables us to begin the healing process. Everything in nature is in balance, and we too should be in balance.

With God’s love, we become the best versions of ourselves. Life brings us challenges, and we must face illness, aging, transitions, and life changes. You are guided to intentionally focus on the health of your brain. You will be provided a Bible verse and a reflection passage that will assist you in experiencing God’s love. The reflection passage will engage you in a brief discussion to assist you in participating in a deep conversation with God. A secular quote will connect and balance your spiritual being with your secular life.

Everything in life is relational, and to be in balance, we must have a healthy relationship with ourselves and God. Having a healthy brain is an important part of that process. Love your brain and love yourself. God wants you to be healthy in mind, body, and spirit. As you read this devotional and build your brain strength know that you are always supported by God’s love.

Brain Health: Authenticity

Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing, and perfect will. (Romans 12:2)

On a good day, when we get up, we have a plan that adds meaning to our lives. The messages we receive from the outside world can pressure us into a feeling that we must conform. Social media distorts our views of self and others and can cause us to feel inadequate as we read posts that display perfect lives.

Commercial advertising suggests that we have value only if we are young, thin, wear expensive clothes, drive fancy cars, and live in the best neighborhood in a custom home. The more we try to conform, the more we leave behind our authentic selves. Taking time daily to connect to yourself and focus on brain health brings you closer to God’s will.

Each day we will be tested and faced with a choice as to how to