A Grateful Heart: 365 Ways to Give Thanks at Mealtime

Count your blessings. Today there is a deep hunger for connection with ourselves, with nature, and with the process of birth and death itself says life coach and author M. J. Ryan, creator of the New York Times best-selling Random Acts of Kindness series. What her book, A Grateful Heart, is offering from a wide variety of spiritual disciplines and secular perspectives, is a way of satisfying that hunger by setting aside time before we eat to acknowledge the blessings in our lives. When we give thanks, we take our place in the great wheel of life, recognizing our connection to one another and to all of creation.

Choose from 365 blessings and give thanks. A Grateful Heart is a tool to help readers reclaim and enrich the tradition of pausing before the evening meal to give thanks. Drawing from a range of religious and cultural practices, the 365 blessings in this book celebrate friendship, love, peace, reconciliation, the body, nature, joy, and appreciation of the moment. This illustrated feast for the mind includes quotations from Martin Luther King Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, Rumi, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Denise Levertov, the Bible, and the Tao Te Ching.

M. J. Ryan wrote A Grateful Heart to encourage families to share the experience of being part of something greater than themselves. With that in mind, the book includes 365 traditional and nontraditional blessings organized into four sections corresponding to the seasons.

Experience the blessings in A Grateful Heart in a variety of ways:

• Just open it and begin reading one-a-day in the order given
• Use the index to pick and choose topics of interest that day
• Open at random and read what is offered

If you have benefited from books such as Earth Prayers, M. J. Ryan's Attitudes of Gratitude, Don Miguel Ruiz's Prayers, June Cotner's Graces, or Marcia M. Kelly's 100 Graces; you and your family will love M. J. Ryan's A Grateful Heart.