In a study published in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers at the University of Texas-Austin 455 store-bought food containers and storage products and determined that "almost all" plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens and showed evidence of EA [estrogenic activity].

Scientists say, BPA or no BPA, any chemical that tampers with the endocrine system -- the system of glands that controls hormones in the human body -- is potentially dangerous. BPA and other estrogen mimickers have been linked to to breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes, obesity, and hormone abnormalities in children.

Focusing on gratefulness keeps us centered and helps ward off negativity.  Here are five little things we can do each day to nourish our sense of gratitude:

1.  Choose your friends wisely.
If you want to be more grateful, spend time with grateful people. Spend time with positive people to be more positive; joyful people to be more joyful.  If you strive to be spiritually strong, supportive, empowering, intelligent, energetic, and positive, seek those characteristics in others.

Help your friends develop more positive traits by living those positive traits yourself.  Know what kind of friends will help you nurture your soul, and set out to find some.

I have learned from experience that happiness is an acquired skill. There is always something to complain about, even in the best of times.  Happiness is not an objective reality so much as a subjective decision.  Chronic complainers miss the boat.

Many people are addicted to suffering and have a mental habit of pointing out the worst in people or situations.  Not only are they robbing themselves of joy, but their failure to appreciate all the goodness that life has to offer actually diminishes all that good.  Both our blessing and our condemnation have power.  Thinking that something is bad has the power to make it so in our experience.

Children are one of the greatest lessons in happiness, constantly challenging us to enjoy the moment, as the next one will not be the same.

Dear Ones, we want you to know that there is never a time when you are not enough. If you ever feel that way, it is never because there is something wrong with you. It is because even more of your divinity wants to shine through! It is your inner divinity that is always wanting to grow and expand and express itself ever more brightly and gloriously.

Come on in and take a seat…. the film is about to begin. Others have joined you for this momentous occasion; your friends, family, acquaintances and loved ones. They are as excited as you are!

Continuing the theme of finding the Divine within ourselves, I wanted to further address the ideas about God that we've gotten from religion. If you're obsessed with the biblical old testament version of "god", me telling you that You Are God might make you believe you're supposed to go smite people or flood cities. If you listened to the new testament, you might think you're supposed to perform miraculous healing and go walk on water. Both of those ideas are there to put God outside of you, to search for external evidence of God. Religion had to put God outside so religion could control your beliefs about God. Every religion does this, they separate you from the Divine and then install themselves as the middleman. It's a very profitable scam.

The ego takes ideas and makes them into Gods. The mind seeks absolutes and in time finds that there are none.

Reality to the ego is only what it can know with the physical senses. To the aware reality is what we feel and know within our consciousness. It is in the personal knowing of our self that reality and truth manifest naturally to us. Truth and Reality are the flowering of consciousness.

The mind wants and the ego stubbornly resists anything or anyone that challenges its control over our false identity.

A mature man or woman will place their attention on awareness and consciousness. They have learned that fulfillment of the ego and mind is futile. The desires of the flesh can be addictive and bring no lasting peace.

The mind and ego crave to satisfy the body. They hunger to perpetuate a cycle of addiction, if our attention is not turned within to the finer energies of our being. They understand that if they can own the body they will block the feeling awareness into the soul.

I just wish we had someone tell us the truth every day.

The truth. 

Not what we want to hear… but the way things are.

I think we would grow up faster.

We would be less naive.

We would be less heart broken.

Since we would know the truth from the beginning.

Read the rest... (secondfirsts.com)