Difficult Times Can be Great Gifts

Even the difficult times are great gifts. Now, again, anybody can be grateful in retrospect, but it takes a true champion even in the midst of what appears to be turmoil to say – thank you, this is perfect and I am benefiting from this.

A lot of people want to talk about enlightenment, and they think it's about wearing white robes and eating lots of legumes. The fact is enlightenment--if you look at the prefix 'en' from the Latin that means 'to be'. To be light is to bring light upon situations and enlightenment is by degree. As we continually learn and grow, we become more and more enlightened.

That's true mastery, in my opinion, is to be grateful in the moment and when you can get to the point where you can be grateful in the moment even the apparent difficult situation or challenges in your life, then you've truly got a degree of mastery. Ask yourself, how does this serve me? If, you believe in a higher source of some sort, call it God, call it universal mind, call it energy, there is some creative source. If we believe that, and we believe that there's a higher purpose in our lives, then we also have to recognize that sometimes things are not going to work out as we, our small ego selves, want them to work out in the moment. And the things that are happening to us right now are perfect to move us toward what we truly desire and choose to create.

Imagine for a moment that you want to create a new job or a new business. You don't know all the things that need to transpire to make that happen. You don't consciously know them. You think you do. You know you have to put a business plan together. You know you have to find the capital, get a loan, or find funds somewhere. But there's so many things that you're not aware of that have to transpire for that to occur.

What we think in our little small ego selves that we have it all together and we know exactly how we want it to unfold. But the reality is there's a greater power involved and that greater power may know things that need to occur that we don't know about. And those things, short term, may be uncomfortable or may not be what we would desire in the moment, but they're feeding into the grand plan and so again, gratitude and mastery is about saying, hey, everything is perfect.

The moment that I don't believe that any more, then I send a signal to the universe that says, I don't appreciate what you're giving me. You know, maybe the loss of that client was exactly what you needed to move you into a different arena. Maybe the loss of that relationship was exactly what you needed to move you into a better, more powerful relationship. We don't always know. It's not our job to play God. It's our job to decide exactly what we choose to create in our life, to hang on to that, to know it's coming in and to be grateful for every part of the journey in the process.

Ten years ago, I was not capable of being grateful for those life lessons or for the difficult people. Only in the last 3 or 4 years have I realized that situations are just as they're supposed to be, and I was there to learn the lesson and understand and be in a position to grow. I did not know that then. I look back now and it seems perfect. I look at the difficult situations that we all have or experience in our lives now and have a much different, a completely different view of them.