object in our lives as good. "Are you saying that if my house burns
to the ground, I'm supposed to ignore the fact that I know longer
have a roof over my head and just pretend that everything is
gloriously fine and dandy anyway?"
The answer is a resounding NO! I am no suggesting that you deny any
experience at all. The blessing process is not one of denial, it is
one of acknowledging and embracing and accepting. What I am
suggesting is simply that you refrain from judgment.
Whenever we judge anything, we tend to place a negative
interpretation on it. We judge it as bad or evil or wrong and, in
so doing, obscure whatever good might be inherent in it. If you
decide, for instance that because your house has burned the ground,
the quality of your life has been totally diminished, then you've
judged the experience as a bad thing. And in so doing, you've
essentially placed a limitation on the amount of good you're
willing to let rise out of the situation. What good does come forth
will first have to push past the mental barriers your judgment has
placed on it. The time it takes for the positive aspects of the
experience to be revealed will be totally dependent upon how much
negativity you allow to build up around the situation. Essentially,
you keep your own good from happening by your refusal to see it.
We do the same thing every time we pick up a newspaper or watch a
television newscast and decide that the reports we've read about
various people and events are bad. We place a judgment on them and
feed into the negative energy already surrounding each situation.
And sadly, because we live in a world where what we focus upon
increases, our willingness to see only the negative aspects of any
situation give it the energy it needs to continue.
That doesn't mean we're supposed to go around pretending that
everything is wonderful and our world is trouble-free, however.
It just means that we must be willing to refrain from categorizing
the experiences and people outside ourselves in only negative
terms. It means that we must be willing to look at every
challenging experience, person and experience in our lives and tell
ourselves, "There is good in here somewhere. And I will find it."
Most importantly, seeking the blessing inherent in all things
brings us into alignment with our Spiritual selves. It makes us
feel whole and centered and at peace without ourselves and the
world. In acknowledging the good, we discover the divinity within
ourselves and we open ourselves to grace.
Today's exercise:
Your task for today
is to look for the blessing. Pick any challenging situation
occurring in your life right now and determine to find the blessing
-- the goodness -- within it. Instead of focusing on its negative
aspects, choose instead, to focus on any good that might come out
of it. This may call for some creative thinking on your part,
especially if you've picked a situation that you have, in the past,
already determined to be particularly troubling. Make up your
mind, however, that the good will reveal itself to you and then
mentally examine the situation from every side, twisting and
turning it in your mind as if you were looking at every side of a
Rubik's cube.
Once you've spent a bit of time pondering the situation, then
record three aspects of the situation that you consider to be good
in your Blessing Way Journal. It may be that the only good you can
determine is that "This will not last forever." or "This is
serving to remind me of what I don't want in my life," or you may
discover an aspect of far greater value than you might ever have
thought possible. But until you intentionally seek out the good in
any given situation you will never know. This exercise gives you an
opportunity to find out.
Today's affirmation:
"I am surrounded by blessings and I am determined to see them."
Today's quote:
"God's world is a perfect world. It is not without trials and
lessons, but it is only our human judgments that create the
illusion that God's world -- the world we are living in -- is
imperfect."
-- John Morton, from "The Blessings Already Are"
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