Yet I have a hard time embodying this understanding, when I experience an illness or a conflict with a loved one.  I spend most of my time trying to get out of it, whether it means looking for a miracle cure on the internet (and even ordering it!) or rehearsing what I should have said in conflict.

I wonder what would happen if we shifted our perspectives a little bit and allowed ourselves to open to the gift of living by recognizing we encounter exactly what we need.  Things are constantly in motion and when things are out of balance, things shift in order to create new balance.  Bodies get out of balance so we need to reconfigure through illness, our living environment is taxing on us so we find an eviction notice taped to the door.  Most of us encounter these things as undesirable hardships and tend to rant how we’ve been wronged.

So ready to count your blessings?

What happens if we recognize the illusion of control and trust the appearance and disappearance of things, the hard experiences might actually be to our benefit.  That somehow struggles and hardship that we experience is part of our path of learning and growing and opening to a broader understanding of ourselves.  That the undesirable that appears at our door like a bad acne outbreak actually is a cover for a wrapped present waiting to be revealed.

Being human and living is a hard endeavor.  I sometimes wonder how people actually survive the tremendous amount of pain and suffering that is part of each human experience.  And no matter what we each encounter, there is always someone somewhere who has suffered greater than one of us.  How can we take the experience out of the self-centered me perspective and recognize that things happen and removing the judgments of good and bad may allow something different.

In the meantime how can we open ourselves to a deeper understanding of the blessings as they occur?  My body has a cold and feels awful right now, but what a blessing that it has served me so well so much of the time.  What a gift to be able to recharge my immune system and find gratitude in each full breath of life.  And this challenging relationship dynamic has allowed me to examine my responsibilities to another person, and discern my projections from theirs.  It does not eliminate the feelings of pain but it might alleviate suffering connected with the extra layer of over-identifying with the experience.  So maybe in the moment of struggle we could take a minute and count, count our blessings.