The first step of gratitude is to see the gift...if you are in the middle of difficulties and problems, how can you feel gratitude? You've got to fight to find the gift even in the difficulty...when you shift your perspective from the perspective of the mind because life will never make sense to your mind...mind is very logical and life is not. In order for life to make sense you've got to be out of your mind and you've got to be into your soul. When you begin to see life from the perspective of your soul then even in the midst of the worst of it you can see the gift.

I began to hear what I was being taught about God, by the priest and my parish, and my exterior teaching did not coincide, did not match up, with my interior reality. And as they were teaching me about that God I was thinking: Who are they talking about? This was not how I experienced God. I gradually began to move away from the God of organized religion.

Once you are ready to truly devote your days and times to what your soul came here to do, you will find your life unimaginably enriched.

It could seem like you are losing something right now, but do not be fooled. This is simply a turnaround orchestrated by your soul. Let it go. Release it. If it was not supposed to be removing itself from you now, it would not be doing so.

As told in Friendship with God, if we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we're all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we've done all our lives pointless.

I actually hear into life - seeing everything that's occurring as a conversation with God in some form. So it really is the next song on the radio - a chance utterance of a friend on the street - it really is what's happening right now. I stop and think, 'What is life trying to tell me right now?' And "What does my soul know about this?'

It is our job to continue imagining higher, and even higher, states of being - higher thoughts, word and deeds - in order that we might continue creating ourselves anew in the next grandest version of ourselves.