Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you. … If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it. –Emmet Fox

As Sarah Ban Breathnach so neatly puts it, “Over the years my easiest and most joyous lessons have been learned through blessing. If you’re sick and tired of learning life’s lessons through pain and struggle, blessing your difficulties will show you there’s a better way.”

When we begin to approach our life-problems as challenges rather than punishments, opportunities rather than evils, then they lose their power to diminish and oppress us. When we learn how to bless our reality, we begin to move through our lives with a sense of wonder and gratitude, trust and abundance. Here is one way to start:

You can start by counting your blessings! Make an inventory of all the blessings in your life that you can think of, seeing if you can get to one hundred. When we write down our blessings, our attention is focused on the abundance that already fills our lives.

Then begin to look back on past situations or events that felt like difficulties at the time. Seen from the perspective of where you are now, what did you learn from that situation or event? What were the benefits? How did you grow?

Now look at anything in your life presently that you perceive as a problem. How could blessing and then dealing constructively with this problem strengthen or teach you?