Finding Hope in Challenging Times

Life can be very overwhelming at times! When you’ve tried everything you know and nothing seems to be working, sometimes it’s very hard to find hope and faith inside.

 
I received a question on my blog recently from a sweet woman who’s experiencing a challenging time. She asked “How can I find hope when everything around me is falling apart?”

I’m going to answer that question today, and I’m also going to give you some tools you can use immediately that can help you to find hope in difficult  times.

Transforming Hopelessness

Usually when we’re feeling hopeless and powerless in our lives, it’s because we’ve given away our power. We’re letting someone else tell us what we should do, or how we should think or how we should live our lives.

Sometimes we’ve been letting other people direct our lives for so long that we don’t even realize that we could own our own power, and listen to our own inner voice and take positive action on what feels right and true inside ourselves.

We’re going to discuss an experiment today for transforming hopelessness and powerlessness into hope and faith. This experiment is very dear to my heart, because it’s made a huge difference in my own life. I’ll tell you a story about that in a little while but first let me tell you about how the experiment works. It involves using the power of your own unconscious minds to bring about positive changes in your life.

I learned about this experiment many years ago and I’ve done it many times through the years and experienced some amazing results. I’ve also suggested it to many other people and watched it make positive changes in their lives, too, so I know that it can be very powerful.

Try a Simple Experiment!

So let’s talk about how to do the experiment. First of all, you have to be willing to spend 10 minutes a day for the next 30 days and keep a daily record of your results. You don’t have to believe that the experiment will work. You just need to keep an open mind. When your fears and doubts come up, which they will, you’re just going to practice setting them aside and replacing them with positive thoughts that will support your experiment.

On the first day, you’re simply going to write a list of things you might want in your life. Maybe you want better self-esteem, or maybe you want better relationships, or maybe what you want is a better job or a better financial situation. Just write anything that comes to your mind—don’t censor anything. No one is going to read this list but you.

On the second day, you’re going to pick the one thing on your list that is most important to you right now. When you’ve made your choice, I’d like you to write a few paragraphs about what it would be like if you already had what you want.

Use all of your 5 senses when you write these paragraphs, including what you would see, how you would feel, and what you would be hearing, or smelling or tasting when you imagine already having what you want. Make this fun! It’s not a chore, it’s actually a very fun experiment.

Listening to Your Inner Self

So for the next 28 days, I’d like for you to read what you’ve written every morning for 10 minutes and as you read, just imagine what it would be like if what you want was already true in your life. Again, it’s very important to have fun with this. Don’t make it work—let it be fun and playful!

After you’ve imagined your dream already true in your life, you’re simply going to ask your Inner Self 2 questions:

1. What actions could I do today to move forward towards fulfilling this dream?
2. What thoughts could I think today that would support bringing my dream into reality?

It’s good to jot down any answers that come to you that day. Remember this is your own experiment—it’s not for anyone else to read—just you, so you can write any answers that come.

Then, before you complete each day, say a prayer in your own mind, and ask for Divine help and guidance to bring your dream into reality.

So that’s the whole experiment! The rest of it is simply keeping track of the dates and times when you see real life changes happen that are related to what you’ve been imagining.

My Story

Let me tell you a story of something that happened many years ago when I did this experiment. I was a young single mother at the time and I had 2 small children to raise on my own. My ex-husband didn’t have a job for a couple of years after we were divorced so he didn’t pay me child support during those years.

I was very dedicated to being a good mother back then, so that was my primary focus in life, but because of my financial situation, I was also working part time. I did hypnosis at that time for people who wanted to stop smoking, lose weight or improve their self-esteem. The problem was that I wasn’t getting enough business in my small town, and without child support coming in, I wasn’t able to pay all of my bills.

After a few months of not being able to pay my house payment, I received a notice that my house was going into foreclosure. As you can imagine, that was very frightening and I really didn’t know what to do. I spent a week feeling very worried and scared and trying to come up with a solution, but there was nothing I could think of to resolve the situation.

With my house in foreclosure, I couldn’t apply for a loan. I didn’t know anyone back then who could loan me the money I needed to get caught up on my mortgage. But fortunately, when I talked to a dear friend of mine about my situation, she suggested that I try the experiment that I just described to you.

Nothing to Lose!

I had nothing to lose at the time, so I decided to give it a try. It wasn’t hard to choose what I wanted to focus on. More than anything, I really wanted to be able to keep my home, so that my little girls and I would have a safe place to live. My little girls had already had their lives turned upside down with the divorce and I didn’t want them to have any more trauma than they already experienced.

To do the experiment, I wrote a paragraph about walking into my bank and handing the lady at the counter a check for the full amount I owed on my mortgage and then walking out. I pictured it in living detail, with how it would really look and feel when I was at the bank paying off my bill. Then I read the paragraph every day and simply imagined it coming true.

When I asked myself daily what actions I could take to bring the dream into reality, I had some trouble, because nothing I did seemed to be working, but I decided to keep doing the experiment anyway.

Choosing positive thoughts to support my dream was something I could do, however, so I worked very hard on that. One of the positive thoughts I chose to affirm was that I knew there was a way for me to save my house, even though I didn’t know what it was. I also chose to affirm that there really is a power greater than me that can bring about miracles in my life.

Miracles Do Happen!

I kept imagining what I wanted for close to a month with no apparent results, but then one afternoon my clients cancelled at the last minute and I decided to stop by a health food store on my way home, to pick up a product for my youngest daughter’s allergies.

While I was at the health food store, I ran into a friend of mine who introduced me to another friend of his who was also shopping there. The three of us sat down and talked about what was going on in our lives and then somehow we got into a deep discussion about hypnosis and some of the amazing things it can do.

I was completely surprised with what happened a couple days later. The person I met at the health food store called to schedule a hypnosis session with me. When he arrived for his session, he told me that he had thought it over and he decided that he wanted to pay me for full year of hypnosis sessions in advance. The interesting thing was that the amount he wanted to pay me just happened to be the exact amount I needed to pay off my mortgage.

Soon after that, my dream came true just like I had pictured it. I walked into the bank and handed the lady at the counter a check for the full amount I owed on my mortgage and I walked out.

To this day, I still remember the feeling of leaving the bank that morning and walking out into the cool air outside and just feeling completely exhilarated! It felt like a miracle to me! It also showed me loud and clear just how powerful my creative mind really was.

Try it for Your Self!

If you’re going through a difficult time right now, I really hope you’ll try the experiment and keep a record of your results. None of us can guarantee the results we’ll get when we imagine our dreams coming true, but there’s always something positive that happens.

When we get clear about what we really want and we imagine it already true in our lives and then follow our inner guidance, miracles can happen. It’s pretty amazing to see how powerful we really are and how intelligent our inner guidance can actually be.

Leave a Comment or a Question

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Have you ever experienced anything like this in your life?

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