quiet miracles: pathways to soulful living

What is a miracle? Is it something we experience that is typically improbable or unlikely, or can it be something that when it occurs it creates a magical result in our life? I see miracles as punctuations in our dance with the divine. It is moment in time and space, where there is no moment in time and space. It is a moment when we just “are”. When we are in this “gap” miracles can and do occur. Here, implausible events happen and create movement from stagnation, and change from relative stability and apparent predictability of our daily lives.

There are many everyday events that occur that are logically implausible, synchronistic, or coincidental--hence miraculous--and often we take these for granted. For me the way Velcro sticks together seems miraculous, or how a flower follows the suns path during a summer day, or how my children can open my heart with a simple a glance. Perhaps these things would not meet the rigorous definition of miraculous, but I experience them in this manner. When I allow myself to feel this and connect with the feeling-- it seems miraculous. I have seen many miracles in the people I’ve met and worked with as well as seemingly implausible events that occurred in my life. Recently, I was in Disney World with my children and I was busy rushing my son Josh from one end of the park to the other for something. We were there to see Disney World and we were going to see all of it--no matter what! In his child-manner Josh decided to delay my goal-directed conquest of the park when he wanted to stop to buy a souvenir penny. The kind you flatten out in a machine for fifty-one cents. He was perseverating on this, the latest object of his desire, while I was dragging him through the throngs of school-vacation families. In the midst of this utter chaos I happened to look down to see the very coin of his desire lying on the ground at my feet.

There it was right there in front of us just as we were discussing it. I thought this was a miracle to me; a glaring example of a synchronistic event that punctuates our ordinary lives. The extraordinary held within the ordinary. The truth is what we may consider miraculous may in fact be a rather ordinary event from the perspective of quantum physics. This is where the probability of seemingly improbable or implausible events is given new credibility. In this manner of viewing our universe all events have an equal probability of occurring and can even occur simultaneously. The fact that I notice something that has occurred is what creates the miracle. It is my intention, my consciousness that manifests this event. The miracle occurs when we stop long enough to breath and quiet ourselves and see what is actuality occurring. Most of the time we live asleep, and we are asleep while we are supposed to be living. We have it backwards. We are actually more awake when we are asleep and we are closer to our divine wisdom and open to the guidance of our soul’s path than when we are awake and supposedly attentive to rational truth and “reality”.

This ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary is what a ‘quiet miracle’ is about. It fine tunes our senses and perception to the frequency that our soul resonates to and we can hear with new ears. Some people use meditation or yoga to quiet the mind and draw themselves within. Others can do so when looking at a beautiful painting, or petting their cat, or looking into the inner recesses of a magnificent flower. What all these events share in common is the narrowing of attention and a sharpened but open focus. We blur our view of the external and amplify the inner sense of the internal and hence the divine within. This spiritual tuning is what we crave and what we so desperately want/need to connect to. It is why we spend so much time numbing and busying ourselves; we numb and distract either out of frustration from our disconnection with ourselves, others, from spirit, or because we didn’t know how to connect to begin with.

I see the nature of spirit evidenced thought our daily routine and the mundane. But where I especially see spirit is in the pain we often find ourselves experiencing in the course of living out our humanity and our stretch toward growth. I believe the experience of engaging in this process, with the help of a healer is indeed a sacred process and that our path toward growth is really a “choice-less choice”. We are indeed hard-wired to move ahead and to grow.

I view my therapeutic and healing work as a small facilitation of these magical results. The combination of intention, installation of hope, helping to understand the unconscious mind, and our various methods for communicating our truth to ourselves, can help produce these small but powerful “quiet miracles”.

Read some articles by Dr. Greenfield about health and healing: