EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON

 

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"Mira Kirshenbaum is a wise and seasoned guide, her book a welcome map of the difficult terrain of life." DR. DOROTHY FIRMAN, coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Mother & Daughter Soul

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON

FINDING THE TRUE MEANING OF THE EVENTS IN OUR LIVES

MIRA KIRSHENBAUM Author of the National Best Seller Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay

EXCEPTIONAL VALUE

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C

W

F FEAR

. 108

CAN FEEL

To My Readers

-... 128

TALENT

-..148

LOVE

..164

181

200

I hope this book will have an impact on your life, but I know that it has completely changed my life.

When I started actively doing the research on which this book is based I didn't believe in God. I'd been very religious until I became a teenager, and then suddenly I lost whatever it was that made it possible for me to have faith. You hear about people who wake up one morning and find they've lost their sense of taste. I lost my sense of God. And it was gone for most of my adult life.

I can't really say how it happened that I've completely regained my faith in God, my utter sense that He is real and always with me. All I know is this: I heard after of story story people who'd gone through something incredibly difficult and then almost miraculously discovered real meaning in what

TO MY READERS

they'd gone through. And somehow in the process of hearing

how life is filled with meaning I became filled with the presence

Don't misunderstand me. This is not a book about God. It's a book about people and their search for meaning. You don't need to believe in God to believe that there's meaning in the events of your life. Plenty of the people you'll meet in these w who discovered the reason they went through something are not believers. And that's fine.

But this is a book about how everything can change for the better when you see that all of the events your meaning and value. Things will probably change for you in a way that's different from the way they changed for me. The pose is that there are things we desperately need if we're going to take the next steps in our life, and somehow discovering how everything has meaning gives us just what we need to take life have 2

All I can promise you is that by the end of this book you'll have found the meaning of the events of your life. But I'm sure this knowledge will have a profound effect on you and on how you live. I hope you will visit me at www.EverythingHappens For A Reason.org and let me know about it. I look forward to

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Everything Really Does Happen for a Reason

SAMS

Is it really true that everything happens for a reason? After all, that's an amazing thing to say-that no matter what happens to you, not only does something valuable come out of it but it's just what you need.

Amazing as it sounds, it is true. It's taken me a long time, but I now see that even in the worst disaster-and I've had my share there are wonderful gifts, hidden opportunities, or life enhancing lessons. And we couldn't have other way. gotten them any If someone as hardheaded as I am can come to understand this, anyone can.

Of course, sometimes it's easy for us to believe that everything happens for a reason. We see it in little ways, like when our plans for an evening out fall through at the last minute, and we discover that everything we really want is at home that night anyway.

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We need to knee why much more when we fell o pheten if your life in mere dicen cap cabe noting hae any meaning every funda random anyting can happen

or why you for the love of your life much more paintiá fran people suspect One woman I lenow was ging home for Thanksgiving when she was in college he dhe plane was lying sting eventy thousand feet in the ar dhe dendoget a centie carache thut that's not what made her cry in the date of a nighttime flight she was obling because there was pain this in the world, seemingly without any day of re

One guy described this beding differenty"When I donk about the bad stuff that's happened in my life, I fod I'm jus a goddamn feel of the cosmos. We humiliating On a stewals crowded with people, I'm the one winds stepped in the dog pop. No one else is as stupid or unludy as I am. The problem is: How can I go forward, how can I use the future if I feel l am this stupid unlucky guy?

Knowing that there's a reason for what happens also saves us from being filled with blame. Blame is a very human attempt to make sense of some catastrophe, but most of the time we hate the way it feels. And yet when something had happens to us, it's almost a reflex to think, It's because everyone hates me, because I'm a loser, because I'm doomed. And so the blame begins.

We blame other people, and then we end up with the sense that the world is full of bad people. We blame ourselves, and then instead of feeling healthy, strong, and witcle we see our selves as sick, weak, and broken. And we blame life inself. Whan could be more demoralizing than feeling condemned to having

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MIRA KIRSHENBAUM

bad things always happen to us and not being able to d

thing about it? Blame is like a boomerang that loops around and bonks us on the noggin. Try this yourself: If you see someone with sadness, anxiety, and negativity, listen to his story. You'll soon see he's living in a world where all he sees are blame because he lives without positive meanings for what's happened to him. The only cure is to restore the sense that there is a good reason for everything that happens. struggling things to

Explain That, Why Don't You?

Years ago, if you'd said to me,"Everything happens for a reason, I'd have said that was a lot of bull. Things happened in my life that were so painful it's no wonder I'd had trouble finding their meaning, and I mistake. gave up looking. I now know that was a big

Lots of things happen to us that challenge our sense that everything happens for a reason. It can be anything. You get seriously ill at the worst possible moment. You think you've found the love of your life but something goes haywire between you and now the two of you are over. You've had one of those really painful childhoods. You screw up and lose a lot of money. Someone you love dies.

Yeah, we think, maybe there's a meaning for some things that hap pen, but not for this.

And even if we still have a shred of faith left that there is meaning in these events, we don't know how to find it. After all, the events in our lives don't come to us with labels attached

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We all have dreams of

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dreaming about going

scape designer. But he w

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him

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and eventually opened.

ness. He felt fulfilled.

*This book is filled with stories

I ran, some from patients. I p

ensure that they and everyon.

changed all names and identit

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CESS

MIRA KIRSHENBAUM

Several years later Scott came back to work with me. he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and he thought he was dying. (Scott's cancer eventually went into remission. He's still okay.) He said he wanted to discover why this terrible disease had happened to him just when his life was starting to work out. "Isn't this really a theological question?" I asked Scott Truthfully, I didn't want to deal with a question like this. My attitude at that time was that you could never find an answer And anyway, the most important thing is to make the best use of the time you have remaining. Why ask why? Sadly,

But Scott, bless him, held onto his need. He was about to teach me an important lesson about how helping people is ulti mately about helping them find meaning. After I'd dismissed his question Scott looked at me with tears in his eyes as if I'd betrayed him and said, "You don't understand. I don't want to die feeling like I was just some squirrel that got run over on the highway of life-hey, man, bad luck. I know that I'm not just a victim of a game of chance. I can't believe that I live in a uni verse where the things that happen to us don't have any mean ing. There is some meaning in this, a message in a bottle for me. The message feels just out of reach, but it's very important to me. Help me get t that message."

Somehow that got through to me. I remembered how much I, too, had wanted to get that message back when I was a kid. (In a few moments I'll tell you about all the things that had hap pened to me and my family that left me hungry to find some kind of meaning and how discouraged I got when I didn't think I could find any.) Looking in Scott's eyes, I lost my sense of being pissed off at the universe because the things that hap

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EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A

pen to us don't come neatly labeled wit Scott's need reawakened my own and a with it. I'd thought my need for meanin if it were dead. But the utter genuinene need made me realize that my own neec died. Suddenly I felt a whole new con younger self, and to a world of people that what happens to them has meanin

There was just one problem: How

Scott discover why he'd gotten sick ar

help myself? I found myself terribly n

saw how this situation should have

fessed that I didn't know how to help

felt I'd failed him. And I felt terribl

promise to myself that I would learn

the true meanings of the events in th Scott called several months later. appointed in me as I was in myself tough this search is. He had a note

"I know why I got sick!" he said." life. I'd made a lot of progress, but many things-flying, confrontation Here's the gift getting sick gave me to be afraid, big-time. Death is the face death, how can you be afraid you? You know, it's true: Cowards d die but once. I'd rather live a short a

ing death of a long life filled with "And I wouldn't have discovered

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MIRA KIRSHENBAUM

sick. I don't know how much time I have left to live, but in the

time I have left I'm feeling more alive and less afraid than I ever

did before."

Everyone who survives something feels they have a new lease on life. But Scott felt he had a new lease on life even when he thought he was dying. Understanding that there was mean. ing in what was happening to him, discovering what that meaning was, made all the difference for him. It made all the difference for me, too.

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My Story

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friends. Over the

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