I recently had a chance to talk to some people who are incarcerated. Stuck in prison for a year or two, sometimes longer, many of them look at incarceration as being ‘wasted’ time. They’re frustrated. They can’t wait till they get out, having lost a couple of years of life.

How do you turn this frustration around?

How can ‘wasted’ time possibly be a good thing?

In fact, this time is a golden opportunity for them to focus on re-seating their own perspective and their connection with their higher power and higher perspective.

By keeping focused, for example, they can spend a lot of time in meditation, thinking about re-establishing their priorities in life.

Prison is an amazing opportunity to elevate oneself in a way that could never happen in a busy life ‘outside’, with a family and all kinds of distracting things going on.

There’s always a silver lining. And if you look at life that way, nothing is really bad.

How do you feel right now?

When I look back at my life and I think of the moments that I was most upset about, moments that I felt were great losses for me…I find that some of those events were actually the best things that happened for me.

Some of those moments were bad. Truly bad.

But many of them were, as I eventually saw, the best things that could have happened to me. And even with those truly bad moments, I can feel good about them because of where I am today.

It all depends on how you are feeling today

If you feel good today, the negative events in your past were part of the journey that got you here, no matter how bad they seemed at the time.

So it doesn’t MATTER what happened in the past. You can look at any event in a new way. It all depends on how you feel about yourself today, and that’s the magic of life. It ALL depends on how you view your life.

Now, if I could only remember that when it’s happening to me! And the only way I CAN remember, is to have faith that no matter what happens, it’s going to be okay.