Five Questions for Personal Success

How to Feed a Miracle Mindset

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

I’ve been teaching meditation for almost five years now, and at the end of every class I offer a small set of questions for people to ponder. Over time, many have told me these questions have changed their lives. I can say the same. They’ve brought clarity and focus to my day-to-day life, and as someone with a wicked case of ADHD, I’ll take clarity and focus whenever I can get it.

One of the cool things about these questions is that they don’t require any heavy lifting. You just repeat them quietly to yourself. You’re not looking to chase answers, just to rest with the question itself.

Now, I love meditation. It’s one of the reasons I teach it, because it’s helped me so much in life that I want to help others experience some of the benefits, primarily how it can keep worry and anxiety at bay. But when we pray or meditate, the benefits rarely show up all at once. I might feel a little calmer after a meditation session, but the deeper work unfolds afterward in conversations, decisions, interruptions, ordinary Wednesdays reading a Substack post. I always say that spiritual practices are like taking vitamins. The benefits happen over time, and you might not even notice them until you realize that you’re not falling asleep during the day or that you have more energy. The same is true with meditation. You might realize over time that the more you practice, the less frustrated you get with delays. Or you might begin experiencing serendipity or a sense of peace more often.

That’s why I return to Rilke so much in my life. Rilke’s advice to live the question helps stir the spirit and keeps us open to how our souls try to speak to us. I’ve also come to see that meditating on the questions I share at the end of each session helps develop a miracle mindset, one that opens our eyes to the good in creation all around us.

As I mentioned last week, a miracle mindset doesn’t mean living a life of spontaneous healings or levitating during a rainstorm. It means living from a place where we pay attention to the things working below the surface of everyday life. It means trusting that still, small voice inside us and believing that insight, healing, direction, and even purpose can arrive in their proper time if we are attentive enough to receive them.

The Five Questions

So here are the questions I offer at the end of each meditation.

Who am I?

What do I want?

What is my purpose?

What am I grateful for?

How can I serve?

I invite you to try this as an experiment over the next week. Spend a few minutes each day repeating them quietly to yourself. Do this by closing your eyes and settling into a chair or lying down. Take a few slow breaths. Repeat each question gently for about ten seconds before moving to the next. If any thoughts, sensations, or images pop up in your mind, just let them be. Detach and come back to repeating the question.

As I mentioned earlier, these questions are not meant to be solved. They’re meant to be lived with and returned to again and again. By repeating them on a regular basis, you allow those questions to do their slow, patient work. Over time, they begin to shape how we act and respond to the world, and we see that the questions are ways of teaching us how to listen.

And when the soul is ready, it will speak.

And if we’re prepared to listen, that’s where miracles begin.