The year was 1948.

Every morning, a man named Marcel Sternberger would leave his home in New York City and take the same 9:09 subway to work. One day, Marcel decided to visit an ill friend before going to work, so he took a different subway, one he’d never ridden before. The car was packed, but there was one vacant seat. As Marcel sat down, he noticed that the man next to him was reading a Hungarian newspaper. Marcel was originally from Hungary, so he struck up a conversation in Hungarian with him.

He found out that this man, Bela Paskin, had survived extreme atrocities during World War II and had ended up in a Russian work camp. After the war was over, Bela walked hundreds of miles back to his hometown in Hungary, only to find that his entire family, including his beloved wife, had been killed in the concentration camps. He was so devastated that he eventually left Hungary and made his way to New York.

As Marcel listened to Bela’s sad story, it felt strangely familiar to him. Just a few days earlier, he’d met a woman at a dinner party who had told him a very similar story. He’d been so intrigued by her story that he’d written her name and phone number on a slip of paper and put it in his pocket. Marcel reached into his pocket for the paper, and asked Bela his wife’s name.

Bela replied, “Well, my wife’s been dead for years, but her name was Marya.” Marcel grabbed Bela by the hand and urged him to jump off at the next stop with him. Then they ran to the closest pay phone. Shaking, Marcel dialed the number on the piece of paper and when the woman answered, he asked, “What was your husband’s name?” She replied, “Well, my husband’s been dead for years, but his name was Bela Paskin.”

Marcel turned to Bela and said, “It’s a miracle. Take the phone and say hello to your wife.”

I’ve shared this true story many times in speeches and on radio and TV interviews, and it still gives me goose bumps every time (I call them “God bumps”). But it’s only one of the thousands of “miracles stories” I’ve read while co-authoring the books in the Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul series. What I’ve found is that miracles are not only possible, they’re happening all the time. And yet, if you’re like most people, there’s probably some area of your life in which you feel like you could use a miracle. Maybe it’s finding your soul mate, or having a financial breakthrough, or uncovering your life’s purpose. Or maybe it’s as simple as being happy.

Now that one was a hard one for me. I’ve often said I came out of the womb with existential angst. Throughout my childhood and teens, I felt like I had a dark cloud around me. I continued to be unhappy in my twenties, thirties, and early forties, even though wealth, recognition, and even fame came to me during those years. It was only when I began studying happiness and applying what I learned to my daily life that everything turned around. By the time I was 50, I was genuinely, deeply happy---and that honestly seemed like a miracle to me.

But then something even more surprising happened. I started experiencing something beyond happiness. I began to notice that everything in my life felt like it was “in the flow.” The right people were showing up at just the right time, whatever I needed was appearing out of nowhere, and miracles seemed to be happening almost every day. Wow, was that nice! I decided to do some research on miracles, and what I discovered blew me away: There’s actually a formula for unleashing miracles in your life.

Now, if you’re a type A person like me, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, give me the formula now, so I can get to work creating my miracles!”

But here’s the trick: You can’t create miracles. According to the dictionary definition (with which I completely agree), a miracle is “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”

So if miracles are a gift from the divine, and there’s no scientifically reliable way to create them, what can we do? We can create the conditions that will invite miracles into our lives. There are specific things we can do, a formula, to put ourselves in the flow that will allow synchronicities and miracles to show up in our lives---I call this “living in the Miracle Zone.”

Once I uncovered this formula for living in the Miracle Zone, I created a course called “Your Year of Miracles” to show people how they can live miraculous lives. I’ve been astonished at the amazing miracles---big and small---that the thousands of people who’ve taken the course have manifested. The formula works!

Let me share with you three key steps in the formula, so you can start to live more and more in the Miracle Zone right away.