Have you ever seen one of those circus acts where someone has ten or twelve china plates spinning on top of thin sticks? The performer comes out and starts a few plates spinning and then adds a few more and a few more, until, hopefully, all his plates are spinning at once. At least, that’s the idea. We all know what happens—just when he has the plates at one end of the table spinning right, a plate at the other end starts to wobble, so he runs down and gets it going faster. Suddenly, two plates in the middle look like they are about to topple off, and as soon as he sets them right, two others in separate spots are on the verge of crashing down. Back and forth he frantically races, the audience laughing with delight and cheering him on if he gets all of his plates to spin properly without disaster.
Why do we find this feat so fascinating? Why do we shriek with a kind of perverse delight when a plate drops? Because this display mirrors our own lives perfectly. The truth is, most of us live just like this. We have all these “plates”—our relationship plate, our work plate, our family plate, our money plate, our health plate, and so many others—and our goal is to keep them all spinning at once. You know what you did first this morning when you woke up? You mentally checked your plates!! “O.K., the relationship plate … well, things with my husband are pretty good. How about the kids plate? Hmm … a little shaky.… Jennifer is having trouble in school but it’s not that bad yet. Let me look at this work plate. OH NO! It’s wobbling pretty badly—I am really behind on that project at the office, and look down there at the money plate … Oh gosh, our credit card bills are way too high this month, that plate’s about to crash …”
And so you spend the rest of the day running around trying to get the shaky plates stabilized, and hoping that too many plates don’t start to fall at once. Your idea of a “good day” is when all of your plates are spinning, no mishaps. And a bad day? Well, we all know what that’s like: it seems like some devious, invisible hand is knocking one plate after another off the sticks, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t keep them up in the air where they belong.
This is the battle you face each day, the battle for control of your life. You have your picture of how things “should” be, how your relationship “should” feel, how much money you “should” be earning, how your kids “should” behave, how people “should” treat you fairly, how it all “should” turn out. And when something happens that doesn’t fit this picture, which it inevitably does, you feel like something is going “wrong”; you feel out of control. One of your plates has dropped. You may have been happy ten minutes before, but suddenly you’re angry, or frightened, or depressed. You have lost your state of equanimity.
Like most people, I spent much of my life collecting what I thought were beautiful “plates”—the perfect career, the perfect relationship, the perfect home—then trying desperately to keep them all spinning, and praying none of them would crash to the floor. And of course I failed, because as we’ll see later on, part of the purpose of life is for those plates to fall, and for us to learn the lessons that inevitably come when we are staring at the pieces of our egos scattered all over the ground. For me, each time a plate toppled over, I would feel as if somehow I’d done something wrong, and my inner state of peace and contentment would be shaken. “If only I can get all my plates to stay up,” I would tell myself, “then I would finally be happy.”
It was my own fervent spiritual search for the truth that ultimately led me to a series of profound realizations. For over twenty years, I’d been teaching and writing about how to create loving relationships with the people in your life. There are emotional principles, I would explain, that make love work or not work, and if you take the time to learn about these principles, you will be able to experience more intimacy, more connection, more fulfillment. Eventually, I reached an even deeper level of understanding: the most important relationship I have, that we all have, is with life itself. I had patterns of relating to life—accepting it or resisting it, surrendering to it or misunderstanding it, approaching it courageously or approaching it fearfully, paying attention or ignoring its messages, being grateful for it or not appreciating its gifts—just as I had patterns in my human relationships. How I chose to interpret events that happened to me, the attitude I brought to each day when I woke up in the morning, the way I responded to difficulty, how much I listened to what my life was trying to tell me, all these habits were determining the quality of my relationship with life. And my relationship with life was affecting my relationship with everything else. It all started inside of me.
I knew the principles that made relationships work. I knew the principles that made communication work between two people. So what were the principles that could make my relationship with life work?
The Ten Secrets About Life
Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know shares the answers I’ve discovered to these questions in the form of ten important principles, or secrets, about life. These basic, universal principles have been taught and written about for thousands of years in all of the great philosophical and spiritual traditions of the world. Why do I call these underlying principles of life “secrets”? The English word secret is a word that comes from the Latin secretus, which means “hidden.” These ten secrets aren’t mysterious or hard to comprehend, but they are ways of understanding life that have, indeed, been hidden from our awareness, and therefore whose wisdom we haven’t had access to. And as long as this wisdom remains a secret to us, we cannot benefit from it, and we go on living our lives feeling as if something essential is missing, yet not quite knowing what that is.
When you don’t have the information about how to make something work, that thing becomes a source of frustration to you. For instance, no matter how wonderful your car is, if you didn’t know how to start it, how to get it to move forward or to turn, you wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere. If you bought an expensive, highly advanced computer but never read the manual or had someone show you how to operate it, the computer would just sit there on your desk, completely useless. A musical instrument like a piano or a guitar or a violin is worthless by itself—unless you know how to make it produce the sounds you want and then, it’s magic.
This same understanding applies to your life. Like the car or the computer or the piano, your life will work or not work depending on whether or not you learn about the underlying principles or secrets that make life work. When we discover these principles and put them into action, it’s as if we have suddenly pushed all the correct keys on the computer, or figured out how to put the car into the right gear. Everything begins to run more smoothly. Everything, finally, begins to make sense.
Here are the ten principles or secrets about life that this book introduces:
Secrets About Life
1. Everything you need to be happy is inside of you.
2. The purpose of life is for you to grow into the best human being you can be.
3. Change is inevitable, so stop resisting and surrender to life’s flow.
4. All obstacles are lessons in disguise—honor them and learn from them.
5. Your mind creates your experience of reality, so learn to make your mind your friend.
6. Fear will steal your Aliveness—make your courage bigger than your fear.
7. You must love yourself before you can truly give love or receive love from anyone else.