Use the four Essential Practices that follow on a daily basis. They are the foundations for your new life and indispensable for the journey to come.
You’ll be amazed at how great you feel when you start giving yourself the care you’ve longed for from others.
WE’s exercises
This is an experiential process. Each chapter contains exercises that will integrate what your mind is learning with what your heart already knows. These exercises are not optional extras; they are essential to the journey you are on, so please don’t skip them. Knowing is not enough – you need to experience the principles for them to achieve their full transformative power.
The more diligent you are in completing the exercises, the greater the results you’ll see. It is better to do them hastily than not do them at all, so don’t let perfectionism creep in. From time to time you will need to write things down, so a notebook or journal will be useful. You may also want to ensure that you have a quiet place where you can work on them without being disturbed. This is a sacred process that deserves a sacred space.
You can return to any of the exercises and repeat them once you have finished working through the principles. Use them if you hit a bump in the path or if you’re feeling stuck. Each exercise works on an emotional, intellectual and spiritual level, so take advantage of them. You will get out of this journey what you put in.
Centre yourself before each exercise. Start by taking five deep breaths in and out, allowing your out-breath to last a beat longer than your in-breath to calm your nervous system. If you have the time and space, light a candle to signify the sacred nature of the work you’re undertaking. You’re doing it for you and for many. Try not to sit on the sidelines, figuring out how to understand the journey by intellectualising it – take the plunge, dive in and experience it!
WE’s affirmations
At the end of each chapter you will also find affirmations. These are antidotes to the toxic messages we give ourselves on a daily basis. Use them to ward off negativity, as you would use a medicine to prevent an infection. Repeat them to yourself as you go through the day, knowing that each time you say them you are gradually moving away from self-harm and towards self-care and self-love.
Essential Practice 1
A Mind-altering Substance
‘When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in.’
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
Gratitude has the power to transform everything: our perceptions, our experiences and our state of mind.
A lot of us come to this journey with a mountain of disappointments and hurts. Feeling grateful may be the last thing you want when you’re unhappy, when you’re full of all the things you haven’t got, and all the things that have gone wrong. But – however low, angry or despondent you feel – you will start to feel the benefits of gratitude as soon as you allow this tool into your life.
A warning: like many of WE’s tools, gratitude may sound simple – way too simple and perhaps not quite complex enough for our sophisticated female brains. Don’t be deceived. Remember those connect-the-dot books you had when you were little, where you joined numbered dots together and a picture emerged? This is what we do every day of our lives: we join up events and assign them meaning so that we can interpret the world.
The problem is that very often we join up the wrong dots. As we go through life, many of us notice all the things that seem to go wrong rather than the things that are going right. We focus on the times we haven’t got what we wanted, when life has disappointed us, when we may have been ignored or slighted in some way. Like fortune-tellers, who are only capable of negative conclusions, we examine the tea leaves of our life and decide that life is unfair, that we’re just not destined to be happy, that we don’t have the good luck others seem to enjoy.
Not surprisingly, if you join up these dots, you end up with a depressing picture.
But stop right there. From this moment forward you are going to try a different approach.
‘I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness – it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practising gratitude.’
BRENÉ BROWN
EXERCISE: Daily Miracles
This exercise will begin a mind-altering process by showing you how to put the practice of gratitude into your daily life. Make yourself comfortable and close your eyes. Breathe in and out five times, as described here, until you feel centered and settled.
Take up your journal and write down ten things in your life right now that you’re grateful for. They can be as small or as big as you like. Notice if your mind leaps in and lodges an objection. It may claim that it can’t find anything at all to be thankful for, or it may want to remind you of all the disappointments, trials and losses you are experiencing.
Like a miner panning for gold, try to pick your way through the silt and mud that your mind kicks up to find the treasure that rests in its midst. Keep looking until you find something – anything at all – that you can be grateful for. Perhaps it’s that you’ve got a roof over your head or you have eyes to see your children with. Or perhaps it’s that you started your day with a warm cup of tea and have something to eat in your cupboard. The items on your list don’t need to be any more complicated than that. In fact, the most basic things are often the most powerful. Imagine what life would be like if you didn’t have them.
Your list might also include some of the simple daily events that we so often overlook because we take them for granted – yet if they were suddenly to disappear we’d be lost.
Keep writing until you’ve got ten. If you’ve got more than ten, that’s great too – you can keep writing until the flow naturally stops. Now read it back to yourself, or, for maximum effect, read it aloud and say, ‘Thank you for …’ each item on the list. It will likely feel awkward at the beginning, but the more often you do it, the easier it will get.
Gratitude lists will become a staple of your new life. We suggest writing a list daily while working through the remaining chapters. After that, it’s up to you, but it’s very possible you won’t want to stop.
What you’ll discover is that as you list the many little things for which you’re grateful, the picture you have of your life starts to change. Behind the gloom, a more positive image starts to emerge. One that is tender and full of wonder. One that existed the whole time, just beneath the surface. We’re not deceiving ourselves; we’re simply joining a different set of dots.
‘Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.’
MELODY BEATTIE
Gratitude is infectious. It creates its own virtuous circle. The more grateful you feel, the more you’ll have to be grateful for. Knowing that you’ll need to come up with a list of positive experiences each day means you’ll start to become more aware of them. When you’re on the lookout, miraculously they start to appear far more often.
It is as if your mind