To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.
KAHLIL GIBRAN, THE COLLECTED WORKS
Guess what Louise Hay does first thing when she wakes up each morning? Well, it’s not brushing her teeth or going to the toilet. And it’s not dancing the rumba. I’m not saying she doesn’t do any of those things each morning, but it’s not what she does first thing. “On waking, before I open my eyes, I like to thank my bed for a good night’s sleep,” says Louise. I ask you, dear reader, who else do you know who does such a thing? Imagine beginning each day with gratitude even before you open your eyes.
“Louise, you’re the only person I know who thanks her bed for a good night’s sleep,” I tell her.
“Well, I’m pleased for you that you’ve finally met someone who does,” she says.
“It’s not very normal, is it?” I jest.
“I’m not interested in being normal,” she counters.
“Normal is overrated,” I say.
“I think so,” says Louise.
“So when did you first start to thank your bed for a good night’s sleep?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, as if she’s been doing it forever.
“Was it 30 years ago, 40 years ago?” I ask.
“Once upon a time I used to wake up and think, Oh shit! Another day!” she says with a big laugh.
“Now that’s a powerful affirmation!”
“Yes, and I’d have a shitty day!” she says.
Louise begins her day with gratitude. “It’s a great way to start the day,” she says. Just as with affirmations, however, she doesn’t just do a ten-minute gratitude exercise and then get busy with her day. She makes a point of taking gratitude with her into her day. She has reminders everywhere. Underneath the mirror that hangs on her kitchen wall there’s a sign in gold lettering that reads What are you grateful for today? Louise practices gratitude with great mindfulness, and she happily expresses her gratitude to everyone and to everything.
“Louise, I’ve been watching you!” I say.
“Have you?” she replies coyly.
“Yes. And I see that you are in constant dialogue with life,” I tell her.
“Am I?” she says.
“Yes. You talk to your bed. You talk to your mirror. You talk to your teacup. You talk to your breakfast bowl. You talk to your computer. You talk to your car. You talk to your clothes. You talk to everything.”
“Yes, I do,” she says with pride.
“And mostly what you say is ‘Thank you.’”
“Well, I’m grateful that my car works well, and that my computer connects me to my friends, and that my clothes feel so nice to wear,” she says.
“I think you live an enchanted life,” I tell her.
“I am blessed,” she says.
Louise hasn’t always felt blessed. “There was a time when I wasn’t grateful for anything,” she tells me. “It didn’t occur to me to practice gratitude because I didn’t think I had anything to be grateful for.” She recalls how her first gratitude exercise was like trying a new affirmation. It didn’t feel real to her, and it didn’t seem to work. That soon changed, however. “Gratitude opened my eyes to a new way of seeing the world,” she explains. “By making gratitude a daily prayer—Thank you, life; thank you, life—I learned to trust in life again. I felt loveable again, and I began to see that life really does love me.”
Listening to Louise talk about gratitude reminds me of something called basic trust. Basic trust is woven into the fabric of our Unconditioned Self. It’s not just a state of mind, it’s a way of being. Basic trust allows the soul bird to spread its wings and fly. The soul bird trusts the air. Invisible forces hold it. It feels the Oneness, the unity with all. It remembers I am loved. It knows I am loveable. As we forget about the Unconditioned Self, we sense a basic doubt, or mistrust. The basic doubt arises from our perceived separateness. We wonder Am I loved? We fear I am not loveable.
Basic trust is essential in early childhood. In his classic text Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson identified eight stages of psychosocial development, each building upon the healthy completion of earlier stages. The first stage, Basic Trust versus Basic Mistrust, occurs between birth and age two. Basic trust is encouraged by, and reinforced by, loving and attentive mother and father figures. Mistrust arises from consistently unloving or inattentive parental figures. Unresolved, mistrust can lead later to an identity crisis, a term first coined by Erikson.
As D. W. Winnicott, the English psychologist and pediatrician who pioneered attachment theory in childhood development, writes, “At the start [a baby] absolutely needs to live in a circle of love and strength.” Winnicott recognized that basic trust and a secure holding environment are essential for a child to experience what he called “a sense of being.” This sense of being is an experience of aliveness that is primary in what Winnicott termed the True Self (that is, the Unconditioned Self). Without this support, a False Self replaces the True Self and acts as a mask of behavior, a defense against an environment that feels unsafe and unloving.
Spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas has written extensively about the “healing properties” of basic trust in both childhood and adulthood. He describes basic trust as a feeling of being “supported by reality.” He says that basic trust teaches us that “life is fundamentally benevolent” and helps us to let go of the false images, identifications, beliefs, and ideas that cause us to feel unloveable and unworthy. He regards basic trust as faith in an “optimizing force” that helps us to engage in life and to be “courageous and authentic.”
In his book Facets of Unity, Almaas writes:
If we really have this trust, this deep inner relaxation, it becomes possible to live our lives out of love, out of an appreciation of life, out of enjoyment in what the universe provides for us, and out of compassion and kindness for others and ourselves. Without it, we live our lives defensively, in conflict with others and with ourselves, becoming self-centered and egoistic. To find our basic trust is to reconnect with our natural state that we have become separated from.
“I like the sound of basic trust,” says Louise as she listens to me talk about it.
“Me, too,” I tell her.
“Do you think this basic trust exists in all of us?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Where does this trust come from?”
“From the Oneness, which is our home,” I reply.
“What happens to the basic trust?”
“Nothing, really,” I say. “It’s never really broken. It’s always with us, but our perception obscures it.”
“Like clouds covering up the sun,” says Louise.
“Practicing gratitude is one way to make the sun come out again,” I suggest.
“Gratitude helped me to say ‘yes’ again to my life,” Louise says.
“Gratitude helps us to trust again,” I add.
“From the One Infinite Intelligence comes everything we need,” continues Louise. “All the guidance, all the healing, and all the help. And for that I am most grateful.”
“Amen,” I say.
Gift of Everything
My start date for writing this book was January 21. I had put this date in my calendar back in October. That gave me the necessary time to create a space in my schedule so I could write without distraction. Just a few days before I was due to start, something unexpected happened. I woke up with a pain in my butt. My left buttock felt sore. The nerve down my left leg was stiff. I tried to carry on as normal, but I couldn’t. I had a consultation with a physiotherapist and also two sessions with a chiropractor. I tried to make the pain go away, but it got worse.
By the time I sat down to write, I was in a lot of physical pain. The muscles in my left buttock were knotted and bruised. A line of fire ran up and down the sciatic nerve in my left leg. My body was in a constant light sweat. I carried my body around like it was a wounded animal. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to write. My deadline didn’t allow for any delay. Fortunately, the pain eased as I wrote. Sitting on a pile of soft cushions helped. I booked a few more sessions with my physiotherapist and with a craniosacral chiropractor. I really needed the pain to go way, but it kept getting worse.
Why now? I wondered. I was in good physical health. I hadn’t fallen out of bed. I hadn’t gotten stuck in a yoga pose. I absolutely had to write the book now, so the timing of my injury was inconvenient and significant. I tried to ignore it, but it wanted my attention. I prayed for it to go away, but it was still there. Eventually, it occurred to me that this injury wasn’t an interruption in my schedule; it was my schedule. I needed to treat it with a more healing attitude. Who better to talk to then than Louise Hay?
Two days later, Louise and I talked on Skype. I told her about the sciatica. She agreed that the timing was significant. “Every book I write is a healing journey,” she told me. That’s true for me, too. All my books have taken me on journeys that never went according to plan. Not according to my conscious plan, anyway. Often I had to get lost in order to find my way. On every journey I found unexpected treasures and happiness.
“Well, how do you feel about having sciatica?” Louise asked me.
“I don’t want it, and I don’t like it,” I told her.
“So, you want it to go away,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid I’ll put on weight because I can’t exercise,” I said. “Not very deep, I know, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind!”
“Don’t judge the fear,” she told me.
“Thank you,” I said, grateful for the coaching.
“What else are you afraid of?” Louise asked.
“I’m afraid that it will last forever.”
“You’re afraid of feeling trapped,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Okay. The first thing you need to do is to dissolve this fear,” she said.
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“With love,” she said.
My attitude had been full of judgment. I treated the sciatica like it was a problem. I felt as if something was wrong with me. The timing was bad. I was rejecting the experience. I wasn’t open. I was busy. And I was afraid. And I collected a few more fears along the way. When I told a friend about my sciatica, he told me that his dad had had to stop working because of sciatica. Another friend told me that his girlfriend had had sciatica ever since she was a teenager and that nothing could heal it.
Louise encouraged me to change my attitude toward the sciatica. “Let’s not make this into a problem,” she said. “Let’s affirm that out of this situation only good will come.” With the help of Louise’s wise counsel, I suspended judgment. I started to treat the sciatica as an experience, not a problem. I decided not to resist the sciatica but to work in cooperation with it, and very quickly, I noticed I was less afraid. The pain began to ease, too. Over the next couple of weeks, I went from 100 percent pain, to 90 percent pain, to 75 percent pain.
Louise also encouraged me to choose my words carefully when speaking about sciatica. “Every cell of your body responds to what you think and what you say,” she told me. Negative affirmations can spread like a virus when you are ill or unhappy. “How are you?” your friends ask. “I’m not well,” you affirm. “I’m in pain,” you tell them. Soon, all your friends know what’s wrong, and then they make regular calls for updates. “I’m still ill,” you affirm. “The pain is worse today,” you tell them. Suddenly you’re sending out hundreds of these mental tweets a day, and your body is reading them all.
In her book Heart Thoughts, Louise writes, “The body, like everything else in life, is a mirror of your inner thoughts and beliefs.” She teaches us that a healing attitude is about being receptive to the messages of the body. “Pain is often a sign that you are not listening to a message,” Louise told me. “Therefore, start by affirming, I am willing to get the message. Pay attention and let your body speak to you. Apologize for ignoring your body and tell it you are all ears now. Be grateful that your body is trying to tell you something. Your body isn’t trying to make things difficult for you; it’s trying to help you. Your body isn’t against you; it’s showing you how to love yourself and how to let life love you.”
A few weeks ago, while aboard a flight to San Diego to see Louise, I read When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher. She quotes one of her students, who said, “‘Buddha nature, cleverly disguised as fear, kicks our ass into being receptive.’” This message seemed somewhat apt for my posterior (notice how I didn’t use the word pain) and me. During that visit with Louise, she encouraged me to listen for the message from the sciatica. We had some big conversations about releasing old pain, forgiving old wounds, living in the present, being more receptive, and, of course, letting life love me.
Slowly but surely, I have been befriending my sciatica. One morning, during a meditation, a question popped into my mind: How would I behave if I was not afraid of this sciatica? Contemplating this question eased the inflammation in my nervous system. My body felt more comfortable. The sensation levels dropped again to 60 percent, and then to 50 percent, and then to 45 percent. I was less afraid now and more open to guidance and inspiration.
“The first thing I want you to do every morning is to thank your body for all that it is doing to heal itself,” Louise told me.
“Sorry, I can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Well, the first thing I do every morning is thank my bed for a good night’s sleep,” I told her.
“Who taught you that?” she asked, laughing.
“Someone I love and respect very much.”
“Well, she sounds very wise to me,” said Louise with a smile.
“She is,” I said.
“Always remember that your body wants to heal. And when you thank your body for all that it’s doing, it really helps your body to heal,” she said.
Louise prescribed one of her favorite affirmations for me. It is I listen with love to my body’s messages. I took this affirmation into my daily meditation. Soon enough, a new plan of action appeared. I felt guided to have a series of sessions with my good friend Raina Nahar, a Reiki master and healer in London. My physiotherapist encouraged me to take up Pilates. I ordered a reformer, a scary-looking but very effective resistance-exercise machine for classic Pilates training. It arrived a few days later. I also followed two leads, given to me by friends, and met a local osteopath, Finn Thomas, and a new physiotherapist, Alan Watson: both helped me make significant breakthroughs in healing the sciatica.
Even with this new schedule and all the appointments and discomfort, I was still able to write this book, meeting each deadline on time along the way. As I write these words, the sensations in my sciatic nerve have continued to ease. I still have some messages I need to pay attention to. Writing Life Loves You has helped me love myself in a new way. It has also helped me be more open and receptive to letting life love me. It’s a journey I’m grateful to be on.
Path of Trust
“I didn’t have a healing attitude when I was first diagnosed with cancer,” Louise tells me.
“What was your attitude?” I ask her.
“I was very afraid.”
“What were you afraid of?”
“Cancer was a death sentence 40 years ago,” she says.
“So you were afraid of dying?”
“Yes. I was also full of superstition.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I believed cancer was a sign I was a bad person and that I’d got life all wrong,” she says.
“How did you change your attitude?”
“I got a lot of help along the way.”
“None of us are healed alone,” I tell her.
“The willingness to heal was the real miracle,” she says.
“How so?”
“When I was ready to do whatever it took to heal, I seemed to be led to exactly the right people.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“In You Can Heal Your Life, I tell the story of how after learning about foot reflexology, I wanted to find a practitioner. That night, I attended a local lecture series. Usually I sat at the front, but this time I felt compelled to sit at the back. I didn’t want to do this, but something inside me made me do it. Anyway, as soon as I sat down, a man came and sat next to me. He was a reflexologist, and he did home visits. So I booked him up!”
“That’s beautiful,” I say.
“As if by chance,” she continues, “wonderful books would land on my lap, I’d hear about lectures in my neighborhood, and I’d meet all sorts of interesting people.”
“You were being led on a path.”
“Yes. It was a path of trust, and everything fell into place for me.”
“What do you believe was leading you on this path?”
“My inner ding,” Louise says, pointing to her chest.
“Thank God for the inner ding,” I say, smiling.
“I quickly learned to trust my inner ding because of all the little miracles and coincidences that were happening to me,” she tells me.
“It sounds like the big plan was taking care of you.”
“Yes. And after six months, my doctors confirmed I was in remission. I knew, without any doubt, that the cancer was gone from my mind and my body.”
In 1999, I wrote a book about personal growth and evolution called Shift Happens! In it I explored the power of trust and how trust can carry us through the worst of times and the best of times. Listening to Louise tell her story, I was reminded how trust can transform a mind-set of fear into love and how a path of trust can take us on profound and wonderful healing journeys. A couple of years after I wrote Shift Happens! I received an e-mail from a reader named Jenna, who told me about her own healing journey. Here’s what she wrote:
Dear Dr. Holden,
I am a 42-year-old woman, living in New York City. A few months back (it feels like years ago now) I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My world stopped. I found myself in hell all of a sudden. It’s been a long journey. So many people along the way have helped me. There have been miracles. Many miracles. One of them was finding your book on an empty seat on a subway train one day.
I remember when I picked up your book a voice in my head said, “This is a gift for you.” I took one look at the title, and I smiled. The title was perfect. The title summed up how I felt about my life. “This is exactly what I need right now,” I said to myself. I read and reread your book over the next few weeks. I kept it in my handbag. It sat on my bedside table. I took it to my doctor’s appointments. Your book was my companion. It has been a friend to me.
Yesterday, I received the all-clear from my doctor. I am well again, but in a different way. Now I am well in my soul, not just in my body. This whole experience has helped me to see everything differently. I mean everything differently—even the title of your book. You see, I thought I was reading a book called Shit Happens! The title was perfect! Every day, ten times a day at least, I picked up Shit Happens! and read another chapter. I even recommended Shit Happens! to all my friends.
It was only yesterday, while sitting on the subway on my way home from the doctor, when I got out Shit Happens! again, that I saw for the first time what the real title of your book is.
I like this new title! The title is perfect. It sums up how I feel about my life.
Thank you,
Jenna
“When you are afraid, it is a sure sign that you are trusting in your own ego,” I wrote in Shift Happens! (spelled with an f). The ego, which is your sense of a separate self, struggles to understand trust because trust is felt only in alignment with your soul. In Shift Happens! I wrote,
To the ego, trust feels like walking the plank. It is a death march. This is because trust takes you past your ego’s perceptions to a field of greater possibilities. Trust invokes the highest in you. It gives you access to the unlimited potential of your Unconditioned Self. With trust, all things are possible.
Trust is not just positive thinking, it is a way of being. In its highest expression, it is a quality of awareness that belongs to your Unconditioned Self. Trust shows you that when your life is falling apart, it isn’t you that’s falling apart. The essence of who you are is always okay. What falls apart is your sense of self, your ego, and its plans, hopes, and expectations of how things should be. “Lives fall apart when they need to be rebuilt,” writes Iyanla Vanzant, in Peace from Broken Pieces.
As I was preparing to write this chapter, I got news that my dear friend Sue Boyd had been admitted to Bristol Hospital. She was in a coma, diagnosed with encephalitis and unlikely to live. Doctors told us that if by some miracle Sue did regain consciousness, she would suffer severe brain damage. Sue’s friends immediately set up a prayer circle. After a few days, we heard that Sue was awake. I made the journey to Bristol Hospital as soon as I could. I felt a wave of hesitation when I got to her ward. I was afraid that I might find Sue in terrible condition. I needn’t have worried, though.
Sue was sitting up in bed. Two nurses were by her side, and she was making them laugh about something. “Bloody hell, old boy, it’s so good to see you,” she said, smiling when she noticed me. Sue and I have known each other for 20 years. She is love on legs. Everyone who knows her would agree with this description. She’s a soul friend. We’ve shared much of our spiritual journeys together. While I was with Sue that day, I saw her take her first faltering steps with the help of her nurses. “These don’t feel like my legs,” she told them.
I listened to Sue’s story of what happened. “What a big surprise!” she said. “I didn’t think something like this would ever happen to me.” Later on, she told me most emphatically, “I trust that there is a higher plan, with benefits, and I am fully signed up for it.” When I mentioned how brave I thought she was, she said, “It’s not really bravery, it’s trust. All I can do is trust.” During our conversation, I shared something that the spiritual teacher Ram Dass once said when we were talking about trust:
Trust is the awareness that
who you think you are cannot handle your life,
but who you really are can and will.
I told Sue that I was about to write a chapter on gratitude that would include something about trust. Before I left, I gave her one of Louise Hay’s Wisdom Cards. The message on it reads, I trust the intelligence within me. Sue smiled when she saw it. “Love is all that really matters,” she said with 24 EEG electrodes stuck to her head. “You already knew that, Sue,” I told her. The EEG monitor registered Sue’s jolly laugh. “Yes, that’s true,” she said, “but I really know it now.” I could tell from the look in Sue’s eyes that she’d experienced something big. “I know what it’s like to be me without a body,” she told me, “and I tell you, it’s all love.”
The Holy Now
In our household, Bo and Christopher are the first to wake up in the morning. They don’t wait till sunrise, they don’t need an alarm clock, and they’re always raring to go. Hollie and I are usually bounced out of our peaceful sleep by two little bodies crawling all over our bed.
“Wake up, Dad!” shouts Bo.
“Come on, Dad!” shouts Christopher.
“Dad, Dad,” shouts Bo, tugging at my nightshirt.
“Let’s go downstairs,” shouts Christopher.
“Good morning, people,” I say, barely able to breathe.
“It’s the day!” says Bo, more softly now that she sees I’m regaining consciousness.
“Let’s play trains,” shouts Christopher.
“What time is it?” I ask, because it feels like 3:00 A.M.
“It’s wake-up time,” says Bo.
“Yeah. Come on, Dad,” says Christopher, who can’t even tell time.
“Have you thanked your bed for a good night’s sleep?” I ask, trying to buy a few more precious seconds.
“Yes,” says Bo.
“Yes,” shouts Christopher.
“Let’s go!” says Bo.
“Now!” shouts Christopher.
Now is very holy to children. There’s no other time quite like it. Now is the natural dwelling place for them. They don’t spend much time in the past or the future. Now is always a brand-new adventure. Adults often interpret children’s steadfast focus on now as a sign of impatience or even rudeness, but really it’s a sign of aliveness. Now is the only real time. And now is the time for the fun to start.
Christopher and Bo usually target me first thing in the morning and leave Hollie alone to sleep. My theory is that Hollie is awake, but she knows how to lie still. She’ll probably have something to say about this theory when she reads it. I have proof of it, though. When Christopher and Bo are trying to wake me up, they sometimes say something very funny, and I can hear Hollie’s silent laughter. The slight change in her breathing is what gives her away. Like the time when I asked Bo and Christopher for another five minutes.
“Good morning, Dad,” shouted Bo, ruffling my hair.
“Wake up, Dad,” shouted Christopher, leaning on my chest.
“It’s the day,” shouted Bo.
“Now, Dad!” shouted Christopher.
“What time is it?” I asked
“The clock says 5 and 5 and 5,” said Bo, meaning 5:55 A.M.
“Yeah,” said Christopher.
“Okay, give me five more minutes,” I told them.
“Bo, what’s five minutes?” asked Christopher.
“I don’t know, but it’s important to Daddy,” Bo told him.
Children have a huge faith in now. Now means more to them than the past or the future. Now is their best chance for happiness. Now is where they will find love. Now is the time to go for it. When they look into now, they see the totality of possibilities that Louise speaks of. Now is their mirror. Early on, children are still aligned with the basic truth I am loveable. This basic truth gives rise to the basic trust that I am loved. Now is a good time. Now is a time of innocence.
When we lose faith in ourselves, we stop trusting in the present moment to care for us and give us what we need. The basic fear I am not loveable and the basic doubt Am I loved? distort our perception. We project our forgetfulness onto the present moment. Hence, we judge that this moment is not good enough. It looks like something is missing. Now doesn’t feel real to us anymore, and so we either try to retrace our steps back to the past or we journey toward a better future. But without now, we are lost.
“Like the Prodigal Son, we all eventually return to NOW to find our spiritual home,” I wrote in Shift Happens! This journey back to now is a healing journey. It takes a lot of courage because as we start to come back to now, we face all our self-judgment, our self-criticism, our self-rejection, and our perceived loss of innocence. “The present moment is a pretty vulnerable place,” writes Pema Chödrön in When Things Fall Apart. Yet it’s only when we come back again to the mirror of now that we can remember what is real and let go of what is not true.
A great gift in my life is my occasional correspondence with the poet Daniel Ladinsky. Daniel and I have e-mailed each other since I first came across his renderings of the Sufi poet Hafiz some 15 years ago. I’ve featured Daniel’s translations of Hafiz in several of my works, especially Loveability. In The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz, Daniel includes a poem I knew I’d feature in this book at some point. Called This Place Where You Are Right Now, it’s about basic trust—an homage to now. Here’s how the poem begins:
This place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you.
Wherever your eyes and arms and heart can move
Against the earth and sky,
The Beloved has bowed there—
Our beloved has bowed there knowing
You were coming.
Basic trust recognizes that you are loveable and that life loves you now. Now offers you salvation and enlightenment, regardless of your trespasses or your terrible history. Now is another name for love. Now is another name for God. Louise Hay has a huge faith in now. You could say she has the faith of a child. “I healed my life by changing my relationship to now,” she once told me. The gift of now is that we always have a chance to start over. Every now is an invitation to let go of the past. Every now is a ticket to a better future. Every now has a gift for us, if only we’d look again.
Basic trust encourages you to see that you have the best seat in the house for your life journey. Wherever you are right now—in your job, your marriage, your financial status, your physical well-being, your emotional history, the prison you’re in—might not be where you want to end up, but it is the perfect place to start your healing journey. “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it,” writes Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now. “Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.”
In my book Happiness NOW!, I observed that the best chance for healing and happiness is always in the present moment. To be truly happy we have to be willing to give up the search for happiness and look again right here. I also shared the following line of letters:
HAPPINESSISNOWHERE
There are at least two ways to read these letters, as I wrote in Happiness NOW! “The difference between ‘happiness is nowhere’ and ‘happiness is now here’ has something to do with the event, and everything to do with how you see the event. Your perception is key.”
Without basic trust, you use each present moment as a stepping-stone to get to somewhere else. You pursue happiness, chase success, and search for love, but you never find them where you are. “In my healing journey I made a conscious choice to live more in the present,” Louise once told me. “At first, it was like moving into an empty house—cold and impersonal. But the more I lived in the present, the more I began to feel at home. Living in the present is how I learned to trust life and to see that everything I need is here for me.”
In every single moment there is a lesson, there is a gift, there is a teaching, and there is a message—all for you. What is the purpose of all this help? What is all this cosmic love for? Well, I think Louise sums it up beautifully in an affirmation from her book Power Thoughts: 365 Daily Affirmations. The affirmation is:
Every moment presents a wonderful new opportunity
to become more of who I am.
“Guess what I do last thing at night?” says Louise, with a twinkle in her eye.
“What do you do?” I ask.
“I go to bed with thousands of people all over the world,” she says, laughing.
“How do you do that?”
“People take me to bed with them!” she says.
“How lovely!”
“They download me so that we can lie in bed and meditate together before going to sleep,” she explains.
“Louise Hay, you are full of mischief!”
“Guess what else I do before I go to sleep?”
“I can’t imagine,” I say.
“I go through my day, blessing and being grateful for each experience,” she tells me.
“Do you do this in bed?”
“Yes, mostly. The other night I opened up my pocket mirror—the one you gave me with the inscription Life Loves You—and I said my gratitudes out loud to the mirror,” she tells me.
“Saying gratitudes out loud is very powerful,” I say.
“Yes, it’s much more powerful than just thinking about them,” says Louise.
“I love sharing gratitudes with my daughter, Bo, as she falls asleep at night.”
“Encouraging children to practice gratitude is so important,” says Louise.
“It’s also a lot of fun.”
“If you start the day with gratitude and end the day with gratitude, your life will be filled with blessings that you couldn’t see before,” says Louise.
“You can’t know how powerful gratitude is until you start to practice it,” I say.
“Practicing gratitude is always better than you can imagine,” says Louise.
“You have to do it in order to experience the miracle,” I say.
“Gratitude is a miracle,” says Louise.
Gratitude is a spiritual practice. Every time you give thanks for your life, even if it’s only for green lights and free parking spaces, you take a step closer to love. Gratitude always takes you in the direction of love. Gratitude takes you to your heart. Practicing gratitude helps you to cultivate a loving awareness for your life and for yourself. When you remember to give thanks you feel blessed, not just for what you have but also for who you are. Practicing gratitude helps you to remember the basic truth I am loveable. The more you practice gratitude, the more you become who you really are.
Gratitude is a training in vision. Imagine you’re looking into a mirror and you’re about to say out loud ten things you’re grateful for in your life at present. Chances are, if you’ve not done a gratitude exercise like this before, you might struggle at first. You might even tell yourself that it’s impossible to name ten things. If, however, you pay attention to your life and stay close to your heart, you will find ten quite easily. In fact, you will usually find more than ten. Gratitude brings a new awareness. It transforms your psychology. It opens your eyes. You see the world differently.
Gratitude is a Sacred Yes. When gratitude is easy, it’s a sign that you’re on track with your life; when gratitude is difficult, however, it’s a sign that you need to stop, because you’ve wandered away from yourself and forgotten what is truly sacred. Practicing gratitude helps you to identify and appreciate the Sacred Yesses in your life. When you begin the day with gratitude, as Louise does, you won’t get lost. Gratitude is a prayer that helps you to stay on track and say yes to what is real. E.E. Cummings wrote a beautiful poem that begins:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
Gratitude expands your awareness. When I told Louise about my sciatica, she talked about the healing power of gratitude. “At some point you’ll be grateful for this sciatica,” she said. “I’m not saying that you should be grateful for it now. It might be too soon. But at some point, you will be grateful because you’ll see that this sciatica has a message or even a gift for you.” After Louise told me this, I did an inquiry in which I completed this statement ten times: I am grateful for this sciatica because … I found this practice so enlightening and helpful. The sensations in my sciatic nerve soon calmed down to 30 percent and then to 20 percent.
Gratitude supports basic trust. Gratitude helps you to suspend your judgment. It gives you another angle, another way of looking at things. “Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you,” I wrote in Be Happy. Sometimes cancellations, rejections, traffic delays, bad weather, and even more bad weather can come bearing gifts. A layoff, an illness, or the end of a relationship may well be the start of something wonderful. “We don’t know what anything is really for,” says Louise. “Even a tragedy might turn out to be for our greatest good. That’s why I like to affirm Every experience in my life benefits me in some way.”
Gratitude brings you back to now. Practicing gratitude helps you to be more present in your life. The more present you are, the less you feel like something is missing. Recently somebody posted this message on my Facebook page: “You may think the grass is greener on the other side, but if you take the time to water your own grass it will be just as green.” Practicing gratitude helps you to water your own grass. Gratitude helps you to make the most of everything as it happens. Gratitude teaches you that happiness is always now.
Our spiritual practice for you in this chapter is called Daily Gratitude. We invite you to stand in front of a mirror and complete the following sentence ten times: One thing I am grateful for in my life right now is …
Please make sure you do this exercise out loud. Hearing yourself say your gratitudes doubles the effect. We encourage you to do this vocal gratitude exercise once in the morning and once at night for seven days. Remember, these spiritual practices don’t work in theory, only in practice. By practicing gratitude now, you step into your life in a whole new way. Gratitude takes you by the hand, and you see even more clearly that you are loveable and that life loves you.
