I've just finished Melody Beattie's
Make Miracles in Forty Days: Turning What You Have Into What You Want. Practising gratitude for the worst of me is a novel concept, but I must say, from the first day I started practising it, declaring gratitude for my feelings of self loathing, a shift seems to have started taking place. The things I loathed myself for, would straighten out, if not today, then the next and I am learning to be a little less hard on myself. Yeah not all the way. I mean I still blanch at my own work and think whatever I do is crap, except if it is stamped off by someone I respect, and even then...well.
I never realised that being the slothful, hateful person I am came at such a cost and that the resultant self-loathing absorbed most of my waking energy and disturbed my sleep. No wonder I was suffering from persistent insomnia. I don't know if this will help you. I hope it does. And that's why I am putting it up here, on my happy blog. Good luck and if you do stumble across this blog through some means of serendipity, and you try this exercise and find it work for you, I'd love to hear your story.
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My Introduction to Making Miracles (by Melody Beattie)
In 1973, when I was twenty-four years old, a judge sentenced me to go to either chemical dependency treatment for as long as it took to become clean and sober or prison for up to five years.
I'd been drinking since age twelve. When I turned eighteen, I switched to drugs. This judge didn't care that I'd graduated on the Twin Cities Honor Roll. He didn't ask what a seemingly nice girl like me was doing burglarizing drugstores in the middle of the night. He said I was responsible for my own behavior, a concept I hadn't heard before.
I didn't want to stop using drugs. I wanted to continue getting high. When the drugs stopped making me feel good, they at least made me feel numb, and that beat how I felt on my own. Then my probation officer visited me at treatment and almost caught me getting stoned. By then, I had enough sanity to react appropriately. I didn't want to go to jail.
I hadn't talked to God for twelve years, but I started talking to Him that day. I said I didn't know if a program existed that could get me sober. I thought of myself as fundamentally damaged, bad and wrong. I didn't know that addiction is a disease. Then I said if God did still care and if a program existed that could get me sober, would He please help me get it? I looked around the room. Nothing happened. I didn't know what I expected.
A few days later I was back to smoking dope. That day I could get my hands on only marijuana, though it was not my favorite drug. I took a hit off the joint. Suddenly the world looked like a Monet painting. Everything blended into everything else. The world turned a shade of ethereal purple. For the first time I no longer felt entitled to get high. I knew I had no right to keep doing this - using drugs - to myself. That moment I knew if I put half as much energy into doing right as I'd put into doing wrong, I could do almost anything I wanted.
I took one more hit off the joint. Then I ran into the treatment center and threw myself into recovery with all the passion I'd hurled myself into using drugs.
Except for one relapse in treatment at a Halloween party when I took a sip from a whiskey bottle, my sobriety began. Some people might call that a miracle. Recovery programs call it a spiritual awakening. Whatever happened, I didn't create it. I became sober by the Grace of God.
Making miracles is different from answered prayers, spiritual awakenings, or the Grace of God. Making miracles is something else. Life taught me how to make miracles in 1978.
In 1975, I had started working as a family counselor at a Minneapolis drug treatment center. That's about the time I met David Beattie, a premier chemical dependency counselor in Minnesota, constantly in the media. He could calm the wildest psychopath; earn the trust of murderers and rapists, charm judges and probation officers. Everyone loved or liked David - except for my mother. Tall, handsome, smart and funny, he embodied everything I wanted in a man. We fell in love.
We married in December. I couldn't have been happier when I became pregnant a month later. I loved it that our relationship wouldn't only be about us. We both committed our lives to service. God could use our marriage to help other people. For the first time, I believed dreams came true.
Life wasn't perfect.
I had uneasy feelings about my marriage from the start, but I figured that was because I hadn't experienced a family's love.
The rosy glow faded, although it took me a long time to realize it. First came David's disappearing acts. He'd go to the store and not return for two days. Next I learned that he hated working as a counselor. He didn't want to work at all. He wanted a get-rich-quick scheme so he wouldn't ever have to work again.
Then I learned David lied about our marriage's foundation. He'd never gotten sober. He learned to binge-drink. He also had serious financial problems. I'd worked hard to rebuild my credit after treatment. Now he had destroyed it again. But I chose to marry him, saying until death do us part. I meant that. It took years for my denial to fade. When I finally became aware that I'd begun counting the days until his probable death, I understood that divorce would be the most loving thing to do. It took even more years before it felt like the time was right to file for divorce. It was a slow, grueling process of facing reality and learning to take care of myself.
When we first married, we lived in my tiny apartment. When our daughter, Nichole was born, we moved to a larger one. Then David decided we should buy a home. But we didn't have money for a down payment and he'd ruined our credit. He convinced me to ask my mother for a loan. She agreed. We started looking at houses but didn't qualify as strong buyers.
The beautiful homes we looked at? Beyond our reach. In the end, we qualified for only one house, a seventy-five-year-old three-storey that had served as a rental property for the past fifteen years. It had become so nasty that nobody would rent it and hadn't been occupied for three years. Permanently filthy orange shag carpeting covered the floors. Holes in the walls went all the way through to outdoors. Our furniture included one used bed, a dresser, and a crib for Nichole. This didn't match my dreams.
Then I became pregnant again. A baby wouldn't improve our marriage, but next to getting sober, my children became the best thing that happened to me. My nesting instinct became fierce. I looked around the house. How could I bring a baby here. I lived better than this as a junkie.
I didn't know how to paint rooms or hang wallpaper. David, constitutionally incapable of anything, preferred himself that way. "If I learn to do something, you'll expect me to do it again," he said. He couldn't even use a screwdriver to assemble the crib before Nichole's birth. What could he do to fix this house?
I began a ritual after putting Nichole to bed at night. I'd sit on the floor in the middle of the living room. I'd think about how much I hated the house. I'd think about how God and David disappointed me. Even David's psychotic clients sobered up, got jobs, bought nice homes, and kept them in good repair. They lived better than us. It would be nice to have someone to lean on, someone to take care of me now and then. David couldn't even take care of himself.
Each night when I went downstairs, I stared at the ugly walls and felt miserable, hopeless and depressed. When I told David's friend how much I hated the house, he said I should be grateful that we owned property.
Gratitude for this? No way, I thought. I hated everything about where we lived.
By September 1978, I couldn't stand it. The holidays would soon be here. The baby would be born at the end of January.
Thanksgiving will be fun, I thought. We can sit on the floor. David can eat turkey legs, and then, like a caveman, throw the bones across the room. That's when the idea came.
Maybe I didn't know how to hang wallpaper, but after everything I'd done, surely I could learn to paint a room. Money was tight, but a coat of cheap white paint would be a huge improvement. I didn't know anything about painting, but the minister who heard my fifth step in treatment said I had a quality - the only quality we could find - that he described as
persistence. (I think he meant
obsession instead.) The dining room would be painted before Thanksgiving. I was determined. By the time the baby came, we would live in a decent home.
A neighbor lent me a stepladder. I scrubbed the wall-papered walls the best I could. We didn't have curtains, but an attractive oak buffet covered one wall at the end of the room. Big windows let in sunlight on the wall adjoining it. One wall arched over the entry to the living room.
I'll start here, I decided. I began rolling paint on the wall, fantasizing about how surprised David would be when he came home and saw what I'd done.
Then I noticed the white paint starting to loosen the layers of wallpaper on the wall. Some of the painted paper curled. Other chunks fell down on the floor. I counted five layers of wallpaper on the walls in that room. Five! There I stood, watching paint soak into the wallpaper and the paper come loose from the wall. That was not what I planned.
I tried pulling the paper completely off the wall. That didn't work. It came loose in scattered chunks. David came home about the time I started cleaning up the mess. "What did you do?" he asked. "You're ruining our house!"
His death might happen sooner than I thought.
Money became tighter. We needed a crib for the new baby, a sofa, a dining room and kitchen tables, and chairs. The nesting instinct might be fierce, but nothing I could do would make any difference. I needed money and skills to fix this house and didn't have either one.
I would soon learn that that statement lacked truth. Yes, I needed money and skills to fix the house, but a miracle would work, too. I didn't know how to create miracles yet, but I was about to learn.
I returned to my nightly ritual of sitting on the living room floor not counting my blessings. The more I focused on what I hated and despised about my life, the more miserable I felt. One evening, while contemplating how much I hated this house, and my life, another idea occurred. I had been practising misery every night by focusing on everything I hated.
I've practiced misery with discipline, I thought. Did a good job of it, too. But all it did was make everything worse. What if instead of griping, I practiced gratitude. Not the "count my blessings" thing. What if I practiced gratitude for everything just as it is - for what I hated and disliked? What if I practiced gratitude for how much I despised that ugly orange carpet, the holes in the walls, and all the wallpaper that soaked up the paint? What would happen if I plastered gratitude over every negative thought and emotion? Instead of just counting my blessings, I'd be grateful for everything, especially what I didn't appreciate.
It sounded crazy, but except for my misery, I had nothing to lose. All my life, I'd resisted my emotions, especially negative ones - anger, fear, sadness. I thought those feelings were wrong. Other people did, too. They called them
self-pity or
feeling sorry for yourself. I hated this house and everything about it, but resisted feeling that way. I resisted the idea that we owned it. I resisted almost everything in my life.
Years later in martial arts, I learned that resistance is the fastest way to disconnect from God, the good in life, and ourselves. Resistance occupies our energy so we don't have time or attention for much else. Resistance locks us into battle with reality, but mostly it keeps us engaged in battle with ourselves. The worst thing about resistance is it destroys all our power.
I didn't expect myself to feel grateful or feel gratitude. This time, I'd let myself feel whatever I felt. Then I would express gratitude for everything, as it was. I'd try my plan for six weeks and then I'd evaluate how it worked.
That night I began practising gratitude for what bothered me. No matter what negative thought crossed my mind or what emotion I felt, I immediately plastered gratitude on it. The second I became aware of a negative feeling or thought, I'd think
Thank you for that. When I thought about how much I wanted a beautiful house instead of this dump, I expressed gratitude for that. I practiced gratitude instead of misery for how awful I felt about bringing this new baby into this awful house and how bad it was for Nichole. I practiced gratitude that I didn't have a crib yet. I practiced gratitude for how abandoned, miserable, alone and unloved I felt. It became a challenge - like a game I played - to counter every negative or miserable thought with a grateful one. Soon I began searching for everything and anything I felt negative about, so I could put gratitude over it.
I willed gratitude, faked it, forced it. I didn't understand much about universal law then. I didn't know a universal law says we should be thankful in every circumstance. No way would I write some phony count-my-blessings list when I felt as miserable as I did. I went the other way and dug as deeply as I could into myself to root out all the negatives. Some people might say that I was lying because I didn't feel grateful, but I didn't say I felt grateful - at least not then. I said
Thank you for exactly what I thought, how I felt, and what I did and didn't have. I expressed gratitude for who I really was. The universal law says we say thank you, it doesn't say we feel any particular way.
I can't tell you when the miracle began. I can't remember what happened first. Events took place so naturally that I barely noticed when they occurred. I found a place selling expensive wallpaper for a dollar per roll. Then I learned to steam off the old wallpaper. My mother, who had owned rental property for years, taught me how to paint rooms and hang wallpaper. I found a plaster-paint, an indoor Spanish stucco swirl that you can put on the walls instead of painting them. It fills big holes and cracks. It was cheap and easy to use. It made the dark oak woodwork stand out, creating a beautiful contrast.
Everything I needed came to me; whatever I needed to know, I learned. My dream home began to materialize but I didn't see it coming, not at that moment.
When I ripped up a corner of the orange carpet, I found beautiful hardwood floors underneath. We didn't have money to rent a floor sander. I bought a nine-inch round sanding tool and used that on the floors instead. Most of the doors on the cabinets in the pantry had disappeared. I couldn't afford to replace them, so I removed all the doors and went for an open pantry look. For each problem, a solution appeared - one I could afford.
While walking down the alley, I saw a couch someone put out by their garbage. The next day was trash pickup day. Instead of letting the garbage truck take it, I asked the owners if I could haul it away. They said yes. I pushed that couch - inch by inch - down the alley and into my house. Then I bought blankets and pillows at garage sales and used them to cover the couch. Scratched, stained end tables turned into antiques when I stripped and refinished them. Although I don't remember all the details, I remember that every single thing I needed appeared.
Soon the holidays passed. Time for me to stop climbing up on pantry shelves. By the time my son, Shane, arrived, both children had beds. I brought that baby boy home to the most beautiful house on the block. That's when I understood what happened. I learned to redecorate a house with no skills or money. I used the miracle route instead.
The lesson was about more than learning to hang wallpaper. Life taught me how to take what I had and use gratitude to turn it into more. I'd learned to make miracles out of what I had. All I remember clearly is my decision to practice gratitude instead of misery for who I was, what I had, and how I really felt.
I didn't see the miracle or the lesson coming. But once I did, I continued to practice gratitude for the house. The difference? My gratitude became real.
