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  Like a drug, your thoughts can change how you feel.

  Close your eyes and think of something that really upsets you: perhaps a disagreement with a friend or a difficult situation you can’t resolve. Observe what happens to your mood and energy. Notice the emotional jolt you experience as you think about it, as if the hurt or offense were happening again.

  Now think of something or someone who really makes you excited: someone you’re attracted to, a child’s embrace, an amazing job opportunity, or a vacation. Feel what happens to your energy levels. This positive thought lifts you up.

  Thinking certain thoughts can give you a high—whether it’s imagining yourself in the arms of someone you really desire or browsing the internet for things you want to buy. But, like eating sugar, it’s a temporary lift, a fantasy, and sooner or later, you will come back down to reality. The scariest thing about the drug of fantasy is that we don’t need to go anywhere to buy it: it’s just there, available twenty-four hours a day, inside our heads.

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  A NEGATIVE BIAS

  We have roughly sixty thousand thoughts a day, and as many as 87 percent of them are estimated to be negative.1 No wonder we find it so hard to maintain our equilibrium!

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  Thinking in and of itself of course isn’t bad—it enables us to navigate our way through life—but only a small portion of our thinking is helpful. The rest is driven by our ego and keeps us locked into patterns of conflict and dissatisfaction.

  Attack Thoughts

  An attack thought is a kind of egoic thinking. It’s quite easy to spot and starts with phrases such as “How dare she . . .?” or “Couldn’t he have just . . .?”

  It doesn’t matter whether your attack thought is aimed outward at someone else or inward at yourself. The outcome is always the same: you are the one who gets hurt. If you consciously take your mind off the negative assault on yourself or someone else, you will feel better. You will be let off the hook of negativity that you placed yourself on.

  It’s not possible to think an aggressive or violent thought and maintain your peace of mind. So the moment you notice yourself mentally criticizing someone—stop! Use the Three-Second Rule you learned in the previous chapter. (See page 135.) Interrupt the thought by telling yourself very simply, “I could have peace of mind instead of this.”

  Of course, you might not want peace of mind. You might want to keep thinking about how wrong someone else is. But you now know that you can’t be both right and happy. So the choice is yours: righteous indignation or peace?

  Self-Blame

  It’s time we start writing a new narrative that doesn’t focus on the struggle but on progression.

  —NANCY KACUNGIRA, Kenyan TV news anchor

  When our attack thoughts are pointed inward, we tell ourselves we’re the worst parent/friend/worker/boss/daughter/person. We get stuck in the awfulness of distorted thoughts about who we are.

  Beating ourselves up is subtly addictive. Some of us started doing it in childhood as a defense against situations we couldn’t control. It gave us an explanation for the bad things that happened. It was less scary to blame ourselves than our parents or caregivers because if our caregivers weren’t to be trusted, then surely we couldn’t survive.

  Thinking we’re bad protects us from disappointment: if we’re not good, we don’t deserve anything good to happen, so we won’t mind when it doesn’t. (Except that we still do!)

  We’re never as bad as we think we are. It’s another one of those lies our ego tells us. Pretending to be worse than we really are is just an inverted form of boasting; it’s pride in reverse. Sorry to break the news, but you’re not actually the worst anything—you’re just you!

  Compare and Despair

  We may believe that everyone is born equal, but how often do we actually act on that belief? Most of us spend a lot of our lives thinking we are superior or inferior to others. We’re constantly reading situations and trying to work out how we fit in. Who has the power? Who’s the smartest? The most attractive? Who’s the loser, or the one who’ll make us look like one?

  Society, of course, actively encourages us to compare and compete with others. We are conditioned to see ourselves as objects that have to be made worthy of selection: educated, groomed, and honed to the max. We’re trained to rake over one another’s appearances and told how to copy someone else’s look, wardrobe, or lifestyle, feeding the lie that who we are isn’t enough. The woman on the magazine cover has always got the body or the job or the relationship that would complete our lives.

  It’s all too easy to end up feeling as if other women are our rivals and that we’re all in competition with one another. That’s the work of our ego.

  When we compare ourselves with others, sooner or later we end up in despair. Our ego loves to make comparisons, but most of the time it doesn’t even compare like with like. It usually contrasts how we feel on the inside with how other people look on the outside, and it makes no allowance for the fact that most people put up a façade.

  Thanks to social media, the opportunity to compare and despair is only ever a click away. We can instantly see what we haven’t got and the places we haven’t been invited to. We live with our faces pressed up against the windows of the virtual lives of friends and colleagues who seem to have exciting careers, luxurious holidays, immaculate children, and so on, and wonder why our lives don’t match up. We forget that most people post only good news: the successes and sunrises, not their daily struggles or the hard slog to pay the bills.

  When I was offered my first pupillage at the English bar by a chambers of more than twenty barristers, I was told, “We’re happy to have you as a trainee, but we won’t have a permanent place for you because we already have a woman.” It wasn’t said with malice, more as a statement of fact—they had their token female. It affirmed what many women know already: that our sex is the first thing many employers see when interviewing us. That can make it hard not to feel as if our only real competitors for any job are the other women. Now if I’m in that situation, I make a special effort to connect with the other female candidates and build a bond of solidarity to replace the competition and the comparisons that my ego (and often society) wants me to make.

  —JN

  The Toxic Cs

  There’s a handy technique for spotting when you’re in egoic thinking. Generally, our ego has five really bad habits—all of which are culturally encouraged and all of which handily begin with the letter C:

  • Comparing

  • Criticizing

  • Complaining

  • Controlling

  • Competing

  These attack thoughts are defense mechanisms, only they don’t work. They rob us of our peace of mind and set us apart from others. Each time we pick up one of the Toxic Cs, we cloud our minds and our outlooks.

  Humility provides us with a spiritual alternative.

  Humility: The Path Less Travelled

  The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

  —ANNA QUINDLEN, journalist and author

  WE’s Principles provide us with an alternative way of living and relating to one another. It’s a path less travelled but much gentler. In exchange for the 5 Toxic Cs, humility gives us three more powerful ones:

  • Compassion

  • Cooperation

  • Connection

  These three Constructive Cs are important not just for your own well-being but also for the planet as a whole. They give us a new template of how to be in the world, and they help us to stop replicating a system that has caused so many of us to suffer for so long. The fact is, if we gain power and influence and then use the old system we’ve inherited from men, nothing will change.

  Instead of seeing one another as rivals competing for scarce resources, humility asks that we treat each woman we encounter as a potential ally and friend. Where once we might have compared and criti
cized, humility enables us to practice compassion, cooperation, and connection.

  Many of us have suffered discrimination, directly or indirectly. We can be hungry for our chance of success. Humility doesn’t mean we can’t still pursue our goals, but it does ask that we do so in a way that doesn’t cause others (or ourselves) harm. When we find ourselves drawn into any of the Toxic Cs, we reach for our spiritual antidotes: the Constructive Cs.

  Remember WE’s acronym for trust: To Rely Upon Spiritual Truth. The “spiritual truth” that humility gives us is that our worth doesn’t depend upon externals. When we truly comprehend this fact, we free ourselves to focus on the journey and our experience of it rather than the ultimate outcome. Our sense of identity is no longer wrapped up in obtaining goals. Instead, we judge ourselves by our values.

  One of my biggest lessons in humility wasn’t voluntary. I loved my working life as a television correspondent. I loved being able to call politicians to account, to be part of the events as they unfolded, to have a voice and a platform. I always had an interesting story to tell over dinner or a cause to galvanize support for. Then overnight I burned out and lost the ability to work. That was it, gone.

  For the next decade, I was too ill to work or do much else. I no longer had stories to wow people with. I no longer had the inside track on what was happening in Westminster, the hub of British government. I was chronically sick—that wasn’t quite so glamorous! But that period gave me freedom from my egoic self. There was nothing I could do to feed my ego; many days, I couldn’t even get dressed. To start with, when people asked me what I did, I’d tell them about what I used to do, but it made me feel ill again. I’d become allergic to my egoic self.

  Then I discovered the freedom of telling them the truth: “I don’t do anything.” I’d watch the look of panic spread across strangers’ faces—perhaps they worried we’d have nothing to talk about—but I was no longer scared of not having an external identity, because I’d found who I really was inside.

  —JN

  The rewards of the spiritual journey you’re now on are enormous, but the work isn’t always easy. It requires honesty, willingness, and commitment. But remember that nothing has to be done perfectly. Perfectionism is banned, but there are other Ps you can use, such as persistence and practice. The more you practice, the more spiritually fit you will become, and the easier it will get.

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  Exercise 1: Spiritual Gym

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  This exercise is in two parts. In its entirety, it will help you build your spiritual muscles to tackle some of the ego’s worst habits. You’ll start to recognize when your ego is in charge and doing the talking.

  In the warm-up, you’ll need your journal and a dictionary. Using a dictionary, even an online version, may make you feel like you’re back in school, but the beauty of working this way is that it harnesses your intellect for spiritual purposes.

  Part 1: The Warm-up

  Look up the definition of the following words and write them down in your journal: arrogance, dishonesty, envy, greed, impatience, intolerance, jealousy, lust, pride, self-centeredness, selfishness, self-pity.2

  Some of the definitions may appear to be contradictory. For example, pride can refer both to satisfaction in a job well done and an inflated sense of one’s own importance. For this exercise, concentrate on the aspects that the ego likes to harness: the negative ones.

  Each characteristic has the power to distort your thinking and your response to life events. It can make you feel deeply uncomfortable.

  Have a look at this list and see how many of these responses are familiar:

  Arrogance—“Why can’t they just do things my way?”

  Dishonesty—“I’d never behave like that.”

  Envy—“I want what they’ve got. It’s not fair.”

  Greed—“I want more [than my fair share].”

  Impatience—“It needs to happen now.”

  Intolerance—“I can’t stand x, y, or z.”

  Jealousy—“I’m going to be replaced by this person or left out.”

  Lust—“I don’t care, I really want him/her.”

  Pride—“How dare they!” or “Don’t they know who I am?”

  Self-centeredness—“How can they do this to me?”

  Selfishness—“What about me?”

  Self-pity—“Poor me; doesn’t anyone understand how difficult this is for me?”

  These often habitual responses to what life throws at us cause discomfort and pain. They lead us straight into a destructive cycle of attack thoughts and one or more of the Toxic Cs.

  Note down which ones you resort to most often. We all have some that are our go-to responses. “Poor me” (self-pity) or “How could they?” (pride) are usually favorites.

  Notice and name them as you go through your day. There is a spiritual cure for them, which we’ll look at in part 2 of this exercise.

  Our ego focuses on externals. It complains that life isn’t fair and looks for someone to blame. But as we do this work, we discover that whether we’re happy or miserable is more likely to depend on our responses to the hand that life deals us, rather than the actual hand. With humility, we learn to replace our habitual ego-driven responses with spiritual ones.

  Part 2: The Workout

  Each of the negative characteristics we just examined has a spiritual opposite. When you notice yourself struggling with one, you can defuse it by focusing on its mirror image. It’s like a gym, only spiritual. Just as when you have a bad back you’re told to strengthen your stomach muscles to reduce the stress on your spine, you want to work with the spiritual opposite of a problem.

  Take up your journal and dictionary again. Write down in color the definitions of the following words: humility, gratitude, acceptance, courage, compassion, generosity, honesty, kindness, tolerance, patience, love. These are your defenses against the ego’s attacks.

  As you write them out, focus on where they reside in your body. Ego-centered feelings are experienced as thoughts in the mind, but their spiritual opposites exist in your heart and in your core. As you develop these new muscle groups, the ego will begin to relinquish its hold.

  Below is a rough guide to which spiritual Principle to exercise to counterbalance each egoic trait. Adjust it according to your needs. The moment you spot a negative characteristic, replace it with its spiritual opposite.

  Arrogance—Humility, Acceptance

  Dishonesty—Honesty

  Envy or Jealousy—Gratitude, Acceptance, Generosity

  Greed—Gratitude, Humility

  Impatience or Intolerance—Humility, Kindness, Peace

  Lust—Gratitude

  Pride—Humility, Acceptance

  Self-centeredness—Humility, Kindness

  Selfishness—Generosity, Joy, Kindness

  Self-pity—Generosity, Gratitude, Courage, Joy

  You might notice that we left one Principle off this list: love. That’s because you can use love in every single instance. So if you’re struggling to remember which Principle to use to diffuse a particular ego attack, choose love, and you’ll always have a healthy defense.

  Try practicing a different spiritual Principle every day, or every few days. Developing these new muscles and behaviors will take time and patience. This is not a race. We’re in it for the long haul.

  Increasingly, you will find that the gap between your values and your actions starts to close. Your life becomes more congruent. And this in turn creates another of WE’s magic-multiplying effects: the better you feel about yourself, the better you’re able to act on your beliefs. As you do, so you become.

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  IDLE MINDS

  A healthy habit that will distract your ego from its destructive tendencies is to give yourself intellectual stimulation each day. Read something uplifting or informative, do a puzzle, learn a new skill. Otherwise, sooner or later, your ego will start roaming around looking for something inappropriate to gnaw on.<
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  Forgiveness

  Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

  —HANNAH ARENDT (1906–1975), German-born writer and philosopher

  Humility frees us from the need to pretend we’re better or more perfect than we are. That means we can apologize more easily when we’ve acted in ways that have hurt others or failed to reflect our values. Humility also provides us with a spiritual skeleton key: forgiveness. Of course, our ego doesn’t want us to forgive—ever. It feeds on having enemies and on being right. From its Neanderthal perspective, forgiving is letting the other person win. It stokes both our longing for vengeance and our need for other people to realize just how much they hurt us and that they must make it better. Our ego—if we don’t neutralize it with humility—can lead us to rekindle the resentments and stories we processed in Principle 3, courage.

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  A WISH THAT WORKS

  If you find yourself craving vengeance, here’s a remedy that really can help.

  Every time the person who wronged you comes into your head, wish or pray for him or her to have every good thing you want for yourself: happiness, fulfillment, love, peace of mind. Wish for the other person to have it all.

  Your ego will naturally try hard to resist it. You may be happier praying for the other person to suffer, but that will just keep you trapped. Your desire for vengeance makes you a prisoner.

  If you can manage to do this every time you think of that person for as long as two weeks, amazing shifts will take place. After three weeks, you’ll feel free.

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