Week 2: There is gold in them thar hills

A quick and easy journaling practice for life, particularly when it feels hard

Hi lovelies!

Today’s post is about a book, and a journaling exercise that can be life changing.

A bit of background:

I first heard about Melodie Beattie’s book, Make Miracles in Forty Days in February 2021. I had been in Tosha Silver’s Living Outrageousness Forum for 5 or 6 years and she had stumbled across this book that was published in 2010 and Tosha was super excited about it.

Tosha’s a spiritual teacher that teaches about surrender and detachment - I’ll be talking about her more but if your intuition sparks with this mention, definitely check her out.

Inspired by Melodie’s book, Tosha held a class called Radical Gratitude that I attended. Although she wasn’t specifically recommending it, I felt the pull to go deeper, so decided to read the book and did the written journaling practice. So glad I did.

It’s pretty bloody amazing. I journaled this way for the first time for the most of 2021.

you can really tell i’ve read this a few times!

BTW: If ‘Miracle’ feels awkward to you, it certainly did to me at first - Melodie defines a miracle as something happens that we couldn’t control, create, conceive or do on our own.

Possibly you’re thinking - I know how, or I already do a gratitude practice Trish, so I don’t need this.

The thing is, it’s gratitude beyond the good stuff. It’s beyond kittens and rainbows.

It’s being grateful for everything. Or almost everything.

Including being grateful for the shitty boss, the broken car, the weight you can’t seem to loose.

It’s alllllll the things.

Don’t worry, you don’t actually have to feel grateful for this to work, you just have to say you are. Perplexing but true.

It works.

Why? I’ve given this a fair bit of thought - why and how does this work so well? I think it’s because the first step does something absolutely essential for change.

“What you resist persists” - Carl Jung

“Resist nothing” - Eckart Tolle

Ok, cool, cool. That sounds great, but how exactly do we do that??

Late in 2007, I was living in Vancouver and for various reasons was going through it. That wisdom “What you resist, persists” kept coming to mind, but I didn’t actually understand what it meant, or how to do it.

I even asked my therapist, attributing her with greater understand of the world that I had, and she looked at me blankly.

I knew it was important, but I was at a loss what to do or how to do it.

How, did I stop resisting?

It obviously wasn’t just a mental decision…

It was something more, something deeper, something energetic, and I couldn’t seem to get there.

It was doing this journaling practice close to 15 years later that I finally understood.

This technique has magic in it, day after day, if you let it, it moves through your life and uncovers all the bits, big and small, that you’ve resisted. Maybe not even consciously decided, but had stuffed under the sofa cushions of your awareness, hidden out of sight.

When people talk about shadow work, it’s definitely included in this practice.

I do recommend reading to the book if you feel like it, because her story is pretty powerful and there will be nuance I can’t include here but I’ll give you the basic outline.

What is this magic practice?

• get a journal, [or your phone or computer]

• you could do this with a partner [emailing each other] but that gets trickier so definitely read the book if you wanna do that step, for the parameters to make this aspect successful. I personally write in my journal

• ideally it’s first thing in the morning, when you’re still close to sleep - there’s a more open connection to your unconscious at this time

• it’s 10 minutes, I do two pages generally

• every day, for a minimum of 40 days

• on day one - start with, what are the miracle(s) that I want to occur. write them out at the beginning of your journal on day 1. [could be things like, I want to loose weight, or have money to pay for a trip to Italy, or not have rage over my ex-husband, or buy a house, have a baby, feel safe to leave the house… whatever is personally true for you. Could be something wonderful, or could be some of those incredibly hard heavy things]

• and then you BEGIN… with the framework below but it’s being grateful for everything that comes up as you’re writing. This is coming from various parts of you, your emotions, your unconscious, it’s all good and all welcome.

• side note on the epically hard things: you decide where this line is for you btw - Melodie’s son died, she will never say she’s grateful for loosing him, but she will say she’s grateful for the emotions she has about his death

The framework & examples:

Today, I am grateful for….

• Today I am grateful for the wretchedly rude ways my kids speak to me. It makes me furious and then I scream at them and feel awful

• Today I am grateful for this weight that is so hard to loose and how uncomfortable I feel in my body

• Today I am grateful I only have $12 in my bank account until I get paid in a week

• Today I am grateful for my anxiety that keeps me from leaving my house

• Today I am grateful I have food to eat, a cosy bed to sleep in, for the hug I received yesterday.

Write it down, whatever it is - ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Keeping in mind those designations are judgements of the mind, not necessarily truth. Remember last week’s post [week one], things in our life are often pulling us forward in ways we might not see. Pulling us towards stepping into our power. Pulling us out of the mud of victimhood.

So what will happen? or Why I think there’s gold in this practice

Things in my life started to change and continue to change for the better. Each day I scan through myself, looking for any bits of aspects that I’m currently resisting. Another way I think about it is, what am I instinctively hiding from myself? Not wanting to take a look at.

By writing, ‘Today I am grateful for this thing I’m hiding from myself…”

I’m effectively bringing it to the surface, giving it light, which brings it into your awareness.

It seems like only if we see things about ourself, is it possible for it to start to change.

For me, I’ve noticed things start to break up, cracking open in different ways. Rather like the frost coming out of the roads in the spring and you get cracks and pot holes in the asphalt. Maybe this seems like a poor comparison but the problem is no longer buried (water in the road) it’s now visible and is now able to be repaired.

I’ve then reallllly noticed how synchronicities start to come in on these problems; answers, suggestions, surprises, information, solutions, people come in and change starts to occur.

I feel lighter and more in the flow of my life. I feel much less overwhelmed or unsure most days.

I decided to write this as the topic for Week 2, because I had the ping to start doing this again late February. Waking up on the morning of February 28th, I had the, ‘oh I need to do that journaling practice again.’ The past year for me has been pretty damn hard in many ways and also remarkably wonderful in others. And my intuition was showing me this would help me move forward.

And boy, has it. From where I was then and how I felt late February to today, feels like a million miles of progress in the direction I want my life to go.

So I wanted to share with you, and if you decided to give it a try, would love to know how it goes for you. Melody did this with a workshop of about forty people and most of them received the miracle they wanted at the beginning within the 6-weeks of the class. I think 3 people were later, but they had seen progress in the class and continued. There is no reason you need to stop, it’s really probably a beautiful practice for life if you so desire. There was also a mom who modified it to do with her kids on the way to school each day! Pretty cool.

If you’re interested in scheduling a trans-channeling - which is a private session where you’ll receive source energy frequency. It tends to help you move through blockages. Send me a message and we can find a time that works for you.

Reporting back on the eclipse - that felt amazing to me! I’m going to include a bit of an update of what I experienced at the end of the audio recording [up at the top of the post], so if you’re interested, you can listen to that.

I’ll reference this video that I watched on Wednesday and it explained one experience in particular! Original blueprints being tightened back into place. Do you feel like you’ve been compressed? Relax and expand if you can.

If you’d like to check out previous posts:

Week 1(!): How our Fear & Anxiety can actually be useful...

first things first