We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere

FOREWORD

Since the first edition of this book was published the need for a different way to approach all areas of our lives has become even more evident and urgent.

In our own home countries, Britain and America, we’ve seen intolerance and bigotry endorsed at the ballot box. There has been an increase in levels of fear and uncertainty not just for ourselves and our communities, but also for the future of our planet.

There is another, better way of doing things. The principles and tools in this book lay out a blueprint for positive change – both for us as individuals and for the world that we all inhabit.

Please read, enjoy and share with other women. Together – joyfully, lovingly and with compassion – we can make change happen.

AN INVITATION TO YOU

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

MARY OLIVER

At some point in our lives, most of us feel the gentle calling of our soul. Sometimes it’s so quiet we can barely hear it – a soft tapping. No louder than a leaf falling from a tree.

We may imagine we didn’t hear it. Or perhaps it is louder and takes the form of a persistent ache, a nagging sense that there is something missing. ‘Is this it?’ we wonder when we wake in the dead of night or find ourselves caught in the treadmill of our daily grind.

It may be a hint of loneliness that endures even in the company of friends. Or a sense of injustice and a desire to change things that feels urgent and necessary, but also hopeless before it even begins.

Perhaps our heart tells us there is a better way of living, that we need to stop ignoring what really matters – the suffering of others and our planet’s future – but our head insists we’re naïve and tells us to knuckle down and get on with our lives as they are.

For others the call may take the form of a crisis – a break-up or breakdown, a betrayal or loss. Or perhaps it’s addiction, depression or another serious illness.

However it comes, it is an invitation to take a journey. You may resist. Many of us have resisted it for years, even decades. Ultimately it’s your choice. But it will wait for you patiently, tapping daily or every so often in small and big ways to remind you that, in truth, you can’t avoid it if you truly want to live a meaningful life.

If you’ve heard that call, this book is for you. It’s for women who want happiness and meaning. It will guide you towards inner peace and provide the power to help transform the world in which we all live.

THE JOURNEY

‘Take courage, join hands, stand beside us.’

CHRISTABEL PANKHURST

WE is a journey based on nine principles that have been taught by sages and saints throughout the ages and they have the power to transform your life and the world around you.

It isn’t a lifestyle choice to be bolted onto our normal ‘me-centred’ way of living; it’s a path of radical transformation that puts compassion for the world at its core.

Use this book both as a guide and a source of inspiration. If you’re hurting, it will help you heal. If you’re lost, it will steer you home. If you’re searching for a purpose, it will gently lead you towards fulfilment.

We arrive in this world without instruction manuals and we grow up without an emotional toolkit. So it’s easy to lose our way.

As we go through life we amass emotional scar tissue from the knocks that we inevitably take. We become like electrical circuit boards that have got so clogged up by the silt of life that we can no longer connect with ourselves and our core beliefs, let alone with the world beyond.

All of us start out in life with a strong internal value system – a sense of what’s right and wrong and what’s fair and what’s unjust. But then life intervenes. In the cold light of reality our ideals can quickly seem naïve, unrealistic and untenable. However strong and heartfelt our intentions, it’s hard to give effect to our beliefs when we’re struggling, stressed or in emotional pain.

Before long we’ve abandoned those values in favour of the rules we’re taught by the world. Succeed, compete and accumulate. Deep down we feel conflicted, but at the end of the day we each have to get by, don’t we?

A gulf emerges between the values we choose for our personal lives and those we live by in the world at large. In our homes and families we believe in sharing and making sure everyone’s OK. But once we step outside our front door the rules change. The common good is replaced with the quest for personal success. Within seconds we dissolves into me and we’re elbowing each other out of the way in the race to get to the finishing line. Only, of course, there isn’t one – just a horizon that moves further away the closer we get.

The Nine Principles in this book have the power to heal our wounds and return us to our centre. As you learn to apply them to your life one by one, you will be taken on a journey from me to WE. Loneliness will evaporate. You will discover a sense of purpose and you will be freed – freed to live a life that is authentic, happy and meaningful.

WHY NOW?

‘Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.’

NAOMI KLEIN

Our current way of doing things – the ‘me culture’ – isn’t working.

The world we all share is more divided and unequal than ever.

Rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm among women are rocketing. And the hard-fought-for rights that we, as women, thought we’d finally won are once again under renewed attack.

Nearly 800 million people live in hunger and yet those with plenty battle with obesity and depression.

Every minute one woman dies needlessly in childbirth, while elsewhere in the world another woman spends thousands on cosmetic surgery because she isn’t able to feel comfortable with how she’s ageing.

Violence against women is rising, yet at the same time refuge services – especially for black and minority ethnic women – are being cut.1

The gap between rich and poor is widening, causing social division and ill health,2 but instead of investment and redistribution we have cuts and austerity.

Large swathes of humanity are threatened by climate change, yet our governments fear tackling it lest they offend big business and consumers.

The list goes on and on, and every one of us knows that it’s crazy and it’s wrong.

Yet instead of joining together, we often find ourselves isolated and in competition. Trying to put a positive gloss on our lives to disguise the huge gap between how things look externally and how they feel inside. Not able to lift our eyes to the horizon and deal with the bigger issues because we each already have so much on our plate.

There is a different way of doing things. One that combines our own emotional and spiritual healing with active engagement with the world around us.

Our current political systems have failed us, but it’s not possible to heal the divisions in our world without also healing the wounds which drive them. We can’t heal our broken system by sitting in judgement. Within each of us lie the seeds of intolerance and hate. If we simply declare others wrong and ourselves right we deepen the divide. But, to remain silent is also not an option – it leaves us complicit.

This path – of necessity – involves a lot of internal work but it is work that will ultimately bring us together.

WE is a movement for change, a manifesto for a female-led revolution: a quiet, peaceful about-face that doesn’t require the consent of those in power. It just asks each of us, one woman at a time, to be the change and take the journey from me to WE.

HOW WE WORKS

‘We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.’

SIMONE WEIL

WE combines spirituality, politics and psychology. We’re often taught to compartmentalize them, but they are intimately connected.

Unless we work across all three disciplines, it’s impossible to achieve lasting, sustainable change. It’s not possible to get happy without getting kind, we can’t be spiritually fulfilled without rolling up our sleeves and helping others, and we can’t help others without healing ourselves.

This is not a self-help book to enable you to get more out of life or a spiritual text to encourage you to float above your difficulties. Nor is it a lecture on how to try harder! It is an intensely practical guide to healing and activism from the heart.

Each of the Nine Principles in this book can be applied to your own life and to the world at large. Their impact is cumulative. Once you’ve completed the process, you’ll have a set of tools that will enable you to handle whatever life throws your way.

Most importantly, underpinning all WE’s principles is an ancient rule that can be found in almost every ethical, spiritual and religious tradition: the Golden Rule.

At its simplest, the Golden Rule states that we should treat each other as we would like to be treated ourselves – in other words, with love. It is a simple rule that has the power to change everything.

Our goal in taking this journey isn’t individual happiness – though that comes as a welcome by-product. It is to live in a way that is true to our inner calling. A way that is kind and just. That leads to personal fulfilment and helps other women across the planet.

WHY WE WROTE WE

‘History has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.’

MICHELLE OBAMA

This book doesn’t come from lofty heights. It comes from two friends who have stumbled along together, trying, failing, crying, laughing, learning and trying again.

It is about a set of principles that led us out of darkness, from a place where both of us were in despair, into a way of life that has meaning and purpose.

We discovered the hard way that no amount of external success could fix how we felt on the inside. The more we had, the more we felt we needed to get. No matter what we achieved, it didn’t make us happy. It made us feel guilty that even with the gifts and luck we’d been given, we couldn’t seem to make life work.

In the end we’d both become dependent on a whole host of unhealthy crutches – alcohol, drugs, work, food, abusive relationships – you name it, we tried it. And at the same time we had therapy, did yoga and tried to puzzle life out.

Our crises were severe enough that we had no option but to change. To start a process of complete rebuilding. Root and branch.

We’re passionate about the Nine Principles in this book because they’ve transformed our lives. That doesn’t mean we’re happy all the time, that we handle every situation perfectly, or that we’re saints. Far from it – we are, like every one of us, perfectly imperfect. But, when we’re willing to use them, WE’s principles give us access to a peace of mind and inner freedom that we’d never even dreamed was possible.

We aren’t doctors or therapists or priests. Our principal qualification is that we handle emotional pain so badly that we’ve been forced to look for answers. For over 20 years we’ve each searched for what works. The wisdom in this book isn’t ours; it’s distilled from a myriad of teachers far wiser. We are passing it on with gratitude and in the hope that others might gain comfort and meaning from it.

When both of us started walking this path we were cynical and resistant. But now, from our own experience, we know that transformation and happiness are possible and that miracles do actually happen. Hopefully you haven’t hit as bleak a patch as we both did, but wherever your starting point, if you follow this path you will experience profound changes.

I came to the journey that is contained in this book when I was a single parent of two boys working my dream job. I was a network news correspondent who got to tell the world about the issues I cared deeply about. Then one morning I woke up and realized I couldn’t go on. I called the news desk and said I was very sorry but I couldn’t come in – not that day and, as it turned out, not ever. Unsurprisingly, my life fell apart. I was diagnosed with severe depression and burnout. I began the journey I’d been avoiding for the previous 35 years – the journey to meet myself and to find a way of living that accorded with who I really was at my deepest level. I sought help and wisdom from numerous teachers, support groups and professionals. I met friends like Gillian who were seekers also. Today I am the same person, but I am so much happier. I have meaning, I have connection, I have people that I truly love in my life. Of course, I still hit patches of pain and difficulty, but I wake up each day excited to be alive.

The journey that these Nine Principles map out doesn’t ever end. But it contains truth. Truth that I know from my own life has the power to guide us away from doubt, depression and self-hatred, and for which I’m infinitely grateful.

JN

I think I started searching for some kind of deeper meaning to my life when I was in high school, but I don’t feel like I properly put solutions into practice until I was in college. By then I had turned to so many outside sources for comfort to deal with my fear and uncertainty, my sense of loneliness, confusion and feeling misunderstood about the world and my place in it that when I started practising some of these principles the effect was dramatic and life-changing. I suddenly felt a sense of stability and grounding, personal power and purpose, and am absolutely certain that had I not had that foundation when I then achieved what turned into international career success, I would simply not have been able to deal with it. That’s not to say that I have not struggled or handled things appallingly or turned for long stretches towards unhealthy ways of coping, but what I did learn in those initial years were tools for how to handle life’s hardships better. And on a daily basis I get to choose how my life plays out. How do I deal with this rejection, this grief, this fear? With these practices in my pocket, it’s my choice.

GA

You don’t have to take our word for it. Treat this journey as if it were a scientific experiment. See what happens if you practise the principles as they are laid out. If at the end of these chapters you don’t feel better, you can always have your old life back.

The Nine Principles in this book work.

Change is possible.

There’s no need to panic or feel overwhelmed. Nothing is asked of you now, other than that you read the book and give the principles within it a try. This is not another thing to add to your to-do list. It is a gateway to an inner freedom and a peace of mind that you may not have known was possible.

You have nothing to lose but your unhappiness, and the world has everything to gain.

WE’S VISION

‘Like life, peace begins with women. We are the first to forge lines of alliance and collaboration across conflict divides.’

ZAINAB SALBI

Imagine a sisterhood – across all creeds and cultures – an unspoken agreement that we, as women, will support and encourage each other. That we won’t seek to take advantage of another’s weakness, or sit in judgement of each other’s shortcomings. That we will remember we don’t know what struggles each of us may be facing elsewhere in our lives and so we’ll assume that each of us is doing our best. That we will do the work to heal ourselves so that together we can create a more compassionate world.