Let Yourself
Receive

Lakshmi's first practice is a worthiness mirror — you stand in front of your reflection every morning and look yourself in the eyes and speak appreciation for three things that have nothing to do with what you've accomplished. I failed the first four days. I'd stand there and immediately start listing what I'd done that week. The idea of appreciating myself separate from my usefulness made me deeply uncomfortable.

I brought this to our circle call and I couldn't get through it without crying. Which told me everything I needed to know about how deep this ran. The sisters didn't rush me. One of them said: "It sounds like you've never been loved in a way that didn't require something from you first." I sat with that sentence for two weeks.

Slowly something shifted. I started letting my husband make dinner without hovering or redoing things. I started saying yes when someone offered help. Small things. But they felt enormous because the old pattern — the independent, self-sufficient, never-inconvenient version of me — had to step aside to let them happen.

By the end of Lakshmi my children had started noticing something different. My daughter told me I seemed more relaxed. My son said I laughed more. I don't know that anything has changed structurally in my life. Something has changed in the quality of how I inhabit it. And that, it turns out, was what I was actually missing.

I did the self-led journey because honestly I wasn't sure I believed in any of this. I'm analytical, I run on data and strategy, and the idea of spending a month on radiance and worthiness felt abstract at best. I signed up because a friend insisted and I thought I'd give it the self-led twenty dollars and see what happened.

What happened was that I couldn't get past the abundance inventory in week two. The practice asks you to list all the love and abundance already present in your life — not what you're working toward, what's already there. I kept skipping it. When I finally sat down and made the list, I listed my business achievements and my house and my car. Then I stared at the page. Where were the people? Where was the pleasure? Where was the rest?

I had built an impressive life and lived almost entirely on the surface of it. I worked constantly, ate at my desk most days, had not taken a proper holiday in three years. Not because I couldn't afford to but because I didn't feel I'd earned it yet. There was always more to do first. Lakshmi asked me a question I couldn't shake: earned it from whom? Who is the authority you're waiting for permission from?

I booked a week off. Just a week — I'm not reborn overnight. But I went to the coast, left my laptop at home, swam in cold water every morning, and sat in the sun reading novels in the afternoon. On the third day I started crying and couldn't exactly say why. Relief, maybe. Or the feeling of something releasing that had been held for a very long time.

I joined the supported circle because I needed people around me. The illness had been very isolating and I was afraid that if I tried to do anything else alone, I'd just quietly stop when it got hard. Having the circle meant I had to show up, and showing up turned out to be the most important thing.

Lakshmi was the month that felt most directly written for me — this idea of learning to receive again, of allowing yourself to be nourished after a long period of just getting through. The body blessing practice where you speak appreciation to different parts of your body — I used to skip this kind of thing. After the illness I couldn't. My body had carried me through something genuinely frightening and I'd been at war with it for so long I'd forgotten to be grateful.

There was a circle call in week three where we shared one way Lakshmi's energy had shown up that week. I said that I'd bought myself flowers. Just from the supermarket, nothing extravagant. But I'd put them in a vase on the kitchen table and every time I walked past them I felt this small, warm thing. Like proof that I lived here. Like something in me was still interested in beauty.

The circle cheered. It sounds small. It wasn't. I've been buying myself flowers every week since.