"I have two children, eight and eleven. I work part-time, I run the household, I organise everything, I remember everyone's appointments and preferences and what they need before they know they need it. I am, by every external measure, extremely competent. What I had never learned to do was 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.
"If you have spent your whole life being the one who gives, Lakshmi will ask you something uncomfortable: what would it feel like to actually receive? Let yourself find out."