Gillian Anderson - We - A Manifesto for Women Everywhere

PART 3: The Manifesto

Manifesto

A World in Need of Love

The Nine Principles at a Glance

Resources

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Authors

About the Publishers

‘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.

‘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, 2but 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 .

‘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.