our soul; and the most powerful way for me is through my senses. Sometimes when I slow down to smell the blossom on a tree, it’s like all the day’s worry and fear, all the doubts and insecurities just evaporate from my being. When I stop to gaze at a beautiful old tree, it grounds me and fills me with gratitude for Nature and life itself. My love for crystals is more than anything else grown from my appreciation of their visual beauty. Any time we tune our senses in to perceiving beauty in the world, whether it’s a stunning piece of music, the smell of a rose, a beautiful stone or a piece of art, we are awakening the Inner Beauty of our soul.
Each of our senses can transform us in a totally unique way. Our eyes, as they say, are the windows to our soul, and these windows can function in quite miraculous ways. An amazing study was carried out in the 1970s on patients recovering from gallbladder surgery.1 Even though gallbladder surgery is very routine, for some reason, certain patients were recovering much faster than others. When researchers looked into this pattern, they discovered that some of the hospital rooms faced on to a brick wall, whilst others faced on to a row of beautiful trees. Guess what … it was the patients looking at the trees who recovered faster every time. This same kind of effect has been demonstrated with colours (pink repeatedly makes people less aggressive), with shapes (rounded edges tend to make people feel more peaceful), and with objects (the presence of a briefcase in a room tends to make people more competitive). Now, many of us can’t look at trees all day, but we can surround ourselves with beautiful objects from the natural world that have the power to restore us. Have a think now – what natural objects might awaken a real feeling of joy inside you?
Our sense of touch can really affect our emotional state. Have you ever worn a cardigan that was a bit itchy and made you feel irritable all day? Did you have one security object when you were younger that you just had to take with you everywhere? Even from a young age, we seem to understand that holding certain objects can make us feel certain ways. We can even see this influence of touch in our language, for example when we say, ‘I am having a rough day.’ For me, something magical happens when I hold and interact with objects such as crystals in a mindful way.
Helen Keller described smell as a ‘potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived’. I really love those words, as smell really does have a magical effect on me, and I’m sure on you. Studies have shown that the smell of baking cookies makes people more likely to help a stranger. Isn’t that amazing! As we get into the rituals in this book, I’ll be suggesting different smells, incenses and oils that act as magical reminders of our Inner Beauty qualities.
The last sense for us to explore is hearing. Now, if you live in an urban environment like me then you’ll probably be exposed to certain sounds that don’t exactly help to make you feel peaceful. The honking of horns, the neighbour’s dog barking all night, whatever it is, sounds in built-up environments can sometimes have a very negative effect on how we feel. This is because our ears are directly linked to our nervous systems in quite a powerful way. The vagus nerve, which is the channel through which the love hormone oxytocin is released in our body, connects our ears to every organ in our body. On the plus side, this means that soothing sounds (like melodies sung to a baby) release oxytocin into our system. The important thing to remember is that we can create sounds, even in small apartments in super-busy cities, that will help to relax our nervous system and can awaken beautiful qualities within us. In many indigenous traditions, sound, sacred singing and drums are all used in ceremonies as medicine to heal. Have a think now: what is the go-to song that you listen to when your heart needs some TLC? How does that song make you feel on the inside?
3. OUR INNER WORLD IS LIKE A GARDEN THAT NEEDS CERTAIN INGREDIENTS FOR BEAUTIFUL THINGS TO GROW
It inspires me to see more and more people really taking time to look after their inner world, with crystals, meditation, rituals. I like to use the metaphor of a garden for our inner world. Just like a garden, if we don’t give enough attention to the plant life, cutting away any dead branches, making sure the plants are getting enough water and sun, then the plants don’t grow in a healthy way. It’s just the same with our Inner Beauty. I know when I find the time to nourish my Inner Beauty, then qualities like kindness, gratitude and forgiveness have more chance of growing. I’ve already talked about using beautiful objects to reflect back beauty. But the truth is, we can’t always surround ourselves with beauty. Sometimes it’s necessary that we carry that sense of beauty into a situation that might be very challenging, where we don’t have all our crystals, our flowers, our nice hot bath ritual to help us reconnect. We’ll look at how to nourish Inner Beauty qualities in more detail as we go through the book. For now, it’s good just to acknowledge that if we regularly give nourishment to our inner world, it can continue to grow and spread its beautiful light, even when the sky is full of dark clouds.
4. INTENTION AND ATTENTION TOGETHER MAKE MAGIC HAPPEN
I grew up in a Jewish family and was surrounded by rituals. But to be honest, at some stage in my life I lost touch a little with the real value of these rituals. Although I could always appreciate the beauty of lighting candles on a Friday night, standing next to my mum as she marked the beginning of the Sabbath with a graceful, welcoming gesture of her hands waving over the candle-flames, after a certain age I feel like I disconnected from the real magic of ritual. It was only in the last few years that I’ve started to appreciate in a different way the two factors that together have the power to make rituals so magical: intention and attention. You see, when we do most routine activities in our day-to-day lives, we tend to have distracted minds. When I brush my teeth, for example, I often find myself planning my route to a meeting, thinking about emails I need to respond to, etc. But when I’m practising mindful rituals, it gives me a chance to slow everything down, quieten my mind, and consciously decide how I want to be that day. Rituals guide us gracefully out of our auto-pilot mode, creating a magical space where something more beautiful can emerge.
Wayne Dyer wrote so much about the power of intention. His philosophy could be summed up really simply in this one quote of his: ‘our intention creates our reality’. Intention to me simply means setting out a crystal-clear plan in my mind of how I want to be and what outcome I hope for in a situation. So often we don’t do this, and our minds and bodies default to our unconscious intentions, those old beliefs we carry from childhood that are often limiting and don’t serve our Highest Self. How often in your average day do you set a crystal-clear intention of how you want to be before engaging in an activity? When we set a clear intention and cultivate positive feelings so that our whole body is signed up to this intention, we can reverse our unconscious habits and influence our reality in quite miraculous ways.
It can be relatively easy to set an intention (just think of New Year’s resolutions), but if our mind gets regularly distracted then the intention will never be able to manifest. There have been so many times when I set an intention in the morning, to be kind, to be more patient, more loving, and then I have a million and one messages, phone calls, emails, to-do-lists and after an hour or so and an encounter with a moody shopkeeper, it’s like I’ve completely and utterly lost track of my intention. This is where attention, the ability to keep bringing our minds back to that one important thing, is so important. In mindfulness meditation, it doesn’t matter how many times your mind wanders off, it’s the practice of bringing your attention back again and again that really has the biggest impact. The same thing applies to intentions and Inner Beauty rituals. It doesn’t matter how many times we might get distracted during the day, if we can notice our distracted mind and bring our attention back time and again to that Inner Beauty quality we want to manifest, then we’re very likely going to start seeing changes quite soon. Attention does require discipline, but it’s worth the effort.
‘Rituals guide us gracefully out of our auto-pilot mode, creating a magical space where something more beautiful can emerge.’
My Story
There’s something magical about the smell of roses. Often when I smell a rose, I’m transported instantly back to myself as a young girl. I remember endless summer days spent picking rose petals from our garden; losing myself in a dreamy