The Handbook for Bad Days

by Eveline Helmink

  Dreams don’t adapt to the image you have of yourself or how you want others to see you. They don’t care about the norms and values of your daytime consciousness, and there are no certainties or blind spots. Therefore, deciphering the messages of your soul requires more than an open and curious attitude; it takes some courage as well. Dreams show you your imperfections, with no consideration for your masks or conditioned attitudes. And yes, that can be annoying and perturbing.

  Still, I love the idea of being able to visit my soul cinema at night, knowing that the stories on the screen have something to tell me. It allows me to deal with the narrative presented more freely, in a more associative way. People become archetypes, like in systemic constellations; they represent a feeling or emotion instead of who they are as a person. Situations become metaphors. Dreams provide an interesting route to self-knowledge and a mirror for the soul. So don’t let your dreams make you too upset on a bad day; use them as a compass instead.

  // About Your Inner Child

   Sometimes we need to be our own parents

  I’ll be honest: When I first heard about the “inner child,” it wasn’t my cup of tea. To me, the term invoked associations of adults in the fetal position, searching for their mother’s bosom under a depressing, dropped office ceiling. Yet, having grown a little older and wiser, I do acknowledge that inner child theories have their merit and can be worth examining, perhaps even more so on bad days. Often the foundation for the way you react and the type of emotions you experience was laid in your early childhood. So if you pay attention to the needs of your inner child, you might discover some interesting triggers for your bad days.

  A theme that is closely related to the inner child is “innocence”—the big not-knowing, unfettered curiosity, lightness and security. That’s your deepest core, around which more and more rings will form over time, like the trunk of a young tree. When you cut down an old tree, you can clearly see it: a center around which tens of rings have grown. In humans, some rings are created as a form of self-protection. The occasion doesn’t even have to be a major traumatic experience; everyday human behavior makes your skin grow thicker too. Some other child plows through your sandcastle, your father doesn’t have time for you right now, your mother takes something away from you.

  Wondering whether emotions, reactions, or patterns are motivated by your inner child can provide new insights and self-knowledge. Especially when things aren’t going your way, you can react “childishly.” But instead of compensating for it by putting on a stern mask or hiding in a dark corner, you can acknowledge and explore it. You’ll see that the more you give voice to your inner child, the closer you’ll remain to your authentic self. That gives you air. And yes, sometimes your inner child needs to be reassured.

  I’ve kept a plaster handprint from when I was a toddler. Now when I put my hand over the cast, the imprint of that little hand almost fits inside my palm. Now and then, when I’m really angry or disappointed, I’ll do that. It reminds me of the girl I once was. And the things I can’t tell myself, I can say to her: Be quiet, it’s okay, don’t worry, everything will be all right.

  Sometimes people carry with them deeply held convictions and patterns that can stand in the way of a lighter life. For them, it’s necessary to first heal the damaged child inside. But the inner child also has to do with pure pleasure, being in the moment, the magic of simplicity. Don’t forget that, once in a while, it can be a sheer delight to behave like a child, uninhibited by the little voice in your head that disapprovingly whispers “Awkward!” or “Get a hold of yourself.” Sometimes I want to be childish. I want to play in the surf, to startle someone, not have to worry about all the suffering and all the hassle, but to live in a world that is no bigger than what my senses are indicating. No schedule, no responsibilities. My mood very much improves when I do this.

  Our need for play doesn’t stop when we reach adulthood. Playing isn’t a guilty pleasure; it should have a natural place in your life. Play connects, relaxes, is a source of pleasure, and it awakens you and makes you alert. It’s a super effective way to reduce stress and make you forget about all the daily fuss. You can think of many games that can be enjoyed as an adult—games that call on your problem-solving skills and creativity: from foosball to gazillion-piece jigsaw puzzles, from poker to ping-pong. And if you never get to the actual game, make it a habit to live playfully once in a while. Jump the white stripes of a crosswalk. Climb a tree. Go full glitter makeup. Regularly and unapologetically give in to your inner child. It definitely is a shortcut to a lighter life.

  // Create Your Own Rituals

   Action + meaning = consolation

  If the word “ritual” immediately makes you think of incense, ceremonies, or deep devotion, I’m going to encourage you to think bigger. In my eyes, rituals are a simple calculation: action plus meaning. Contrary to a habit or a pattern, ritual acts are performed consciously, mindfully, and with regularity. And what you do gives direction or meaning to your life.

  A gratitude journal can be such a ritual. As can lighting a candle before you start meditating, sticking your head out of the window first thing in the morning to take a deep breath, or always giving your sweetheart a kiss before you walk out the door. As you repeat the action, you mark the time. A ritual like that connects you to the here and now, while at the same time, other rituals connect us to what is eternal and everlasting. As if you take a golden thread and mark your timeline with a cross-stitch. The “Love you to the moon and back” my sons and I say to each other before I close their bedroom door at night. On days when they’re at their father’s, I still always walk by their beds and whisper it. A precious ritual from my childhood is “lucky break day.” Every Saturday, we’d go to the grocery store and the market with our father, early in the morning, hoping that it would be “lucky break day.” Then our dad would leaf through his agenda and make the joyful announcement: yes. Then we got to pick dessert, for instance, or some snack from the racks near the cash register. It was a ritual between our father and us, and it lent significance to an otherwise trivial routine like getting the weekly groceries. It added rhythm and security, and one of those golden cross-stitches.

  Making the mundane valuable—that’s what rituals can do for you on lesser days. Your life will become more meaningful because of them. You connect the lesser days to the wonderful ones, which gives you a perspective through time with the addition of routine, rhythm, and form. Rituals are nice when you’re calm and peaceful, but they’ll become even more valuable when things aren’t going so well. When your world is a maelstrom, rituals provide a handhold back to better days.

  But what should you do? It doesn’t have to be epic and riveting. In the large Zen monasteries in Asia, the monks really don’t spend as much time meditating as we presume here in the West. Often, in a monastery routine, meditation actually consists of performing everyday tasks. Sweeping, weeding, chopping vegetables for dinner. “Simplicity attracts wisdom,” as they say, and every daily routine can turn into a ritual, even watering the plants or taking a shower.

  Likewise, some of my healing rituals aren’t very exciting. The house where I live now doesn’t have a dishwasher, for instance. With sustainability considerations in mind, I was fine not having one; I didn’t have any grand, spiritual musings about doing the dishes. But now, it has become one of my favorite mindful rituals: I do the dishes at the very last moment of the day, after I have turned off my phone and dimmed the lights. The repetitious motions, my hands in the warm water, have a calming effect on me, as if my soul is briefly dipped in the warm suds as well. For me, it’s the moment to look back on the day and let it go.

  In addition to implementing daily routines, you can use ritual to mark or release moments that call for it. Bad days are full of such moments: a rupture, a setback, a change. “Rituals go where words can’t come,” as one writer put it in Happinez. I haven’t read a better description anywhere.

  Performing a little ceremony or
taking a symbolic action can be a perfect way to mark something—say, when you say goodbye or when you want to make room for something new or if there’s a shift taking place in another sense, one that requires more than silent observance. A few examples: Try making a fire to throw something into, letting a wish be carried by the wind, releasing something in running water, or burying something deep in the earth. Try drawing an intuition card for yourself, light a candle with a good intention in mind, or sit down in the light of the full moon. When you perform a ritual, you mark an event, grand in its moment, so that the event will be embedded in your soul.

  // Muttering a Prayer

   Also suitable for atheists

  “Please, help me!” Sometimes a hastily muttered Hail Mary, a desperate raising of your hands to heaven or folding them in deep silence and speaking your mind, contains much power. Teacher Elizabeth Lesser wrote this about prayer: “One of the reasons I love prayer is that it is an antidote to guilt and blame. If we are unhappy with the way we have acted or been treated, instead of stewing in self-recrimination on the one hand, or harboring ill will toward someone else on the other, prayer gives us a way out of the circle of guilt and blame. We bring our painful feelings into the open and say, ‘I have done wrong,’ or ‘I have been wronged.’ And then we ask for a vaster view—one that contains within it all the forgiveness we need in order to move forward.”

  Often, the first question prayer raises is what or whom to pray to. I myself was raised in a fairly liberal, culturally Christian ideology, and as a child, I prayed occasionally. I understood that you were allowed to ask for help, but that God wasn’t a figure perched on a cloud, let alone a mailman delivering ordered parcels. Nevertheless, I passionately prayed during the weeks leading up to Christmas: “Dear Lord, can I please have a Little Miss Makeup?” Little Miss Makeup was a weird, blond, plastic doll whose shoulders you had to deliberately dislocate to make her ponytail grow longer and on whose face makeup would magically appear when you rubbed it with warm water. I had to have her. But because I understood that meanwhile there were wars and famines raging in the world, as well as children who didn’t have nearly as much as I did, I figured I had to be reasonable. God had other stuff to do too! So I devoutly followed my prayer up with: “And if you can’t, Little Miss Fashion would be fine too.” Christmas Eve came, and God didn’t answer.

  The praying from my childhood was naïve, as are the childhood prayers of most of us. And many people no longer identify with the Christian scheme, myself included. But couldn’t you perhaps just sidestep that “to whom” issue? How would it be if the insight that life is bigger, more mysterious, and more elusive than we are able to grasp is enough to experience the power of prayer?

  If you do want an entity to address and want to cry out “Hey, to anyone out there willing to listen!” that’s fine. If you want something more structured, Bram Moerland, culture philosopher and expert on Gnosticism (Christian mysticism) retranslated the Lord’s Prayer from the Aramaic, and I’ve found the first line a universally excellent address for your soul mail: “O Source of being, whom I meet in what moves me.”

  Regardless of religious stance, the thing I find most comforting is the universal nature of prayer. We all do it from time to time. The child pose in yoga, for example—the position in which you let your head rest on the floor—is a prayer. You bring your head, your mind, lower than your heart and closer to nature. You lay down your ego for the moment. No matter where in the world, people almost instinctively close their eyes sometimes, their gaze turned inward.

  Many spiritual teachers make a distinction between praying and meditating. Praying is being in conversation: articulating your question, expressing your doubts, asking for help and forgiveness. Meditating is listening, being open to the answers, which, in all their subtlety, you often already carry within. In that sense, praying and meditating are the yin and yang of the art of sitting on a pillow.

  Author and teacher Geertje Couwenbergh, who has practiced yoga philosophy and Buddhism for years, explained in Happinez how a Madonna statuette ended up in her meditation room. She’d noticed that, for certain things, she couldn’t rely on Buddha, and that sitting and reflecting didn’t suffice. I found her words moving: “The Buddha as mirror, Maria as sponge. For matters that exceed my understanding and ability—the matters of sickness, death, and despair—I need help and mercy just as much as insight, maybe even more so.”

  Although it may seem like a passive act to send something into the void, you also focus your energy on something you desire. You articulate what’s important to you, and where your attention is, your energy will follow. More even than that, though, I find praying on lesser days to be a form of surrender, the acknowledgment of sorrow or absence, or a desire to express something that really stems from your soul. As such, it’s also a release of what has been keeping you preoccupied.

  Prayer for Beginners

  What should you say? Whatever you need to say. You may want to complain. You may want to get angry. You may want help. You may want to express your gratitude. You can adapt existing prayers or invent your own. You can use objects too, if that helps ground you: Buddhists sometimes hold a mala with 108 prayer beads in their hands. As you let the chain run through your hands, you establish some sort of rhythm: Each bead represents something you are thankful for or need to get off your chest.

  You can also look for ready-made prayers that belong to a tradition that appeals to you online: Native American culture has beautiful prayers, and the internet is full of them. Do your research and hold the right intentions—be wary not to appropriate other cultures!—but if there is something that speaks to you, you can try to find your voice from that place. One day you will find your own words. And then prayer will no longer feel like an empty form, but like a relief or like tapping into an energy. A good prayer makes you feel like you’re a little lighter, more connected and heard. If praying doesn’t bring you that and instead feels more like a mediocre play or a melodramatic performance, then just don’t do it.

  // Create a Home Altar

   Sacred spaces can be small

  It invariably makes my no-nonsense friends chuckle somewhat, but they often spend more than three seconds looking at it: my little home altar. At this moment, it’s filled with all sorts of things; it might look random, but to me it’s meaningful. A wooden hand manikin from the Tate Gallery, a card from the Inner Compass Cards deck, a golden triangle (amethyst, rose quartz, and rock crystal), a coin with a depiction of a compass rose, and several shells from beaches I’ve visited, a feather I found in front of my feet, some assorted papers. And a candle that I light if I feel like it. Home altars have slowly become more popular with the rise of meditation, mindfulness, and yoga, and I feel this has everything to do with the need for focus and meaning in our lives that are so busy, busy, busy.

  A home altar is a simple way to connect with something outside yourself, whether it be divine, a cosmic energy, or the cycle of life. It might feel a tad esoteric to you, but it can be wonderfully comforting on bad days, and creating one isn’t complicated. Whether you want to create a place where you can focus on what you find important or a place for reminiscing and expressing intentions, your altar is yours to build. There are no rules, only suggestions. You can make an altar in the corner of your bedroom, on your desk, in the hallway, or, like me, on top of a sideboard in the living room, a place I picked because I walk by it every day. Fresh flowers, some cherished objects, and perhaps a photograph—and then you’re pretty much set.

  Here are a few tips and tricks that might come in handy. For one, it’s satisfying to mark out a defined space for your altar—for instance, by using a board or a cabinet, or by placing a piece of cloth beneath a certain space. I use a round marble slab. A base like that almost automatically connects whatever you place on top of it. If you want to go to the next level, you can consider what to put where and draw on the elements of nature. Still, I invite you not to overthink these kinds of things.<
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  An altar done right (not that you can truly speak in terms of right and wrong here) is ever evolving and therefore never has to be perfect. Your altar itself shouldn’t become sacred. It is a means. A tool. You add something, you remove something, refresh the flowers, place a note on top for a change. You can celebrate the changing seasons on your altar, or decorate it with inspiring images you’ve ripped out of magazines, et cetera. Precisely by being so devoted to it, you charge your altar with your own energy and attention. The most beautiful altars are those that mirror the personality of their creator.

  // Living in the Present

   It’s not the same as #yolo

  “Living in the now” is an often-heard adage in spiritual circles. As I wrote at the beginning of this book, it might be the key lesson in pretty much every kind and flavor of spiritual practice: flowing along with life as it is. And this as it is can only be found in the present moment. The most famous figurehead of the power of now is unquestionably Eckhart Tolle, who has written worldwide bestsellers on the subject. Time is an illusion, he argues, and the only way to find relief is to be fully present in the moment. Freed of stories from the past and projections onto the future, life will become more effortless. Pain, desire, doubt—they stem from worries about what has happened and what could happen. In the now, however, your attention presents you with what you do, feel, and think. On lesser days, you have three options, roughly speaking: stepping out of the situation, changing the situation, or accepting the situation.

  Being in the moment, the now, can really put your trouble in perspective, give you comfort and air. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get there,” I like to reassure myself or others whenever there’s a restlessness about all the things that possibly could go wrong in the future. Often enough, life runs a totally different course than I expect, and I have long learned that it usually is a waste of energy to get all caught up in “what if” scenarios. At other moments, I’ll put things in perspective: “Water under the bridge!” It’s already over, passed, and intangible. You shouldn’t spend your energy on the things you could’ve done differently; you can’t time-travel and relive the past.