And So It Begins: The Miracle Project Starts Today!
How acknowledging the gifts we didn't ask for can change absolutely everything
Today’s the day: we start our own Project Miracle, a subversive gratitude practice based on Melody Beattie’s book, Make Miracles in Forty Days.
I’ve been excited about this since I first heard about this potent little book in
’s Substack. And now that I’ve read the book cover to cover, I’m far more excited than before. This is going to be extremely powerful work—individually and collectively.If you want to participate but aren’t yet a paid member, you should make the leap and upgrade now. Project Miracle (as Beattie herself terms it) is a writing intensive, of which we’ve done many. But perhaps beyond any other intensive we’ve done, it’s one that shows in no uncertain terms that the premise of Writing in the Dark—that writing is more than writing—is unequivocally true. Because now, in addition to our Wednesday creative writing and craft exercises—which will for these next six weeks relate in some way to the concept of gratitude—we will also be engaged in this intentional forty-day, ten-minute/day life-changing writing practice. And by the way, I’m pretty proud of myself for figuring out a way for us to adapt this practice as a community project on Substack, because it wasn’t easy, and I like doing hard things.
And having now read Beattie’s book, I truly believe we will, through this practice, make miracles. Further, I believe that by doing it together, those miracles will be even more powerful for us. As Beattie herself writes:
With everything in our world made of the same energy, the connection between equals becomes a powerful force. We create a power we can’t create alone. It’s a difficult concept to grasp until we experience it, but it’s the same mystique or process that occurs in a good group or even between two people whose hearts are open when they’re working as a team. Each person becomes, when connecgted with the other person or people, more than he or she is alone.
If you haven’t gotten a copy of the book yet, don’t worry, you’ll be fine for this week, because we’re just introducing the program and the work we’ll do together starts in earnest next week. By then, you will—if you want to engage in this practice as deeply as possible—need to acquire the book whether by ordering or checking it out from your local library. Not only is it an act of respect for Beattie, who died in March of this year, but having the book will be useful for you for many reasons, including the greater depth with which Beattie describes the practice and how it worked in her life and the life of many others from the time she first began discovering it in 1978.
To note, Beattie states openly, in regard to others teaching workshops or intensives on her Project Miracle methods, that:
You have my blessings to do workshops and groups on the subject. Experiment with it. Take it to the next level … Improve it. Find new and different ways to ues it. Carry on with Project Miracle in all the ways with all the people and as much as you can.
Having read the book, I can see that there is no “secret” or “magic” involved in Beattie’s method. It is, as she herself explains, simply an aspect of universal law: “Doing the miracle exercise will make us better, kinder people. We’ll want to help make the world a better place. We’ll let giving and receiving happen naturally. We won’t ask for more than we need and we’ll give from a healthy place. The space around us will fill with the sweet scent of peace, awareness, and love.”
And so we will experiment, alone and together. Starting today. Don’t worry if you don’t believe it’s possible to create miracles. That’s totally okay. Beattie says you can believe whatever you want. She’s seen the miracles happen over and over again, but people have to make up their own minds about these things.
What I know for sure is that regardless of miracles, gratitude is never the wrong path, and writing amplifies the power of all things. So why not give it a try?