Month: June 2018

Categories
General

Recovering Creativity

Julia Cameron’s resourceful book, an oldie but goodie, The Artist’s Way, holds many divine mysteries for those of us in recovery, especially those of us with a growing yearning to create and express. Using a format inspired by 12 Step, she explores themes related to coming into a more reliant relationship with our God Source, whom she names as inherently creative, to the point where we allow that God Source to be opulently expressive in our lives.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of our most loved and cherished cultural icons, artists, and specially-gifted people struggle with addiction at some point in their lives. The same qualities which make a person’s veil a bit too thin, her doors a bit too open, and her soul a bit too transparently bright, make her susceptible to turning to a substance to help her modulate what’s coming through her exquisite, sensitive channels when they get overloaded.

Artists are often ultra fine-tuned, with ears, eyes, noses, mouths, senses, emotions, and minds that perceive our intersecting realities in more specialized ways than others might. Artists may receive the vibrations of their emotions at a more amplified and intense volume than other personality types. More often than not, they are thin-skinned, permeable, vulnerable, mercurial.

Artists function like barometers of the collective field, expressing what’s going on in our group soul, whether that is rapturous joy or devastating pain. Artists are like scientific instruments tuned to register subtle oscillations not all of us perceive, and therefore get to experience things that not everyone is so naturally privy to. (But all people can develop the artist within them).

At the same time, that sensitivity, since it can’t be turned off, makes the painful challenges of life – the rejections, the slights, the brokenhearted empathy with all of the world’s aches, the misunderstandings, the isolation – more loud and all-encompassing. Of course such a person might find her way to the modulating effects of drugs and alcohol.

I think it is also no accident that whether or not they identify as artists, many people who end up with addiction problems share the same genetic trait to begin with – the gift-curse of being especially, unusually sensitive. Artists and highly sensitive people both are more likely to get enmeshed in addiction matrices than others.

Recovery affects our artistic sensibilities and our sensitivities as well. Typically, our creativity and uniqueness is resurrected once we achieve some measure of stability in our recovery. Our own perspective and take on the world is one of the gifts that recovery gives back to us. Sensitive perception, creative responses to what we perceive, and the ability to rest naturally in authentic, spontaneous streams of Being are gifts that get corroded and corrupted by addiction, but which then return in purified, integrated, and balanced forms once the inner spiritual alchemy of recovery has been borne to a certain degree.

Authenticity and creativity are specifically about having the inspiration and nerve to proceed in an unauthorized direction in spite of the countless social controls. The worry lives in all of us that if we do anything unscripted, anything that hasn’t been done before, anything truly revelatory (in the sense that it reveals something previously hidden, about us or about our world), we will get social consequences.

In fact, many people close to us do worry about us (aka project their deep-seated anxieties onto us) and counsel us (aka try to get us to do what makes themfeel better) when we get into our mysteries and therefore become a bit unknown to them. We will likely be encouraged to go back into the domain of what’s safe and socially pre-approved, where they think we can’t be hurt, and where they aren’t unsettled by us anymore because we are perfectly pre-defined. But living only what’s been scripted deprives of the deep joy of improvisation.

At its core, a sincere opening to creativity is radical and spiritual. Ego – the often quite inauthentic, conditioned personality that we present to the world in lieu of our true face – and superego (the one that tries to shame and criticize us into being “good” people, where good is mainly defined by what others will praise and accept, and “bad” is nothing more than a collection of ideas about what will cause other people to reject, blame, criticize, ridicule, or attack us) run counter to God Source surrender. When we choose to ignore ego to strengthen the stream of creativity within us, we strengthen our dedication to God Source.

In recovery, we learn how to tune out the noise of ego and superego, to tune into the still, small voice within, the voice of our own, personal Higher Power. This power, the one that retrieved us from the clutches of addiction, the one who has the power that is greater than ourselves, is full of its own ideas about life, that don’t necessarily match what others want from us. This power is a true, deep rebel, a magnetic and beautiful presence with a natural authority that answers to no one but that which is at one with all life.

Higher Power is creative – you could even call her an artist. People who come to know their Higher Power as a palpable presence in their lives, like people who stick around recovery rooms usually do, eventually see that God Source likes to create things, and will do so with harmony, balance, and beauty. If we ask to be, we can be God Source’s living creation in action, the effervescence of what flows out from the spiritual realms. As Eckhart Tolle phrases it, “Life is the dancer, and [we] are the dance.”

When I think about how many people have been shamed out of their natural right to experience and express creativity I feel very sad. That’s akin to shaming people out of their right to know and experience God Source flow directly into them, and to enjoy whatever form-play that Source flow wants to do through them. This is one of the ways in which our world is spiritually bankrupt.

Instead, we could be spiritually luxuriant – filled with supply and support from within. What magnificent benefit might come to our beautiful, broken planet, if more of us could surrender to Source and let it flow its creativity into the outer world? What brilliant philosophies, funny jokes, beautiful buildings, harmonious communities, ecological solutions, spontaneous healings, inspiring art works, and cures for ill could spring forth from that power? Wouldn’t it be nice to find out?

Are you or a loved one looking into recovery? Click here to visit our site for more information. 

Categories
General Love

The Voice of Love

In my first year of 12 Step, I couldn’t get through one single day without calling multiple people in program for support. Grappling with the task of being a normal(ish) person on the outside, while feeling deeply unfit for life on the inside, required so much of me that I could barely breathe. Sometimes it was right in the morning, sometimes later on in the day, but at some point I would hit such a wall of pain, such a sideswipe, such an inability to move forward, that I would need to call someone and give voice to what was happening to me.

What was happening to me ranged from long bouts of intense crying, to paralyzing, nameless grief, to explosive fits of rage, to vicious panic attacks, to the longing to die, to urges to return to addictive behavior.

The person on the other end of the line mostly listened. Sometimes he or she offered soothing, nonjudgmental affirmations, like “That’s all right, sweetie”. Occasionally she helped me correct my thinking, by temporarily lending me hers, interrupting the momentum of my vortex of psychological agony to say something like, “That thing you can’t forgive yourself for – all of us have been there before. It’s human. It’s not your fault. It doesn’t define you. You are lovable and good.”

People in program gave me my first taste of unconditional love, spiritual perspective and hope of transformation: “This is a normal part of early recovery. It will get better. You will come out the other side. I can’t wait to see who you become.”

Program people had the ability to deeply understand, from their own personal experience, what I was thinking and feeling. Owing to the priceless wisdom that usually only arises from time spent personally suffering, they had the rare ability to let me be exactly where I was in my process, without any need to hurry me along.

At the same time, they were able to hold a higher perspective, the perspective of my potential. They could look at the wretched caterpillar version of me and calmly see the likelihood that I would become a butterfly (as long as I stuck with the process, which they also encouraged me to do). They were not afraid, like I was, that the caterpillar stage would last forever and that was all I’d ever be. They understood metamorphosis – that the process of spiritual transformation, if sincerely sought, is real, inevitable, natural; something we can trust in.

The combination of compassionate witnessing, allowing me to be exactly how I was, while at the same time believing in how I would be, guided me along, slowly but surely, to relief, recovery, and a life of magnitude and meaning far beyond what I could have imagined at that time in my life. My spirituality, my authenticity, my ability to be a good friend, my instincts for healing, my capacity to love deeply and yet hang onto my sense of self, even my calling in life, are all gifts which ripened in the warm “sunlight of the spirit” that circulates throughout the network of recovering people.

After a good long while of being lovingly heard, accepted, cheered on and validated by this group of truly unconditional others, I discovered I could also be the carrier of healing, loving thoughts. Program is a complete lifecycle, with the elders caring for the new ones, and the new ones relying on the experiences of elders. What activated me in my capacity as healer and channel for the voice of love were the desperate, raw needs of the newly recovering. Even though I was just hardly stable myself, when newcomers reached out to me with their enervating pains, with their oceanic needs, I found to my surprise that a healing, loving force spoke through me to them, with the same types of words that had been spoken to me: “It’s human to suffer, it’s not your fault, it doesn’t define you. You are lovable and good”.

With the spirit of kindness moving in me, I felt such tenderness, such a desire to relieve these new ones of their burdens, such a longing to soothe, comfort, and protect them. In fact with that love speaking through me, I said the things out loud that I had always longed to believe. The wounded parts of me heard the authority of the love in me, and began to feel safe for the first time in my life.

The voice of love is shared around the group, and does not belong to anyone in particular. No single person is the keeper of recovery or insanity – we take turns in the needy wounded role, and we also take turns speaking in the voice of love. Inspired by the aches of others, we channel a loving spirit whose words come to our lips when we see suffering.

The power of the recovery community entrained me to a vibration which I can still feel into, to this day. This vibration spirals upwards and outwards, towards more and more life. It reaches for more and more love, joy, and connection, for acceptance, for more claiming of all of us, more allowing of it all, more valuing of all people.

I will always be indebted to my disorders for leading me to get into recovery, where I discovered how love flows in a group consciousness that is tuned to the right station, and how I can be a channel for love too. I learned the value of our wounds: wounds are holes in our ego fortresses, places we can see through to each other. When we peek through those holes, when we see the real, magnificent, injured Self of the other in front of us, crying out for love, then we become the voice of love that that hurt Self needs.

May the voice of love visit you today. Thanks for reading!

Are you or a loved one looking into recovery? Click here to visit our site for more information. 

Categories
General

The Heart Chakra and the Fourth Step

The Fourth Step of any Twelve Step Program is to do a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”. It’s during the Fourth Step that we clean house. We come back to the wreckage left by the hurricane of our addiction and take stock of the damage.

It hurts. It hurts to recognize who we have been while living under the command of our addiction. We realize that we have not been sane, we have not been our intended selves, and that we have been, in one way or another, a source of pain for others. If we do our Fourth Step right, we will meet a challenging feeling: remorse.

Remorse burns. Remorse blazes in the heart. But remorse is a healing, cleansing, purifying fire. If I could send a blessing to anyone on this planet, it would be the power to feel remorse.

So many people push remorse away, and I understand why – I do it too. I do it when I am afraid of feeling shame about who I am, when I am frightened that if I let in even a tiny bit of regret, I will be swept into an undertow of self-hatred. Since a large part of me already believes that I am not worthy of love, I am scared to acknowledge any further evidence of my imperfection.

But without the gift of remorse we remain at best narcissistic and at worst psychopathic: not able to feel the harm we are doing to others. Narcissists and psychopaths also can’t feel what they are doing to others, and that is the key reason that they are difficult to treat.

People with addiction, luckily, don’t stay narcissistic and psychopathic once they get into recovery, provided that we go through the whole process of spiritual alchemy that sustainable recovery generally requires of us.

When people with addiction get into recovery, we develop a beautiful, flowering heart that is even more empathetic, kind, and open to loving than it was before the addiction. This flowering heart is born from our remorse. People in recovery have broken hearts – hearts that broke open.

Before recovery, addiction took all higher heart qualities, like tenderness, unconditional love, and empathy, and sucked them down into the more instinctual realm of impulse and satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with the beautiful, animal, instinctual realm, don’t get me wrong. But it becomes distorted under the influence of addiction. The hungry ghost of addiction hijacks the second chakra, where we would normally experience healthy pleasure and comfort. The addiction then governs us by running everything through that energy center. We get cut off from our higher chakras, including the fourth, or heart chakra.

When we do a Fourth Step, which we might think of as a Fourth Chakra, or Heart Step, it can be painful to realize that we have not been acting from heart, that we have been out of touch with love, as all of our life force has been directed through the lower, survival-oriented, needs-gratifying parts of us.

The Fourth Step allows us to experience the purifying fire of remorse awakening in our heart chakra. It is that very painful remorse which resurrects our heart and its unitive, connective nature.

I believe it helps to couple remorse with self-forgiveness and self-compassion. The first time I did my fourth step my inner critic gave me the beating of a lifetime. My shame was only relieved when my loving sponsor helped me see that while in my disease, I had not fully known what I was doing. It was the illness within me that had done those things.

She also helped me see that everyone in the rooms, and indeed everyone outside of the rooms, does things that hurt other people. Everyone has a shadow. Everyone acts in ways that are a sort of selfish, greedy, and even corrupt, especially before they have developed spiritually. This is not unique to me, this is an important and humbling realization, to see that I share the broken condition with all of humanity.

In the spirit of applying self-compassion during the Fourth Step, Heart-Chakra-purifying process, I’d like to offer two little ways of enhancing the journey to make sure that empathy and self-forgiveness are in attendance.

One is to remember and perhaps rewrite the prayer, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do”. Since I’m not extremely into patriarchal slants on God, I reword it as something like, “Forgive me, God Source, I did not see and feel what I was doing, but now that I can see and feel what it was, I intend never to do that again, please help me to live up to that intention. I am sorry for any pain I caused anyone, anywhere in the Oneness.”

Another twist is to include the classic “Just like me…” formulation when reviewing the items on your Fourth Step. The phrasing is originally taken from Buddhist practices for expanding heart, and is expanded upon in Kristin Neff’s beautiful work on Self-Compassion. Here I say to myself, “Just like me, all over the world, people have been sucked into addiction. They have helplessly hurt those they love without even realizing it. May all of our hearts open to awaken from addiction, to heal ourselves and others, to remember our power to choose what forces we serve, to remember our sovereignty, our freedom, and our goodness.”

As I practice these attitudes, my remorse for what I have put out into the world expands to include compassion for myself. My remorse opens heart qualities that benefit and extend forgiving love and a desire to do no further harm to me, too.

Sending good luck for passage through the healing, alchemical fire of remorse!

Are you or a loved one looking into recovery? Click here to visit our site for more information. 

Categories
Happiness

Two Ways of Being Happy

In his lovely book, a New Earth, Eckhart Tolle writes, “There are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.”

This past Memorial Day weekend I had an opportunity to see a related truth. There are, in fact, also two ways of being happy. Getting what you want is one. Not getting what you want is the other.

My husband and I were fortunate enough to find a last minute booking for the holiday weekend and decided to take off on a trip to the mountains. I did some research, set out some intentions, and chose a place for us to hike that I felt sure resonated deep in our hearts, with what we both needed: pristine, quiet, stunning nature.

The trailhead that Google directed us to turned out to be inaccessible with our small car. Sharp rocks looked very capable of popping our regular street tires. Overgrown thickets scratched the sides of our little Toyota Yaris. Neither of us had cell service.

After forwarding and reversing, circling around, getting lost and nearly stuck a few times, we finally decided to park and walk along the road to the trailhead, not knowing how long it would take us to get there.

There was good reason to believe this plan would work out. Surely we weren’t too far to the trailhead. The day was young and fresh. The sun was shy of noon. We had backpacks full of water and snacks and we both brimmed with an optimism that blunted realism.

Snow capped mountains poked up from the horizon in all directions. The air was fresh and piney. Conifers creaked amiably in the wind, and the soil was a deep, nourishing red.

“Look at this view,” I said to my husband. “Look how nice it is that that this road is dirt and not paved. Listen to the wind in the trees! And not a soul in sight! I like this walk, I’m glad to be out of the car and walking. And pretty soon we’ll get to the trailhead.” We looked up at the white mountains in the distance and overrode our doubts with desire.

I was cheerful, optimistic and grateful for about an hour. At that point, the lovely dirt road, with its blanket of dry, resinous and aromatic needles and charming stony peaks and valleys, emptied out onto a normal, blacktop road. The beauty of the scenery dropped away. The view became muddied, eclipsed by thick, wildfire-maimed trees that didn’t seem comely or friendly anymore to me. The sun hid behind a thick cloud.

Cars started driving past us. Big ones – the kind that leave you in a wake of fumes. The kind that don’t slow down for pedestrians. The kind that seem rude just because they have so much better tires that you do. Cars with four-wheel drive. Cars driven by fitter, luckier people. A Honda Fit drove by, to add insult to injury, proving that we must have just had the wrong directions – if a small car like that could make it, ours could have too. These people must have just done something better, been in the know, had the right instructions. Google had not led these people astray.

My mood curdled. The certainty overcame us that we were quite a bit further from the trailhead than we had hoped. As the hours paled and the warmth of the day drained away, we came to understand that by the time we would get to the start of the trail, we would probably only have just enough time to turn around and go back.

As I sourly trundled along, I fell into a lower and lower vibration. I ignored the trees, the birds, the glimpses of white mountains, the musical creaking of the pines, small waterfalls and cute ferns, to focus on feeling sad that I wasn’t at the trailhead. My mind helpfully offered negative thoughts to amplify my downward spiral. Scarcity thoughts, like “There’s never enough nature in my life”. Personalizing thoughts, like “This is exactly the type of thing that would happen to me.” Blaming thoughts, like “I hate stupid Google and its stupid bad directions! Stupid data collecting privacy invading internet tyrant overlords!” In the back of the mind, I registered that some of the cars coming back down the mountain were the same ones that had passed us just moments before. But this wasn’t quite conscious.

It took us a little over three hours to arrive at the trailhead. During that time, my mood evened out, and as the pleasure of walking dominated, the rhythm and pulse of quiet movement overrode my negativity, and I mellowed. I accepted. I allowed. I got over it. I slipped into pleasant reveries, into the gentle dreamlike meandering mind that I associate with hiking.

When we got to the trailhead, the one I had chosen because I was sure it was aligned to what our hearts longed for, the last of my resentments melted away. The trail was a treasure of nature – unspeakably gorgeous. A small, clear, crystalline lake rested at the bottom of a glacier. Light and shadow play cast shifting patterns around the woods. Scented firs rustled their arms, shaking up aromas to radiate on the wind. Tiny, brightly colored birds sang in their special code.

My heart felt sore with longing to commune with nature. But all was forgiven as I felt the presence of pristine nature collapse my resistance. I could not hold a resentment in the strong force of this beautiful place. With aching feet, we gently walked the first part of the trail, that wound around the crystalline aqua lake. Surrounded by young ponderosas, we found a spot in the sun that was sheltered from the snow-cold wind. We were hungry and tired, and we deeply enjoyed the food we had packed. We rested quietly, enjoying the lush silence, closing our eyes in the sun, leaning back in the grass.

Just then, several knots of people came back down the trail. The same people who had been in the cars that passed us on the road. The same people who had been better prepared, who had better tires and better navigation. People with big packs of professional gear.

I looked at them curiously. One man caught my eye and said, “Did you hear? Mountain lions up there. Fresh tracks everywhere. The ranger said a hiker ran into them and one of them is real mean, snarling and growling. You better not go up there”.

I was stunned. “How far up?” I asked. “About a quarter mile”, he answered, and grumbled on down to his car. I recalled the cars I had noticed, which must have been returning down the mountain because of this.

Had the Google navigation worked, my husband would have gotten to the trailhead like the others. But we also might have encountered mountain lions. Had things worked out the way we thought they should, we might have been those early hikers meeting the snarling growling dangerous one. At best, we would have had to turn around like the others, with no hike at all.

Instead, my husband and I got to have a three hour hike. We were there, coasting the wave of endorphins, resting in nature, feeling full and soaking the beauty in. Our bodies were refreshed, tired, full of cold mountain air, energized by the dry sun, and scented with forest resins.

I laughed out loud as I took this little wink from the universe. I remained buoyant as we descended the mountain, knowing that the best possible thing happened, in those circumstances, that mysterious forces had both kept my husband and I safe, and kept the mountain lions safe. I was happy that the mountain lions were allowed to protect their pristine mountain lake terrain, that we humans were not allowed to blunder into their territory too much.

As I rode a wave of appreciative thoughts and feelings, everything seemed different. With my head up and my gaze loosed from the inner monologue of woe, I was able to notice the beauties. The forest, once burned, was being repopulated with soft, fuzzy saplings, radiant green, that moved me with their earnest rise to the light. The old fallen trees seemed like guardians, protectors and nourishers as they gave their old bodies up as mulch to the new forest. The sun moved intermittently across the many snowy peaks around, creating many different qualities of light. I saw the waterfalls and the ferns this time. I saw a small herd of small, elegant deer, including two speckled fawns.

As we drove away, happy our car had intact tires, I remembered Eckhart Tolle’s quote: that there are two ways of being unhappy. There are also two ways to be happy, I thought, and today, not getting what I wanted was my way of being happy

I also thought of the words of a less esoteric spiritual teacher:

You can’t always get what you want

You can’t always get what you want

You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find

you get what you need

Thanks for reading!

Are you or a loved one looking into recovery? Click here to visit our site for more information. 

Categories
Spirituality

What Is Suffering Good For? Practicing Care of The Soul

In Thomas Moore’s beautiful book, Care of The Soul, he suggests changing how we normally relate to suffering. He says that the whole question of finding fault is off point, and like all wrong questions, will get you the wrong answers.

Inquiries like “What mistake did I make?” “Who’s to blame for this suffering of mine?” “How can I get rid this?” and “How can I make sure I never have to go through this ever again?” are all, in a way, expressed in the wrong spirit. We are barking up the wrong tree and won’t find our missing kittens there.

Rather than expressing an attitude of care of the soul, these questions all reflect our culture’s bias against suffering – we have completely forgotten what it’s good for.

I love Thomas Moore’s point of view. He understands the fundamental quandary that those of us in recovery are in, once addiction sets us on our spiritual path. The quandary is exasperatingly, beautifully simple: sometimes our soul needs something that our ego doesn’t want.

The ego just wants to live on the surface of life, it wants to fit in, to be acceptable, to be approvable, to stay innocent. It wants success according to the template, according to what we’ve been taught to believe.

My ego believes what she reads on the internet – that it’s possible to just be healthy, wealthy, good looking, successful, surrounded by friends, and have a nice big house (end of story). Any failure to be like that means something is wrong.

From my ego’s point of view, all my symptoms – my depression, my low self-esteem, my acne, my struggles in marriage, my imperfect finances – all of these are inconveniences. Aberrations, things that shouldn’t be. Obstacles that stand between her and what she wants.

The bad news for my ego, which is good news for me, is that my soul wants something completely different. My soul doesn’t care about fitting in, about achieving someone else’s pre-defined and highly culturally dependent idea of what life is about. My soul is here to live, to grow, to expand, to experience, to have adventures.

What adventures? Who knows! I will find out if I let her breathe. My adventures will unfold in the moment and I likely won’t know what they are until they happen.

My soul is disconcertingly unconcerned with fitting in, has little interest in pleasing people who don’t match her vibrations. She has little time for status and the opinions of others, unless they are people in my true soul family.

I try to be kind to my ego, but I guess in the end, it’s clear to me whose side I’m on these days.

I relate this choice to side with soul over ego, if I can even call it a choice, to my recovery. People who don’t have disorders, or have never experienced “failing at life” the way that I have might still imagine they have the choice to live from ego. And maybe they do.

For those of us in recovery, however, it is my experience that we don’t live for our egos. We may still try everyday – I will give my ego credit for being nothing if not persistent – but it’s not sustainable. For some of us, at least, the doomed venture of trying to be what this world wants from us in place of who we were born to be isn’t really supported. For some of us, soul just wins.

So my choice, if there is one, is thwart or support. I have found it easier to support. My soul has a way of getting her way whether I thwart or support. The difference is how much pain for me – if I thwart, and try to build up too many structures of ego, my soul just sets fire to them. Supporting my ego against soul causes me so much suffering that I must give in to living more authentically one way or another. Suffering is that fire, my soul burning away the false within me so she has more room.

One way that soul communicates with me is through my symptoms, those same things that ego wishes weren’t there to begin with. This is one reason why the medical assumption that symptoms should be suppressed or taken away misses the point so heavily, in my opinion. The medical model is in bed with ego, it says, “Ok let’s get rid of this inconvenience” and crushes or rips out or medicates away the message that’s coming through from soul. I do feel that medication can be a blessing and a tool that supports a larger intention to honor soul, but it’s not always used in that way.

Care of the Soul says, “What is this suffering good for?” It says, “Why might soul need to be depressed right now? Maybe it needs time in the dark. Maybe depression is the only way for you to get into doing nothing for a while. Maybe the darkness of the void is what soul needs to birth her next creation.” Care of the Soul says, “What is this loneliness good for? Where does it lead me? What is trying to happen through me right now? Maybe soul has arranged for me to be alone tonight, so that I can finally meet a new aspect of my own self.”

Lately I have been playing with this shift in attitude, borrowed from Care of the Soul’s lovely perspective, and asking myself “What is this suffering good for?” I’ve been moved, pleased, and relieved by the answers. If you have answers of your own to share, about what your suffering is good for, we would always love to hear from you! Thanks for reading!

Are you or a loved one looking into recovery? Click here to visit our site for more information. 

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