The One thing We Have to do to Recover
There is only one thing we have to do to recover – develop a loving, personal, close relationship with our Higher Power.
On the strength of our relationship with our Higher Power, we can do the impossible. Our Higher Power can always intercede on our behalf, often bringing quite creative, elegant solutions to our problems.
We can’t avoid the human tasks we have in front of us – to grow up, to face our pain, to embody who we’re here to be – but God can help us every step of the way.
What’s in a Name?
If the word God doesn’t sit well, that’s ok. Trust that. There are good reasons for the struggles we have with that word.
Still, per Shakespeare, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name will smell as sweet.”
Our recovery is not in our relationship to a word, but in our relationship to the ineffable, huge, loving, humorous, creative, sweet, incandescent, indescribable Presence that lives within us all, which this word, “God,” tries to encapsulate.
We can call God something else, whatever helps us best summon up our own Wonderful, Loving, Everywhere-All-At-Once Beingness.
Why Go to Rehab?
If all we need is God, why go to rehab and therapy? In a nutshell, it’s because surrendering to the divinity inside of us, simple as it sounds, is really hard to do for many of us.
We have been trained since birth to clench up, resist, avoid, and fight. We’ve been shown through experience and social programming that this is a dog-eat-dog world, where we must exert our will, often over others, or else we’ll be hurt.
Our Higher Power will not hurt us like the wounded humans around us do. But it can take a while to learn how to relate to anybody without the expectation that we will be abused if we let them in.
On the flip side we have been encouraged by our backwards society to surrender to pleasure, to satiation, to materiality, to distraction.
We very much have not been encouraged to find the place in between, where we are present and conscious of our pain, but also connected to support.
The Benefits of Rehab on the Path to Surrender
We go to rehab and we get help from practitioners, guides, experiencers, and professionals because clearing the obstacles, traumas, and complications that make such an undertaking the hardest thing in the world takes all the help we can get.
Learning to surrender means unlearning everything else we’ve been taught to do, which is to block out God and instead live by our fear of death, in a perennial search for lower-needs gratification.
We get help from rehab and therapists so that we can be restored to our true nature, scrape away and purge out all that’s falsely corrupted inside of us, and get to at last be the original, divine child we were born to be.
3 Tips for Surrendering
If you’re in the situation where you need to surrender your will and your life to God, somehow some way, because your recovery is on the line, the following 3 Tips might be helpful for you.
-
Personalize Your Higher Power
It’s important to know that God has infinite faces, and doesn’t mind if you call God a he or a she, think of it as a receptive force like the Tao or an active force like the Sun, as the Egyptians did. However you think of Higher Power, it will not be Higher Power’s totality anyway. So don’t worry about getting it all right, it’s impossible for us to know all of Higher Power. Whichever face of God makes you feel like you can relax, feel safe, and believe in goodness and a plan for your life, is the right one for you.
-
Tell Your Higher Power All About It
Start telling your Higher Power about everything you’re experiencing, good bad and ugly. Unlike many of our wounded brother and sister humans, God is completely ok hearing the entire spectrum and intensity of human experiences, including rage, complaining, victim feelings, outrage, devastation, and so on. This is the start of the dialogue. When you talk truthfully about what you’re feeling, God listens (and eventually answers, too). But for now, just talk. Do this either out loud or in written form.
-
Experiment with Surrender Little By Little
When you’re ready, start giving topics to God, telling God, “Ok, God, you’ve got that topic.” Trust in this matter is built over time, as you will learn that God has your back, understands the problem, and is coming up with a solution that will arrive in the exact right moment, when we actually need the solution. Before we see through our own experiences that our Higher Power is indeed trustworthy, there will be many false starts and times of confusion and disappointment, but we should keep going. Because at some point we will benefit from all the time and energy we put into this relationship, at which point it will become a truly helpful aspect of our lives.