Category: Spirituality

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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. 

Sometimes we must be reminded that healing isn’t as complicated as we think it is. Yes, life is complex, adaptive, and emergent. There are many factors involved in making it what it is. 

But at the end of the day, a few simple, elegant truths underpin our world.  

One simple truth I come back to is that life wants to live. 

The Self-Healing Nature of Life

Because life wants to live, we can rely on it to do everything in its power to heal itself. Life can be counted upon to help itself, and prevailed upon for solutions to its own troubles. 

Left to its own inner directives, life will thrive – unless we make it impossible. Even then, life never gives up on living. We pave the earth, but sooner or later the earth buckles, sends up green shoots anyway. 

Isn’t that wonderful? What a loyal friend, what persistence, what tenacity. And we are made of life, so life will always try to keep living as us, for us, through us, and with us, for as long as we are meant to. On this we can rely.  

The Life Force and Recovery

Why does this truth, that life wants to live, matter for recovery? Because it means the most natural thing in the world is for us to be happy, joyous, free. The life inside of us will always be resilient, growing, creative and essentially healthy.

If we can only remove the obstacles to the self-healing force, what’s inside will take us towards an optimal expression of who we are, who we are meant to be. 

What was in the way of our vitality, that we had to find a way to adapt to? And is that rock, that obstacle, that pavement, that imbed, still there now? 

The Burden of Sameness

One big rock that squashes the vitality of most human beings is the requirement to fit into someone’s idea of “normal”. 

Though we would never think of asking a squirrel to be more like a lion, or a lion to be more like a shooting star, humans are told all the time to be different than what they are by nature. 

If we are loud and delightfully boisterous, we are taught to be quiet. If we are quiet and peaceful, we are told to talk more. It’s as though everyone has to fit into a bland, anonymous, dry template of a human being. Our natural diversity is suppressed. 

This is an enormous burden and a ridiculous endeavor. Why should we all be the same, when diversity is all over the place in the natural world? 

What destroys the balance of the world is an insistence on one-sidedness, a monoculture of psyche in which all healthy variety is wiped out in favor of an inorganic singularity. 

Giving Up on Being Normal

I’m not completely sure how we ended up thinking that everyone being the same is a good thing, but I do know it creates terrible burdens for the psyche, that we all struggle with. As we each try to meet the ideal of “normal”, all suffer. 

If we remove the burden of having to be different than we are, and instead take the attitude that we can support ourselves to be what we already are by nature, – maybe even more so, rather than less so! – we are heading in the right direction. 

If we are loud by nature, why are we? What did life want to do with us, that required this loudness of us? Are we meant to be a speaker, a singer, a writer? Do we have a lot to say? If so then we will never be happy unless we are supported to say all it is that we came here to say. 

If we are mild and soft by nature, again, why are we that way? How might we nurture, support and grow that mildness, that softness, to be its highest and best expression? Are we a mother, an artist, a gardener? Is there a reason why our quietness is just right? 

Let Life Live

If we were to take this more pro-human approach to life, then we could drop many burdens, remove many rocks from the parts of us that are always going to try, one way or another, to keep growing big and strong in this world. 

I would like to officially invite you, dear reader, to be as wonderfully unique as you actually already are. Even more so! And I will try to do the same. For all of our sakes. 

Because life wants to live. And we are life.

The Paradox of Human Life

The paradox of human life is the fact that although we are all one, we are also unique. 

You could also say the opposite – although we are all unique, we are all one. As someone close to me used to say, “we’re all one, and we’re all alone”. 

What better way to understand the spectrum of human life than to realize that we are both completely lonely and completely unified? 

Separate and Connected at the Same Time

Here in our embodied human experiences, we are the most isolated we have ever been, alone inside our own skins. Even so, this lonely part is embedded in gradually more unified rings and circles of consciousness, until at some point we are at the heart of all creation, as one big oneness. It’s all a question of focus, of where we place our attention.

The question is, where are we focused now, and is that all right? Are we supposed to be somewhere else, or exactly right here? Sometimes spiritual practices could lead us to imagine maybe we are supposed to be less here, more somewhere else. More in our unity, less in our singleness.

I don’t know about you, but my goal is to be both as much as I can. Completely myself, and not any less of that, but also completely connected to all. Separate and connected, in the same breath. Is this possible? 

The Limits of Comparison

When we love ourselves and our experiences of the divine just as they actually are, not in opposition to what anyone else experiences, but in addition to, we are in the right mindset, of adding pieces together to get the whole. Each of us is an utterly unique puzzle piece of the whole picture, without which the oneness is not complete. 

So interestingly, the path into unity consciousness involves loving our individuality. Really leaning into the wonderful ways in which we are quite distinct, disparate and differentiated leads us straight into the oneness. 

At the heart of our difference is our sameness. From within what we share, what is universal, we express outwards our own markings, our patterns, our own special celebration of what the divine is, going back into our specificity.  

Trusting that the divine knows what it is doing with each and every one of us, we can enjoy the great diversity of expression that exists inside the one, the incredible variety and beauty to creation. We don’t have to try to be any different than what we are, what life leads us to be. Our life doesn’t have to be like anyone else’s. Comparison fades away. 

Finding Authenticity in Individuality

Loving our individuality means practicing authenticity, by siding with ourselves and the truth of what we experience in life. Instead of always wondering what we did wrong, that we feel or think or experience things so differently than another, we could drop the expectation and requirement of sameness.

It’s quite clear that life has infinite creativity and that we are one of those unique creations, of equal value to all the rest of creation, with a place in the family of life. We are not exactly the same as anyone else in this world and we don’t have to be.  

Many of us get sidetracked into inauthenticity in our spirituality, marginalizing parts of ourselves, (such as our anger, addictions, or immaturity), comparing ourselves to others favorably or unfavorably, rejecting what we experience (or don’t experience!) because it doesn’t sound as glamorous, holy or divine as someone else’s. These self-dismissals set us up for being taken over by shadow and for spiritual bypassing.

How might we be feeling more unity consciousness, through fully embracing and honoring our uniqueness, including the highly personal ways we experience the divine’s love for us?

Unity with Freedom

I invite anyone of us dear recovering women, to explore the love that unity has for each and every one of us, expressed in our personal life streams, seeing also how we are ultimately connected in group consciousness. To hold both at once. 

Any woman has the right to more consciously contact and touch into the deep, unconditional love that divine source radiates to and through her, specifically. This specificity is a gift, a combination of qualities, a signature energy that no other woman has. Unrepeatable, infinitely cherishable, beautiful and exquisite. You are this, I am this, we all are this. 

Divine consciousness has the capacity to harmonize the full spectrum of radiance, embracing each woman and her frequency set to merge into a community of beautiful spirits, a unity that heals us internally and positively affects the environment around us. A unity which leaves specificity its freedom, and yet softly embraces and holds all.