I recently read something written by my friend Lee McCormick who is a cowboy-shaman-writer-teacher and director of an addictions recovery program based in Tennessee called The Ranch.
“Traditionally Addictions treatment has focused on clients recovering so they can fit back into the matrix, so they can live with the ways of the world as they are and remain sober for that way of life. I have always believed Recovery has a higher calling, to offer clients the opportunity to unravel all their beliefs, agreements, behaviors, stories, questioning everything for the grace and empowerment to come to terms with who they REALLY are beneath all the cultural programming and inheritance of legacy and What they choose to live with and for from this point forward as Unique expressions of the One Who Created us…to re-claim our authenticity and our relationship to the Great Spirit > a Recovery of Choice on the path to Personal Freedom.“
As a therapist who has worked in the recovery field for 30 some years, I wholeheartedly agree that it is about far more than abstinence from drug(s) of choice. It is about immersing in life full out, healing what I think of as ‘a hole in the soul’ that people attempt to fill with substances or behaviors. It is about recognizing our wholeness/holiness.
Consider they ways in which you view your life. Are you a ‘glass half full’ or ‘glass half empty’ kind of person? When I ask myself that question, what I clearly state is that I am a glass totally full person, since even if it is halfway filled with water, the other is filled with air. I call myself an opti-mystic who sees the world through the eyes of possibility. Sometimes I have blinders on and miss out on the
beauty of the life around me. It occurred to me that there are times when people are so caught up in the hole that they miss the luscious, decadent, sweet donut around it. I lose myself in that paradigm sometimes too. I was reminding someone today that if he spends too much time in anger, resentment and revenge mode, then he is drinking the proverbial poison and expecting someone else to die. His take was that if he couldn’t get what was ‘right’, at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing the people he felt had ‘done him wrong’ would suffer in some way. That, to me, is part of the addictive thinking that can keep us in that downward spiral. The stories we tell ourselves of how things ‘should be’ that just ain’t so.
I liken us to diamonds in the rough that were dug up from the Earth and whose luminosity might be covered over by dirt and just need a little cleaning up. If you believe that you are Divinely Human and Humanly Divine then what is truly lacking in your life? What if you were complete AS IS, even if you may have the desire to polish the gem that you are?
http://youtu.be/dkL8mkqPbK8 In These Rooms (I have shared this video with my clients who nod in recognition)
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