from Richard Rohr's daily devotion today...good stuff for the journey

[Childofmine]

I get a daily devotion from Fr. Richard Rohr (link here to who he is, background, etc. https://cac.org/richard-rohr) I think it is directly related to the spiritual journey WE are all on right now in working hard to turn the bright light from someone else to OURSELVES. One of the reasons I enabled is that I would much rather "fix" someone else than fix myself. Now that I am slowly releasing the need to fix and enable and control and manage another person, I am finding that there is work to be done on ME. Me, the long-suffering, good one. Me, the one who held it all together while others in my family crumbled around me.

Learning how powerless I really am is what is drawing me ever closer to God and learning to rely on him more instead of myself. I believe I am finally on the path I need to be on to becoming a better, truer, more honest, more authentic person, and the peace, calm and serenity inside me that is growing must be the fruit of that.

I am much better today than I ever was...all this while my beloved and precious son sits in jail for violating probation from two felonies, and having been thrown out of his fourth rehab for the second time for failing a drug test. It is truly a miracle that I can be okay...no, really really good in my heart and soul...for long periods of time, for most of the time.

This is outside recovery work...Rohr's contention is this is the stuff of a real life.

So, see what you think here...it is food for thought. This is today's devotion:


Stage Six: I am empty and powerless.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Alcoholics Anonymous would call Stage Six the First Step!

Stage Six is: I am empty and powerless. Almost any attempt to save yourself by any superior behavior, technique, belonging system, morality, role, strong ideological belief, or religious devotion will not work. It will actually lead to regression. What the saints and mystics say is that some event, struggle, relationship, or suffering in your life has to lead you to the edge of your own resources. There has to be something that you by yourself cannot understand, fix, control, change, or even begin to deal with. It is the raw experience of “I cannot do this.” All you can do at this point is wait and ask and trust.

This is where you learn real patience, compassion, and forgiveness. I don’t know how else you learn to forgive other people until you see seventy-times-seven your own brokenness, your own incapacity to love and, in this stage, your inability to do anything about it except throw yourself into the arms of mercy and love (Luke 7:47).

This is the darkness of faith, and now you can trust that this darkness is a much better teacher than supposed certainty or rightness. God is about to become very real. Some even call this “God’s Waiting Room!”

 

[recoveringenabler]

Very good COM, thank you.

It appears that many of us here on the PE side who have older difficult child's, have landed here on this strange journey with our adult kids to heal ourselves of childhood stuff or whatever brought on our enabling selves in the first place. If anyone can bring us to the "edge of your own resources" it would be our beloved children. The remarkable powerlessness one feels can bring you to your knees..................and keep you there indefinitely, with the very real feeling of " I cannot do this."

Many call that journey the Dark night of the soul. Where all the external facades fall away and we're left to look squarely at who we really are.............warts and all............yet in that looking, we can find ourselves, shed the extraneous masks and discover acceptance, which for me has offered that peace, compassion and forgiveness which allows my life to be filled with a real sense of internal comfort and peace.

My daughter provided the impetus to explore more deeply my own relationship with myself and the pockets of self cruelty and my own issues of control and fear............as my own healing in that progressed, my enabling of her stopped.........freeing us both to follow the song of the heart..............or not...............

Oddly in my detaching from everyone across the board, in my acceptance of what is, it's brought move LOVE, more empathy and more trust in to my relationships and my every day life. I am in the lovely realm of gratitude for most of the time..............

Thank you for sharing that COM, a very nice way to begin my day..........

 

[Childofmine]

I couldn't resist also sending today's meditation from Rohr. Not knowing the religious/nonreligious feelings of any of those reading, don't let that be a barrier to seeing what he is saying here. Take what you like and leave the rest. I believe it is profound and a piece of a healthy walk out of enabling and into a joyful life for all of us. I am starting to experience some of what he is saying here and it is wonderful, a new place, a better, more peaceful, more sure place:

Stage Seven: I am much more than who I thought I was.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014

When you finally accept your own powerlessness, you learn to plug into a different outlet and draw upon a Deeper Source. This is conversion. This is radical transformation. It is like an identity transplant. St. Paul describes his own conversion in this way: “I live no longer, not I, but I live in Christ, and Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). You will experience a much larger sense of self, and it is not all about “you” anymore!

At Stage Seven, you have a qualitatively different sense of your self. “I am so much more than I thought I was!” you might feel. The false self has died in a significant way and the True Self is starting to take over. But because you are not yet fully at home here, it will first of all feel like a void, an emptiness, but hopefully an okay emptiness.

You begin to act for the sake of the action itself because it is true, because it is good, because it is beautiful, and not because it is popular or even because it works!

There is no felt consolation most of the time, and there is lessening social reward.

Yet there is great peace. You are being weaned of your reliance upon your feeling world, which means very little at this point. Because you are living in the Larger Self, all is okay.

You know Another is now holding you. You do not need to hold yourself. You are at the heart of faith, and in a certain sense true spirituality only begins at this point! (Most of Jesus’ teaching proceeds from this level or higher, which is why much of the church has not been ready for Jesus.)

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

:O)

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I saw myself in the Seven Stages.

You cannot imagine the comfort this information has given me! THERE I AM. That means I am in a change process. I won't always be stuck in this horrible place where everywhere I look there is some other bad thing about my (formerly wonderful, pretty much all-knowing, radically practically perfect) self to see.

It's been a rough week. All over the place emotionally and never once coming out on top.

Never once.

No wonder I spent all my time in denial.

:O)

Cedar

P.S. Just a little joke for those who may not have heard it: Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

There is no felt consolation most of the time, and there is lessening social reward.

This is the feeling Recovering describes when she says we begin to focus on ourselves, on in here, not out there.

I think it must keep happening, this awakening,this expansion, on level after level.

And didn't one of us just post something about slipping from "yes", which has something to do with trust (and so, growth), and back into "no", which has to do with refusing change, with keeping things safe?

How amazing, that we come through the same kinds of expansion, each through different means.

I was talking with someone just the other day, who was telling us about confronting fear through sailing the oceans. It was not intentional for him, either. He just loved to sail. But out there, alone, where anything can and does happen, you learn to trust yourself.

He said the same sort of thing, COM. That he has no frame of reference any longer, for approval. It is all about personal integrity, about what matters, to him.

Cedar