Your True Self

Your true self, God, or Higher Power is everywhere, particularly in its opposites. Like the Taoist yin-yang symbol, your original nature is present in both the dark and the light, in the male and the female and in the heights of ecstasy as well as in the pits of despair. Our Higher Power had never abandoned us, In many ways we had abandoned our Higher Power as a result of our diseases.

Mel Ash (The Zen of Recovery, p. 180)

*****

My friends in recovery sometimes refer to non-alcoholics or addicts as "normies". I believe this label is erroneous because I am hard pressed to find anyone that, at one time or another, hasn't hit such a bottom as the result of separation from our True Self. The truth is that most of us are born connected with God. This original consciousness and joy of discovery is what my relationship with the Heart of Compassion is all about. When I lost that I searched through the self-centered pursuit of that original enthusiasm (that some mistakenly tagged, "original sin"). We call this experience in the West, the Fall and, expelled from the Garden, we wander through life trying to retrieve our original nature. Through the dependency on the accesses of religion, of power, pleasures, property, security and prestige most of us were waylaid grasping for this lost special place. The self-centeredness we were born with was based on the necessary dependency of our helplessness. However, at some point most are able to reciprocate the nurturing we received and shed what was once useful, just as a snake sheds its skin. Are these "normies"? Are we special just because we went too far and drove ourselves over the edge and now need some form of spiritual discipline of recovery?

            I think not because there are no "normies" in this regard. I am not special just because I ruined most relationships through my addictions… the web of samsara.

geo 4,837