You’ve always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself!
This quote is my life mantra. Isn’t it true for most people? Until we learn to believe in ourselves, life just seems to be one struggle after another. The feeling of being powerless to what happens to us, when in truth, we do have the power to create the life we want.
It was 7 years ago; I published my first book. A book that haunted my spirit for years. It was how I integrated the 12 steps of recovery with characters and scenes from the Wizard of Oz. I thought the day I published my book; I had arrived. The universe had a different plan for me. I wasn’t as solid in my recovery as I thought. I missed the most important lesson.
Recovery isn’t something you achieve; it is an ever-growing foundation that helps to create a lifestyle worth living. You see, many people that seek recovery have come to the point of admitting life has become unmanageable. Whether they are forced by circumstances outside of themselves or have an awakening of some kind, life feels out of control.
One issue, I found for myself, and yes, it is only my opinion, I got stuck in the belief that recovery was something outside of myself. It wasn’t until I realized that while a lot of the behaviors and actions changed, my inner relationship with myself hadn’t. I still didn’t trust myself. I still would slip, and my addictive thoughts and feelings still could run rampant, at a moment’s notice. On the outside, I seemed to have it all together, but on the inside, I was still living in fear of losing.
And when I did lose, the most important thing, life seemed to crash down around me. I lost ME, again. I had come to rely on circumstances and people outside of myself for happiness, validation, and the misconceptions that life feeds us.
This is when I went back to square one, became friends with myself, treated myself with the compassion and love I was known to give others. I immersed myself in the practice of mindfulness.
The last few years have been a lot of self-examination, reflection, truly getting to know me, forgive myself, and yes others too. More importantly the realization that my early years of recovery were seeds of mindfulness that I didn’t tend to. I can see clearly, so many things I did, even as a child was the beginning practices of mindfulness. But that will come in another blog post.
And I will end with this quote by Anais Nin
Namaste
Love & Light
Jules