September 22

FREEDOM MONTH: DAY 22: “There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.” ― Miguel Ruiz

In this book, there is a deep significance (for me) as applied to not taking life personally. And I really love to work with this principle. Addicts are SO self-absorbed that we believe the Universe is doing things to “pay us back” for bad behavior! Or we consider karma to be a series of bad events that compensate for our series of bad behaviors. It ain’t THAT!

Energy follows energy. If we are greedy and fearful, we hang on and cling to life, old ideas, events and people, places and things. If we learn to let go, then energy can flow again through our lives and bring new energy through and through and through all of it.

Until we stand back and get out of our own way, nothing new can enter. And we have to recognize our intense dependence on judgment! We label life as “good or bad”, “right or wrong”, pretty or ugly, nice or mean, etc., etc., etc. There are no such things…life is life is life is life. Even the appearance that life is gone is an illusion.

And NONE of it is personal. We are here to walk our path. It will intersect with everything that we are supposed to have occur. We get to choose ONLY those responses we bring to it! In working with our addict minds, we really need to recognize what we believe about life and what we do and where we go and what happens next.

We are neither rewarded or punished in this deal. I remember working to discuss this concept with my darling husband. He was horribly injured in 1968 in Vietnam and could never understand why he was the one who got to live, first of all, and then why he had to live for another 37 years in constant pain. But he made peace with this stuff in those years we were together. We brought one-another healing in many areas of life…understanding and acceptance.

Most of us have walked through life with beliefs about things that have broken our hearts in so many ways, trying to do life with those beliefs is horrible! And we get to let go of what we believe about it and shift our focus to embrace a richer, happier and fuller way of seeing it all. We are not picked out or selected for anything…it is only a path…and every path includes great joy, great sorrow, great love, great peace…all of it…it is the humanity our spirit came to experience and express. And every one of us is stumbling and lost at times (almost all the time, I believe); so it is nice that we can love each other and give each other our listening and presence.

Not our opinions or critiques, but our listening and sharing and love. Being present to another is such a gift and both people are gifted! I love that!

I love when Chuck C. talked about Heaven and Hell being in the same place all his life. All that changed was his perspective. I have inhabited the same dwelling for 3 years. For the first year, I hated it with all of me! It was ghetto, dirty, noisy, ugly and way too small. I saw only the things that made it a miserable time for me.

Then, one day, I began to see the good of this little tiny house. And to create more garden space and to take good care of it and to focus my attention on how little it cost me and how it worked out for me to have most of my time free to walk on the beach, rather than spending my life working to pay for a home I never got to hang out in. Oh! And it is now my magic space! And part of that happened by continuing a gratitude practice that shifted my perspective.

In the 1980s, there was a popular T-shirt and bumper sticker: “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” When I was about 9 months into recovery, I found a badge that I still have that says: “Life is a bitch and then you change your attitude!” Well, that works for me. So my only job here is to examine what I believe about my life and then clean up the messes I have made with my bad attitude and get on with being Happy, Joyous and Free. I am SO down with that!