LOVE MONTH: DAY 23: “A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.” ~ Max Muller
Loving others is such a great adventure! Loving them when they are not behaving well is a challenge, as well as when they do something hurtful or harmful to us.
Seeing others without judgment is another great challenge. Most of us tend to distance ourselves from those whom we may disapprove or fear is common. Soon we have no one we can connect with because the world at large is too painful to let come near. I know I have done this in my life; because I see what it looks like for others and I can relate.
Everyone I have ever met has left something with me and for me. Some have had significant impact on my life; often an impact that I took personally and felt damaged by. They were the most significant teachers on my journey. I have felt quite unloving and angry or hurt by them. I believed I was their target or “victim”, which is terribly untrue.
These people came bearing gifts, but they did not appeal to me as such. They were the things that I have spent a great deal of time working steps and looking inside myself in therapy to understand and make peace with.
I have been given a tremendous gift in being able to make peace with them and myself and to not only let them off the hook, but to embrace and love and thank them for this exchange. I am so grateful for that love and acceptance. Now I am free to really live my life (this is a slow, long process!) and to be able to open my heart more widely than ever to embrace everyone with an unconditional kind of love.
That was never available to me before. It has been a process, a long and slow one, to be sure. But I can feel the product of some very deep work I have been doing in the last few months. The biggest hurdle so far is overcome.
I am, by no means, “WELL”; but I sure am happy to say I am better. And content. And willing to allow all the people I know and will meet to be who they are and where they are and let them off the hook. A few of them will never need to know how much I have disliked them or their behavior. It doesn’t matter. They can sit in love and be. I am free and so are they.
This is what Step 12 asks of us. To love others enough to share ourselves freely with them and then walk away if they don’t want to do what we do. Not to quit loving them, but to let them off the hook. It may happen many years later, but we just let them know what can happen and how it happens and that we are doing it. Then, when they are in the space where it can happen for them, we hold them in love and welcome them home.
This is hard for those closest to an addict to ever understand. That is why it is so hard to learn. We see others as being “wrong” or “bad” when they do things that we do not like. Untrue. They are walking their journey, just as we did. How can we not be the ones who love them best and for fun and for free?
Dolphin Hug 