HONESTY MONTH: DAY 23: “The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” ― Jim Morrison
If “the truth will set you free” is correct, and I believe it is; this quote is the mantra of Step 4. For me, I fell in love with it the moment I read it.
My truth does not make your life easier, freer, or more enjoyable to live. It will not keep you from addiction. My truth only does those things for ME. So, all the work I do in Step 4 is for my benefit. There is some small ripple effect out in to the world around me, but it only impacts directly on my life.
This, I believe, is how we get to use that character defect of selfishness and self-centeredness to an advantage in recovery.
My obsession with ME is a great driver to the place where I am going to focus energy on what I am up to and what I can get out of this deal. And Mr. Morrison wrote another great truth. I don’t have to be honest with YOU to recover. Just me.
And then I must be into practicing personal integrity to be in relationship with YOU. That is how I know I am able to show up for relationship. I learn to be honest with me. I am unafraid to tell you what works for me and what doesn’t. That is how I avoid the nasties that come when I allow you to walk all over me and I begin to resent you.
There is so much insanity in the way we navigate relationships. We are angry and resentful of how others treat us; but so very dishonest with our own truths that we cannot separate where they end and we begin. That is the road to ruin in relationship.
There is so much baggage that we drag around with us that we can never fully unpack this shit when we are trying to build something constructive with another in the present that can bridge out into the future. Our baggage, their baggage, and all the stuff we pick up on the way gets in the middle of things and there is no breathing room for growth.
I cannot grow forward until I can sit still with NOW; and I cannot sit still with NOW until I can sit still with what was. What WAS must be resolved to be at peace NOW. That is the purpose of Step 4, applied liberally, repeatedly, until I am clean enough to sit still with NOW. Then, and only then, am I ready to move into something new.
In the current political crap going on in the media, people are becoming all riled up and protesting the way things have been allowed to unfold. We are not going to change anything until we can be at peace within ourselves. Mr. Morrison wrote this quote in the 1960s, when we were running around trying to change the world. “Buying the world a coke” isn’t the response.
The response is to find ourselves first. We can only save one person, it must be us. I can only do this work for me. I cannot do yours. Nor can I force it down your throat or create the space for you to want it, even a little bit. It is the oxygen mask on the airplane. I can help you only after I get mine.
So, if you want to change the world, change who you are first. When you have swallowed those big pieces of truth about yourself, you are clean enough to walk out into the world and tell the truth; not about what you think, (Nobody cares!), but about who the hell you are and what you have done so far.
And, changing one lie at a time, the truth will set us free!
Dolphin Hug 