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10 SIGNS YOU MIGHT SUFFER FROM A SPIRITUAL ADDICTION

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Tidal_Wave_Thorpe_Park  I have been thinking a lot about the beach. Even though I’ve had so much sun exposure that I will soon be a piece of charcoal, I still adore body-surfing in the surf and sun. The undulating waves instantly pacify my mind and body and bathe me in serenity. It’s a preference, but also a symptom for me.

It means I’m in my religious addiction again. I’m driving myself to earn something I think I need and I’m doing it with such relentlessness, my mind is signaling me it’s time to go to my happy place and press the reset button.

Instead of being a renewable source of serenity, peace, hope, confidence, and the unshakable certainty that you are enough, a religion that is an addiction produces the following:

 

1)   You feel drained and burned out, emotionally and spiritually.

2)   Submission to the will of God looks exactly like subservience to the wishes of others. You can’t “ let anyone down” without feeling acute disappointment in yourself, intense anxiety or both.

3)   Your shame is triggered by the behavior of other people towards you, not your own actions.

4)   Guilt and shame are indistinguishable.

5)   You forgive everyone but yourself. You can’t forgive yourself for whatever evidence of your imperfections that is present in your life. You treat yourself more harshly than anyone else.

6)   Forgiveness of others means never kicking someone out of your life, even if their presence dissolves your peace, happiness or self- worth. The potential that you may help them negates how they might hurt you.

7)   You fear punishment by your Higher Power and anger from others.

8)    Your own anger is so scary or “ wrong” to you that you are rarely aware of feeling it, even when boundaries are being crushed and it would be completely justified. Instead you often feel disappointment, sadness or fear.

9)   It’s often almost impossible to distinguish selfishness from simple self- care or self- discovery.

10) Faith and Grace may be bedrock principles in your religious practice, but trust in a God who loves you, understands you and is your friend seems as remote as the Hubble Telescope.

We are not meant to be perfect. We are meant to be whole. – Jane Fonda

 

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SPIRITUAL AUTHOR/ A LIGHT- HEARTED VIEW

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A LIGHT- HEARTED LOOK AT A HEAVY SUBJECT

 

 

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Theodore Roosevelt

7;30am

1)

“What if I will never be the next Nostradamus?

What if my ‘aha moment’ isn’t going to happen today?

What if I have nothing life- changing to contribute?

What if I totally miss predicting the impending apocalypse?

What if what I am inspired to say angers or offends:

The Religious Right/ Left/ Centrists

Baptists

Catholics

Jews

Universalists

Atheists

Zen Buddhists

Muslims

My family?”

 

“What if I inadvertently leave a group out? “

“What if one group thinks I am writing about them, when I’m not?”

 

“What if people come to my house with pitchforks and blazing torches, like the scene from Frankenstein?”

“What if no one says or does anything, because they don’t care or simply do not know that I exist? “

“Can I do what I feel called to do if no one knows I am there?”

 

Have existential meltdown. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…

 

 

2) GET OUT OF BED.

 

3) Beg/ bargain with God about all aspects of number one.

 

 

4) Drink coffee for inspiration.

 

blankcomputerondesk5) Wait for mountaintop experience to write about.

 

6) Go to job that supports writing habit, enjoying the peace that accompanies actual completion of tasks. While working, have hundreds of inspiring writing ideas, just nothing relevant to this particular writing deadline. Forget most of them before writing them down. Write down the remainder on To Do list stretching until the year 2050.

 

 

7) Resort to exercise or a nap to clear the mental pathways.

 

 

 

8) Receive desired inspiration/ word from God while engaged in inconvenient activities such as showering, using the other part of the bathroom, or pretending to pay attention in the middle of a conversation.

 

latepm9) Let the words out.

10) Thank God for doing the real work.

 

11) Collapse in heap.

 

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Hans Hofmann

THE PRODIGAL WRITER by L E Kinzie

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“I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.”

Martin Luther

 

In my twenties, I was a lawyer and proud of it. I was proud of being perceived as powerful and independent, but underneath that pride was a psyche composed of Jell-O and ruled by fear. I had no idea that at the root of most of what I did was greed. I had the first dime I ever made. I was saving for the future. How could that be greedy? I did not trust that there would always be enough and that it was not up to me alone to provide it.

Then, I got married, bought a house and had two kids in very short order. I began to have a mini midlife meltdown in my 30s that lasted for a decade. I had this feeling deep inside that I needed to run away and just escape, but I did not know how to extract myself from the Golden Handcuffs I had willingly put on. I was a horrible person, because everything I did was prompted by the fear of losing that paycheck. I was all bravado and no bravery, because I was trying to “ muscle through” a pervading fear of the future.

God was patiently waiting, while I ignored him and tried to rule and fix my world and myself. Eventually he answered my unspoken prayer for escape.

Someone finally did me the favor of firing me. I went into a tailspin and shook my fist at the heavens. How dare he free me by making me a failure! Who the heck did He want me to be?

Oprah had no answers. I threw myself into every new self- improvement trend that came along and grew progressively angry with God with every failed attempt to become Martha Stewart or Mother Theresa.

Having nowhere else to look, I looked within. I worked a 12 step program on myself and my need to control everything and begin to see that this fallow period was not about God stripping things away from me at all.

The only things he stripped away were my chains. He was actually returning the most precious things to me: the things of childhood. Trust. Hope. Willingness. Surrender. Dreams. Belief. Abandon. Living from the Heart. Knowing I am loved. Play. Play. Play.

 

Finally, I see God was never asking me to change myself, remove all my weaknesses or be strong. He was asking me to remember and return. He was asking me to remember the happy little 10-year-old girl who wrote poems to process her emotions and was closest to God and happiest when she did. I had completely eradicated her memory, but she was who I really was.

Words spewed out of me like a mal- functioning fountain and filled page after page. Eventually all of these words formed a non- fiction book about my long- overdue spiritual and artistic awakening. I started going to artists’ retreats. I started feeling…happy.

Like most writers, I have a non- writing job that pays the bills. Sometimes I get really tired of burning the candle at both ends. But, when that happens it’s because I’ve made a job out of my source of peace and joy, my means of connecting to God and sharing that connection with others. Life and writing become joyous again when I remember to give back to the original Creator all of my creations. Remember, return and repeat, as needed.

 

SELF- AWARENESS SUCKS

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grasshopper on top of world Anything that is both absolutely essential and inherently difficult, by definition, sucks. Mindfulness, the most important tool to emotional and spiritual healing, growth and wellness, can be a graduate level S&M course from which one never graduates. So why bother? The pay off is worth it. Of course, to find out what that is you have to read all the way through to the end 🙂 But, first a few reasons why it really sucks:

 

1) Self- awareness sucks because I can’t be a pernicious pain in the ass provoking mass flight from friends and family, and then blame said flight on said friends and family. Unfortunately, self awareness requires an hourly examination of my true motivations and an assessment of whether I am being truly loving to my fellow man or fake- loving to get them to behave in a way that makes me more comfortable or directly benefits me in some way.

 

2) Self- awareness sucks because I can’t blame disappointments, hurts and failures on

“ my enemies”. I can no longer do this because I know my true enemies are my thoughts. Fear, guilt, self- condemnation, arrogance and insecurity are the line-up that will cause me to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory before any living person can truly have power over me. It sucks because I have to ask myself, does my attitude match the facts? I should have been born centuries ago during the time of the Huns, because I am always girding my loins in preparation for Barbarians at the Gate, most of whom never arrive except when I invite them in, which leads me to number 3.

 

3) I have to ask myself “ what would I do if I weren’t afraid?” about every 60 seconds, because I am aware of how fear is the prism through which I often choose to view my world. It is my fall- back position. Self- awareness requires me to act the opposite of what my mind is telling me to do, which is “ batten down the hatches!”

4) Self- awareness sucks because it isn’t flat. It’s a multi- level high rise, and it’s about progress not perfection. If I am self- aware, I can no longer hide behind technical truthiness.

I can have awareness of something in my mind, and it may be the literal truth. From my mind, awareness then travels to my heart. This is a deeper level of truth for me. This is where denial begins to fall away and those hurts from way back when begin to surface. It is painful, but it passes to the next level after the tears have been shed or the anger has flared, and it reveals a still deeper level of truth—the emotional truth.

I never felt anger until I finally got to this level and, as a consequence, I had no idea what a boundary was. I was trampled and resentful and had no idea why. Once I tended these truths begging for my attention, I discovered boundaries, and stopped being a professional doormat.

It’s at this point that my higher power shows up because I’m hurting and I ask for help. A more accurate statement would be I’m suddenly aware of his presence, because I start looking for it.

Then, my awareness reaches the cellular level and I am sitting atop the high rise. Fear is no longer present. I am not attached to an outcome, the past or the future, and therefore, my vision is unimpeded.

This is the only point at which I literally hear the deep and unabashed truth coming out of my own mouth. In the long run, it is always kinder.

 

So, what on earth is worth all of this self- vigilance, you might ask?

Here is the big payoff:

 

I don’t need to blame God for ignoring me because I am aware that I have ignored him, and that he has always been there. I know that he is not too busy to help me: I’ve been too busy to ask, and I know I can rectify that oversight at any time. I don’t have to lose my peace or obsess about if I am in his will because I know that so long as I am in the presence of my loving creator, I cannot really avoid being where he wants me to be.

I get the true humility that comes from knowing the whole truth about myself and speaking it.

I get courage, if not the freedom from fear.

I get success, fruitful relationships and spiritual transformation.

I get to finally close the door on the past, and let happiness and blessings happen, instead of vigilantly watching for them, with firmly clenched fists.

I get true abundance, as my eyes are opened to miracles and blessings falling on me like rain.

 

“ My God with his loving kindness, shall come to meet me at every corner.”

Psalms 59:10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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