Practicing Peace

There can be no lasting peace on earth until each of us makes peace with ourselves.  Steps 8 and 9 of the 12 Steps are about making amends for the harm we have caused while being actively addicted.  The most important amend we have to make is to ourselves for losing faith in our essential goodness as living beings on this planet.  We are all born innocent, open and receptive.  This is our birthright, the basis of our essential goodness.  How we are taught and treated after we enter into this world will often determine whether we embrace this essence or reject it.

What is self love and why do so many of us mistakenly associate it with selfishness?  I think it is because we don’t really understand the meaning of love.  Love is a verb; it is an action and a way of being.  Love is love because it sets no conditions for itself.  Love is vast, healthy, balanced, healing.  Love gives with no thought of getting.  Love is the most perfect thing we can think of which is why many people identify their Higher Power with love.  But the adults of our species must confront their own imperfections daily and the greatest imperfection of all is this shocking lack of self love.  Yet it is mostly the adult population that breed and bring children into this world.  And these adults teach what they have learned from their parents, caretakers and teachers; they teach the great lie that love is conditional.

When Buddha and Jesus tried to teach us to love our enemies, they were trying to teach us that love must be unconditional towards ourselves and all others.  This world we have set up of reward and punishment is not a world based on love.  We live in a world of rules.  Follow the rule or “moral law” and you will be rewarded, break it and you will be punished.  And yet we break these rules all the time.  Love has only one rule: do no harm to yourself or others.  That’s it.  When you beak that one rule, all you have to do is to return to love once again, that’s how we are able to make the amends we all have to make.

Do no harm to yourself and others.  What would our world turn into if every parent in every culture across the planet taught their children this one golden rule?  It would turn into a place of peace.  Love is peace and harmony amongst us all.  As it stands we are a planet of using addicts.  Addiction is about war and disharmony within ourselves and with each other. Addiction at its core is about self hatred.  Addiction is about reward and punishment. Addiction is about following and breaking “rules”.  Addiction is about being caught in a cycle we cannot willingly stop.  This is the world we teach our children to enter into and to adapt to and they do.

The seeds of self hatred are planted in each of us when we are so very young and vulnerable to attack.  We are told as soon as we are able to understand that if we are “good” and follow the rules, we will receive the reward of love and attention, and if we are “bad” and don’t follow the rules, we will be punished and the affection we need for our soul’s health will be withdrawn or worse we will be verbally attacked or worse than that physically and/or sexually abused.  Most of us choose as children to follow the rules because we wanted  to survive. How quickly we as adults forget that children are dependent on us for their physical, emotional and mental survival.  When we teach the children that love is a thing, a reward, and not an action and way of being, we stop practicing and teaching love.

Addicts who choose to enter into recovery, choose to practice love as a way of being and acting.  They finally take on the responsibility of caring for themselves and loving themselves in a way that their parents, caretakers and teachers did not.  They take the child that they once were and become a true parent to that child.  They give love with no thought of a return and continually teach themselves and that child about unconditional love, how to nurture it and extend it out to all others.  This is called practicing peace.

Song: The Crossroads

The Crossroads

Sometimes depression lays me low
Takes me places I do no want to go
Down to the crossroads where I must decide
Whether to stay here or to give up and die.

Do I really have a choice?
I've said Thy will be done
On earth as it is in Heaven.

God's will be done
I am joined by Heaven to another person,
His suffering is greater than mine
But he fuels that fire all the time.

It's his turn to make the choice
That I made a long time ago
To give peace and love a chance
To grow.

Play Song

Letter To An Addict

Dear Suffering Friend,

Who/What is more important than your recovery?  No one and nothing.  Not your career, nor your friends and lovers and family.  Perhaps you’ve been financially successful, even famous, in part because of your addiction.  Maybe you’ve become codependently addicted to the people who supported you in your ambition to succeed in the world and they to you.  If so, you have taken on too much responsibility.  You have been ignoring your spiritual health by hurting your body, heart and mind.

I know you’ve learned the art of managing the unmanageable and of hiding behind a wall of denial. And there is so much in this troubled world to support you in your denial.  Yes, it is easier to go along with business as usual, to adapt to the sickness rather than to challenge it.  So here you are in this place where the world tell you one thing, but your spirit tells you another.  Can you honestly tell me that you are not deeply suffering inside, doesn’t this aching awareness follow you wherever you go?  Your spirit has not given up on you.  That pain is its way of calling to you, reminding you to take care of yourself.

What would you do if you entered a prison cell and found a little boy chained to the wall repeatedly hitting his head against the wall?  Wouldn’t you search for the key to unchain him?  Wouldn’t you pull him away from the wall and embrace him, comfort him?  Wouldn’t you lead him out of his cell to freedom?  Doesn’t that boy deserve the chance that only you can give him to heal?  Of course he does. Listen to this call to love yourself.

Love Your Enemies

I am not a Buddhist or a Christian, but I feel a great love for Buddha and Jesus.  They are our worlds great messengers of peace and love.  Buddha lived to be eighty years old as a master teacher; he lived in peace and health.  I wish I could say that the countries that embraced Buddhism also embraced peace and became the leaders of a peace movement all over the world, but that has not come to pass.  Jesus lived to be thirty three and died a horrible death and because of this he stands out in a more dramatic way than Buddha.  Jesus’ language is more dramatic, too.  He didn’t just suggest that human beings should love each other, he commanded it over and over again.  He could have said it no plainer:  love your enemies.  And he practiced what he preached, even towards the Pharisees that he rebuked for being scholarly hypocrites.  Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for another person is to be direct.  The shock of the confrontation is a wake up call.  It wasn’t business as usual with Jesus.  He did not conform to the sickness of the culture he lived within, inviting some to listen to his message while rejecting others.  Everyone was welcome; he spoke to everyone.

Almost a third of the world’s seven billion plus people claim to be “Christians” or followers of Jesus, but they are not.  If they were then at least over a third of the world would be committed to pacifism. Jesus was willing to die for peace and he did.  No, mostly men continue to be willing to die, be maimed, maim and murder others by participating in the practice of war.  But this faith in war goes much deeper into conflict within nations, within communities, within families, and most particularly within our own souls.  Who is really our worst enemy?  We are to ourselves.  You cannot extend love out to others in a genuine and life changing way until you face yourself and accept yourself with all your strengths and weaknesses.  But most of us run from facing ourselves as much as we run from facing the fact that all of us will die.

And so, in over two thousand years since the murder of Jesus, we have become a world of addicts. God has repeatedly touched the lives of spiritual teachers like Buddha and Jesus and sent the message out. The message is love.  Love yourself, love others, love this planet, love God.  It is so simple, so basic, so logical.  So what do we do with this message?  As a species, quite simply, we reject it.  We are just where we should be, clinging to our illusions as our very world is in the process of succumbing to the poisons we so willingly produce within it.  Can we save ourselves?  What group of people can lead the way?  The answer:  addicts committed to recovery.  Addicts are interspersed throughout the whole world’s population.  Those who commit to recovery are committing to it all over.  They are like white blood cells fighting off the infection in a sick organism.

In recovery programs all over the world addicts are taught that they must love and accept themselves as they are.  Self hatred is the plague of the using addict and it is a way of being that must be confronted right from the start.  There can be no personal recovery without self love.  I know 12 Step programs are not the only way to recovery, but as far as I can judge, they are to date the most effective and the most widespread.  It is a requirement that each individual addict admit to themselves and publicly that they are indeed an addict.  We must admit that we are powerless over the illness, an illness both physical and spiritual.  Addicts who become this self aware also become very aware of the elements of addiction interspersed throughout the culture they find themselves living in.  Using addicts are everywhere, inside religious organizations, governments, businesses, education, courts of law, communities, families - everywhere.  There is really no place left to turn but to something greater than humankind, to the Higher Power.  And so it should be.  Our sickness is just too deeply rooted into the core of the human species.

The way to heal the world is to focus on healing ourselves and healing ourselves means becoming honest, peace loving, responsible, humble, spiritually disciplined individuals.  There is no other way. There never has been.

Our Mute God

Maybe about five percent of our entire mind is conscious.  Much of what  goes on inside of us is a mystery.  We speculate that all of our memories are stored in the unconscious in some kind of retrievable order.  If we are not conscious of the process, who or what organizes our memories?  Much of what we can retrieve is visual rather than verbal.  Our night dreams give us glimpses into our mental process of often working through the things that disturb us in life, but much of our awareness of our dreams fades quickly upon waking.  As for our conscious minds so many of us are pulled into habitual, non reflective patterns of living.  How “awake” are most of us?  Not many.  Waking ourselves up requires a spiritual discipline that most of us are either ignorant of or evasive of.  And so we attach to the superficial as if it were profound when the superficial is just the tip of the iceberg in a wide open sea.

For those of us who believe in an entity or great spirit we call the Higher Power, that Power has been throughout history mute.  God does not “talk” to us directly and yet so very many of us believe that we commune with God anyway and I believe that we do.  Communion is not so much intellectual as intuitive.  How could it be any other way when so much of our minds are submerged.  Those that rely mostly on reason with its facts and its proofs, with its intellectual analysis, ignore that they, too, are mysterious to themselves and don’t know themselves because so much of our existence is ruled by unconscious processes.  Our very spirits cannot be contained and analyzed and so it is the same with the Higher Power.

The Higher Power relates itself to our entire spirits, not just the conscious part.  While we over attach to our skills at verbal and written communication, our language is still woefully lacking in expressing the depth of each of our spirits.  Language necessarily reduces the individual and complex to the simple allowing us to use and misuse the symbolism contained within it.  Our languages are a blessing and a curse, both potentially  uniting us and also dividing us.  Our extensive use of language is what sets us apart from other animals and allows us to embrace the arrogant notion that we are not  really animals at all.  We have all been wounded at a young age by thoughtless comments about us by our caretakers and other children.  We, in turn, all learned how to wound others with our words.  Words are a double edged sword.  The sickness deep within our spirits gets expressed through words and abusive actions.

It is no wonder to me that the Higher Power does not speak to us in words.  They are neither a pure enough form of communication nor an accurate one.  Words are in themselves manipulative and God is not.  Words come from the individual who utters them and not from the Great Spirit that tries to guide them through other means.  God works through us and our experiences of life, through our conscious and unconscious lives.  God can inspire individuals to touch on great truths through their words, but the illnesses and biases within our souls always come through.  We are finite beings.  We have many limitations and we need to be humble.
I don’t believe there are any holy books precisely because man wrote them and the true spirit of God cannot be reduced to words.  It is too vast and too brilliant and we are not.  And yet we continue to presume and continue to divide ourselves from each other most hatefully by using these “holy” books as a basis for our actions against others.

It is my belief that God exists in space, as a kind of holy spirit, and thus is everywhere, inside and outside of us.  Space cannot be captured or manipulated or controlled or even defined and yet it is integral to everything.  Space is always receptive, non harming, non judgmental.  Space is and always will be greater than we are.  That is the natural order of things.  It has no voice and yet it makes its presence felt, especially when we stop taking it and the great mercy of it for granted.

Sex And Love Addiction

I am in a close friendship with a sex and love addict.  He is an incest survivor who never healed from the severity of the abuse he endured.  He was taught to equate sex with “love” and he was taught that “love” also meant pain, that true love had something to do with abuse of self and others.  His experience taught him to embrace sex/romance/relationship addiction.  He’s been living with this addiction for 35 years.   I’ve been working with him for over a year, regularly encouraging him to seek help outside his circle of codependently addicted “friends”.  These also very sick “friends” are his whole world when he’s not working and when he is working.  Unfortunately society has rewarded him financially for being an addict.  He is a hardworking perfectionist and the work he does is of good quality, but it comes at a great sacrifice.  Essentially he does not love himself and is mistrustful of the idea that a benevolent unconditionally loving Higher Power exists.

It is really quite a miracle that he reached out to me at all.  I don’t even know if there is anybody but me that is trying to help him see and go treat his illnesses.  What it means to me is that a part of him really wants to heal and be a good man because he listens to me.  I talk to him about my love addicted past and how much it hurt me, but that when I turned toward help, particularly from a 12 Step program, I began to become aware of how much I had been hurting myself, essentially hating myself and putting myself in a position where I would be beaten down and degraded.  Then I talk about how I began to deepen my faith that there existed a benevolent Higher Power that was aware of every second I had ever lived and cared about me all through my trials which were my toughest lessons.  From there I talk about my gradual process of learning to love and accept myself with all my strengths and weaknesses.

For the last two months I’ve been talking to him about the 12 Steps as I go through them while trying to commit myself to going to a 12 Step group.  He’s still listening.  He’s not shutting me out or acting defensively.  Obviously, he doesn’t share all the details of his life with me, but the part of himself he does share has a great deal of health in it already.  He is kind, considerate, tries to be open, reflects on what I say and appears to be continuing to try to be honest, particularly with himself.  I can see the seeds of self-love starting to grow in him.  I’ve asked him to “act as if” there exists a loving God and he hasn’t said no to that either.  I’ve sent him support books which include a couple of daily readers, one for people recovering from sex addiction and one for men recovering from any addiction.  I encourage him to read at the very least one of the readers each day and reflect on it.  I learned so much and got a lot of comfort from reading my Al-Anon daily readers when I was very ill and lost.

I understand, sympathize and have great compassion for the many sex and love addicts in this world. Here in the US particularly romance addiction is interwoven into the entertainment industry and massive numbers of people flock to the most popular products (books, films, music) and consume them often repeatedly.  The twisted message is that addiction is cool and perfectly “normal” and healthy. Any reference to the concept of a benevolent Higher Power that  is trying to help us help ourselves to heal this sick world are conspicuously absent.  More often there is a one finger salute to the individual artist’s idea of “God” yet even that happens infrequently.  After all, God is not the point; the point is to preserve the romantic delusion that unhealthy relationships with ourselves and others is actually profound, passionate, interesting and good.  The point is to continue the addictive cycle and make a lot of money doing it.

How do you heal from such a soul destroying illness when examples of people engaging in the addiction are all around you.  How do you get the strength to detach with love from others who are caught inside the illness that you are trying to heal within your spirit?  The answer is basic and practical: read support literature and meditate on it, pray to a healing God, write your feeling and thoughts and lessons learned in a journal, go to a 12 Step meeting, find an appropriate therapist, get a sponsor or several sponsors to go through the Steps with, practice self honesty always, cultivate love and compassion for yourself and others, include as much humor into the process as is possible or appropriate, believe that you are on a spiritual path, ask God to remove your compulsions, stay creative, open and expressive.  It’s a matter of unlearning false lessons from childhood and adolescence, false lessons given by our culture and learning the truest lesson there is, that of cultivating from now on love and compassion for yourself and all beings.

The prime directive for everyone of us is to take care of ourselves in our spirits by connecting to something greater than ourselves, whatever that might be as long as it is something healthy and healing. Our responsibility is to keeping ourselves healthy, that’s the only real and lasting way to deeply help other suffering people.  I can’t heal you.  You can’t heal me.  But we can heal ourselves through the grace of the Higher Power.  And if we choose to take this path, there will be many fellow travelers to be supported by and to support.  This is the way to heal the world, person by person.

Let Go And Let God

Right now I am holding on and I am in a lot of pain.  I want to figure things out and find solutions, but the more I study and work and think, the more overwhelmed I am by the massive quantities of problems and pain in this world.  That I am in pain is the logical outcome of trying to take on the role of God.  I lose sight of my smallness when I get ambitious this way and I forget that I am dependent on God for help and not the other way around.  I lose the faith that God is in this world and that every person is connected to God and on their particular path.  It is not my job to heal anyone else.  My responsibility is to take care of myself and hopefully set a good example for other people to do the same.  God loves me as I am; I do not need to prove myself to God or anyone else.  The goal is for each of us to do our part, working from inside out, from improving our conscious contact with God and being helpful to others without taking on their responsibilities to themselves. There is no one human savior for humankind.  What we have on this planet is a living network and that is how we create positive change in the world.  We willingly work together on one playing field without bogus hierarchies.

I have to accept that I will never know the big picture; only God has that vision.  Letting go is accepting my limitations, letting myself be humbled by them and putting myself in my proper place as one small being amongst many.

Drawing Of A Friend's Daughter

The Eleventh Step

11.  Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step eleven is a very, very important step.  An individual cannot turn his or her will and life over to God until he or she reaches out to try and form a conception of God.  After meditating on it and finding some kind of orientation be it towards Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Mother Nature, a group of recovering addicts or any other creative alternative, it is time to call out to that spiritual power, to pray for guidance.  Remember, whatever orientation you have, this power that you pray to knows absolutely everything about you and loves you unconditionally.

So, on the one hand, you have to come to realize that you are totally vulnerable with God and there is nothing that you can hide, no matter how much you might like to.  The reason why this is okay, more than okay really, wonderfully healing is that God is also always sending you unconditional love.  All the  shame and guilt, all the resentment, all the abuse, everything that makes you tighten up in your spirit, is put in the presence of this inexplicable force, that is here at the moment you turn your awareness towards it, to heal you, not just a bit, but entirely.  The key is to train yourself to turn to the Higher Power as much as you are able to, in good times and in bad times alike.

Very simply, turning towards God heals you and turning away from God makes you sick.  For all people, the language of God is in the words patience, tolerance, open-mindedness, kindness, healing humor, acceptance; it doesn’t matter whether you are a conscious believer or not, we all know the same language and know that it represents what in our heart of hearts we want for ourselves and those we care about.  Most of us move towards and away from God each day, which is why we need to improve our conscious contact with God and allow God to guide us by turning our will and lives over to something infinitely wiser.

Every time we pray, (and a prayer can be as simple as “Please guide me”) and every time we meditate (and meditation can be as simple as reading one small page of a daily reader and reflecting on it) we are admitting our powerlessness, our need for help and our willingness to reach out and do our part.  The big message is that we must learn to put ourselves in our proper place, a place of humility.  How could it be any other way?  And how often do we fall flat on our faces when we try to assume God’s position in relation to others and parts of our own more vulnerable personalities?  We have to stop taking on other people’s responsibilities, avoiding our own responsibilities (mostly towards taking good care of ourselves) and avoiding having faith in and reliance on the Higher Power.  We also need to acknowledge that in trying to be God we perform a terrible interpretation, sick and distorted.  People who try to believe that they are God, or the only Higher Power around, are very controlling, perfectionistic, judgmental, unforgiving in their relationship to others, but much worse, in their relationship to themselves.  This is the world of the using addict, a world of self hatred that gets projected out onto whatever target the addict attaches to.

The addict, however compulsive and miserable, is never outside God’s realm, though he or she can feel sometimes to be caught in a Godless place, a Godless world.  Using addicts walk around sometimes in a dream and other times in a nightmare, and the reason they hurt themselves so often is because they are blinded by the negative, destructive force of their addiction.  The main thing that restores vision is developing a belief in God that you reach out to and abstinence.  Every time I removed myself from the person I was codependently addicted to my connection to myself and the Higher Power grew and my vision began to return.  The magnitude of how much I had been hurting myself grew in my mind and with it the need to face it and gradually move towards changing myself.

God’s will may seem elusive, but it is not.  Keep in mind, the overall goal is peace on earth for all of us.  Who hasn’t thought at one time or another - what an amazing, beautiful planet we live on, a place fit to be called, in the places where humans have not been set on the destruction of it, heavenly.  The block to that possibility is not the planet and not God, but us.  The only way to heal the damage we have done and are still doing is for every individual to turn towards healing in whatever way or form that takes.

Don’t you know we are destroying the life sustaining qualities inherent on this world?  There is no way we can get out of this web we have woven without turning to a Higher Power and that means turning inward, doing our part by working on our own spiritual development and letting go and allowing God to take on the rest.  God will show us what we have to do, where we have to go, who we have to connect with in order to form a whole, functioning human organism that can overcome the sickness in our spirits that we have been spreading all around us.

Self Acceptance

Anyone who tentatively approaches recovery from any kind of addiction is told that first you have to accept yourself as you are.  That is what the Higher Power does and if the Higher Power can do it, so can you.  And you must because it is the basis of self love.  For the most part, I do accept myself as I am, but there is one area where I resist:  my obese weight.  God has placed a voice in my mind, a man’s voice and this voice says that it is a sex addict.  Sex addicts, like most using addicts, are immature and they focus in on physical appearance.  So this voice often attacks me for being obese. He says he has multiple lovers who are all physically beautiful.  He does not dwell on their sexual sicknesses.

Actually, he doesn’t dwell on them much at all, but they are the measure by which he measures me. From what I can tell he and they are “beautiful”, self hating addicts who probably have eating disorders that lead them to be underweight.  They see sex as an expression of “love” when the reality is more like they use each other to avoid dealing with themselves and their problems.  I do not want to be like them.  I am very resistant to the reduction of love to mere appearances.  This is not the man that I would choose to be in a love relationship with because he is not capable at this point of loving himself or anyone else.  But my connection to him and his insistence on the superficial aspects of relating to me hurts me.

Unfortunately his sick, sexually addicted way of looking at women in particular is mirrored in our culture.  He has a lot to hold onto to preserve his orientation.  TV, films, magazines and countless teenagers and young women all trying to present a prefabricated image of what it is to be an attractive woman.  The irony is that many of these women who obsessively attach to the superficial are not able to accept themselves even when they do reach an “ideal” weight.  Regardless of how they look, they do not feel beautiful inside.  Inside I feel neither beautiful nor ugly; I am just myself and I like and love myself inside.  Outside I usually like myself, too, but not always.  So this is my Achilles heel and my sex addict voice attaches to it with a certain relish.  And I believe God is using my obesity as a lesson to me and to this voice in my mind, whoever, whatever it is.

As I said in a previous blog, Love is spiritual in its essence, not physical.  How many people have you loved dearly who were physically imperfect?  I think most of us would say most of us because the fact is that’s the way we come.  We are imperfect beings.  Physical imperfections are the least of it.  But for obsessive, controlling individuals trying to erase or deny their physical imperfections, minor things become major things and hook them into horribly addicted patterns that too often cost them their very lives.  I did decide at a certain point in my illness when I was reducing my meals to one or two a day that I would rather be fat than anorexic or bulimic.  I was not willing to train myself to become obsessively compulsive with my food and treatment of myself.

It is my heart and mind, my spirit that is most valuable to me.  As for my body, I am so grateful that I can walk and that I have relatively good health.  So many people are suffering within their bodies due to various ailments.  I have nothing to complain about.  More than that I know the Higher Power loves me just as I am.  I will continue to try to eat right and get some exercise, try to do my part, but as to the rest of it, it is what God wills and in God’s time, not mine.

What Is Love?

“4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”    (The New Testament - Corinthians  13:4-7)

Because I see God as Love, this quote is for me a good description of God.  Just replace the word Love with God and see if it broadens your perspective.  God can be so unconditionally loving because God is not sick, but we human animals are very sick and in our sickness we distort our conceptions of love. The most distorted conception of love that we have conceived and compulsively promote is romantic love.  Conventionally the height of romantic love is marriage and our first example of it is with our parents.  Most of the marriage partners I’ve encountered through my friends and lovers have been dysfunctional.  It does not surprise me that in the US 40 to 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. The dysfunction within these marriages teaches dysfunctional patterns of interrelating to the children who in turn grow up and seek out what is familiar to them:  another dysfunctional relationship.  And the cycle continues.

Meanwhile the myth of ideal romantic love is fed to the children in the form of stories, particularly in fairy tales, found in books, TV, films and music.  The archetypes of the princess and the prince were in my experience always white, heterosexual, presented as physically “beautiful”, personally flawless. The storyline was one of discovering each other and instantly “falling in love” followed by separation due to an almost insurmountable external threat that primarily the prince has to overcome thus proving his worthiness to union in marriage and living happily ever after in some now ideal world.  And in this world full of “ideal” romance there is no expression of sexuality except for a kiss or two.

The reality that each child confronts in their daily lives is that there are no princesses or princes, no Queens and Kings to be found.  We live in a multicultural world with couples who have different sexual orientations.  Most of us are not  stereotypically “beautiful” and every single person encountered has personal flaws.  Children are very perceptive.  They know what kind of world they are living in.  Perhaps that is why they are taught over and over to seek out fantasy as an escape from the problems and pains of real life.  What’s worse is that the fantasies that are chosen for them are very shallow, very unchallenging, counter to the deepening awareness of personal growth.  Counter to the very thing that parents say they want for their children: to be grounded in reality, to grow up healthy, able to work through the challenges of life.

As a culture made up of so many individuals, we don’t only teach our children poorly, we teach them to be sick.  We teach them to adapt to the dysfunction in society.  It is depressing to me that so many artists not only reflect our collective illness, but promote it and feed their own individual sicknesses, thus continuing the cycle yet again.  It is an addictive cycle.  What fuels any kind of addiction is at first the need to avoid pain and then the compulsion to always look outside oneself for fulfillment.  Romance addiction is not about love and intimacy and growth; it is about trying to use another person to avoid facing oneself.

I think the very first lesson children should be taught is to love themselves unconditionally.  But how can a child learn that if they are being taught by adults who have adapted to the dysfunctional, addictive society they live in?  These are adults who continue to love themselves and others conditionally, which I believe is not true loving.  The answer is these children can’t, unless they are blessed by having regular contact with some self loving healthy adult that agrees to take them under their wing from time to time.  This doesn’t mean that these children don’t have contact with examples of healthy love growing up, but these examples are short in duration and can get overwhelmed by the many more examples set by self rejecting adults and peers.  And so as these children grow up they cobble together a mixture of health and sickness in their relationships with others.

I think we all really do want health and happiness in our lives, but all too often we are blinded by our own sickness, which is so deeply rooted as to be passed on from generation to generation.  Adolescents and adults feed on conflict in romantic relationships in their lives and in the stories they read, watch, listen to which includes intrigues, infidelity, lies, manipulation, mistrust, misrepresentation, all of which seem put in place to sabotage self love and love of the other and neatly avoids the necessary inclusion of any positive spiritual orientation.

The essence of love is spiritual, not physical.  Learning to love yourself is a spiritual process.  If the Higher Power is Unconditional Love, then when you reach out to love and care for yourself, you are reaching out to God in and around you.  The usual pattern is to reach out to love and care for someone else, but if you skip over the most important step, that of committing to loving yourself first, you will never find the love you seek.  More likely you will encounter conflict and pain.  Without unconditionally loving yourself, in essence removing the Higher Power from the picture, you are left with a lot of sickness.

Though we try to convince ourselves otherwise, love and hate do not mix.  Love is health; there is absolutely no sickness in love.  Hate, in all its guises, is all sickness;  there is no health in hatred.  That we can recognize genuine love at all in a world so full of distortions of it, is a miracle in itself.  That’s God’s grace at work in everyone, everywhere.