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I was just talking to a friend who is going through a divorce. She chose to leave her husband due to his inability to follow through on his commitment to his personal recovery from sex addiction and substance abuse. His pattern would be one of letting the addiction get the better of him which, in turn, would negatively affect everything in his life. He then would become so beaten he would crawl into a treatment center looking for help. He would come out of rehab with the best intentions and strictly follow a recovery action plan. Eventually, when he started feeling really good and reaping the benefits of recovery, the action plan would slack off. Insidiously, the old behaviors would creep in with the inevitable end would be relapse. The whole cycle would start all over again.
Commitment and re-commitment is the key. It’s the same reason most diets fail. We decide we want to lose weight so we start the diet with the greatest enthusiasm, but eventually the enthusiasm wanes. This is where we are at a crossroad – go on and make this diet a “lifestyle” or take the easy way – the familiar way – and settle.
When working on ourselves, we are never “done.” Yesterday’s recovery won’t count today if we don’t continue the actions that made today’s recovery possible. You know what I mean? Every day we are presented with a choice to re-commit to a positive way of life. Each day is a crossroad.
It’s not easy to always make the right choices. That’s why surrounding ourselves with positive allies is essential. When it gets too hard, we call on our allies to cheer us on. We don’t want friends that will join us in our “pity party.” We want friends who can lovingly remind us of our inherent value and our commitment to growth. Of course, this is a two way street. The same friend who talked you off the ledge today may be talking you off the ledge tomorrow. We can have bad days, just as long are we are always moving in the right direction.
Thankfully, we who are seeking happiness and a positive way of life have many resources from which to draw inspiration. We don’t have to “make it up” or come up with a whole new plan on our own. Many people have died miserable that way – too proud to take direction or ask for help. Here’s where we practice humility. We know that Albert Einstein did not come up with the Theory of Relativity in a vacuum – he drew on all the scientific discoveries and knowledge that came before him. Similarly, we can draw on all the knowledge of the spiritual seekers who came before us. You see, there are spiritual laws of the universe just like there are laws of physics. Water will always freeze at 32 degrees and happiness is a choice we make every day.
Here’s some tips from Anne Naylor writing for the Huffington Post:
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Research on spirituality indicates that people who are religious are happier than non-religious people, but what if you are a struggling with religion?
Let me share some of my experiences with you.
I am gay and was raised a Catholic. My mother, before she was my mother, had been a nun. I found this out only after my grandmother had died and I was looking through a box of old photographs that she had kept under her bed. I came across a picture of my mother in a nun outfit and immediately thought “Halloween” and kept shuffling through the pictures. Then I came to another series of photos and noticed that in some there were leaves on the ground, others snow and still others were taken in what seemed like the bright sunshine of Summer and there was my mother, still in that damn Halloween outfit! My eyes bugged out as I put 2 + 2 together. I held up a picture in front of my sister’s face and said, “What is this?”
This was a tough week for me. It seems like the life I am trying to build isn’t happening fast enough and I started to get discouraged. I’m sorry to say that I can’t tell you a great tale of victory of how I “turned it around,” had a great spiritual awakening and went on to have the most fabulous, amazing time of my life. I actually had some moments this week where I just wanted to get drunk and forget my troubles while lamenting, “poor me… poor me… pour me a drink!”
Shakespeare said, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Sometimes, nothing changes but the way I look at it.
Thoughts are like a raging river. I can stand on the side of the river and watch them go by or I can fall in the river and get swept away. When I fall in the river and get swept away, it sometimes takes friends to pull me out.
What does it say about a culture whose media reports round the clock coverage of an entertainer who grew before our eyes from an adorable, talented child into a tragic caricature of a tortured artist? For one thing, it says that culture needs a serious wake-up call about what it values as successful.
We are alive during a time in society that is the spiritual equivalent of the TV show “Supermarket Sweep.” This was the old game show where contestants would have a limited time to run through a store stuffing purchases into their shopping carts, while menaced by monsters that stalked the isles. The winner would be the contestant whose items would add up to the higher monetary value. This premise may make for a fun 30-minute contest, but it isn’t a great model for a successful life.
While parents may tell their children that “happiness comes from within” or “it’s the thought that counts” when it comes to gift giving, the messages from our culture are mixed.
We all like creature comforts, but there is a big difference between the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness cannot be found in the ability to string together a never-ending list of pleasurable moments – it truly has to come from within.
The life and death of Michael Jackson speaks to this. Here was a talented man who was rich enough to indulge all his whims and surround himself with innumerable objects of distraction, however bizarre or obscure. Yet, all one has to do is look at his self-inflicted disfigured face to know that he was a man who self-esteem was seriously damaged.
His penchant for plastic surgery speaks volumes about the pain he undoubtedly felt being in his own skin. Of course, his money did buy him many willing accomplices to go along with a distorted plan that left his face looking like a puppet that was caught in a house fire.
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When I turned 30 about 10 years ago, a friend who was already 40 said to me, “30 is a great age! Life begins at 30!”
I was very encouraged to hear this because, frankly, I had been waiting for my life to begin. My birthday came and went and I waited… then it was the Spring… and then it was the Summer and then it was my birthday again and I was still waiting… well… you get the point.
Waiting for life to begin is like waiting for “Waiting for Godot,” the Samuel Beckett, “tragicomedy” in which two characters wait for someone named Godot, who never arrives. In the play, during their two days of waiting, the pair of men divert themselves with various distractions such as eating, sleeping, arguing, singing, playing games, exercising, exchanging hats and contemplating suicide — anything “to hold the terrible silence at bay,” they say.
Voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century in a British Royal National Theater poll of 800 playwrights, actors, directors and journalists, “Waiting For Godot” won such prestigious accolades because it spoke to a spiritual conundrum that many people face and pointed out the human tendency to occupy ourselves with distractions in order to avoid the real work that needs to be done when we take full responsibility for our lives.
