Getting Back to the Basics That Saved My Life and Can Change Yours

I am reading a  life-altering book in terms of spiritual growth.  I haven't been this excited since I discovered Marianne Williamson.  Now I've read Julia Cameron before, particularly, "The Artist's Way," and some of her other books on creativity.  I always gain a lot from her sharing her experience, hope and strength of her recovery.  But I recently read an interview with her in a writing magazine, and I learned she had written a book called "Faith and Will: Weathering the Storms in Our Spiritual Lives," which you can get in hardcover from Amazon (here) new copy for $2.56 and used for $1.70.  It speaks about what happens when you are left wondering where your higher power has gone to.  You're just not feeling that old connection.  You'd like to do His will, but He's not letting you know what it is as far as you know.

          There are clues as to why this might be other than the old standard, "Who moved?" when God is
          missing.  She writes, "Most of us are too hurried to know God.  And yet we act as if God is too
          hurried to know us."  She's right of course.  It's not God, our Higher Power, or the Creator who
          is afraid of missing Pilates at the health club at 2:00 so you can get in the step workout at 3:00.
         "It is we who have abandoned God."  She adds, "It is easy to be addicted to anxiety.  It is easy
         to make worry our home vibration."  "Just for today, I am going to reach out toward God.  Just for
         today, I am going to act as if I am a believer."

         
         Just as love, I know,  is a decision, Cameron writes here that faith is a decision.

       
        Just remember that we are right where we are supposed to be in the here and now.  God, the world,
        your significant other, aren't going to finally love you in a few years when you are a perfect human
        being.  They love you as you are, right now, this minute, and never forget it.


        
        I need people--writers and teachers--like Julia Cameron to bring me back and help me remember
        what's important. Like only worrying about taking the next right step.  That's all I have to worry about.
        After that I don't know what happens.  I'll know when I get there. 


   
        Cameron suggests we reunite with our H.P. by praying something like this, "Dear God, I want to be
         united with you.  Here's where I am at right now:  (List what you're doing that doesn't feel good.  You
         won't shock God.  He's heard it all.  List your failings you need to have removed.  Ask for help to
         forgive yourself and others and to be forgiven.  Ask for guidance and follow it.


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I have been caught up in arts and crafts suddenly.  I decoupaged a flowerpot, and now want to decoupage either fish or stars on my coffee table.  I am art journaling up a storm and releasing so much it's like writing my memoirs.  I am even scrapbooking.  I've been reading about why you should do scrapmoir as a form of memoir and I'm sold.  Listen to this insightful quote I didn't just come across at the same time: 








                                 "No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly
                                  where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present
                                  place." --Maya Angelou

I am learning so much about my healed and still healing places.  I am putting together a newer, stronger, more flexible version of me and I feel open, free and joyful while I shape the pieces and figure out where each goes. Last night I did a lot of scrapbook pages on some people who have made a difference on the journey of my life.  It was good to stop and recall and write a few words.  I still love many of them.  I even made a tiny beaded necklace to wear among a certain group of groovy peace, love and good drugs old pals. It's amazing the creativity that comes out once you get going. 

I'm cheating on my scrapmoirs and I'm glad.  I started it some time ago and then let it collect dust because I lost interest in it.  No wonder I lost interest.  It was a very boring project that went from my birth to preschool, grade school, and quit just when things were going to get good as a teenager.  But then I had to think about my first husband, getting married at 18, being so poor, a miscarriage--just so many sad things I didn't feel like jazzing on.  Instead I did a page on a few of my lifetime jobs and then went into adult friends, which is where I still am.  It won't be a normal scrapbook or scrapmoir.  I have the feeling I'd be utterly bored if I were to take a class in it--same for art journaling.  It conflicts with one of my new favorite quotes that I hung up on my desk over my monitor: 

              "Don't play what's there.  Play what's not there."  Solid advice from Mr. Miles Davis, who knew.

So go do the next right thing.  I hope for the benefit of your inner child it's something creative.  I just bought some fingerpaints, and they felt good.  I felt five again.

 
     

    

GOD, IF THIS IS YOUR WILL FOR ME, CAN I GET BACK TO YOU ON IT?

 

I used this question as a journaling exercise.  (I know it sounds like all I do is journal, but, hey, I save a fortune on therapists.)  The journal question was, "What conditions are you still tyring to set on your willingness to be led?"

I decided to take a look at how well I practice two of the steps of my 12-step recovery program;  namely, the third and the eleventh.   The third step is:

"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."  (Any power greater than yourself will do.  Some say it's their "H.P.)

The eleventh step is:

"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."

Regardless of what you're recovering from, if it's a twelve-step program, you will find those two steps.

I ask God in prayer and, when I can sit still long enough, in meditation,  what His or Her will is,  and for the power to carry that out every single day.  Then I immediately take it back and begin my self-will run riot day of pumping adrenaline and pouring down coffee and Diet Coke so I can accomplish more than three of the things on my daily to-do lists, which usually have about 25 items on them.

So this journaling question intrigued me.  Did I put conditions on doing God's will for me?

Yes, I do.  Here are a few that immediately came to mind:

1.  Whatever, God, but leave me some space, my solitude and plenty of time to write.

2.  Let me keep my freedom.  All of it.

3.  Don't make me do things I don't want to do.

4. Don't ask me to discipline myself or do things that are too hard for me.  I don't even like the word "discipline." 

5.  Don't require that I do things now instead of later.  God knows by now about what a terrible procrastinator I am.  Surely God doesn't expect me to break out of that nasty addiction anytime soon. 

6.  Don't forbid me from my noodling on the Internet time, my other time-wasters and my just plain lazy time.  Sometimes you have to sit back and chill.

7.  Don't care if I forget to ask what your will is or ignore it even when I am  pretty sure what it is.

8. Let me do things in my own way.  I want always to be in control.  (This method seems to make big messes and things have a way of never working out, but I don't learn.)

9.  I want to choose the people who come into my life, the synchronicities/coincidences God uses to send me messages, and the miracles that I want the most.

 10.  Don't require me to give up my dreams of one day writing a bestselling novel to do service for others as my life's work.  I can do both. Let me have both.

11.  Make things easier.  Let more doors open and more invisible hands reach out and help if something is your will.

12.  I need more magic and miracles to help me get on the right path and stay on it.  I need signs and wonders.  I need some surprise checks coming in the mail occasionally.

13.  Show me the way, inspire me, help me create.  I need you God.  I depend on you, really.

14.  Replace my doubts about whether I am doing your will with certainty.

15.  Send me reminders throughout the day to pay attention to what your will is and act on it.

16.  Send me some money, real abundance to make the way easier, especially if you want me to do things that cost me money like setting up the support group has.

17.  Never make me leave my comfort zone--not even for you.

18.  Don't let me lose my health or die before I fulfill my goals, your plan,and  my life's purpose and soul's mission.

19.  Don't keep making me go to more recovery support meetings and work the steps.  I get bored.  I've heard it all before.

20.  Don't make it your will that I quit smoking, eat healthy foods or exercise. It's just not in me.

I tell you I read these conditions I put on doing God's will and I was shocked.  I once wrote an essay about how God and I were sharing a bicycle built for two.  He steered, and my job was just to peddle.   He kept turning his head and yelling, "Just peddle."  And I realized that the best things, situations, jobs, people and opportunities came when I let go and let God and I just peddled and reported for duty. 

Now I had to face the facts.  I didn't necessarily want to give up control, be humble, be led at all, give up a successful career I fantasize about and the wealth that would go with it.  I do not want to do a lot of things God's way and not my way.

My conditions, and I know I could have written many more, made me sound like an insolent, stubborn child who didn't want to do her chores or listen to her parents' rules.  Was I really a brat?

And I wonder why my spiritual growth, life's purpose fulfillment, career success and personal self-improvement goals are so slow in coming.  God doesn't fight me for control.   God gives me free will to create crises and disasters with my grandiose ego and need to control.   That's my choice.  I have choices every day.  And a lot of the time I chose being in control even when I know the outcome will be one giant negative fall on my face as usual.


Do I really want to serve? 

Actually, I really do want to help others who are still suffering with the same diseases and conditions that I have blindly crawled and stumbled over to reach recovery.  I want to make their way easier for them than finding my own way of overcoming was for me.  Because it's all too damn hard when you don't know, or aren't sure, or can't admit what's wrong with you and all you can do, so it appears, is watch the remnants of your former life go down the toilet.  Goodbye spouse, kids, job, career, reputation, health... the whole  package down the drain while you try to figure out what hurricane just blew through your life.

You want to hear a corker?  After I wrote all this out in my journal I looked at the clock.  It was 7:15 p.m.  I thought to myself, "Well I'll never make that meeting now.  I think it starts at 7:30 p.m."  And I know I have been prompted to get out of myself and go to more recovery meetings.  But I didn't feel like it. It was cold out.  I wasn't even dressed yet.I had plenty of no-good excuses.

Something or God made me go look for the meeting listing in a directory.  It started at 8:00 p.m.  I started to get ready and thought about what a bad person I must be to immediately go against God's will for me after looking at the conditions I put on doing it.  I can feed on self-loathing and shame for days. 

I was glad I went.  I may have made a new friend.  In any event, I have a fellow recovering person to call so we can support and encourage each other.  It's always a good feeling when I do God's will because things go smoothly and work out perfectly.

When will I learn to just peddle?

My ex-husband, also recovering, couldn't take my controlling nature too much of the time.  He would play on the saying "Let go and let God" and say, "Maryellen, if you can't let go, just let."  And sometimes when I was being nutsy, he would turn to me and say a single word, "Let." 

I should hang that word over my desk.