This blog is a response to the excellent Daily Meditation on Emotional Sobriety
and the 12-Step Program offered today by Fr Richard Rohr. He refers to the 11th step.
Step 11
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our
conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of
God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
Emotional maturity needs to be learned. I am not talking
about having a bit of restraint, I am talking about quieting that inner critic,
letting go of the niggling fear and anxiety about stuff, changing the
perception from a glass half empty to a glass half full, moving beyond the need
to control everything and everyone in your life, reducing your reactivity to
cultivated responsiveness. Do you know that psychologists use meditation in
therapy? Some use spiritual direction also as a nonjudgmental method of
reflecting you to yourself. Here is why.
Religion is all about re-ligare, “binding back” to your
highest (best) self we call “God.” Religion uses ritual and liturgy and
practice of prayer to encourage you to be aware of the Spirit of Love that
integrates the Mind- body on the very levels (see programs for happiness) that
Fr Rohr describes below. Before there was psychology, there was religious practice.
But the goals are the same: a healthy, balanced, integrated mind body; a subtly
aware, emotionally mature individual, who is balanced and fair to herself and
to others. This is Union
with God. This is the Kingdom
of God
The 11th step on the 12 step program is
important for all of us! We are all “addicted” to our entitlement to be
negative and judgmental, to our pain and anxiety, to our “suffering” as Buddha
would say. We are blindly addicted to our immature emotionality. And it takes a
long gentle process of waking up and being with our self to heal. We would
often rather suffer, leaving things as they are (certain and predictable), than
change! That’s addiction.
The way we feel and act follows the evolution of the human
brain. So here is Rohr’s explanation from a scientific/evolutionary
perspective, simplified: Our reactions result from our primitive needs for: 1.
survival/safety (oldest part of the brain – reptilian) 2. power and control
(next oldest part of brain – limbic-frontal cortex) 3. esteem/ affection
(Frontal cortex – limbic). Check out the graphic of Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs. This developmental process not only takes place across humanity, but it
is the way we each develop as individuals. The body responds with sympathetic
flight/fright first (vagal tone), then the emotions follow reactively, and
finally, our mind becomes aware of the situation and either reacts or holds.
The rational mind is the last to kick in! This is why we need to cultivate a
delay and a more subtle awareness between the mind and body. The body
physiology “remembers” responses we needed when we were more primitive and the
mind – capable of objectivity – must mature into a capable, skillful master of
compassion. That is emotional maturity. Not denying or repressing your
emotions, but learning to be gentle with them so that you can also be gentle
toward others’.
Meditative prayer is the time-tested way to hold space –
indeed, it anatomically and physiologically changes the brain wiring and
neurotransmitting to downplay emotional and egoic reactivity and stimulate
skillful rationale. The answer has been right in front of us all this time. We
must learn to BE with ourselves. We must learn to be Mary and not so much
Martha. We must learn to Be Still and Know that we are. What are we? Made in
the image of God, vessels of the Kingdom, Love incarnate. We can only know who
we are if we are quiet enough to listen to our selves.
For the excellent blog that spurred my thoughts read Fr Richard Rohr's November 19, 2015 Daily Meditation Emotional Sobriety by Fr Richard Rohr
I leave you with the message in this meme - I cannot state it any better than that!! Love and peace to all of you!!
_/\_Peggy @ Ecumenicus
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