Intimacy. Identity. Life is Sacred Relationship - Love Yourself In Order to Love Others

Lee Kerttu

More thoughts on the Daily Meditation from Fr Rohr today, on the 12-Step program. 

Father Rohr's meditation refers to this 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.

Having had experience with addiction, I can say with all certainty: addiction is always related to an unmet need for love - not from others, from yourself. Remember, when we say "love" we refer in a deep, emotional way, to RELATIONSHIP. 

Addicts, whether blatant substance abuse, sex, gambling, etc., or more subtle, critical, negative, judgmental, distracted, anxious, or otherwise at the mercy of the ego and emotions, all fall seriously into the first category of "Why we suffer" per Buddhist reasoning:

We do not know who we are.

We cannot give our self what we need if we do not know who we are. BEING balanced and peaceful within, being in "union with God," is primary to DOING balanced and peaceful or unitive. I cannot stress how subtle and continuous this work is!

Rohr makes 2 statements in his meditation today that I find ultimately important:

"...addiction emerges out of a lack of inner experience of intimacy with oneself, with God, with life, and with the moment."

"If something is really working for you, then less and less will be required to satisfy you."

Knowing who you are is more than taking a moral inventory. Its making the realization that YOU ARE/HAVE ALL YOU THINK YOU NEED and living into that truth. 

You may like the notion that you are partnered with a Higher Power in this case. It certainly helps to believe so. In fact, it is this relationship that is the foundation for all others. This trust, this confidence, this forgiveness, this compassion - self love lays the groundwork for all our outward expressions of love. So, as Mother Teresa's beautiful prayer says, "In the end, its between you and God." Its always only between you and God. The real, true, authentic you (not the one you are hiding or denying) and God. If you get that part right, everything else seems to fall into place, just as Rohr implies in the second quote above.

Matthew 22:36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

The first statement in Matthew's quote is about loving yourself or, in others words, loving yourself through a deep, continuously cultivated spiritual relationship with your higher power, whatever name that goes by.

Here is Fr Rohr's second meditation on the 12 Step Program and Intimacy: Experiencing Intimacy

May you realize now that you are a perfect child of the Sacred Universe. "no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here." (Desiderata) May you know yourself as LOVE, the most sacred relationship of life - whole and wisely balanced within, giving expression to whole and wisely balanced without. This is the example of Jesus the Christ, the enlightened one. This is the example of Buddha, the awakened one...and all the wise ones who impart their stories to us so that we may grow into possibility and potential. So that we may "Go placidly amid the noise and haste..." (Desiderata)

Anna Valle

_/\_Peggy @ Ecumenicus