Monday, February 13, 2012

Spiritual Awakening #6

Early in my recovery I read a lot of books trying to find a way to connect with a Higher Power.  One of them was "Love is Letting Go of Fear."  There was a story in the book about a guy on the subway who was very, very disturbed by some children who were more or less running amok.  He got angrier and angrier because their father was sitting right there doing nothing about the situation.  Finally he got so mad that he confronted the father.  The father apologized and got the children to sit down.  He said that he guessed the kids were just letting off steam because they had just come from the hospital where their mother had died and he, himself, was just not quite present since he was in deep grief.

Of course, the moral of the story is that I don't know whether my harsh judgments of other people are true or not.  There may be a good reason for what I've judged as their bad behavior.  In fact, instead of assuming that they are bad people, lazy, uncaring or just have bad motives, it might work better if I assumed the best instead of the worst.

This has helped me immensely in that I no longer wear myself out so much with judgments of other people or myself.  If I assume good reasons, I can just adjust to what is, instead of using my time and energy blaming and complaining and keeping myself in emotional turmoil.

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