Breathing Under Water, Week Two: Weekly Summary
Sunday
Prayer is a symbiotic relationship with life and with God, a synergy which creates a result larger than the exchange itself. We ask not to change God, but to change ourselves.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
God fully forgives us, but the impact or “karma” of our mistakes remains, and we must still go back and repair the bonds we’ve broken.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Ask forgiveness, it will make the repair stronger: remorseful apology and reparation twined with gracious forgiveness, strands of hope woven together to make a better future than the one that the past promised us.
—Mpho Tutu van Furth
Wednesday
Watch yourself objectively, calmly, and compassionately. From this most positive and dignified position, we can let go of, and even easily admit, our wrongs.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
Prayer and meditation can lead us to real inner “knowledge of God’s will for us” and the “power to carry it out” (actual inner empowerment and new motivation from a deeper Source).
—Richard Rohr
Friday
Until people’s basic egocentricity is radically exposed and foundationally redirected, much religion becomes occupied with rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, moving alongside other isolated passengers while the whole ship sinks.
—Richard Rohr
Week Thirty Practice
Mindful Recovery
With these twelve important breathing lessons, you now know for yourself that you can breathe, and even breathe under water, because the breath of God is everywhere.
—Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water
Authors Thomas Bien and Beverly Bien approach recovery through an ongoing, mindful approach:
Be willing to practice returning to mindfulness again and again. It is gentle, self-accepting persistence that reaches the goal (if we can speak of a goal), not pushing, striving, or struggling. Be like the waves of water, which overpower the hard rock by being willing to return again and again and again. This is completely natural. All of us who are not yet full-time Buddhas have moments of forgetfulness. When you find yourself having lapsed again, perhaps for the thousandth time in a day, laugh and smile. As a recovering person, you know a lot about the power of habit energy. Don’t let it catch you in frustration and impatience.
Remember that mindfulness is “choiceless awareness”; that is, it is the willingness to be present with whatever is going on. This includes being willing to become aware of your forgetfulness and to return again to mindfulness. If you become self-critical or frustrated, you have become too goal oriented about your spiritual practice. Relax. Use humor. Smile. Tune into the fun…. Isn’t it funny that, if we struggle too hard, we get caught in the very net of suffering we want to escape?…
Make patience and self-acceptance your main practice. And one day you will realize you have changed. You will see that you have become a more mindful person. You get there, not by trying all at once to attain some perfection, but just by the simple daily things…. You get there one mindful breath at a time.
Reference:
Thomas Bien and Beverly Bien, Mindful Recovery: A Spiritual Path to Healing from Addiction (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 225.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, bubble detail (detail), 2020, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Air is released as bubbles when water hits water. Where do we find oxygen when we’re underwater?
