Letting go. Or not.


Stop. Stop now.

There is an illusion in recovery that wellness comes from an accumulation of "recovery actions", like wealth might come from an accumulation of things. A man who merely takes recovery actions is no more well, necessarily, than a monkey with a bank account is rich.

"You have not only been fully created, but have also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in you."

All recovery acts are like an actor's words cast into an empty auditorium, or a gourmet banquet set for a colony of ants, unless their purpose is revealed.

In themselves, they are useless. If they remove the illusion of sickness, they release power, like a split atom. They transfigure.

If, however, they are undertaken out of a sense of duty and labour, to escape or mask a sickness that is not there, to win points or acclaim, to be a good boy or girl, to allay guilt, to fill time as though it is empty, they will become a frantically active addiction in themselves, the worst, in fact, because there is then no pleasure in them and no apparent solution when they are supposed to be the solution.

Some people who slip work the Steps over and over, to no avail. If they did not work the first time, another hack at them will not work, if the reason for their failure is not uncovered.

There is only one reason for failure: the futile clinging to a set of beliefs about the world that condemn one to the perpetual climbing of a mountain whose summit becomes the foothills of the next mountain. When recovery is another mountain, there is no recovery.

So, what is the solution?

Let go.

I can't tell you how to let go. I can only tell you that that is the only action (or actually the reverse of an action: becoming the acted upon rather than the actor) that will release you.

Then, every recovery act becomes a joyful expression of that release.

Tense? Frustrated? Panicked that whatever you do will never be enough? If so, then it won't be, because letting go is not about doing.

So, let go. How? Perhaps, by realising you cannot.

Until then, keep up the good work.