We look with uncertainty beyond the old choices for clear-cut answers to a softer, more permeable aliveness which is every moment at the brink of death; for something new is being born in us if we but let it. We stand at a new doorway, awaiting that which comes… daring to be human creatures, vulnerable to the beauty of existence. Learning to love.
It has now been decades since I first heard of Angeles Arrien and read The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer, and Visionary. This was a life changing experience for me as I worked to integrate these teachings into my life. On several occasions, I have also been moved to share these "Four Rules For Life": Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don't be attached to the results.I believe that this wisdom is deeply needed in these times. May we all inspire and support one another in bringing our healing medicine to the world. ― Molly
Photo by Molly
No one is immune to the pull of the natural cycles
of the universe: no one is immune to love.
In many indigenous cultures, you can find some variation on the following rules, which are intended to make living a life very simple. The first rule is, Show up. Choose to be present to life. Choosing to be present is the skill of the warrior archetype, an old fashioned term for leadership abilities. The warrior in us chooses to be present to life.
Once we show up, we can go on with rule number two, which is, Pay attention to what has heart and meaning. This rule is associated with the archetype of the healer, the one who recognizes that love is the greatest healing power in the world. When we pay attention to what has heart and meaning, we are opening the arms of love.
When we show up and pay attention to what has heart and meaning, then we can follow the third rule: Tell the truth without blame or judgment. This is the path of the visionary, the one who can give voice to what is so. Telling the truth without blame or judgment is not necessarily being "polite," but the truth teller does consider timing and context as well as delivery. Truth telling collapses our patterns of denial and indulgence, keeps us authentic.
When we are able to tell the truth, we can go to the fourth rule: Be open to outcome, but not attached to it. This is associated with the archetype of the teacher, who trusts in the unexpected and is able to be detached. Often, in the West, we define "detachment" as "not caring," but detachment is really the capacity to care deeply but objectively. If you've taken the other three steps, then the fourth rule should come naturally, if not always easily: if you have shown up, paid attention to what has heart and meaning, and told the truth without blame or judgment, then it should follow naturally that you can be open, but not attached, to outcome.
None of this is necessarily easy to do. But one of the great joys of soul work is that whether or not we are able to be fully present to life, like keeps calling to us. No one is immune to the pull of the natural cycles of the universe: no one is immune to love. And because it requires just as much energy, if not more, to stay out of life as it does to be fully engaged in it, why not be engaged? Octavio Paz, a Latin American poet and Nobel Prize winner, realized that when he was in his forties just how much of himself he had spent staying away from the deep currents of his life. He wrote this prose poem describing that experience and describing, too, the persistence of the world in spite of it all:
XII After After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging myself and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stories of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.
No matter how we try, soul calls out to us. We may have become so injured in our instincts, so wounded in our souls, that our demons threaten to overwhelm us, that we cannot quite hear the call of spring. But spring calls to us anyway. The center of our soul work is ensuring that the good, true, and beautiful in our nature is at least as strong as the demons and the monsters: put another way, it is ensuring that my self worth is at least as strong as my self critic. That issue is central to all of the indigenous peoples I have studied. If I am living in a way that feeds the good, true, and beautiful in my nature - as opposed to feeding the self critic - then I can heal myself. If I can stay in touch with my own deep source, my soul. And I can also be a healing agent in my family, my community, my nation, and the world.
I said before that the basis of soul work is really to eliminate everything that gets in the way of my being myself and to feed that which encourages me to be myself. I want to suggest a simple exercise - two simple questions - to help you track that. Each morning, before you step out into the world, ask yourself, "Is my self worth as strong as my self-critic?" Be sure that you can say yes before you go out the door. Then, using your name, say, "Jim, are you Jim?" or "Sally, are you Sally?" and be sure that you can say yes to that, too, before you go out into the world.
All of us carry, within ourselves, an original healing medicine that is not duplicated anywhere else on earth. If we say yes to those two questions every day, then we can bring our medicine fully into the world. We can, as the woman at the bus stop did, move out of reactivity into creativity. When we live soulfully, each of us can be a shape shifter: each of us can be fully engaged , moment to moment, in the great gift called life.
―Angeles Arrien
Excerpted from a chapter in Nourishing the Soul:
Discovering the Sacred In Everyday Life
- with writings from several teachers, healers, and visionaries.
This can also be found in Angeles Arrien's book The Four Fold Way:
Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer, and Visionary
So excellent!! Horrifying and 100% spot on! Worth sharing again. And again and again. Thank you, as always!, Rebecca Solnit. And thank you, too, Mo Husseini. Deepest bow. 🙏🙏 Molly
Rebecca Solnit, in the Guardian today, writing (as always) the piece that the moment requires. Read it.
She is doing the thing that almost nobody in mainstream media is willing to do right now, which is to stand back far enough to see the full shape of the destruction and then describe it clearly, without flinching, without hedging, without the false balance that has become the coward’s substitute for journalism.
This is what it looks like when a writer decides the truth is more important than maintaining their access to monsters.
Read it.
‘Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment
The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.
Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers.
It is striking that the Trump team’s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people, which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop Doge, destroyed USAID last year, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe, Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine. Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before she was fired.
Although there are far worse things about the utterly gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that huge cuts are being made to environmental protection and national parks, and the forest service is being effectively sabotaged, while public lands are being offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests. The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country, which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump’s first term. More than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.
Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country ... We’re fighting wars ... It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids. Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world in scientific research, including medical research, which had led to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health, but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is murder.
The old aphorism about how long it takes an aircraft carrier to turn around might be why the nation seems relatively stable, and why reactions have been inadequate; the full impact is yet to come. At some point if the ship doesn’t turn around, maybe it will start taking on water or listing badly or hit an iceberg, or perhaps the iceberg has been there all along and is named Donald Trump. He has started a war for no particular reason – the word fun was deployed – that is further undermining the global economy he already badly damaged with his ever-fluctuating tariffs. Enterprises need to be able to plan, and tariffs that triple and melt away and pop up again like his moods undermine the ability to do so. In much the same way, threats that aren’t carried out, talks that never took place, administration actions that the courts reverse become forms of political whiplash, jerking everyone and everything around, a show of force that is also a show of incoherence and inconsistency.
But the offensiveness may be a distraction from the destructiveness. A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit them into the context of competent leadership and coherent and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda, it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one. The newly popular slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” is useful here, because what this system does is weaken, damage, corrupt and harm. The idea that there’s a coherent agenda driven by Vladimir Putin works in the sense that most of what Trump has done is good for the ageing Russian dictator while also bad for the US.
It’s also evident that Trump wanted to come back into office in part to revenge himself on a country that in 2020 had rejected him, the way an ex-partner sometimes becomes a murderous stalker of the woman who dared to escape him, and specifically revenge himself on the individuals and institutions that had prosecuted him for crimes or otherwise thwarted him. Trump at some level knows he’s failing politically, cognitively and physically and wants to take it all down with him, the way that ancient rulers were buried with their slaughtered horses and servants. He’s also, as mortality breathes down his neck, trying to grab some immortality by sticking his name on buildings and park passes and currency.
But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.
It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change
It has now been over four decades since I took my last drink, first attended AA, and identified myself as an alcoholic. In addition, I also participated in Al-Anon and ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) and many other resources of support. Through these experiences over the years, and many hard earned and painful lessons, my perceptions and beliefs have changed, deepened, evolved, and expanded. Today this includes how I see the 12 Steps, which are a core part of AA, Al-Anon, and other 12 Step programs. I have come to recognize both its strengths and its limitations — what was helpful and what ultimately did not serve me.
In the early months and years of my sobriety and beginning to root into a path of healing and awakening, I was overcome with shame and fear, generations of absorbed and unhealed grief and trauma, and feelings of powerlessness and disconnect from the deeper wisdom of my heart. At that time, I rarely questioned what I was told within these meetings. Those who had been coming to meetings longer than I had were the "experts." I looked outside of myself for answers and did not trust or fathom that within my being was this greater core Self that was wise, courageous, compassionate, and loving.
To cope with deep pain and loss, beginning at age 15 I sought to numb myself with multiple substance and nonsubstance addictions. And because I was disassociated and instinct impaired, I had a limited and fragile conscious connection with the sacred essence, beauty, strengths, and wisdom within myself and all of life. I was lost in my delusions and pain and trauma.
Even though I worked so hard at image management, the truth is that I felt apart from rather than a part of. And I did not want anyone to see — including myself — what lay inside the deepest recesses of my being. It is very sad for me in this moment as I reflect on how incredibly flawed as a human being that I believed myself to be. I had unknowingly tried so hard for all of those years of my young life to numb and distance myself from the crippling pain of shame, of unattended generational grief and loss, and of the internalized unworthiness and unlovability that my delusions told me were true.
So of course I smoked and drank and cultivated a false sense of self because if anyone ever knew how damaged, unlovable, and full of "defects of character" that I was, surely I would be abandoned. Again and again. And I would be so starved for love that I would end up like my twin brother who gave up and took his own life in 1978. That was the unknown narrative that I buried deep inside and lived by. It just takes a lot to keep all that down...
For many years into sobriety, I continued to live with a defended heart. I continued to be lost in nonsubstance addictions. And I continued to experience only a limited connection with the wholeness of who I most truly am. I did not know that within myself was this core Self that could not be damaged or wounded. For years into my sobriety, I remained lost to much of the beauty of my true nature.
Instead, my beliefs in a deeply flawed and limited self were reinforced by my internalized shame and unworthiness. Much of my deepest trauma lay untouched within myself. Although I couldn't see this at the time, today I recognize that some of the language within the 12 Steps also served to reinforce my delusions and the pain of separation from myself, others, and the sacred within us all. The language of "shortcomings", "defects of character", powerlessness, and that only God — also referred to as "He/Him" — could "restore us to sanity" was not helpful, healing, or empowering. At least this has been my experience.
For many years, I did not recognize that within the 12 Steps were aspects that embodied both light and shadow. As I reflect upon this today I recognize that, of course, how could this be any different? The 12 Steps were originated by white men in the 1930s. So naturally there was patriarchy embedded in the framing of these Steps — something which was coupled with powerlessness, a belief in a deeply flawed inner self, and that we can only be saved by an all powerful male god outside of ourselves. Some may be offended by these words. And some will recognize these truths which shine light on the limitations and shadow side of the 12 Steps.
It is also my belief that it is vital to clearly welcome all religious and spiritual beliefs or none at all. But that is not the message that I heard in the original 12 Steps.
Most important of all in any spiritual path which professes to help us heal is that it is grounded in love and compassion. Those of us who are trying to let go and free ourselves of our addictions need to be held with love. Full stop. Love is always the most powerful medicine and antidote to blame and shame, judgment and fierce inner critics, grief and loss, confusion and delusion, and all the ways that we are drowning in pain and trauma.
* * * * *
We Are Not Alone
All this said, there were also countless gifts which blessed and empowered me. Early on, when I was experiencing so much shame from the identity I then wore as an "alcoholic," this shame began to dissipate when I first encountered resources, narratives, and wider truths which led me to recognize that I was far from alone. When I read When Society Becomes An Addict in 1988, a new vista of growing awareness began to enter my consciousness. Oh, I am not alone! We all have addictions. Wow! My terminal uniqueness began to dissolve and I got tastes of moving beyond an identity of "alcoholic." I was recognizing that this was just one part of me — only one part! Yes, it was the part that was driving the bus. And I am so much greater than any one part of myself. As are we all.
Over the years, and as I've written in other posts, I have come to define addiction as anything in which there is a pattern of our using as a coping strategy to distract and disconnect us from these deeper painful emotions and experiences that we carry and have buried within ourselves. This includes substance addictions and a whole host of non-substance addictions — to social media, work, exercise, food, sex, shopping, religion, meditation, spiritual bypassing, compulsive cleaning, hoarding, gambling, caretaking, people, pornography, cults, gurus, greed, guns, war, unhealthy relationships, political polarizations, conspiracy theories, image management and perfectionism, anger and chaos, power and control, judgments and dehumanization, mental and emotional states that are dangerous, projections and ideologies of separation rather than connection. And the list goes on.
In essence, it is a pattern of engaging in harmful beliefs and behaviors no matter the suffering and losses — sometimes subtle and unseen and sometimes blatant and obviously devastating — to ourselves and others. There will be reasons why some will say that this doesn't apply to them, that they have no addictions and have no underlying trauma that they've experienced. Some will believe that their alcoholism and drug addiction are their one big problems. And that's it.
What many don't recognize, as was once true for me, is that so often we begin to unknowingly defend our hearts from a very young age, sometimes preverbally. And any time that we abandon our deeper needs, emotions, sense of self in order to preserve a significant attachment, a process begins in which we are abandoning ourselves. A defended heart is not an open heart. And this is what leaves us vulnerable to any kind of addiction. It is simply too painful to not be seen and held and loved in the wholeness of who we are. Only through recognizing this often very old pain and loss can be begin to free ourselves of the patterns we've taken on to protect our defended hearts. And that is when our addictions can begin to lose their hold over us. At least this has been my experience.
In so many infinite ways, we are not alone. And yet it is our sense of separation that causes us to suffer. There are reasons that addictions of all kinds, depression and anxiety, autoimmune diseases and other illnesses, isolation and rugged individualism, abuse and neglect and all forms of violence, and other symptoms of pain and trauma are epidemic in American culture and beyond. Even for those who grew up in healthier families, on a continuum it is my belief that we are all impacted by the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy that we are born into. A human being does not need to be physically or sexually abused to experience the ancestral and cultural trauma which permeates our society and our shared world. We live in a hurting world. And a beautiful world.
We humans are simply all connected. It is my experience and belief that the suffering and the joys of others — and whether we know it or not — are also ours. We are all impacted, all in this together, all one great family on spaceship Earth. And, as Thích Nhất Hạnh once wisely said, “We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.”
* * * * *
The 12 Steps as written in the Big Book
of Alcoholics Anonymous:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
* * * * *
16-Steps for Discovery and Empowerment*
1. We affirm we have the power to take charge of our lives and stop being dependent on
substances, habits, or other people for our self-esteem and security.
2. We come to believe that God/the Goddess/Universe/Great Spirit/Higher Power awakens
the healing wisdom within us when we open ourselves to that power.
3. We make a decision to become our authentic Selves and trust in the healing power of the
truth.
4. We examine our beliefs, addictions, and dependent behavior in the context of living in a
hierarchical, patriarchal culture.
5. We share with another person and the Universe all those things inside us for which we
feel shame and guilt.
6. We affirm and enjoy our strengths, talents, and creativity, striving not to hide these
qualities to protect others’ egos.
7. We become willing to let go of shame, guilt, and any behavior that keeps us from loving
ourSelves and others.
8. We make a list of people we have harmed and people who have harmed us, and take
steps to clear out negative energy by making amends and sharing our grievances in a
respectful way.
9. We express love and gratitude to others, and increasingly appreciate the wonder of life
and the blessings we do have.
10. We continue to trust our reality and daily affirm that we see what we see, we know what
we know, and we feel what we feel.
11. We promptly acknowledge our mistakes and make amends when appropriate, but we do
not say we are sorry for things we have not done and we do not cover up, analyze, or take
responsibility for the shortcomings of others.
12. We seek out situations, jobs, and people that affirm our intelligence, perceptions, and self worth and avoid situations or people who are hurtful, harmful, or demeaning to us.
13. We take steps to heal our physical bodies, organize our lives, reduce stress, and have
fun.
14. We seek to find our inward calling, and develop the will and wisdom to follow it.
15. We accept the ups and downs of life as natural events that can be used as lessons for
our growth.
16. We grow in awareness that we are interrelated with all living things, and we contribute to
restoring peace and balance on the planet.
From Many Roads, One Journey: Moving Beyond the 12-Steps by Charlotte Davis Kasl
(*I have much more deeply resonated with the 16 Steps and for many years had them framed on a wall in my home. Today I experience that I have integrated these steps in an ongoing way into how I live my life.)
* * * * *
Photo by Molly
We Are Evolving!
There are deep reasons why traditional treatment programs, therapy, 12 Step Programs, and other resources have not been able to empower many human beings to break out of cycles of addiction and trauma and to find true and lasting freedom from their suffering and peace. There is no shame or blame in this. It is simply the way it is.
And, gratefully, we humans are evolving! We are discovering more effective, trauma informed, wise and compassionate methods and modalities, and forms of soulful loving support in which we can be empowered over time to heal, unburden, and transform even the deepest pain and trauma that first drove our addictions and other ways of coping that have caused harm to ourselves and others. And this is the very good news to share!
As Charlotte Kasl wisely has said, there are many roads, one journey. May we each continue to evolve and connect with whatever resources that empower us to bring our exiled parts out of hiding so that we may heal and grow into the greater fullness of our sacred being. Our world needs the wisdom, consciousness, and fierce compassion and love rooted in our increasingly awakened, unburdened, and undefended hearts.
Metta Prayer
May all beings be filled with lovingkindness,
be free of suffering, and be happy
and at peace.
***
May you be at peace.
May your heart remain open.
May you know the beauty of your own true nature.
May you be healed.
Bless us all, no exceptions...
💜🙏💜
Molly
* * * * *
Suggested Resources
I’m a Psychologist and Addiction Is Not a Disease:
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