Spiritual Journey of a Lightworker

I chaired the meeting for my Al-Anon group last night. It has been over ten years since I chaired a meeting. I took a break from meetings and learned to live what I had learned. I only recently returned to Al-Anon meetings because a friend asked me to accompany her to them.

I couldn't decide what to do the meeting on so I called my friend and asked what she, as a new-comer to Al-Anon, needed the meeting to be about. She said, "Let Go and Let God." This is one of the many slogans that we learn and use in Al-Anon.

I started the meeting with the following reading from Hope for Today, AL-ANON FAMILY GROUPS, 2002, page 320:

"When I heard 'Let Go and Let God' for the first time, it didn't make sense to me. Let go of what? And let God do what? The little I did understand was the futility of my efforts to try to control other people, places, and things. Al-Anon told me I could turn my attention to monitoring myself and my reactions.

I let go of other people and I began to feel some relief. I let go of what others said or didn't say, and what they did or didn't do. I let go of my expectations. I no longer felt a need to be a people-pleaser. As I let go, I found I lived more harmoniously with myself and with others. I began to take more responsibility for myself. I figured if I could accept myself, I could accept other people too.

I let go of outcomes. It was okay if things didn't go the way I envisioned. Sometimes the results were better than I anticipated. It was no longer important that others read from the script that my expectations had written.

As I let go, I learned I could let God. 'Letting God' doesn't mean I abdicate my responsibilities. In fact, I become more accountable for myself. 'Letting God' indicates that I accept my imperfections and grow toward the person I dream I can be. 'Letting go and letting God' means I can enjoy being responsible for what is rightfully mine and leave the rest to God.

Thought for the Day
'Let go' comes before 'let God' for a reason. I can't expect God to do anything if I am still holding onto my problem.
'When we put this slogan to work, we get out of the way.'
How Al-Anon Works for Families & Friends of Alcoholics, p. 76"

I could not have found a better reading to explain this slogan, "Let Go and Let God". The above reading says it all.

"Let Go and Let God" is not about enabling yourself to continue in the victim mode. When I first heard the word surrender, which is used a lot with Let Go and Let God, I thought to myself, "I will not be a doormat like my mother was to my father. I will not let someone else tell me what to say, do and think like my dad did when I was a child." I was in open rebellion to this idea until I began to understand the concept as expressed in the reading above.

Growing up with incest and a father that was a dictator who controlled everything and everybody in my family, I learned from an expect on being controlling. I was in Al-Anon for a few years before I realized that I had become my dad in trying to control. Notice that I said "trying to control."

Control is an illusion. What I realized was that the more I tried to control everything, the more out of control I became. I could not have imagined the freedom that came when I Let Go and Let God and stopped trying to control my world.

You only see the person that I am today. I hope by giving you glimpses of who I was that maybe you will learn from my experiences and not have to do the same thing in your own life. I know that some of you will make the decision to face the same challenges and have the same lessons to learn from those challenges that I did. Some of you will travel down that very same road. I can't and shouldn't try to stop you from doing just that, no matter how painful I know it will be for you. This is especially hard to do if it is my child that I see traveling down this road.

Well, today, I can Let Go and Let God and Let You. I couldn't always do that. I wanted to fix you and your problems so that I wouldn't have to look at my own. Today, I know it isn't my responsibility to fix anyone else. I am doing an injustice to you if I try. Today, I can say, "Have a glorious day, unless you choose to do otherwise." and mean it. What you do with your life is your choice. Today, I choose to Let Go and Let God. How about you?

In the book With Love Man Is God written by Dr. Samuel H. Sandweiss, Dr. Sandweiss says, ". . . Swami waits until the last minute to test patience, faith, and surrender."
I found this to be true for myself with my sinus infection last October in India.

When you are a visitor at the ashram, many people are hopeful of getting a personal interview with Sai Baba. Baba says to desire an "inner" view instead of an interview. He says an inner view is much more important.

For me, the inner views always come as a voice that I hear in my head. I have learned to listen for that voice. I guess you could say that mine are inner talks instead of inner views. I rarely see anything.

As it got closer to time for us to leave India, I started to get concerned because my ears were still stopped up with fluid behind the drums. I have a friend whose ear drums burst from flying to Connecticut for Christmas a few years ago because she had fluid behind her ear drums. She wasn't allowed to fly home at the end of her visit. She had to rent a car and drive home to Arkansas.

I didn't have that option. You can't drive from India to Arkansas. A voice told me that when it was time to fly home, I would be fine. I had to trust that voice instead of listen to my own voice of fear and doubt. I had to fly home.

We left the ashram on the morning of October 14 for our three hour drive back to Bangalore where we would fly out about 2:00 a.m. on the morning of October 15. On the trip to Bangalore, I was feeling better until my friend Sherryl bought some Indian potato chips. She shared them with me and our two drivers. I took one bite, the pepper hit the back of my throat and I swear I coughed non-stop for at least five minutes or more. It seemed like forever. I frightened our two drivers because I couldn't stop. I was concerned because I didn't want to cough during our 22 hour + flight home.

When we got to Bangalore, we checked into our hotel and had a late lunch. Sherryl did Reiki on my head and lungs when I got a migraine and started coughing again. We took showers and slept the afternoon away. I still had fluid behind my ear drums.

We set our clock for 7:00 p.m., got dressed and ordered in a late dinner. We watched a little India TV which is a treat in itself. We were at the airport shortly before 11:00 p.m. to give us plenty of time to get through airport security and immigration with our passports. Our only hassle was when a bus boy wanted much too much money for helping with our luggage. Baba gave me a lesson in being firm about the cost. I was proud of myself that I didn't get taken advantage of.

At 2:00 a.m., we were seated on the plane waiting for takeoff which was late. In India, everybody runs on a different time than in the USA. You get used to it quickly. My ears were stopped up and I knew I still had fluid behind my ear drums. I couldn't hear everything that the airline personel said over the intercom because of it. I didn't get stressed about it. I learned a long time ago that worry does no good. Worry just adds more stress to an already stressful situation so why worry.

I believed what the voice told me. As the plane finally started to take off, a voice told me to Reiki my ears on takeoffs and landings and I would be fine. I know I looked strange to several fellow passengers.

Sherryl later told me that the young girl that was sitting across the isle and slightly ahead of us obviously thought I looked strange. She would stare. I didn't care. I was busy doing what I had been told to do. I Reikied my ears. I still had fluid behind my ear drums and I didn't have the first pain the entire trip. My ears did pop a lot but I had no pain at all.

As I was told the week before the flight home, I was fine and able to fly home. My ear drums did not burst. I did not cough once during the flight home. I did cough for two days after I got home before the cough went away on its own.

So, you could say that I agree with Dr. Sandweiss's statement that Swami does try our patience, faith, and our ability to surrender with challenges that are presented to us by Life and other people. I knew when I read those words that it was time to write about this experience of mine.

I recently read an article called How To Eliminate Worry written by Andrea Hess and found at http://www.empoweredsoul.com/blog/?p=169 .


I left a comment:
"Many years ago, a friend told me about her God Box. You make or use any box of your choice. You can decorate it all pretty or leave it plain. Mine was actually a metal can that I had and liked. What do you do with the box? When you have something that worries you, write it on a piece of paper. Fold the paper and put it in your God Box. Then you let go and ask God to handle it. At the end of the year, you get your God Box and read all of the pieces of paper that are in the Box. You will be surprised at how many are no longer problems simply because you let go of them and let God handle the problem."


Andrea's comment back to me:
"Patricia - I love that image of a 'God Box.' What I always am concerned about, though, is that fine line between appropriate surrender, and abdicating our responsibility as Creator of our experience. Any thoughts?"


My comment, in answer to Andrea's question:
"Andrea, I do believe in taking the appropriate action on my part before putting my problem in the God Box. I believe in taking responsibility for being a Co-Creator (with God) of my reality. Putting something in my God Box is so that I give God the space to do his part rather than worrying it to death and creating the opposite of what I want. The God Box gets ego out of the way. It stops any obessive behaviors from getting out of hand. Worry just makes the situation worse. Once it goes in the God Box, I am able to stop the worry. First, I do my part, then I turn it over to God for the results."


That is the end of my comments with Andrea. I did tell her that I would be doing this article. I have intended to do it for some time. This is one gift that I would like to share with my readers that was given to me by my friend Kathy White. Some of you have read about Kathy and may remember her name from one of my early articles called The Most Influencial Person---#3---Recovery. To read more about Kathy go to http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/07/most-influencial-person-3-recovery.html
This article is dedicated to her memory. The idea of doing a God Box is probably the best gift that Kathy ever gave me. It helped teach me the idea of surrender.


For an incest survivor, the idea of surrender is a difficult one to even think about, much less do. Surrender takes a lot of trust which incest survivors are usually short on. Surrender doesn't mean playing victim and doing nothing. It means doing whatever you can, in your power, to solve a problem and then surrendering or turning over the results to God. That is where the God Box comes in.


The process that I take in using my God Box is to do the necessary action to solve whatever my problem is, then write it down on a small piece of paper. Fold the paper and put it in my God Box. Say a prayer asking God to handle the results. Put the God Box away and forget about it until the next problem comes up. Then the process starts all over again. At the end of the year, you take out your God Box, open it and read all of the small pieces of paper that you put into it during the year. You will have forgotten some of the problems totally. Others you will remember, how once you got ego out of the way, the problems seem to just disappear. Others may still be something that is a problem. Put it back into the Box. Don't take it out of God's hands.


I haven't actually used my God Box in a long time. I surrender things a lot easier than I used to. Today I simply say a prayer and turn it over to God. The God Box was just a tool that I used to teach me to surrender and to trust God and myself.


My first year of using a God Box, I wasn't very good at surrender. I only put 4 things in it. The second year, I was a little better and had over 40 items in my God Box at the end of the year. The third year, I either did pretty good or had more problems or both. I had over 100 items that I released to God that year.


The God Box is a great tool for learning about surrender. It also taught me that I didn't have to carry everything on my shoulders. I am not in control of the world. I am not even in control of my little bit of the world. Guess what? The world didn't fall apart because I was able to surrender control. Control could be a whole other article. Not today.


Kathy, thanks for teaching me about surrendering and God Boxes.