Weekly Newsletter: That One is Me

​In Religious Recovery the relationships are not between healers and patients but between patients and patients, because we recognize our own need for healing no matter where we are on our spiritual journey. It is not the function of the group, or of the facilitator, to heal another. A Modified Serenity Prayer reminds us the only one we can change is ourselves, and only when we have changed ourselves can others be helped by us — not by direct teaching, but in the group dynamics that come about in the 13-step program of Religious Recovery.
 
Another way to say the same thing is: the only way we can help others heal is to be in a state of healing. We can’t force another to be healed, but when we heal ourselves, little by little, we offer the example of our lives. We see a healthy person and it inspires us to be healthy. We see a happy person and we want to be happy. No one can make us healthy or happy. Every individual has to choose what his or her own life will be.
 
What we can do is show courage. Change is not for the timid. The fearful are not healed, not changed, and seldom break free from the self-made bonds they have imposed. But, when we see an individual who has broken free and is making a better world, it inspires us and gives us courage to follow — or to even blaze our own trail. We ask Divine Spirit to help us realize there is only one person we can change, and that one is me.