Friar Richard Rohr, Spiritual Teacher & Addiction Recovery Mentor
Richard is a Franciscan priest and leader of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. He is a super helpful mentor for me in my recovery and I can feel my awareness expanding each time I engage with him. People with minds based in logic and science, people in a 12 step program, and ‘recovering Catholics’ like me will find his teaching particularly helpful.
A quick list of things I have learned from him:
- How a 12 step higher power, powerlessness, acceptance, the ego, and not having expectations tie in together
- What contemplation is, and how that relates to meditation
- How Christianity relates to modern science and eastern religions (like Buddhism)
- What Jesus first taught makes sense… just turns out the Catholic church, naturally, as an organization, twisted things over the last 2000 years. Seeing this gave me acceptance and compassion for my religious background and allowed me to open my mind a bit to the ‘G’ word
- How the Enneagram works
Breathing Under Water — Spirituality and the 12 Steps
Breathing Under Water is one of the best books I have ever read about recovery and spirituality. This is a summary of a presentation he gave about the book, which is a great place to start. (I am working on a post summarizing the book which will be out soon too.)
The way he speaks gets directly behind my ego, right down to my true-est self, so humbly and wisely directing my attention and self-observation towards the sneaky way my mind works when it’s toxic in addiction vs. healthy in recovery.
In the talk, he points out that most religious people simply replace the word ‘addiction’ with ‘sin.’ I find this fascinating because it ties recovery in with what I know about religion nicely. Often with Richard, I learn things like this that tie seemingly separate worlds together which makes me feel like I’m on a truthful path… He says:
My contemplative work has helped me see that really what I think religion at the more mature levels is saying is we’re all addicts.
He goes on to speak about the universal addiction of all people, and why meditation and contemplation help, saying:
The universal addiction we all have [is that] we’re all addicted to our way of thinking… that’s why religion at the higher levels said you’ve got to find a way to detach from that or you won’t get very far — that was called meditation or contemplation, [the act of] changing the the software [in your mind] so you don’t process things with the usual self as the reference point.
He says, if we can’t detach from our usual way of thinking, we will continue to take everything we perceive in through the filters of our egos, and talks about what those filters are specifically, saying
Your filters are your own fears, your own cultural agenda, your own biases, your own anger, your own limitedness, your own lack of education in a certain area, blind us all, and who of us is not blind in certain areas?
For me, this is a great reminder of the ways I am taken over by my ego… and the things I should observe in myself vs. let myself grab hold of when they come up in my mind.
Later on, he discusses what he saw at 12 step meetings he attended:
I would come out from these meetings and say ‘whatever is happening here feels a lot more like church should feel than what’s happening in the sanctuary on Sunday morning,’ and, he says, ‘that’s not an exaggeration! It was just obvious to me there was much more humility and there was much more honesty and when you have humility and honesty you can build.’
This might just sound nice to my ego, as an addict & alcoholic in the program, but I also know it’s true in my heart that many religious people I have met know they are right, lack the humility to open their minds, and are unwilling to change… While so many people I have met in recovery seem truly grounded, right-sized, open to change, and embedded deeply in reality.
Going further, Richard calls the 12 steps America’s contribution to the world of spirituality:
The 12 steps so pragmatic, so American, so practical, so down-to-earth, so real, so honest that they’re going to go down in the history of world spirituality as the American contribution. There’s something so American about it, and what I mean by that is it doesn’t get lost in metaphysics and doctrine and dogma and it just asks “how can we transform and heal people.”
This rings so true for me… it does feel like the reason that once I hit rock bottom, I was actually able to engage with the 12 steps.
He goes on to speak about emotional sobriety, and how that relates to contemplation (meditation) and long term recovery. He says,
We can’t be satisfied with merely overcoming the substance addiction. Until you achieve … emotional sobriety you’re not really in recovery… and that’s what contemplation is teaching you to control.
Until you know how to take charge of this self referential world which is up and down and in and out all the time… until you have had a vital spiritual experience, he [Bill W.] doesn’t believe recovery can go to any depth, or that any long-term transformation is possible.
He concludes by talking about people in recovery who do not have emotional sobriety, and are what are known as ‘dry drunks.’ He says the key factor in knowing whether you are dry, is if you are engaging in ‘all or nothing’ thinking, requiring perfection in your activites, never having any outcome be good enough.
Learning to breathe underwater can be helpful to all of us to really recognize that you and I are addicted to our to our binary, jumping back and forth, all or nothing thoughts. You have to recognize how quickly you do it! By the time you’re in your 20s, it’s pretty much automatic already because it’s the only way you’ve been trained how to think… to go to university is to get a PhD in dualistic thinking.
Given this definition, I do feel like I could be a little less ‘dry’ in my life these days, so I am grateful to know what to look out for. Also, I can try to have compassion for myself because this type of thinking has been conditioned into me through a long education, and it does seem to be the default of many humans in our society today.
If only the world could absorb this teaching… perhaps we could have the discussions we have not been able to have about politics, what it means to be American, and how to handle things like automation of jobs and enough abundance to potentially implement socialized healthcare or a universal basic income… These seem like the conversations that push people quickly to judgment, to shutting down, rather than holding mind space open to having an in-depth discussion.
The Center for Action and Contemplation Blog
Richard also publishes a wonderful daily blog. You can sign up at this link. This excerpt is from a blog he sent around when COVID began that I found particularly helpful:
If we cannot control life and death, why do we spend so much time trying to control smaller outcomes? Call it destiny, providence, guidance, synchronicity, or coincidence, but people who are connected to the Source do not need to steer their own life and agenda. They know that it is being done for them in a much better way than they ever could. Those who hand themselves over are received, and the flow happens through them. Those who don’t relinquish control are still received, but they significantly slow down the natural flow of Spirit.
When we set ourselves up to think we deserve, expect, or need certain things to happen, we are setting ourselves up for constant unhappiness and a final inability to enjoy or at least allow what is going to happen anyway. After a while, we find ourselves resisting almost everything at some level. It is a terrible way to live. Giving up control is a school to learn union, compassion, and understanding. It is ultimately a school for the final letting go that we call death. Right now, as we face social restrictions, economic fragility, and the vulnerability of our own bodies, is there something deeper that you can surrender to, that can ground you in disruption?
Another time, he sent this poem:
Let nothing disturb you.
Let nothing upset you.
Everything changes.
God alone is unchanging.
With patience all things are possible.
Whoever has God lacks nothing.
God alone is enough.
Richard and The Enneagram (another great recovery tool)
If you like Richard, he also teaches the Enneagram in a great YouTube series — find that in four parts here:
I wrote a longer post and gave an interview about how the Enneagram helps in my recovery that may also be of interest.
My gratitude for reading & may you have a peaceful week.
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