Navigating Complex Relationships: A Journey of Soul Recovery and Finding Serenity with Al-Anon

Have you ever felt like a ship lost in a storm, seeking the lighthouse of inner peace? My own voyage through the tumultuous seas of alcoholism and codependency has led me to the serene shores of Soul Recovery, thanks in no small part to the guiding lights of Al-Anon. In today's heartfelt episode, we navigate the transformative journey to serenity, discussing the significance of embracing discomfort and the power in releasing the compulsion to mend others.  I open up about the spiritual tools and daily practices that have shifted my perceptions, allowing me to rediscover a sense of identity and connection that lies within us all. Inspired by the teachings of Al-Anon, we learn to foster peace through spirituality and a bond with a higher power, understanding that true growth comes from within. We weigh the concept of personal responsibility, learning the art of detaching from the outcomes of others' actions, and instead making intentional choices that nurture our well-being.

For more information about Rev. Rachel Harrison and Recover Your Soul- visit the website www.recoveryoursoul.net  use the code TRYASESSION for 40% off your first Spiritual Coaching session when you book on the website.  Visit the website for all events and groups to get involved in Soul Recovery and the community.

Soul Recovery Support Group on Zoom -The 1st Monday of the Month, 6PM Mountain Time.   Visit the

Join others on the Soul Recovery journey on Monday July 1st from 6-7PM on Zoom for the FREE Soul Recovery Support Group. This month we will be talking about 'Criticism and Judgement.' I will give a brief talk, open for questions and then we will break into small groups.  Register on the website, or if you have already registered- be on the look out the day of the meeting in your inbox for a reminder email.  

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:59

Soul Recovery has inspiration from Al-Anon. It was a huge piece of me coming back to myself and letting go of my codependence. It was a huge piece of me actually recovering from alcoholism because I learned how to be uncomfortable. I learned how to let go of trying to fix and save everybody around me. And for today's episode I'm reading out of Hope for Today, may 20th, on the day that we're airing this episode, and it's around serenity. What I love about this reading is it's the promise of freedom and finding peace in our life. It's not a promise of escaping the complexity of life, and this is a fundamental piece of what we teach in soul recovery. Piece of what we teach in soul recovery how can you be in your life exactly as it is and still find inner peace, find serenity. Enjoy the episode.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 1:55

Welcome to the Recover your Soul podcast a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and soul recovery to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our inner change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 2:36

Welcome to the Recover your Soul podcast. I'm Rev Rachel and I am so grateful that you are here with me today. I am excited because somebody here is listening to this for the first time and I think that it's no mistake that higher power has brought you here to listen to this podcast today. It means that you are being led and directed to a spiritual path that is going to provide you with the tools that you need to choose happiness, to be healthy and to let go of needing or wanting the outside world to be any particular way for you to be so. That's been my transformation and I love that I can share it with you Today.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 3:15

I wanted to come back to what had been foundational in my healing, which is when I stepped back into the rooms of AA six years ago to truly let go of my addiction to alcohol and then to take that next step, which I was afraid to take, which is to let go of the people in my life, to surrender to a higher power and let go of trying to control and fix and manage and mother and maintain all the other people in my life either my family or jobs or whatever it was and I went to Al-Anon. I had been to Al-Anon for years before, sporadically, but I hadn't gone diligently. And when I went in to my recovery this time, I went both to AA diligently and I went into Al-Anon diligently, and this was in 2018. So luckily, it was before the pandemic and there was lots of in-person meetings and we had some really beautiful connecting home groups in my area and those moments started to change my life forever.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 4:22

And any of you who are here for the first time or even been for a little while, you know that I am inspired by Al-Anon and 12-step, many other things, but I do not speak for them, I'm not affiliated with them and I'm not here to take anybody away from those rooms or those experiences. I hope that this is in addition to that for you, and so, if you are indeed in any of those 12 steps, I hope you will continue to go and that this is just helping you to enrich and really deepen your relationship with those programs. And if you're not in those programs, but it inspires you to maybe go check them out, do that. This doesn't have to be exclusive. This is your spiritual journey and there's enough for everyone, and it's really about taking what works for you and leaving the rest. Everything that you need is already inside of you. Every amount of healing and wisdom is already within you. You will be led to hear the voices that will give you the information that you need, and it's around you. Having discernment and connecting to those voices so that you can indeed remember your wholeness, you can indeed remember the truth of who you are.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 5:41

And so today I wanted to come back to some foundational Al-Anon tools, and for me, in those first couple years, I woke up every morning and I read from Hope for Today, or Daily Reflections, or many of the other readers that are available. I needed and wanted something to help me get started for the day, to get my mind right. That's what we're doing in soul recovery is we're learning how to change our perception. We're learning how to see things just enough differently that we can open to the truth, that we can let go of the pain and the wounding and we can step into our wholeness. So when I started reading these daily readers, it allowed me to get out of my sort of whip of thinking that had become distorted, and now that I go back and I read them again, it's as if I had never read them.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 6:39

The first time I love this about spirituality is every time I get onto a deeper level. It's not like the level's better, it's not like you're higher up, it's that you're feeling it deeper. None of us are any better or worse than anybody else. This journey that we're on is uniquely our own, for our own expansion and growth, and so when I read these principles from both Al-Anon and also from the other books that I read so many other books that I read I find myself putting the puzzle pieces together in a more profound way. It's like I'm stepping back from a impressionist painting and I'm saying oh, there I am. I've been looking for myself the whole time and I was too close in to see the beauty and the wholeness and the truth of who I am. I was too in it, too deep. But when I can step back, something beautiful happens, something beautiful emerges. That is not even me. It's the connection to everything.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 7:50

So I wanted to read from today, which is May 20th, on the day that this is airing. And it's funny when I pulled out the Hope From Today book and I just opened it to find May 20th. Guess what day it opened to? Of course it did it opened to May 20th. Okay, guess what day it opened to? Of course it did it opened to May 20th, okay. So here we go.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 8:09

So I'm going to read as I do, and then I'm going to share the soul recovery perspective for this and again, I am not associated with Al-Anon. I am inspired by Al-Anon, I have been healed by Al-Anon, but I am not speaking as if we're in an Al-Anon meeting. So, for those of you who are new, take what you like and leave the rest. As I often say Okay, so I love, love, love. That this was what was today. It says the serenity I am offered in Al-Anon is not an escape from life. Rather, it's the power to find peacefulness within life.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 8:46

If you're ready for soul recovery, as a spiritual coach I can support your healing to help make real changes that will bring you a life of peace, happiness, connection and abundance. You can also work in smaller groups by taking a deep dive in a Zoom workshop or with me in person at a retreat or an event. Join others on the Soul Recovery Path, once a month for the free Zoom support group or daily on the private Facebook page. Visit the website recoveryoursoulnet to book coaching sessions with me or find all the information you need about soul recovery dates that are coming up and how to register for those groups and workshops. To support the podcast and the community, check the links in the show notes to make a small monthly donation or a one-time donation of your choice. That will make a huge impact to support this community and the soul recovery mission. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul soul. This is really powerful.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 9:52

Starting for this, because I think that what I'm aware of now is I was running from life. I was running from life in so many ways. I was running from life in my relationship. I was running from life in terms of what I thought my family was supposed to be like. I was trying to make my job be my full identity. I was running from just what was, and in that there's a lot of discomfort, and so I was trying to escape from it. And now I can see that the power is to be peaceful within life. And so, just reading these lines again, there's just such a deeper level of awareness and understanding that I can see it in a way that I heard it before, but I didn't feel it. It's like I couldn't really grasp what it could really mean to me. And again I want it to mean what it means to you. So I'll just start with that again, the serenity I'm offered in Al-Anon is not an escape from life. Rather, it's the power to find peacefulness within life. It's the ability to be within the chaos, to be in the discomfort, to be in the crazy kookiness of the world and still have peace within.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 11:03

It says. Al-anon does not promise me freedom from pain, sorrow or difficult situations. It does, however, give me the opportunity to learn from others how to develop the necessary skills for maintaining peace of mind even when life seems most unbearable. The program helps me learn how to request, accept and use the strength and wisdom of my higher power. My higher power works through my fellow members, helps me maintain my sanity and sense of self-worth. This is so beautiful to me because, again, when we do spirituality, it's not a promise that there's going to never be pain, sorrow or difficult situations.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 11:47

What it is saying is that we're seeing them from a new lens and, in soul recovery, I'm often talking about the value of seeing your life as a learning tool that if we think life is happening to us, then we feel like we're being beat up on. But if you recognize that it's part of your expansion, part of your expansion, part of your learning and it does not mean that it has to be hard learning, it does not mean that you have to have it beat you up constantly. It actually means that you start to notice where it's beating you up, where it doesn't feel good, where it doesn't align, and then you say why am I putting up with this? Why is this okay with me? When did I learn that this was okay with me? What do I actually want out of my life? We can learn from others and we can learn from ourselves, and some of us need harder knocks and some of us can watch someone else's experience and say, ah, that doesn't appeal to me, I don't want it to look like that for me. And we can actually have our lives transform and changed in that way.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 12:56

What I love about this is it's saying the program helps to learn how to accept the strength and wisdom of higher power and how to ask, how to ask, and I think that when you truly understand that the spiritual journey is where the healing is whatever higher power is to you, that you start to realize you're not alone. You start to realize that you can ask for help, that you can ask and receive healing, that you can see that there's a power, a higher power, power being the important part of that. A power that's going to work through your life, through the people that you interact with, through the messages that you hear, and it's going to provide you with sanity and self-worth. So many of us are looking for everybody else to give us our self-worth. We want them to tell us we're okay and we're in a situation right now where you are with yourself and you are learning to love yourself exactly as you are, to have peace and forgiveness and compassion and grace for yourself first, and then we can move to the other people. It reads Al-Anon also gives me the opportunity to live a serene life, free from the burden of responsibility for others' decisions.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 14:27

Okay, just that line alone could be an entire lifetime if you could truly follow this principle. Al-anon, or spirituality, gives me the opportunity to live a serene life free of the burdens of responsibilities for others' decisions. The first step in soul recovery is admitting that we are powerless over every single thing outside of ourself and that our desire to control people, places and circumstances causes pain and suffering in our life. That we think that we are responsible for others' decisions. If you have someone in your life who's choosing addiction, or choosing dysfunction, or choosing to be unhappy, or choosing to be depressed, or choosing to not have a job, or choosing to see life as miserable, that is their choice, but we don't realize that we carry their burden. And this line alone, al-anon, gives me the opportunity to live a serene life free of the burdens of responsibility of others' decisions. If we could just do that, we would truly be released of so much pain and suffering.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 15:49

It says it teaches me that I can make choices to redirect my life towards personal growth and satisfaction. It increases my confidence, which comes from trusting the higher power of my understanding that it will sustain me and guide me through life's ups and downs. I want you to really listen to what this says. It teaches me that I can make choices to redirect my life towards personal growth and satisfaction. It does not say it teaches me how to let people walk all over me, to let me learn how to be with people who are miserable. What it says is I can redirect my life towards my personal growth and satisfaction.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 16:38

I think so often about how it doesn't have to be an either or and this is a big piece in soul. Recovery is we're not making judgment and we're not saying that somebody is good or somebody's bad. I think everyone is whole, I think everyone is worth it, I think everyone has value. But I think that a lot of people are very, very, very lost, that a lot of people are very, very, very lost and then we do this piece where we want to fix it and make it better for them, and then we get lost, we get sucked down and pulled into the mire and it's complicated people. This is not something that is black and white. This is gray to the gray of all grays. This is nuanced. It is about having compassion for people and letting them have their experience, and sometimes they need to have a difficult experience. They need to hit a wall to realize that they're worth it, that they can make choices and redirect their life towards personal growth and satisfaction. Can make choices and redirect their life towards personal growth and satisfaction, it says.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:53

It increases my confidence, which comes from trusting that the higher power of my understanding will sustain me and guide me through life's ups and downs?

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:57

Do you believe that there is a higher power guiding and holding you, regardless of whether it's a good day or a hard day? Can you trust that there is indeed an answer for everything? And sometimes the answer is to just be still, to just be in your own feelings, to be in your own experience that we can have a peaceful life by letting go of this belief that we have to take care of it for somebody else. The thought for the day is serenity is not about the end of pain. It's about my ability to flourish peacefully, no matter what life brings my way. The more spirituality I do Life brings my way, the more spirituality I do, the more teachings I learn.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 18:52

The more that this integrates into my being, the more understanding I truly and deeply have that it isn't about a stress-free life or without having problems. It's about how we interact with every single thought, every single action that we have. That if I can be present in the moment, then I have some dominion over my well-being. I get to decide whether that's going to irritate me or whether I'm going to see it with compassion. Decide whether that's going to irritate me or whether I'm going to see it with compassion, whether I'm going to allow it, whether I'm going to have a boundary, and I can't tell you how much my life has changed around how I choose to see it. I just had the episode that they are as we choose to see them. Life is as we choose to see it.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 19:45

So this concept of serenity is not about the end of pain. It's about the end of suffering, and suffering is attachment to wanting it to be different. And again, I really really stress in soul recovery that it does not mean that you have to stay in situations that are untenable, where you are truly losing yourself, where you abandon yourself. This isn't about learning how to just suck it up. This is about learning how to be strong and to know that if you are learning something and what that is teaching you is this does not work for me, then you are getting the strength to say this does not work for me and to choose something different, to choose a different life, and to know that it isn't going to be that you're walking away, to never having problems again. It's around you understanding yourself better, your connection to your inner being better, your healing your past traumas and beliefs and patterns that you have been repeating your willingness to be new, to be whole, to be true to who you really are. The quote is I felt utterly at peace with life and at the same time filled with joy. At that moment I realized this was serenity and I laughed out loud for the sheer glorious pleasure of it. From survival to recovery page 268.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 21:14

Serenity is this concept that means that we are at peace within ourselves regardless of what's happening. It doesn't mean that it's serene like the pond, without any waves. It means that we know that there will be waves, but we also know it will eventually settle, that this too shall pass. And when we start taking our power back and we start saying I'm not going to need you to tell me that I'm okay, I don't need you to validate my well-being and my value of who I am. I can let you have your experience exactly as it is and come back to myself and work on me and let you be you and work on me and let you be you, then we start to feel the serenity that says, even in the midst of the storm, even in the incredible waves that can be crashing, we know that there will be stillness, that underneath there is stillness that we are held by our higher power.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 22:24

And life isn't always going to be difficult and it's not always going to be easy. But I'll tell you, for me the difficult parts have diminished so much and I think that they're still happening. But I feel it different, I respond to it different, and from that it means there's not big, huge blow up fights with my husband, I'm not an enormous amount of stress over my children, I sleep well, I choose to take better care of myself because I have a better sense of myself. That doesn't need somebody to be filling me up. I can see the complexity of the world and people's situations and I'm not putting my energy into them and not taking care of myself. Our energy is so, so precious, and when we're constantly handing it over to everybody else out of worry and anxiety and fear, we're actually not keeping it for ourself, for our strength, and the truth is they can't use that anyway. They need to have their own strength. It goes back to the freedom from not having to carry the burden of other people's decisions. Those are their decisions.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 23:46

Al-anon does not promise me freedom from pain, sorrow or difficult situations. It does, however, give me the opportunity to learn from others how to develop the necessary skills to maintain a peaceful mind even when life seems unbearable. So where is your life unbearable? And can you begin to recognize that? Even you're being drawn to listen to this today? To listen to something that is inspirational and heartfelt, is a message from spirit that you are not alone, that you are always held with opportunities to see it differently, to change your perception, to attend to your own pain, to connect to the part of you that needs to be held and loved, and to let go of trying to control an uncontrollable world. There is peace in that, there is serenity in that. It's calming down.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 24:53

Thank you so much for being here with me on this journey and I am here for you. I hope that you understand that my desire to help others find the serenity that I feel through my service of this podcast on the bonus episodes on Fridays, that I'm so grateful to be now having a lot of really amazing people to interview, to deepen your soul recovery experience with even more insights and tools, and also to do book studies. I'm trying to figure out which book I want to do on the book study next for the bonus episodes, but, most importantly, that I'm here to work the steps with you, either one on one, in individual coaching or by using the new program where you can work the steps on your own through video modules that I've created. This community, this group of people all over the world, means so much to me because I hope that you can feel each other the way that I can feel you, that we are not alone, that, along with so many beautiful groups and programs, we are reaching out to each other and new ways to recognize that we're ready to raise our consciousness, we're ready to let go of pain, we're ready to forgive ourselves and others, and we're ready to see it from love, we're ready to see it from compassion, we're ready to be serene Until next time.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 26:25

Namaste, thank you for listening to the Recover your Soul podcast and if you loved what you heard here, every Friday we have a bonus episode and you can access this by becoming a subscriber through Apple Podcasts for only $3.99 a month or become a Patreon member, and on this platform, you can choose $5, $15, or $25 a month to show what you want to support the show with On both of these subscriber platforms is an entire catalog of back episodes intended to inspire and support you on your soul recovery journey. I really want to invite everybody to attend the free once a month, every first Monday of the month, support group. This is on zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend and by giving a like or a review and sharing this with your friends and family really helps us to share the soul recovery message with even more people.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 27:23

We are on social media. We are on all the platforms. I am on TikTok. You can listen to Guided Meditations by Rev Rachel Harrison on Insight Timer. Thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for being part of the community. To find out more about soul recovery and everything that's being offered, visit the website wwwrecoveryoursoulnet. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.