This Day in Recovery
This Day in Recovery offers a short, daily experience to help bring readers back to their spiritual center in the daily moments of struggle and questioning. A 2022 Silver Nautilus Award Winner in the Health, Healing and Wellness category...
Unitarian Universalism is a faith focused on love, but it often feels easier to extend that love to others rather than to ourselves. With love at the center of our Universalist heritage, it is a wonder that so many of us think of ourselves as unworthy of love. This love is for everyone, including us.
For those of us who grew up in homes with addiction or dysfunction, it was so hard to know we were loved. Our parents struggled to show their love, and, truthfully, were incapable of giving us love at many points in our lives. Growing up in this environment, we internalized that our lives did not matter and that we were inherently flawed.
Our call is to keep love at the center of our lives by acting compassionately toward ourselves and others. Our call is to consider our actions with a forgiving spirit, even and especially those that we cannot seem to shake or to for get. This is hard work. We cannot undo a lifetime’s worth of messages in a few days, but we can begin with forgiving ourselves. We can take that deep breath and remind ourselves that we are beloved one day at a time.
Note: As the Twelfth Tradition of Twelve-Step recovery reminds us, "Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities." The editors and authors of This Day in Recovery chose not to provide individual attributions in order to respect this tradition. This meditation appears for August 12 in that book.