Recovery―The Sacred Art Quotes

“My God, the soul you place within me is pure. And because it is pure I am free to live today differently than yesterday. Because it is free, I am free to live today without the burden of past habits, past fears, past mistakes, and past failures. I am free to look at my past without repeating it; to examine it for lessons to be learned and amends to be made; and to draw from it what guidance I can to live today differently. My God, may I use today’s gift of freedom to further my capacity to serve You by serving Your creation with justice, compassion, and humility.”
― Rami Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“A woman once approached the Buddha in tears. She presented him with her dead child and said, “Lord Buddha, I have heard that you can bring the dead back to life. This is my son who died only this morning. I beg you, Lord Buddha, restore him to me.” The Buddha agreed, provided that the woman bring him a single mustard seed from a home in the village that had not experienced death. The woman ran to the village and went door to door to find even one household that had not been touched by death. She failed. When she returned to the Buddha, her grief was no less but her attitude toward it had changed. She knew the inevitability of suffering and the futility of seeking to make things other than they are. She could now mourn her child and move on.”
― Rami Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“we are powerless over our addiction. I am asking you to admit something further: that you are powerless over life.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Never underestimate the human capacity for rationalization and denial.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“If people are dissatisfied with you, no matter what you do differently they may never change their minds about you.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“We cannot control what happens to us. All we can do is work with what happens moment to moment.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“as you think you are in control of life, forget it.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Named addictions are few—alcohol, drugs, food, sex, gambling, and shopping, for example—but they are merely symptoms of a general unnamed addiction from which we all suffer.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“To paraphrase Albert Einstein: We cannot solve problems with the same mind that created them.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Twelve Step recovery offers no image of God other than God as a force capable of helping you recover your sanity by freeing you from the insanity of your addiction and the delusional thinking that feeds it.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Recovery is a process we work every day, not a destination at which we arrive. Because recovery in this sense is a verb, rather than a noun, you will want to work the Twelve Steps over and over again.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Living without even the possibility of control is so frightening to most of us that we would rather live in an addiction-induced fantasy than face the tough truth of reality.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“spirituality as the practice of spiritual maturation, designed to continually cut through the illusion of control and return you over and over again to reality and your powerlessness over it.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“addiction as a state of mind committed to maintaining the illusion of control.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“The real gift of Twelve Step recovery is not simply the cessation of our harmful behavior, but the ending of our harmful thinking. For it is ending harmful thinking that is at the heart of spiritual growth, awakening, and recovery.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“The addict who succumbs to addiction and hits rock bottom becomes or at least has the opportunity to become wise.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“William Blake puts it, “A fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Humans experience themselves, their thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of their consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of love and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.3 Our”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Hitting rock bottom is the term recovering addicts use to identify those moments when reality demolishes the illusion that you are in control of your life.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Spirituality refers to behaviors designed to free you from the delusion that your life can be controlled and the illusion that you are controlling it.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“The more mature our spirituality is, that is, the more we embrace life with justice, compassion, curiosity, awe, wonder, serenity, and humility, the more we become aware of God in, with, and as all things.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“God is the Source and Substance of All Reality: God is what is and what was and what is not yet.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“spiritual growth is this: an ever-deepening capacity to embrace life with justice, compassion, curiosity, awe, wonder, serenity, and humility.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“the mind that seeks to fill the hole is the same delusional mind that is digging it.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“because the root cause of your action is your thinking, the deep cure must focus not only on the body and its behavior, but also on the mind and its thoughts.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“our quest for control always ends in exhaustion and failure.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Quit playing God, and abandon the delusion of life’s controllability, or find some way to escape reality and maintain the illusion that you are in control.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“The real disease from which almost all of us suffer is the disease of playing God, of thinking we are or should be in control of what happens to us in life.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“Twelve Step recovery is about freeing yourself from playing God,”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“whatever addiction brought you to rock bottom has opened the door to spiritual awakening.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice