Spiritually Feed Yourself By Accepting Things As They Are

We vow to put an end to the three obstacles of

earthly desire, actions and retribution, and transform the afflictions.

We vow to realize the wisdom that sees clearly things as they are.

May our desire to put an end to these obstacles be universally realized.

Buddhist Chant

The average person places many obstacles in his/her daily path. Those of us who suffer with addictive behaviors know that unattainable desires present a serious problem for us. We too often want what we cannot have and we are in serious denial about the fact that we are powerless.

It’s our great denial that leads us to believe that we can attain our desires through manipulation of reality. This blindness then leads us down a path of destruction as our focus and our actions become obsessively driven toward attaining the impossible.

We desire this particular man or this particular woman and we want them to save us. We want him or her to want us as badly as we mistakenly believe we want him or her. And so we take action. We will lie, cheat, people-please and caretake our way into his or her life. We will do our best to make ourselves indispensable to him or her. And we’ll continue to do this until it all finally blows-up in our faces.

Time and again, those of us who suffer from codependency have seen our obsessive denial-driven dreams explode into millions of shattered pieces. As we lay amidst the rubble, we’ve cried and whaled. Then we’ve plotted our retribution. After all, we were the innocent victim in all of this disaster—or so our denial tells us—and so we have to get that bitch or bastard and make her/him pay.

If this sounds familiar to you in any way, you might take some advice from the Buddhist tradition, as I have. The prayer, or chant, above is used to free ourselves from the obstacles of denial. These obstacles are desire, actions and retribution. It’s important that we choose to free ourselves from these obstacles.

Equally as important is our vow to “realize the wisdom that see clearly things as they are.” This is the part of the prayer that seeks to remove the veil of denial so we can see reality as it is; so we can see that no one person can rescue us.

We are the only person who can rescue us. We need to see this clearly. And we can rescue ourselves by developing a healthy spiritual life. The more we rely on self-love and the love of God to fill our emptiness, the clearer we will be able to see that others exist to compliment our happiness—not to be the objects of our happiness.

Remove the obstacles to accepting reality as it is and you will be on a path to healing.