Stephen Crenshaw

Author: Stephen Crenshaw

5 Ancient Teachings the Modern World Forgets
I have a teacher-of-the-day problem. A new book comes out, a new voice starts resonating, and I’m in. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But lately I’ve been pulling back toward the older sources, not because the modern writers don’t have something to offer, but because most of what they’re offering the ancient ones already said. Going back to the source puts everything in sharper focus.
These five things, in particular, have held their weight across centuries.
The outer world is a poor mirror for your inner one
Somewhere along the way, most of us started judging our insides by someone else’s outside. We see the perfect family on social media and we measure whatever we’re feeling against that curated image. Or we scroll the endless feed and feel vaguely like we’re missing out on a life that, if we’re honest, isn’t even real.
Lao Tzu wrote that an excess of light blinds the eye, an excess of noise ruins the ear, that too much of everything deadens the senses. The wise man attends to the inner significance of things and does not concern himself with outward appearances.
Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you. Buddha said it is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles.
We have been told this for over two thousand years. And still, most of us are looking for peace somewhere outside ourselves. Jesus called it a narrow gate for a reason. Looking at yourself is hard, looking at others is easy. But the latter slowly kills something in you.
The practice is simple, even when it isn’t easy: a few minutes of stillness in the morning, a midday pause, a shutdown practice at the end of the day. What am I feeling? What do I actually need? The answers are there. They’re just harder to hear than the noise.
We think we’re in control
Controlling others is the major sport of modern life. Whether through force, through subtle pressure, or through the slower erosion of trying to shape someone into what we need them to be.
Both Jesus and Confucius offered a version of the golden rule, but they came at it from different directions. Jesus said to do to others what you want done to you. Actively show love, actively care, actively listen. Confucius said don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you. Don’t yell if you don’t want to be yelled at, don’t tailgate if you don’t want to be tailgated.
Together, they form something complete: an active kindness and a practiced restraint. But notice what’s missing from both. Neither of them is about changing anyone else. They’re both entirely about what I am doing, saying, and being. The moment I turn that outward and try to manage what someone else is becoming, I’ve lost the thread.
A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart… the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
Luke 6:45
All of it starts inside and moves outward. None of it begins with controlling the other person.
You become what you rehearse
The Buddha said we are shaped by our thoughts. That we become what we think, and when the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, said the renewing of our minds transforms us.
I’ve spent time with the concept of cognitive distortions. The things we say to ourselves that have been twisted so far from truth they no longer resemble it. If I say every day I can’t do this, my mind will work efficiently to confirm it. The stories we rehearse become the lives we live.
The mind is curious. Ask it a question and it goes looking for an answer. How can I do this better? How can I love this person as they actually are? The reframe isn’t magic, but it does something real, it begins the process the teachers were all pointing toward.
Michael Singer writes in The Untethered Soul that we should learn to become the observer of the voice in our heads rather than its obedient subject. Watch what you’re telling yourself. Then ask better questions. Every answer you genuinely need is already somewhere inside that.
The nature of things is to change
Lao Tzu wrote: Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
That’s easier to read than to live. Most of us guard our comfort zones carefully, not because they’re especially good but because they’re familiar. We know what to expect. We’ve quietly arranged things so that very little surprises us and we hope nothing significant shifts.
But Marcus Aurelius observed that the universe loves nothing more than to change the things that are and make new things like them. Change is not an interruption to life. It is life.
And this matters: every change carries an opening in it. Jobs end and different ones begin. Relationships shift and new depths open. Even the painful changes maybe especially those tend to carry something forward into new territory, if we’re willing to move with them rather than brace against them.
Resistance doesn’t stop change. It just makes us miserable in the meantime.
There is only today
A friend of mine was told not long ago that she has a short time to live. What she says, to anyone who asks, is that she’s staying curious. Curious about what’s coming, and present for what’s here. She didn’t stop living when she heard the news. She chose to keep living today, which is, as it turns out, the only place any of us actually lives.
Jesus told his disciples not to worry about tomorrow. That today’s trouble is sufficient for today. That sounds almost dismissive until you sit with it. What he’s saying is: you already have enough to attend to. Tomorrow will be what it is. You are here now.
Seneca wrote that expectation is the greatest impediment to living and that while we are anticipating tomorrow, we lose today.
Each of us gets a finite number of days, more for some and fewer for others, and none of us knows the count. The question isn’t whether tomorrow is coming. The question is what we’re choosing to do with this particular day, this particular hour, this particular moment.
That, as it turns out, is the only question any of us ever actually gets to answer.
August 26, 2026
Finding Identity In Recovery, No Longer Defined by Our Addiction?
For a long time, addiction gave me something I couldn’t name out loud. An identity. I was the life of the party, the one who couldn’t stop, or just the person who needed help. However I held it, with swagger or shame, it organized me. It answered the question of who am I.
When I got into recovery and the I, as I understood myself, vanished.
This is one of the least-talked-about experiences in recovery, and one of the most disorienting: the identity vacuum. We expected to feel freedom when we put down the substance, and in many ways we do. But beneath the relief, there is often a strange and unsettling emptiness. It’s not the craving kind of emptiness, but an existential one. We don’t know who we are anymore, and we’re not sure we ever did.
Most recovery programs, wisely, don’t ask us to wrestle with this question too early. The first order of business is survival staying clean, attending meetings, becoming part of a group, adding structure. We need ground under our feet before we can ask what we’re standing on it for. But eventually, the question surfaces.
Who am I now?
A concept in Jungian psychology distinguishes between the persona. It’s the mask we present to the world, shaped by social expectations and survival needs, and the deeper self that lies underneath it. Most of us, when we were in active addiction, had built elaborate personas. Some were charming. Some were tragic. Some were both, depending on the need at the time. The addiction became woven into the persona, and the persona became woven into how we understood ourselves.
Our false selves.
When the persona collapses, we are left standing in front of a question we have been avoiding for years.
Who is the “I” that remains?
The mystics have been asking this question for centuries, though in different language. They spoke of the false self and the true self. Not as ‌metaphysical abstractions but as lived experiences. The false self is not simply a lie we tell others; it’s the accumulated story we’ve told ourselves, the identity assembled from wounds and compensations and the desperate need to be seen. The true self is what remains when the story gets quiet. It is not an achievement. It is more like a discovery. (See Thomas Merton and Fr Thomas Keating)
People in recovery often understand this better than most: the person we were in our addiction was not really us. Not the “I” who is deep inside. The organization we’d built around our using was never the whole of who we were. It was a wound with a personality grafted to it.
Where I personally got stuck was wanting to go back to the person I was before. The loving, caring twelve-year-old who loved everyone and everything. But, that “before self” is a dream, and especially for those of us who lived in our addiction for most of our adult life. It’s a dream that pulls us backward. The before self is hollow in its own way, because it asks us to become less than who we are right now, a person with hard-won experience, and something real to offer to others who are still finding their way out.
I love Michael Singer’s explanation of “Who am I”? I am teh one who sees. I am not the body or the voice in my head i am the one who hears the voice, i can control it or listen to it.
The self we’ve been mourning or celebrating or trying to recover was was never actually who we really were. The work of recovery, from this angle, is not to find the self we lost, but to stop clinging to the illusion that the self was ever what we did or thought. What we discover, in the space that opens up, is something more interesting: a capacity for presence, for growth, for genuine choice.
Where Do We Go From Here?
None of this means we stop being a person with a history. We are not erased by awakening. The question “who am I?” is less about discovering a buried essence and more about deciding, deliberately, what kind of person we intend to become. That decision is made daily, in small choices, in the way we meet difficulty and show up in our relationships.
What recovery gives us, if we let it, is precisely this: the chance to become ourselves on purpose. Not to manufacture a self from scratch, but to live more intentionally inside the process of becoming. To stop letting our wounds make our choices. To bring more of our attention and our values to bear on the life we’re actually building.
The question “who are you when you’re no longer defined by your addiction?” doesn’t have a final answer. Sorry. I guess that’s the point. It’s less a question to be solved than a direction to walk in.
What would you be free to become if you stopped waiting to finish becoming it?
August 12, 2026
What a Spiritual Practice Actually Looks Like in Recovery
There is a version of spiritual practice that lives in the imagination. Candles and cushions, hours of silence, a kind of serene detachment from the noise of ordinary life. Most of us in recovery took one look at that version and quietly decided it wasn’t for us. We had enough on our plates already. We were trying to stay clean, repair relationships, get to work on time. We didn’t need another thing we were doing.
But there’s a different understanding of spiritual practice that doesn’t require us to become someone else before we begin. It doesn’t start with achievement. It starts with attention.
In recovery, we are often told that spirituality is essential. What we’re rarely told is what it actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon when we’re tired and a little irritable and the last thing we feel like doing is sitting quietly with ourselves. The gap between “you need a spiritual practice” and “here is how to have one” is where a lot of people quietly give up.
So let’s close that gap a little.
Practice Is Not Performance
The first thing worth saying is that a spiritual practice is not a performance. It isn’t something we do in order to prove we are serious about our recovery, or spiritual, or on the right path. It isn’t a box to check. It is, at its core, a repeated turning of attention, a gentle act of coming back to what is real.
Every tradition we might draw from points toward this same thing, just with different language. The Stoic discipline of attention is training yourself to notice what is within our control and release what is not. The Buddhist practice of returning to the present moment, without drama. The Christian contemplative tradition’s invitation into inner stillness, as presence. The Taoist idea of moving with what is rather than against it.
These aren’t competing philosophies. The room is the same: the present moment, the inner life, the honest look at what is.
For people in recovery, this isn’t abstract. We have spent years running from ourselves, and what actually is. We know what that looks like. We know what it costs. A spiritual practice is‌ simply the choice to stop running. Not just once at the moment of surrender, but again and again, every day, in small ways.
What It Actually Looks Like
A spiritual practice doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. What it needs to be is consistent and honest.
For some of us, the practice begins in the morning five minutes of quiet before the day begins with its demands. Not necessarily meditation in any formal sense. Just sitting and breathing. Noticing where we are. Some people frame this in prayer. Others hold it as an act of awareness. The tradition matters less than the intention: I am here. I am paying attention. I am willing to be present to my own life.
For others, the practice is embedded in movement. A walk without headphones, with attention turned inward as much as outward. Movement becomes a kind of prayer when we bring awareness to it.
Some find their practice in writing, not as self-analysis or narrative therapy, but as a daily act of noticing. What am I feeling right now? What am I avoiding? What am I grateful for? These aren’t questions we answer so much as live inside for a moment before the day sweeps us forward.
None of this requires a spiritual director, a meditation teacher, or years of training. Just showing up consistently without demanding that something dramatic happen.
The Role of Difficulty
A spiritual practice will, be uncomfortable. This is not a sign that it’s failing. It is a sign that it’s working.
When we sit still and get quiet, things we’ve been carrying tend to surface. We hit the parts of ourselves we haven’t made peace with yet. We’re brushing up against the shadow, the unlived life that waits in the basement of the psyche. This is not pleasant, but it is important.
And I can tell you from experience, there will be times that it feels like you have not even started. That you are back at square one and everyone around you knows you are. You’re not, and they don’t because everyone else will see your progress long before you do.
The instinct, when discomfort arises, is to stop. To find a reason why this particular practice isn’t working, or isn’t right for us, or can be resumed later when life settles down. Life never settles down. And the practice that calls us to sit with discomfort is the same practice that teaches us we can do it.
This is a gift that recovery has already given us some preparation for. We have already sat with something hard and come out the other side. A spiritual practice is just a way of bringing that same capacity into our daily inner life.
Practice as Relationship
Perhaps the most useful frame is this: a spiritual practice is less like a program and more like a relationship. Relationships require consistency without rigidity. They survive missed days and difficult seasons. They deepen not through perfect adherence but through honest return.
We don’t fail a spiritual practice by not showing up for three days. We fail it only by deciding not to return. And even then, the door stays open.
What we are building, over weeks and months and years of practice, is not a catalogue of experiences or spiritual accomplishments. We are building a different relationship with our own inner life. We are learning to be present without flinching, to notice without judgment, to return without self-recrimination. These are not small things. For those of us in recovery, they are some of the most revolutionary skills we can develop.
The question isn’t whether you have the right temperament for this, or the right tradition, or the right amount of free time. The question is, what would it mean to give five minutes of honest attention to your inner life today?
July 29, 2026
Why Getting Clean Was the Beginning, Not the Destination
We tend to mark recovery by the moment we stopped. The day we put whatever “IT” was down. The morning we woke up, for the first time in a long time, without something to be ashamed of. That moment is real, and it matters more than we can usually say.
But there’s something that happens somewhere in the middle of doing all the right things the meetings, the steps, the check-ins, the slow reconstruction of a life that had come apart when a quiet question starts to surface. Not a dramatic one. More like a low hum in the background of an otherwise functional day.
Is this it?
We’re clean. We’re sober. We’re showing up. So why does something still feel unfinished?
That question is not a warning sign. It’s an invitation.
The immediate work of early recovery is survival work, and we shouldn’t minimize it. The white-knuckling, the phone calls at midnight, the counting of days is real, and all of it is necessary. That kind of work takes everything we have. It’s supposed to.
But here’s the thing most of us eventually bump into: getting into recovery removes the substance. What it doesn’t automatically remove is the inner landscape that preceded the substance. The anxiety that made stillness feel unbearable. The shame we never learned to put down. The hunger for something we couldn’t name, that the drinking or using seemed, for a while, to satisfy.
Most of us started using for a reason. Whatever that reason was — relief from pain, escape from a self we couldn’t stand, or a search for something that felt like transcendence — the substance was a counterfeit answer to a genuine question. Getting clean removes the counterfeit. It doesn’t answer the question.
And so the question follows us into sobriety. It gets louder, actually, without the noise of using to drown it out. When survival is no longer enough and we find ourselves hungering for something more, we often assume we’ve done something wrong. That we’re broken in some new way, or that everyone else in the room has found something we haven’t.
We haven’t failed at recovery. We’ve just arrived at where recovery was always trying to take us.
There’s a thread that runs through many of the great contemplative traditions — Christian, Buddhist, Stoic, Sufi — that speaks of waking up. Not metaphorically. Literally: the possibility that most of us move through our lives without ever fully inhabiting them. That we go through the motions. That we react rather than respond, perform rather than live, numb rather than feel.
We know this from the inside. We know what it’s like to be asleep. And we know — even if we can’t always name it — that getting clean isn’t the same as waking up. It’s more like opening our eyes in a dark room. Something essential has changed. But we’re still learning where we are.
Waking up is a different kind of work. Slower. Less measurable. You can’t count the days of it or get a chip for it. It’s the work of turning toward yourself — toward the questions, the silences, the parts of your inner life you’ve been avoiding — not with self-punishment or relentless analysis, but with a kind of honest, soft attention. A willingness to see what’s actually there.
This is what the contemplative traditions call the inner journey. Recovery, followed all the way down, is exactly that.
The Twelve Steps aren’t about not using. They’re about excavation. They ask us to take inventory of ourselves, admit what we find, examine what drives us, practice prayer and meditation, and carry what we’ve learned into the world. That’s not a maintenance program. That’s a spiritual path.
The Stoics had a practice of turning the attention inward: watching the movements of the mind with clarity and without flinching. The Buddhist traditions speak of insight practice: the slow, patient work of seeing things as they actually are. The Christian mystics wrote of a direct seeing beneath the surface of things, beneath the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Different vocabularies. The same country.
Recovery was already pointing there. The steps were already asking for this. What changes in the deeper work isn’t the direction, it’s the depth. We stop managing the surface and start paying attention to what’s underneath.
“Most people go through their entire lives without ever experiencing a moment of genuine awareness.”
Anthony de Mello
It’s worth sitting with that. And then asking honestly: Have I?
I’m not talking about awareness in some transcendent, mountaintop sense. Just the ordinary miracle of actually being here. Present to what’s moving in us. Present to what’s real. Awake to the life that’s happening right now, in this body, in this moment, with all its difficulty and all its unexpected grace.
That’s what recovery can become, when we let it. Not the absence of a substance, but the presence of a life. A real one. Ours.
We got clean so we could wake up. For most of us, the waking up is just getting started.
Where in your own recovery have you started to feel that quiet hunger — the sense that staying sober, as essential as it is, isn’t quite the whole story? And what have you done, or not done, with it?
July 15, 2026
Recovery & Spiritual Awakening
My boss woke me up while I was sleeping in my car in a customer’s parking lot. I don’t remember what I said. Something automatic, something that sounded like an explanation. What I remember is the look on his face. Not angry, exactly. More like a man watching something happen that he couldn’t stop. I straightened up, started the car, and drove to the next call like nothing had happened. Because that was the skill I had refined above all others by then: the ability to keep moving while being completely absent from my life.
That parking lot wasn’t the bottom. It was a Tuesday. It would be another ten years before I found a solution I could live with.
And the funny part is…there is still a version of me that exists somewhere in the past, sitting in a car in a parking lot, sleeping, and not going anywhere.
I tell that story because most people reading this have their own version of that parking lot. The details are different. The feeling is the same. A life lived from the outside in. Managed and performed. Mostly numb, until something gave way.
For me, that giving way was the beginning of everything.
Beginning to Wake Up
We use the word recovery because it’s the word we have. It’s not a bad word. But if we’re not careful, it can shrink the thing it’s trying to describe. Recovery suggests we’re retrieving something lost, returning to a prior condition, getting back to baseline. And there’s truth in that. But it isn’t the whole truth.
Because most of us don’t want to go back to baseline. The baseline is what we were medicating.
What happened when I got into recovery wasn’t a return. It was a foundation. Not to some achieved state of spiritual excellence, but to the beginning of something I hadn’t known was possible: the experience of being present in my life. I want to tell you; I was a pastor for much of this time and did not know how asleep I was. Which is either; very ironic or very sad, but probably both.
Anthony de Mello, the Jesuit priest and spiritual director who could be pretty blunt about human self-deception, used to say that most people are asleep. He says we’re born asleep; we grow up asleep; we get married asleep; we live all of our life asleep. Not literally — but in the sense that we move through our days on autopilot, reacting from old patterns, mistaking the noise in our heads for reality, never quite inhabiting the moment we’re actually in. He wasn’t talking about people living in addiction specifically. He was talking about everyone. But those of us who have lived inside the particular unconsciousness of active addiction know what he means from the inside. We didn’t just sleepwalk. We ran.
Learning to Live
Here’s what I have come to believe, and what this whole project is about: getting clean is the doorway. What’s on the other side of the doorway is the life.
The recovery I found gave me a framework for walking through that door. I am grateful for a spiritual form of recovery in a way that I can’t quite put into words. Recovery was given to me when I had nothing else, and it worked. But recovery in itself was never meant to be the destination. The founders of that tradition knew this. They spoke of a spiritual awakening as the goal, not simply abstinence. They pointed toward something interior, something alive, something that abstinence alone cannot produce.
That interior something is what draws me to the great contemplative traditions. Not because I’ve left the recovery community. But because the mystics, across every tradition, seem to be describing the same territory that recovery points toward, just using a different vocabulary. The Zen teacher and the Desert Father and the Stoic philosopher and the person with thirty years aren’t saying identical things. But they are, I’ve come to believe, describing the same country from different entry points.
The stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius kept returning to a single practice: look at what’s actually in front of you. Not what you fear, not what you resent, not what you wish was different. What is? There’s something in that practice that feels immediately recognizable to anyone in recovery. We call it acceptance. The Stoics called it amor fati. love of what is. The Buddhists call it equanimity. Whatever we call it, it is the antidote to the thing that was killing us.
The Road Ahead
I am not a guru. I want to say that plainly.
What I am is a fellow traveler who has been walking long enough to have a few things worth sharing from the road. Some of what I’ve found has surprised me. Some of it has undone me in the best possible way. Some of it I’m still working out.
This blog, and the conversations it’s meant to start, is for people who are ready to move beyond survival. Who have done the initial work, or are doing it, and are beginning to sense that there’s more. More depth. More aliveness. More of what can only be called meaning, even if that word still feels a little slippery.
We’re not going to talk about spiritual life as a reward for staying clean. We’re going to talk about it as the reason to stay clean and more than that, as the texture of the life that becomes possible.
We’ll draw from the 12-Steps because so many recovery programs use them. We’ll also draw from other recovery traditions like Celebrate Recovery, Recovery Dharma, and SMART recovery because a lot of people are finding those ways to be helpful as well. And, we’ll draw from the mystics. From the Christian contemplative tradition and from Buddhism and Taoism and Stoicism because truth is always showing up in unexpected places, and we need all the light we can get.
We’ll talk about silence and about shadows. About the self we built to survive and the self that was there all along. About what it means to actually inhabit your own life.
And we’ll do it, I hope, as people who are honest about not having arrived. Because that’s the only kind of spiritual conversation worth having.
The Conversation
I drove out of that parking lot and kept pretending for a lot longer. The pretending was getting heavier. The distance between who I was performing and who I actually was had become impossible to keep crossing alone.
Recovery didn’t close that distance overnight. But it gave me enough stillness to finally see how far apart they’d gotten. And somewhere along the way I had a morning where I sat in silence without dreading my own company. Nothing dramatic happened. No vision, no voice, no moment I could point to. Just a quiet that felt, for the first time, like it belonged to me.
That’s where this whole conversation starts. Not at the bottom. Not at the breakthrough. Right there, in the ordinary silence.
What was the moment you first sensed that recovery might be pointing toward something more than just being clean?
July 1, 2026
Being a Channel for Peace
Most of us, at some point, have wanted to be someone who brings calm into a room rather than friction. Someone who, when tension rises, doesn’t add to it. Someone who makes the air a little more breathable just by being present.
The Peace Prayer puts it plainly: Make me a channel of your peace. A channel doesn’t generate what flows through it, but stays open enough to let it pass. That image is beautiful because a channel doesn’t force anything. It just remains clear.
The work of becoming that kind of person begins inside. Not because inner work is more important than what we do in the world, but because what we carry within us is what we bring into every room we enter. We can’t consistently offer calm we don’t have. We can’t reliably extend patience we’ve never practiced. The outer life tends to reflect the inner one, whether we intend it to or not.
Looking at Ourselves
So the first practice is simply paying attention to ourselves.
- What triggers you?
- What do you tend to avoid?
- What do you carry from old wounds into new situations?
Meditation, quiet reflection, and honest writing are keys to this kind of work. They’re how we begin to see what’s actually running beneath the surface. Once we can see it, we have at least a little more choice about what we do with it.
Part of that work is learning to be gentle with ourselves when we fall short. Forgiveness isn’t only something we extend to others. Forgiveness has to start closer to home. The person who is chronically hard on themselves rarely manages to be genuinely kind to others because there isn’t enough left over. Self-compassion isn’t softness. It’s the ground from which real care for other people grows.
From there, the work moves outward. It starts with the people directly in front of us.
Learning to Listen
One of the most quietly powerful things we can offer another person is to actually listen. Not to wait for our turn to speak, not to compose our response while they’re still mid-sentence, but to hear them. This is one of the biggest areas where I fall short. I get in a hurry and want to respond or say something funny instead of listening to the other person.
The truth is that most of us were never taught to actually listen. But there’s something in the experience of being genuinely heard without judgment or interruption that can move a relationship to a new level. It can make a person feel less alone in the middle of a difficulty, which is no small thing.
Dealing With Conflict
When conflict arises, the temptation is to win it or flee from it. But there’s a third option: to stay present and curious. To ask genuinely what the other person is trying to say beneath what they’re saying. Look for the place where your concern and theirs aren’t as far apart as the argument makes them seem. This doesn’t mean we abandon what we believe. It means we hold it in a way that leaves room for the other person to be a full human being too.
And if the conflict goes too far, forgiveness comes in. Forgiveness isn’t pretending that the harm didn’t happen. It’s more like setting down a weight we’ve been carrying. Letting go of a perceived slight frees us to see the other person’s side of the issue. If we ask what part did I play, we understand that to have conflict requires two parties at least. We can release it, not because it doesn’t matter, but because we do, and because resentment is expensive to our thoughts and our well being.
What Peace Looks Like
None of this stays contained to our closest relationships. What we practice in private and in our immediate circles ripples outward in ways we rarely track. The conversation we had that helped someone feel less alone. The moment we chose not to escalate. The small act of kindness that interrupted a hard day for someone we may never see again. We contribute to something larger than ourselves not through grand gestures, but through the small quiet choices made in ordinary moments in our families, our workplaces, our neighborhoods.
Being a channel for peace isn’t a destination we arrive at and maintain. It’s a direction we keep choosing. We will miss the mark. We’ll react when we meant to respond. We’ll close when we meant to stay open. That isn’t failure it’s the work of becoming aware.
The only question is whether we keep returning to it.
God, make me an channel of your peace:
where there is hatred, may I bring love;
where there is wrong, may I bring a spirit of forgiveness;
where there is discord, may I bring harmony;
where there is error, may I bring truth;
where there is doubt, may I bring faith;
where there is despair, may I bring hope;
where there is shadows, may I bring light;
where there is sadness, may I bring joy.
God, grant that I may seek to comfort, than to be comforted,
to understand than to be understood,
to love, than to be loved.
For it is self-forgetting, that one finds.
It is forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying to self that we are awakened to eternal life.
June 24, 2026
Surrender to Win
There was something I held onto for a long time. You may have your own version of it, so naming it might make this feel like my story instead of the thing underneath our stories. What I’ll say is this: I knew, for years, that I needed to let it go. I could explain why. I had walked through the reasons in prayer, in journals, in conversations with people I trusted. I understood surrender the way you understand a foreign language after learning it from Duolingo. Technically, you can speak it, but you’re not able to explain it.
The problem with surrender is that you can talk about it indefinitely while doing the opposite. I became quite fluent in the language of letting go.
Anthony DeMello has a line about how most people don’t want to wake up they want to dream about waking up. That landed pretty hard for me the first time I read it. Because that was exactly what I was doing. I was dreaming about surrender. Building a comfortable, well-furnished relationship with the concept of it. I said I wanted to wake up, but did I?
Holding on doesn’t always look like clenching. Sometimes it looks like understanding. Sometimes it looks like being articulate about your problem. Sometimes it looks like explaining it to other people while you keep doing it.
The Phrase That Never Quite Made Sense
Surrender to win is a recovery slogan. I heard it early in recovery and it struck me as the kind of thing that sounds profound until you try to do it, at which point it reveals itself to be essentially impossible. Surrender to win. It’s a paradox, and paradoxes are easy to appreciate from a distance.
What nobody told me, or maybe they did and I couldn’t hear it yet, is that surrender isn’t a decision you make. It’s a discovery like waking up. You don’t decide to stop fighting. You discover that you’ve been fighting something that was never going to lose, and the realization arrives not with fanfare but with a particular kind of tired.
What That Season Looked Like
There was a particular season somewhere in the middle of years that had already been teaching me things I hadn’t signed up to learn when I started noticing how much of my interior life was organized around something I couldn’t change. Not the dramatic varieties of uncontrollability. The quiet kind. The story I kept rehearsing. The conversation I kept having in my head. The outcome I kept trying to secure through the force of wanting it hard enough.
I was showing up to that inner argument every day. Like a second job.
If you look at any 12-Step program, their first step doesn’t say try harder. It talks about powerlessness and a life that had become unmanageable. It’s not describing the thing itself, the obvious problem that brought someone through the door. That the same language might apply to something quieter: what happens inside when reality doesn’t cooperate with your preferences. Everyone is powerless over something. Powerless over the outcome. Powerless over other people’s choices. Powerless, eventually, over the story you keep telling yourself about all of it. That’s a more unsettling version of the same idea. And probably the more important one.
When Something Loosened
I don’t remember the exact moment it shifted. That might be the most honest thing I can say about any of this.
I was expecting a door. A definite before and after. What I got was more like a slow loosening. The grip becoming gradually less my main occupation. Less the thing I woke up thinking about.
DeMello talks about awareness as something that does the work for you. Not that you force a transformation, but that you see clearly, and the seeing is what transforms. I used to find that frustrating. It sounded like spiritual advice for people whose problems weren’t real problems. But somewhere in that season I started to understand what he meant. Not because I had achieved clarity. Because I had gotten tired enough of the alternative.
There’s something to be said for exhaustion as a spiritual teacher. Nobody writes about it because it’s not inspiring, but sometimes the bottom of a long effort is the first place you can actually see from.
It’s Not a Technique
I want to be careful here, because this is where it gets slippery. The temptation, once you’ve lived through something that resembles surrender, is to make it into a method. A sequence. Here’s what it feels like, here’s how you know it’s working.
I have done this. I have described surrender to other people as if it were something transferable, something you could hand over wrapped and ready.
It isn’t.
In her book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware puts it this way,
It was at that point, as I watched the high tide wash back out, that I remembered the importance of surrender, of letting go and allowing nature to weave its magic. The same force that balances the flow of the tides, the force that sees seasons come and go and creates life, was surely capable of bringing the opportunity to me I needed. I had to let go first. Trying to control the timing and outcome was a terrible waste of energy. My intentions were already out there and I had taken what action I could. My only job now was to get out of the way.
Winning is a Byproduct?
You don’t really surrender to win because winning is the point. Most spiritual teachers will tell you this. The winning comes as a byproduct and only after you’ve genuinely stopped trying to win. That order matters more than it looks like it does. The winning is almost beside the point. What you get isn’t victory in the sense you were originally after. It’s something quieter. A little more room. A slightly looser relationship with outcomes. A reduction in the background noise of wanting things to be different than they are.
That’s not a small thing. After enough years of the alternative, it’s quite a lot.
I still hold on to things. I want to be honest about that. There are still arguments I rehearse, futures I try to secure, stories I prefer over reality. The difference is that I notice it faster now. And sometimes, just noticing is enough.
That’s closer to what DeMello was pointing at. Not a victory you achieve. A waking up you keep doing.
June 20, 2026