Choosing Soul Recovery and Healing Yourself is How You Help Others

Are you overwhelmed with the feelings of wanting to help and fix the people and even the world around you?  It is painful to see others caught up in behaviors or emotions that are hurting them and so our first instinct is to jump into action and try to 'fix it'.  In Soul Recovery, we are learning that the greatest way you can make change in the world, is by choosing your own healing.  When we take the focus off of changing  them, we can put our focus on the only place where we really have any control- in healing our own hearts and souls.  When we remember our wholeness and interact with the world from this place, we are able to help from a healthy state of mind and soul, allowing others to have their own experiences and choosing their own path.
 
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. This is a drop in support group where we can come together to explore, connect and support each other on our Soul Recovery journey.  Visit the website to register and receive the meeting invite.  Free to attend and donations appreciated.

Ready for a weekend of Soul Recovery, deep healing and Transformation?!?!?! Join Rev Rachel on June 8th and 9th in Lafayette Colorado for 2 full days of teachings, meditation, group work, journaling, connection and sound healing and Soul Recovery with others in the community.  Use  this coupon code at check out for $50 off!  RYSJUNERETREAT$50 

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: 0:49

Maybe you've stumbled on this podcast because you've come looking for a way to help the people in your lives. How do I help somebody who has an addiction? How do I help somebody who's going through depression? How do I show up in ways to make their lives better? And these are really important questions and are heavy on our hearts. But when you walk through the doors of Soul Recovery, what you find is that healing yourself is how you can help and be of a light that will help others find healing in their own lives. This is the path of Soul recovery. This episode is around learning how to truly understand and see that your own healing is indeed the greatest gift that you can give to the people around you. Enjoy the episode.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 1:40

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 interchange and healing Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to Recover your Soul. I'm Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I hope it's a beautiful day for you, wherever you are in the world, and that these podcasts are helping you on your Soul Recovery journey to find that inner strength within yourself to be able to let go of the people around you and their dysfunction, their life, their choices, and turning the attention to yourself and your own healing and your own happiness, choosing happiness for yourself, choosing to live a life that is free from the suffering of others. It isn't easy. It isn't an easy thing to do to turn to yourself and choose yourself, and so for today's episode, I wanted to touch on a subject that hits both one of my main beliefs in Soul Recovery that our own healing, our choice to be in our own journey, is the best way that we can actually help others in our life, because I think it also hits on one of the other topics that was mentioned as something to more hear about from one of the community members off of the Facebook page, and that question is how do we detach with love, how do we allow other people to be where they're at, how do we continue to do this detachment where we're seeing the people around us struggle and we are going to choose ourselves?

Rev Rachel Harrison: 4:00

One of the reasons why I think it's so important to come into this part of ourselves is because most of us have gotten to this podcast, because we're trying to figure out how to handle the pain that we feel around someone else's life, someone else's choices, someone else's discomfort. Maybe you have someone who's an addict. Maybe you have a life where you grew up with a dysfunctional family. Maybe you're living with somebody who is experiencing mental health issues. Maybe you have family members who are having mental health issues. You're looking at this world around you, this very immediate world around you, and you're being impacted by the energy of somebody else, by the choices of somebody else. It can feel like it's your responsibility to take on those energies, those emotions, those circumstances within their life.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 5:03

And if you have listened to any of the podcasts for the last four seasons now we're in our fifth season you know that I expended so much time and energy in trying to help and fix and be responsible for everything around me, and I did that so that if they could be okay, I could be okay. If they were okay, then I could relax. And I think that one of the things that we do is we give our power away by saying I need you to be okay, I need the situation at work to be better, I need the political situation to be better, I need the world's situation to be better for me to actually be okay. When we do that, what we're doing is we're giving every ounce of our power to something outside of ourself. Everybody teaches us to bring it back within, to turn within. That we can indeed handle what's happening on the outside if we have more tenacity, more inner strength, more capacity to hold the uncomfort, the discomfort, the dis-ease of the world with the people around us, if we are more intact within ourselves. And so it's a shift in Soul Recovery to turn the attention to ourselves and our own healing. Now, how do you help the world, how do you show up from a Soul Recovery perspective, for others to be, for others to do, for others to help make change in the world? And the answer is you heal yourself, you bring healing to yourself, you put your focus on yourself, and we've done episodes on this, but I really want to come back to it again at the beginning of this season because this is a transformational year for us In Soul Recovery.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 7:03

For the fifth season in this community, we are making a commitment to do the Soul Recovery work, to have a transformation in our lives that allows us to be at ease and to be at peace, regardless of what's happening around us. And to choose ourselves feels selfish. It feels like there's something wrong with us. If we're going to actually put our oxygen mask on ourselves, if we're going to stop having somebody shove us down when we're trying to save them and we're the ones underwater we can't breathe, we are going to make a different choice and it isn't selfish. It's actually one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself and that you can give the people around you is to allow yourself to be your first priority. In your experience, I did a social media post in the first day of the year and what it offered was if we can live by three habits, the first habit being that we put our self first, especially our spiritual life first, and the second being that we create a spiritual practice in our life. And the third being that we let everyone else and everything else go, that we stop trying to control everything in the world. If we can follow these three principles, three practices in our daily life, there will be incredible transformation. And these are the foundational pieces of us learning how to turn to ourselves, learning how to choose our self.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 8:52

First, I was raised and again we're in the fifth season, so we're going to be repeating stories and if you've heard these stories, I hope that you can always pick up a different nuance if you've heard them before. And if you haven't heard them, welcome to my life. Here's Rachel sharing everything about herself. I was raised to learn very early on how to be a good girl for others, that that wasn't put on me. I didn't have demanding parents who yelled at me and made me feel small or made me feel like I was there to be subservient to them. In my psyche, as a very young girl, what I learned very early on was I got rewarded for being good and I got rewarded for putting other people's needs first, that there was something beneficial in the situations if I just went along with or if I didn't demand too much attention. I knew early to not need or want too much. And when we recognize how much energy our younger selves have put into being present for others before we're present for ourselves. Then we start to see the patterns that were built, the highways that were built for our neuron paths to run, the way that we've learned how to be in the world. This concept of actually asking for what you need or putting your own emotional needs first or your spiritual life first is incredibly counterintuitive to our entire foundation of a lifetime, of how we are in relationships.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 10:46

I also chose a husband and a family that aligned with this system and created and helped to create a system in which I was the one who did everything, was in charge of, created the organization of, took care of everything. I made that. I made that because it was comfortable. I made that because it was the map of which my entire life had been, and I think the funny thing is that then we get mad about it, right, like then at some point. We wake up one day and we say I'm doing everything. This is crap. I can't believe that you guys can't do any of these things for yourself. I can't believe that you don't do your own laundry or clean your own rooms or organize your own stuff or know how to do all these things. Well, who set it up for them? I did. I set it up for them that way because I was taught not from punishment but from survival, that this was acceptable in the way to do things, that saving them is the first priority.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 12:02

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 www. recoveryyoursoul. net 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.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 13:01

My mom and dad are these lovely, wonderful human beings who loved me so much, but they both were very independent. They were both very independent and had very strong drives of what they wanted in their life and the truth was having kids was not in the picture, that they hadn't thought to themselves oh, I want to have a family and I want to create this whole life of kids. But they were these very interesting, independent people back in the late 60s that found each other early beatniks, interested in the new paradigm of thinking and the getting out of the norms. And my mom actually said to my dad when she met him and they fell in love immediately and knew that they wanted to do this journey together and she said I will never iron your shirts and I don't want children. And he said okay, and they went off and moved to St Louis and ran a coffee shop and my dad became a musician. And then they moved to New Mexico, the land of milk and honey and this concept that you could have a hippie life in this free place and had no concept or desire to be family people.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 14:26

And the story is that they were in the mountains of New Mexico, maybe on hallucinogenics, I don't know. One of the stories say that they are and sometimes they say that they weren't, but they were doing that kind of thing at the time. But the story is that they were in New Mexico looking out over the stars one night and they both got this strong feeling that a soul was to come to them, that they were to receive this soul. It's a pretty powerful story, right? Neither one of them were thinking we want kids neither one of them but they were willing to listen to this message that they received to have me, and so they got pregnant with me and were more than happy to have me. And my mom says on such a regular basis I didn't want kids, but I was so grateful to have you, to have you in my life.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 15:22

The part of what that created was that I just was part of their lives. I was never treated like a kid who the world surrounded around. I was learned very early on that I just went along with whatever the grownups were doing and it was around what they wanted and it was around whatever was interesting to them to do in their lives. Now, what's interesting in this conversation is this is them putting themselves first, and I've had a lot of healing around the woundedness that I felt at some point in my life. That said, I never got to be the center of attention. I didn't get this childhood experience that you see some other children getting. I just had to be somebody who participated with what the grownups were doing, and whatever my mom wanted or whatever my dad wanted was the first priority.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 16:20

Now here we are saying put yourself first. And I was raised by people who put themselves first. So if we look at the expectations and we look at each of us as being here on some journey that is uniquely our own, brought in to have the experience with family members that are uniquely their own, and we stop believing that there's some fairy tale, that there's some formula, that there's some way that it is quote unquote supposed to be, and start looking at our lives from a bigger perspective of what is my soul to learn here. I actually was raised by people who on their best day now there was some parts of it that were not was the best day, but on their best day demonstrated the ability to truly be who they were. My response, my reflection as a child was around mirroring and accommodating for those behaviors. They never demanded that of me.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:30

I learned that all on my own and here I am, on the brink of my 54th birthday, able to see for the first time these last couple of years of doing my Soul Recovery work, the learning that I can get from this, that I can see how I became who I am here and now, and attend to the parts of me, the younger parts of me, that created belief systems such as what you need is more important than what I need. No one ever told me that I create that on my own, and I'm here to invite you to do the same. How do you begin to look at what you need first, instead of what everybody else needs? Now, there's so much balance that's needed here, because it isn't about being dominating or not accounting what other people need in this situation, or just throwing everybody else to the wind and saying you got to figure it out for yourself and I'm going to do what I want and you guys will just have to suffer.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 18:35

It's not about that. What it's about is it's starting to look at these elements of how do we show up in every situation in our life, making sure that we can be balanced, that we can show up in our wholeness and allow other people to be in their experience, detaching from the need to save them, detaching from the need to fix it for them, detaching from the need to make it not be so hard for them, make them happy. Detaching from the need to make them happy and looking at this concept that says, if I heal myself, if I attend to myself, then I can better show up in everybody else's life in a way that will allow them to have their most true experience and generally reflection of being better. And what we end up doing when we start to really do this work for ourselves is we drop all the pain and grievance and anger and carrying forward all the past and the hurt and the resentments that we've been carrying with us and we clean up the relationships so that what's real shows up more, that we can actually be in it in a way that sees it for exactly what it is and sometimes what.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 20:12

Exactly what it is is that that person is having a hard time and is making choices for themselves, that they need to have the consequences for they need to have the life's experience, they need to have the life's learning, that their soul needs to learn what that is, and that we stop trying to fix it, be it for them, change it for them, and we just hold space for them. So this putting yourself first and healing ourself, not from a leaving everybody else behind, but from this perspective that says my soul's journey, my experience here on this planet, in this body, is uniquely mine to start to make choices for myself that align to the truth of who I am, my higher self, and then I can start to let go of the need of everybody else to feedback loop for me. What those younger beliefs were, whatever they are and we all have them, we all have them and some of them are really destructive and some of them have created a critic within us that is loud and mean and cold, and we're starting to look at how do I heal that part of the voice that speaks to me, that wants to tell me that I'm not enough, that wants to keep me small, that wants to tell me that I have to take care of that, I have to fix, that I am responsible for others, that I'm not lovable, that I can't do it. That's the voice we want to heal. That's the part of us that is our responsibility and our obligation in this experience of life, to understand why it's speaking to you like that and to begin to put yourself first and to realize that those words, those messages are not true. They're just fear. There are people in our lives who are experiencing great difficulty and if you don't have someone directly in your life, just turn on the news. Just turn on the news and see what's happening in your city, in your state, in your country and in the world. And there is difficulty everywhere.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 22:52

I recently was listening to a spiritual channel, which you can take or leave, whether you believe any of that stuff or not, and what I thought was really powerful was a New Year's Day message and what the channel was sharing was that the message is the way to heal the world literally the world is to stop paying attention to that, to stop clinging to what isn't working and why it isn't working and being angry about it, and to heal your heart and choose love within yourself. The more that we open to our own healing and our own love and our own wholeness and our own connection to our higher power that is indeed there whispering in our ears what is true and right and good for us, the more that we actually choose to not be in resentment and in anger and in attack, and the more that we do that in our microcosm, the more that it spreads out into the world. And what it also offered was that we can't understand what situations have been happening for a long time within those energies that create what is happening in that country, in that situation of government, in that situation of the country or of the world. And what I really found profound about that is that if we look at that and we bring it into our family and we say these dynamics that have been happening within our family generally go back generations.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 24:38

If you had alcoholism and your family growing up, those patterns, those ways of being, those lessons and belief systems have been handed down from generation to generation to generation and literally your choosing, healing and your lifetime will radically affect change for generations to come around, how people interact with each other, how people see each other, how people communicate with each other. You are actually making change that will benefit generations by choosing a spiritual path, by choosing yourself, by choosing to let go of all these old, painful, difficult ways of thinking, feeling and believing, and how you interact with the people in your immediate family and in your job and in the world and out from there. It's the butterfly effect. So when we look at the news, we want to cling to aggression, we want to cling to who's right and who's wrong, and when we look at our family, we want to make it be different.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 25:56

But this detachment that we practice in Soul Recovery is around opening your heart and allowing it to be as it is and believing with some definitive knowing that the universe is participating in all of it and that our free will that we have is the only place that we can control within ourselves, that we have the ability to have free will but we can begin to open to this concept that our free will can move us towards healing, that we can use that free will to move out of these old family patterns, out of these old beliefs, and that we can stand in our individuality, that we can stand in the truth of who we are. And with that I look back on how I was raised, with these parents who are very interesting individuals, who have demonstrated to me how to truly be yourself and how to stand in who that is, with authenticity and love, and some of it I really connect with. And I still have issues with that younger part of myself, with both of my parents. That is mine. That is mine that I continue to work on. But now I can let go of the parts of it that want to hold on to something that says I didn't get what I needed or it wasn't the way that I thought I wanted it to be.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 27:31

And I can recognize that those ways that I interacted with my mind and my beliefs and how I saw the world and the stories that I made up helped create the life that I've created for myself, the patterns that I've created for myself, the way that I showed up in my family, the way that I taught them how to be, the way that I taught them how to treat me, the way that I taught them how family dynamics are and some of that wasn't all that great. So here I am in this part of my life radically changing how I show up in everything and choosing myself from this place of strength and vulnerability and awareness that is kind to everyone around me but isn't codependent. That is mindful of how I can affect the people around me but I don't lose myself. That chooses what I need and asks for what I need but doesn't demand that for me to be okay. It's a slow and steady process and as I do this, every relationship in my life has changed, every interaction that I have feels different and my relationship with my parents is very good and I just did the episode around my dad and his cancer and I can see us for exactly who we are and I can love us for exactly who we are, and my relationship with my mother continues to blossom and grow and just have such gratitude for her in my life. And my relationship with my husband is so much better than it used to be, and all of these relationships oftentimes still include complexity. It isn't that they don't continue being human. It's that I see them, feel them, participate in them in a different way, and through that, my children are witnessing a human being that is now giving them better tools to be able to live their life that doesn't include some of the painful dysfunction that I was helping to create, and from that they get to choose. They get to choose and they get to learn and they get to grow. Just like I'm choosing to learn and to grow at this part in my life right now, and so are you right now.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 30:10

I always like to offer that I'm here for coaching at any time that you want to work through any of these things or if you want to do the nine steps of Soul Recovery with me to have this year of transformation. I'm currently working on doing some videos. They call them courses I don't really like the word courses but some ability for you to work the steps with me through a video process so that you have that feeling of the one on one in your own time. I know that many of you in my work schedule, the coaching, just doesn't work because of your life schedule, so I want to be able to provide you with that support, regardless of where you are, what your schedules are. So keep an eye out for that. We're doing this together. We're having a year of transformation. Healing yourself first is the way to help and heal others in your life and even the world.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 31:08

Until next time, namaste, thank you for listening to the Recovery 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: 32:06

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 www. soulrecovery. net website . Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.