Devotion, Recovery and the Journey Home

Sometimes I can be really hard on myself for not being “further along” on my path. I’m doing my best, however,  to see things as they are and learn from my mistakes so I can respond differently next time.

I have been contemplating commitment, and how I often sit on the fence because I feel like once I commit,  I can’t waver or change course. It can feel all-or-nothing. If I say yes to something, I believe I need to follow through no matter what, and that pressure often keeps me from fully committing in the first place.

I’ve also been reflecting on how we, as women, self-sacrifice. We do this often with family and our work in the world. We give our energy away, and yet when it comes to committing to ourselves and something that matters to us, we can so easily step away from our own plans and priorities.

I just started reading What to Make of It All by Jim Collins, and he talks about the importance of focusing the inner fire. It leaves me wondering: How can I build something meaningful if my energy is scattered and I’m always sacrificing my own commitments? What am I teaching myself when I continually place my own work, dreams, and purpose at the bottom of the list?

These aren’t comfortable questions, but they feel like important ones.

As I’ve been reflecting on these patterns, I’ve realized there is a fine line between devotion and self-sacrifice. In Hindu mythology, Sita is often seen as the archetype goddess of unwavering devotion, yet her story also raises important questions about how much of ourselves we are willing to give away in the name of love, service, or loyalty.

For many of us on a spiritual path, the invitation is to continually refine our relationship to devotion. To ask: What am I devoted to? Am I devoted to keeping everyone else comfortable, rescuing those I love, and carrying burdens that aren’t mine? Or am I devoted to truth, healing, awakening, and the steady work of returning to my own soul?

Walking inside of the family disease of addiction for many years, has brought this question into sharp focus for me. Healing, asks us to love without abandoning ourselves. It asks us to remain devoted to doing the work of liberating ourselves from repeated patterns, it means devoting ourselves to the truth and to our own practice and lives, even when someone we love is suffering.

Perhaps addiction is, as Gabor Mate says, “the disease of the lost self” —a longing to fill the ache of separation, a search for relief from the pain of forgetting who we truly are. Beneath the substances, the compulsions, and the suffering, there may be a soul trying desperately to find its way home.

And perhaps recovery, for everyone involved, is ultimately the same journey. I feel it has been that for my family. Not a journey of fixing or saving, but a journey of remembering. Remembering who we are beneath the fear, beneath the roles, beneath the conditioning. Remembering our connection to something so much bigger than ourselves.

The challenge for those who love the addict is that we can become lost as well. We can lose ourselves in the worry, the monitoring, the rescuing, and the endless attempt to control what cannot be controlled. The spiritual path asks something different of us. It asks us to stay rooted in our own center, devoted to our own healing, and to trust that every soul has its own path back to wholeness.

Perhaps this is where true devotion lives—not in self-sacrifice, but in remaining connected to the Divine, to our own deepest truth, and to the unwavering belief that even in our darkest moments, the soul remembers the way home. The journey of awakening is realizing that you cannot save others, but we can walk beside them in love while remaining anchored in your own center. That is what I have come to know about devotion on my journey, and I’m devoted to supporting those who are ready to find their way home to themselves during life’s great initiations.