How do you rise up again beneath the ash-heap of decisions — good and bad — that have, over years, shaped their own dough, and slice by slice dish up to you the yeast and the synergy of this self-made plot? The place where decisions are stored away does not work by the cleverness of a pre-programmed algorithm; it measures with fine accuracy even the smallest intention flickering about inside your chemical disposition. And it is precisely here — at intention — that you have to trip yourself up, to illuminate the arbitrary and the reflex out of your story (things that make of you a bystander) and replace that dynamic with a demonstration of will-power (just remember: without enough sleep, blood sugar or calm, will-power is weak). This means the developing of an awareness that keeps watch, with intention, over every thought you formulate and every feeling you send out.

No one can sabotage us the way we sabotage ourselves. How do you detox the invisible tissue in your soul, where habits and decisions are formed, so as to reconcile the person you have become with the person you are meant to be? It is difficult to operate on yourself.

Our bloodstream knows instinctively how to keep our body healthy: red cells feed and deliver oxygen, and white cells clean and fight. Our spirit also knows how to move away from what is poisonous and nearer to what is nourishing. A humble disposition that lets God walk through the walls of the heart and move hand in hand with Him, place by place, through our spiritual terrain, will know where and when to throw out what. And so spiritual growth becomes the throwing away of everything that steals our value — and the road back to ourselves.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer