It’s Sunday, and my body, heart, and soul will tell me that I should participate in a ritual that represents organized religion, but the defiance is potent and persuasive.

Instead, I took part in a twelve-step narcotics meeting that started with a breakfast club of everyone sharing sentiments of gratitude for being alive. A five-minute meditation followed to help quiet the mind and settle in for the meeting. Then there was a fifteen-minute share from a speaker, winding down with thirty minutes for shares of 4 minutes each from a platform sometimes greater than five hundred people, so the variety of claims were plenteous. This regiment represents a ritual per se, but one of personal growth, based on an individual’s desire for healing, yielding no guilt and shame from expectations or lack of a particular dogma. The fellowship is tender that allows me to connect spiritually with the universe while listening to and hearing people from all walks of life worldwide.

Defiance doesn’t necessarily mean a negative thing. Still, it can indicate a desire to improve those things that better my life and push out those things that weaken my ability to be the wholesome person that I’m capable of being.

Thank you, sweet spirit of the universe, for guiding, holding, supporting, and nudging me toward betterment for society. My love for life is a boldness that I welcome. I have to stay in action to recover from a dis-ease that wants to tell me that I am less than and don’t belong when I know that I do. The lie that wants me to be disobedient for the love of life, but that lie is dead, and I can recover when I show up for life and participate in my recovery—for that, I am upmost grateful.