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Help Yourself!

© Rev. Marie Jones

Read any good self-help books lately? You are not alone. The self-help industry is a billion-dollar baby designed to provide the planet with a panoply of spiritual and inspirational do-it-yourself books, audio and video tapes, lectures, cruises and mastery courses... all aimed at repairing our inner damaged souls.

Where traditional medicine and psychiatry leave off, the alternative world of self-help picks up and shoots off into the atmosphere with hundreds of programs, diets, formats, designs and treatments geared towards the modern seeker who likes to sit shotgun, if not in the driver's seat, of their own healing.

I love self-help books, tapes, and seminars. I see a lot of motivational speakers, read a lot of books and attend several inspirational classes each year. But I have begun to notice a whole new breed of addicts, self-helpaholics. People who are so into the self-help movement, they never progress for fear they won't have anything good to read! Self-helpaholics actually cling to their dysfunctions like identity badges, knowing that once they actually put some of what they've learned to work in their lives, they might actually get better. Then, whom will they identify themselves with? Like alcoholics who continue to claim they are in recovery, yet never have recovered, self-helpaholics are hanging on for dear life to a world made to order, a world always so full of new ideas and suggestions to try that how could you possibly stop now. A world full of striving, but never quite arriving.

Self-help is just what is says it is. Helping the self. Once you've helped yourself, be sure to move on. Evolve. Grow. You can only read the same books over and over again for so long before you have to admit to yourself that you got the message the third time 'round. Don't get so caught up in the treatment, you lose sight of the cure.

Don't be afraid to eventually put down the tapes, close the books, get up and get out there and live. Those tools will always be there if you need them. But chances are you already know all you need to know. You just forgot that you know.

And if you're still afraid, I've got plenty of good audiotapes I can lend you...

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