OprAh Gives a Shout to OA…

…Well, not Oprah herself but Oprah.com has a great article contributed by an OA member. The article originally appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine and has been given new life online.

Here’s the opening paragraph. Follow the link for the rest of the story…

Overeaters Anonymous: One Food Addict’s Spiritual Cure

I thought of the hundreds of times I’d sat in a restaurant so locked into a basket of bread that Jesus himself could have sat down beside me and I would not have noticed. How available could I have been to other people at the table? Did I have anything to offer my family and friends? The underlying suffering of all addiction is self-centeredness, but unlike garden-variety egocentricity, addiction guarantees an unrelieved isolation. At every turn, need is confused with love. Need replaces love, obscures it, and manipulates it. And, as the wisdom traditions tell us—in one way or another—Love is God. This is the all-encompassing love of unconditional acceptance, and the radical vision of 12-step work is that this unconditional acceptance can be, and in fact is, realized by drunks and drug and food addicts sharing their stories and listening with open—and broken—hearts. For many members, the meetings themselves represent higher power; for others, the communion established by stories shared with raw honesty testifies to God’s presence and blessing.

— Read the rest of this OAs story at Oprah.com —

 :: Disclaimer ::

Oprah.com and O, the Oprah Magazine are commercial enterprises which Overeaters Anonymous, in keeping with the 12 Traditions of OA, neither endorse or support.