“Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Spiritual principle: Open-Mindedness
Open-mindedness means opening my mind and inner awareness to possibilities beyond my personal limited imagination, creativity and intelligence. Whatever this power greater than myself is, it is not defined in this step; we need only be open to possibilities. Many of us are confronted here with The Great Wall of UGH. In this society there are a quinbillion different roadblocks to belief in a higher power. These mental and emotional blockages can seem insurmountable at first, but with a little bit of reflection and the spiritual principle of open-mindedness, I can step my way safely into the sunlight with surprisingly little resistance.
I was told that eventually I will need to define what is meant by a "power greater than me." I don’t necessarily think so; I think I needed to undefine it for myself. Source, what some people call God or Higher Power, cannot be confined to my limited mind. I need only be open, though, which means willing to change. I must be careful not to fall into the deadly trap of waiting to be absolutely certain I can conceptualize and define in detail my higher power. If I am expecting certainty, I will be waiting for a long time--probably long enough to get drunk again. I don't need to be certain, I simply need to be amenable to being shown the way, which means listening without judgment. Perhaps the more appropriate term for this spiritual principle is open-hearted, not open-minded, as I need to feel my way through this process more than think my way through it. If I am in AA, chances are I didn’t get here because my thinking and reasoning have a stellar track record; this doesn't mean my mental faculties are all garbage, though. I need my wits to stay sober, but first I need to train my mind to be able to discern. I must be able and willing to see things as they truly are. But how can I do this when I never had the power to do so before? The answer is in this very important step, which has been called in AA literature the "rallying point to sanity."
Sooner or later I understood that in order to believe in a power greater than me, I also needed to deconstruct my perception of the word 'belief' and build up a definition that works for me. The idea of belief as it relates to spiritual principles may have uncomfortable associations for many of us. So we need to define belief for ourselves. I asked myself How am I going to choose to believe? How is my belief going to be genuine to me? It is possible that if I read the AA literature and form my own conception of a God or Higher Power, I may be concerned at some point that I am merely using my imagination to gain a tenuous purchase on spirituality, and thus my grasp on sobriety will be flimsy. Yet my imagination is the creative, connected aspect of my mind, and my mind houses a lot more than I can consciously call to memory or articulate in my waking hours. From this vast storehouse dreams are born, and as Joseph Campbell once said, dreams and myths come from the same place. If I approach my own creative imagination with the honest intention behind the spiritual principle at play in this step, I will not be off the mark.
Part of the open-mindedness required in this step is to make myself open to the unknown, accepting that my alcohol-addled brain cannot fully serve my mind in the early stages of recovery. I have already admitted to lack of power. This is the fundamental problem that I am addressing in Step 2; I cannot address it through defiance. Making myself open to the process of change and growth is vital. With the human ignorance I am born with and lived with and drank with, I shattered the perfect image or representation of my connection with Source.
Imagine this image of a Higher Power as a crystal sculpture; it represents belief or inherent awareness of this spiritual connection I have and have always had, whether I’ve been ignorant of it or not. In recovery, at Step 2 in fact, I can wake up to the fact that this glass sculpture is lying in shards at my feet. The rest of this process is about picking up each piece I can find, examining myself through it, turning my gaze inward, and then fixing these pieces together to form my own representation of the whole. It will never be perfect or complete, but from this perfect sculpture I may someday piece together a stained glass window through which I can, during times that I choose to, glimpse enough truth and beauty to understand that love is what's left when I let go of everything I don't need. Love is what I was looking for in the first and last place I drank, and what I sought out every time I put a bottle to my lips.
The third thing that begs defining (or redefining) in this step is sanity, the antonym of which is often defined in AA meetings as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. Presumably, if I am at Step 2, I have already copped to this in Step 1, so it shouldn't be too bitter a pill at this point. And yet it is, for many. There is often the residual fear that if I accept AA's version of insanity, I am admitting I am a crazy alcoholic. Ego tries to lift its head here, disguised as thoughts of what others might think or perceive of me joining this mysterious cult of weirdos that hang out in musty church basements. We have assumed for so long that we do not fit here or there because we have feelings of "not fitting in," which is one of the great many things we eventually come to understand we all have in common. My ego tells me that while AA (which is at its core a fellowship to help people practice the 12 steps) might work for some, it certainly won't work for me; I am different, after all. My situation and circumstances and background are special. If I am unable to break out of this egoistic thinking, this is what is known in recovery parlance as "terminal uniqueness."
"Whatever you do, don't go to AA, man," a friend warned me when I told him I was checking myself into a 28-day rehab in September, 2001, "That's like going to church! They'll change you." At that point, thankfully, I had had enough humiliation and suffering to grasp enough humility to understand that I needed to change, whether I wanted to or not.
Go to an AA meeting and look around; when people start to speak watch what happens to the energy in the room and to people's faces as one alcoholic after another shares their experience, strength and hope. There is a higher power at work--something is at work in these rooms as the faces of the powerless and insane soften and regain colour, their eyes brighten, and they gather confidence and even laugh at the misfortunes which not too long ago plagued them with anxiety and merciless depression.
A power greater than myself is a power greater than my personality, something bigger than the persona I have settled into and come to ignorantly think of as my whole being on this one plane of existence. The truth is that I start to get healthy when the 12 steps strap me in for the long internal journey. It is a revelation to one day understand that my God, as mysterious as God has been to me, has infused my entire being since forever, and that there was never any division between me and Source or me and others—the division was only in my mind, and grew wider and wider until I couldn't come to any sort of grace through my own efforts.
But in early recovery it hardly matters how or why it works. I just have to believe that something related to this process will work for me. Getting caught up with the gritty, granular details of higher energy and how it works in early recovery can be deadly. As the Buddha said, "Suppose a man were wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and companions brought a surgeon to treat him. The man would say: 'I will not let the surgeon pull out the arrow until I know the name and clan of the man who wounded me; whether the bow that wounded me was a long bow or a cross bow; whether the arrow that wounded me hoof-tipped or curved or barbed." All this would still not be known to that man and meanwhile he would die."
Didn't I make alcohol my higher power? Wasn't it capable of changing me from my true nature? It tricked me into believing, over and over again, that I could control it.
The hardest part of all this, of becoming open-minded, is that it demands humility. Humility means seeing things as they really are—not as I want them to be and not as I fear them to be—and to attain humility I have to be able to park my mental habits of seeing myself as either better than or less than other human beings. We the people wander around this globe, classifying and judging and sorting all sorts of impressions, adding value to these impressions, and reinforcing the fallacious belief that we are all separate entities.
These judgmental thought patterns are ancient and deep-rooted, and it takes a profound spiritual experience (whatever shape that might inhabit; there are as many spiritual experiences as there are creatures on the earth) to lift the veil, even for a moment.
This is why we must gently, delicately, and thoroughly examine childhood trauma, and the most apt definition of trauma for recovery purposes is "anything less than nurturing," to figure out what our beliefs, feelings and judgements are in relation to the world and ourselves. We will eventually have to deconstruct all these beliefs and judgements, one by one, as well as all the assumptions that they have fertilized over the years. In recovery we can come to understand that just because we have a thought, feeling, or insight, it doesn't mean that this thought, feeling or insight has any basis in reality.
How do I do this? Just as a scientist would. I conduct an experiment, with my life being the lab. Then I need only observe and note what sort of effect it is having. Part of this is not judging my own beliefs or those of others, but simply take stock of what's in store. I don't need to employ the old habit of putting a (+) positive or (-) negative charge on everything. I need only be open to an honest stocktaking, and accept everything as it is without needing to fix it, manage it, defend it, hide it, or control it. I observe it. And when I start observing, I will very quickly realize that what I am observing, all of it, is constantly shifting, changing, moving.
In this step we are not being asked to understand or believe anything. We are asked simply to drop denial and judgement so that our minds can open to possibilities that exist. A mind full of stale beliefs has no room for grace. We must empty our minds and open to the possibility that there is an energy operating and that we can invite this energy to manifest itself in our lives. We are also not asked to believe blindly - this type of belief is useless. We are asked to open to possibility and observe and note what changes occur. We become scientists of spirituality, our wrecked lives become our laboratories, and the change that takes place is the spiritual experience that supports the theory that we can, and will, be restored to sanity. All we need is an open mind.
