The Roots of Recovery

William Wilson, also known as Bill W., was one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), whom Life Magazine named one of the most influential men of the 20th Century. Despite his obvious accomplishments routinely suffered from bouts of personal problems and inner turmoil, despite the obvious success of the recovery movement he had helped create.

Lest we forget that prior to the advent of AA, we are told that the only places for drunkards in the advanced stages of alcoholism were jails, mental institutions, the streets…or cemeteries. But Bill W. was reportedly a chronic philanderer, even after he sobered up and his paroxysms of what can probably be termed sex addiction caused no shortage of internal discord and friction in his marriage and, one may assume, in his own mind. I’m no judge of this behaviour; I’m merely interested in what we can learn from this information

Behavioral addictions such as sex, spending, eating, gambling and working, are tougher to recognize, let alone treat, because through the activity itself, the addict’s brain is a lab manufacturing its own supply of the very thing it is craving. Wilson was also eager for publicity, and he suffered from bouts of depression, loneliness and self-doubt—not to mention a debilitating addiction to cigarettes.

This information is in no way intended to detract from the invaluable contribution Bill Wilson made to the human race but to demonstrate that he clearly didn’t know or possess sustained inner peace; if the man who more or less wrote the book on conventional 12-step recovery suffered so much mental anguish after sobering up, I put forth that it is possible that the organization’s program is possibly missing some elements required to achieve happiness, peace and serenity—at least for some seekers.

One of the greatest attributes a seeker of truth needs to possess is an objective, discriminating mind which is free from prejudice.

It appears Bill Wilson possessed this faculty and his afflictions eventually led him to dabble in the occult and various forms of mysticism, including his friendship with Aldous Huxley and experimentation with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). Wilson likened LSD to a miracle substance—and he reportedly used it regularly in a controlled therapeutic context well into the 60‘s. But we never talk about this in AA. The relevance of hallucinogens to Bill W.’s sobriety and research is not part of A.A. folklore. But denial of events that do not fit into the paradigm we have fashioned cannot help us expand our awareness.

Modern Drunkard Magazine writer Richard English even reports that Wilson, near his 70th birthday, had concocted a plan to distribute tabs of blotter to AA meetings nationwide.  Conferring with an AA historian, I have discovered that there is thankfully no factual basis in this anecdote; the notion of feeding acid to scores of insecure, often anxiety-ridden, recovery neophytes who huddled in musty church basements across the continent is, to put it mildly, alarming.

Nonetheless, no substance has been more widely tested and used in the treatment of addiction in North America than LSD and it hasn’t been without significant success. These trials were eventually published in a book by Doctors Hoffer and Osmond entitled A Cure for Alcoholism. This book is no longer in print. 

LSD didn’t help Bill W. with his depression or his cravings. There were also instances of people having psychotic reactions to the LSD. Later they pulled the plug on the LSD research, and this eventually led them to study Niacin, which was validated to be, essentially, a wonder cure for multiple ailments, including heart disease and depression. 

But there is still some basis in the research that shows hallucinogens  can be beneficial in treating addiction. This is highly relevant at a treatment centre called Takiwasi, which is located in the jungles of Peru, where French doctor Jacques Mabit works with hardcore addicts using traditional shamanic medicine, specifically Ayahuasca, that is thousands of years old. Ayahuasca, however, is stepping away from the laboratory and moving further into the mystical realm of entheogens, into the sacredness of plant consciousness itself. Mabit’s rate of success for recovery is somewhere around 80%.

When I recently travelled to Peru to take part in shamanic yoga training, I’d done my homework on the roots of recovery and the nexus between addiction and psychotropic plant medicine—but the knowledge I carried when I arrived in Cusco didn’t do much to discharge my aversion to psycho-reactive substances. I reminded myself that many of these medicines, particularly ayahuasca, are traditionally used for the treatment of addiction and while my recovery program has kept me clean and sober for over 12 years, I have not yet managed to find freedom from addictive patterns of thought and behavior, as well as depression and anxiety.

My gut urged me to delve into the experience of plant medicine with a teachable heart and to seek out the courage and support I needed to do so—not only from the competent and professional people running my training, but from my non-physical guides and teachers. Ultimately, as much as I feared and had antipathy towards letting anything perception-altering past the blood/brain barrier, I also knew intuitively that there was something in this opportunity that would assist me in becoming more adept at shifting my existential reference point to allow me to more fully experience the lessons which are, I believe, all around us.

Yet the gerbil in the wheel of my small mind kept running back to the awareness that I was more or less bucking the tradition I come from and potentially isolating myself from my own community of recovering people.

Ultimately it was worth the risk, partly because it has long confounded me why so many people recovering from addiction are trapped in grief, depression, anxiety, ignorance, subtle layers of denial, not-so-subtle judgement. So many people in recovery, myself included, engage in this navel-gazing victimization, too often re-hashing their problems and living in fear. The characterization of recovering alcoholics as chain-smoking coffee addicts who subsist on an abhorrently unhealthy diet is not far off the mark in numerous cases.

As a yoga teacher and student of yoga, I have come to understand how, after my breath, the food I put in my body is the most vital component to my health—not only my physical health but my mental and emotional health. The time for our species’ belief that these states worked independently of one another passed a long time ago.

So here it was: I wanted to know why there so many people in recovery living such unhealthy lives, treating their bodies as garbage pails, similar to how they functioned in active addiction; I also want to know how to help them.

It’s a sad but earnest truth that for every person who makes it in recovery, 20 don’t. The answer to this problem, by the members who stick around and stay sober long enough, is that the people who relapse and continue to live in misery are just not working a program. Still, more fascinating are the multitudes of men and women who stay in recovery and stay sober but require the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s) for depression and anxiety, despite theri dubious worth and effectiveness—and those who are on medication for stress, high blood pressure and for many other physical ailments, the roots of which I suspect are planted in a lingering and profound sense of disconnection.

I don’t know of any reliable statistics on the number of addicts who turn to behavioural addictions to continue the natural search for connection and inner peace but my sense of it is that the numbers are alarmingly high.

These medicines, as has been demonstrated by ancient history, as well as some avant-garde researchers, have proven extremely useful for opening a students’ or patients’ paradigm rapidly and safely. In confronting my own doubts and fears, I reminded myself that these medicines have been considered sacred since before recorded history—likely well before. They are recognized as important, legal and ethical by not only numerous governments around the world, but by the United Nations as well.

I’m not the only one. AA members need to start thinking outside the box again, fully considering the impact of these other dimensions of experience. I think that is fundamentally what Bill W. had in mind when he wrote Step 12.

Step Eleven

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

source: sharetwenty.com 

Conscious contact implies a relationship that is awake, aware, sentient. In order to make a connection with my higher power, I need to raise my consciousness to a higher level. Incidentally, this is exactly what I have been doing in Steps One through Ten. 

To raise consciousness, I need to raise my vibration. What does this mean? Well, we are space, mostly. We seem like solid flesh and bone but the actual physical matter at a subatomic level amounts to the size of a frisbee lobbed across a cathedral, except the cathedral walls aren’t there. So we are vibration, mostly. To raise this vibration at the physical level, I need to ensure I am not polluting my body. Food that is filled with genetically modified organisms, excitotoxins (such as aspartame) and neurotoxins, or food that is processed with high fructose corn syrup or unsaturated fats is going to lower my consciousness, and my thoughts and emotions are going to follow. In this way, through trial and error, I have discovered that there is a very physical component to my spirituality. In a similar vein, meditation is all but impossible if I am still nursing physical addictions, such as nicotine. I am too distracted at a cellular level with the cravings that send my thoughts stampeding through my mind like wild horses. 

I can say without hesitation that I didn’t really move into recovery until I quit smoking.

Knowledge of God’s Will For Us

What does it truly mean to be asking for knowledge of God’s will for me? This is a tough proposition to nail down considering that there are as many different understandings of a higher power as there are AA members. I know one thing for certain: I can’t be open to receiving this knowledge if I am holding on to a fixed idea of what God’s will is. Generally speaking, this knowledge is a highly a personal odyssey—not a standard recipe of somewhat bogus self-sacrifice in the name of service to others. God’s will for me is my true will in alignment with the spiritual principles that resonate with me. It is right place in the universe at the right time. 

Between Steps 3 and 11 is a Quantum Leap

I can’t improve my conscious contact if I’m being inauthentic, and I cannot possibly be authentic if I am holding on to a one-sided man-made idea about what it means to be spiritual. Whereas Step 3 can often represent a leap into the belly of the whale on blind faith, Step 11 is a step forward into ultra-conscious awareness.

Some of the teachings in AA appear to have the clear intention of supressing, controlling, or subordinating the individual will. My own experience has demonstrated to me how guilt and denial of my own will is what caused enough discomfort to make me seek out booze as a solution in the first place.

It is not my individual will that is the problem, it’s the misalignment of my will with natural divine order caused principally by ignoring my deep-rooted need to move my own feelings. These are important considerations and observations to make non-judgmentally as I move forward into a genuine surrender, a surrender to reality as it is—not just in my left brain, but as it is emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. This process of observing with equanimity is sometimes called meditation.

I’ve taken many courses and tried many styles to find out that there is nothing overly technical or fancy about meditation, which ultimately consists of observing various phenomenon—breath, physical sensations, emotional or mental fluctuations—objectively, without reacting to whatever might crop up. Meditation is essentially an engagement in a choiceless observation without wishing that what I’m observing were different. By doing this I can eventually come to some  very valuable insights such as: I have a tendency to crave pleasant sensations, I have an aversion to unpleasant sensations. After some time I may notice that the craving and aversion both eventually get me feeling uncomfortable by provoking fear of not getting something I want or losing something I don’t want. 

One of the most powerful observations I have gleaned from insight meditation is that all sensations, all fluctuations, are transitory, ephemeral. Why would I get hooked into craving or struggle with aversion if everything is constantly changing? When we see this we no longer need to react and can live with more harmony. As Bill W. put it in the 12 & 12: “Let’s remember that meditation is in reality intensely practical. One of its first fruits is emotional balance.”

I can’t expect to drop into insight meditation of any sort, however, if my mind is weighed down by guilt, remorse and shame. The first ten steps are designed to remove these obstacles, or at least render them more manageable so that some degree of focussed observation is possible. This doesn’t mean I have to have a zen mind to practice; meditation can serve as a diagnostic as well. I may not even know what type of mind I am carrying until I attempt to sink into the stillness and listen to what it has to tell me.

I’ve learned that it is very easy to become discouraged with meditation, not merely because of my chaotic mind but because it is my nature to hold onto some one-sided idea about what meditation is supposed to be like.

If I am reaching for a perceived ideal, it is impossible for me to be able to accept reality as it is in this moment—which is precisely the goal. If I am grasping onto some grand idea of spiritual progress rather than simply accepting the genuine sense of ease and comfort that is possible through accessing the innate awakening of my being, I’m sort of a spiritual junkie, looking for the same kind of hit I was looking for every time I put a bottle to my lips. 

Meditation only asks me to calm down and pay attention. 

Prayer

It is often heard, particularly in AA, that prayer is talking and meditation is listening. I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that, but I would certainly want to qualify the talking bit. A series of specific words said without meaning or feeling can, in my view, be more misleading than helpful. I have to find my own way to pray. Sometimes this is done physically—through dance, hiking, skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding, mountainbiking, yoga. Prayer happens through playing with my children. Laughter can be prayer. Preparing a meal. Drumming. My breath. All prayers, when done with conscious intent.

My higher power isn’t an anglophone who can only understand incantations; energy and intention is what counts. The ‘fake it until you make it’ advice bandied about the rooms of AA is utter nonsense. If I am a human being, capable of feeling, then there is nothing to fake. I just need to feel something, and have the intention to feel more—to feel better. How tough is that?

Prayer amounts to a conscious elevation of my energy to connect with a higher power and to bring myself into a right relationship with how things are. The easiest and most effective way for me to do this is to cultivate gratitude. Prayer is anything that evolves my awareness of gratitude, protection, expansion. Prayer is a concrete vector in the direction of self-care. Love, which is a behaviour, not an emotion, is the highest prayer. Love is what amounts to the highest good for everybody.

Step Ten

CONTINUED to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

source: http://www.fasttrackph.com

Step Ten, which amounts to ongoing constructive self-criticism, is the first of three maintenance steps. We shouldn’t, however, be lulled into complacency with thoughts that all the heavy lifting is done.

This step is demanding in what it asks of us; namely, to remain self-aware in the present long enough to make objective self-scrutiny a habit

If we fail to do this, it is only too easy to fall into the old grooves we’ve worn into our brains through years of dysfunctional living. 

No practice has been more rewarding to my recovery than the regular application of Step Ten. That being the case, one might surmise that I clung to this practice as soon as I could appreciate the dividends it pays out. But this is not the case. I have rarely kept up this practice for any length of time. I love this Step, and speak about it as a wondrous unfolding of insight, as it was the few times I was able to stick with it for more than a week. 

Why do I continue to abandon it, then? Why do I have such a strenuous journey coming back to this Step if I really love it as much as I say I do? The practice doesn’t take long—a spot check here or there, a few minutes every night, and several hours a year—so it can’t be the time factor that keeps me from my Personal Inventory. And it’s not that I am avoiding what comes of it, because I invariably feel lighter after looking at myself objectively. So what is it? It’s the mindset that I need to crawl into. The frame of reference I need to possess to be able to survey my actions and attitudes critically is what becomes so imposing.

Most alcoholics I know are like me: extremely sensitive and no damn good at being receptive to criticism. After a day of engaging in social behaviours such as storytelling, where I cast myself as the hero of my own narrative; gossiping about other people; judging the world and the people in it; and routinely polishing the image I wish to present of myself to the world—either physically, or virtually through the likes of facebook—it requires some sincere effort to shrug off this ego armour and get real with myself.  the honesty required for self-appraisal isn’t the natural state I live in all day, each day. I can easily fall into the ruts worn by time and the unconscious practice I’ve given to ignorant living where my character defects, particularly the artful and indistinct ones I am not yet aware of, are steering me.

However, when I can manage to climb over the psychological hurdle of living a subjective, superficial life in a fallacious, time-based mentality, and more into an objective and compassionate place of presence and unconditional self-acceptance, I gain new insight. Whether this insight involves the burgeoning awareness of a previously undiscovered character defect, or the recognition of an addictive way of thinking that is hamstringing my own happiness, it pushes me into a new realm of recovery. The widening awareness of how my patterns of thought and behaviour grow subtler and subtler until, at their very roots, they are seeded with very ancient imprints, imprints which taught me to believe certain things about the way things are that were never necessarily true, although they appeared to be. 

This is the way of life recovery demands: no more stuffing our feelings and hiding our motives. There is a distinct difference from feeling my feelings authentically and reacting to them in damaging ways. When I feel my feelings authentically and allow them, in a safe place, to have the spontaneous movement they require, I experience tremendous growth. When I react blindly to these feelings, even if it appears I have movement happening, I am generally harming myself and most likely others. The more gross is my mind, the more difficulty I will have discerning the line between the two. That’s what the first nine steps are for. 

Step Ten invites me to take continuous responsibility for the successes and failures in my ongoing attempts to take back my life. It is how I learn the intricacy and the sometimes baffling insidiousness of what was steering my ship. Through practice, I can navigate to calmer seas and avoid hazards and even foul weather. I can see clearly whether I am isolating or taking valuable communication risks, whether I am becoming more obsessed—with food, money, sex, power, control, internet, television, fixing others, my warped idea of love—or whether I am releasing obsessions. Through ongoing practice I can see if I am owning my own feelings, which means allowing them to be felt without needing to deconstruct or label them with my mind, or if I am playing the blame game, dumping ownership for my cruddy feelings on others by acting like a victim or a martyr.

Undertaking this step is huge because it is an objective exercise in accepting all of my behaviours compassionately and learning to cultivate gratitude that I can learn from them and grow into the man I always wished I could be.

Step Nine

Made amends to all persons we had harmed, except when to do so would injure them or others. 

source: www.charlieglickman.com

The daunting part of finishing the drastic self-appraisal in Step Eight’s list of persons we have harmed is that the list is useless to us unless we do something with it. What we do with it is repair the damage we have done in the past, otherwise known as Step Nine. 

AA literature advises this step calls for good judgement, a careful sense of timing, and prudence; a crucial differentiation for me here is that what I have always thought of as ‘good’ may not necessarily be so. Good judgement isn’t any good when it is based on ancient fallacious impressions. To assume a universal standard of right and wrong, good and evil, is camping on the same treacherous territory of mind that led me to drink in the first instance; this place in the mindscape has a name: Denial. 

Making amends means taking appropriate action. An action is appropriate when it feels right. For something to feel right it should be free of appeasement, manipulation, and self-righteousness. Thus, amends that are done with proper intention, and when the time feels right, will always feel good to me. 

Coming out of denial means moving away from what I think others think is right and moving into what I know is right for me in my gut. In practical terms, this could translate as not worrying about the perceptions of others vis-a-vis my behaviour, but focusing instead on where I feel I have violated my own ethics. I know I have done wrong when I feel I have done wrong. 

The problem is, I’m not feeling much of anything until I have journeyed through Steps One through Eight honestly and to the best of my ability, which has the accumulative effect of installing an internal bullcrap detector.  Getting this intuitive gear working is a necessary part of putting my life in order and being of maximum service. Being of service, I understand, is not synonymous with people-pleasing or martyrdom. 

Service is cleaving to our true and highest selves to find our right place in the world. 

Our literature does advise us, when approaching ‘the man we hated’, to take the bit in our teeth. This is strong imagery, suggesting not only to bite down, but to do so in an effort to swallow the information our internal guidance system (our feelings) is feeding us, no matter how much it makes us froth at the mouth. 

But this is absurd. I cannot make any sort of amends to a person with whom I am enraged, because no matter what my words express, my energy will be coloured with rage and possibly hatred. So my amend, in denial of these feelings, becomes toxic for both myself and the ‘the man I hated.’ While we are most accustomed to living principally in our physical reality, using our words and our bodies, most of our communication is actually energetic. This is difficult to perceive for some at first because we have been taught for so long and so convincingly to ignore or dismiss other dimensions of experience. 

However, just as I am usually able to tell when someone is being phony with me, or trying to manipulate me, I have to assume that others are capable of sensing this when it happens to them.

So: if I am approaching a prospective amend with the proverbial bit clenched between my teeth, I am essentially trying to choke down my true feelings in order to express a tactful and polite admission of my own faults. These words, if coming from a place stained with lovelessness or hatred, are useless and effectively contradict the very wording of this step. 

So first I need to move my anger, my rage, my hatred, since denying it doesn’t get rid of it. Forgiveness is an essential part of these steps, but it is a two part process. The dictionary defines forgive as to cease to feel resentment against and to give up resentment of or claim requital for an insult. The act of forgiveness thus needs the inward movement of letting go before the outward relinquishing of some energetic debt. If I fail to do the first part, my forgiveness is only hollow acting. 

I must move any anger and fear that comes up, and I must do so in a place that feels safe. For me, moving it vocally, with sound—and not necessarily words—is the best way to release from a gut or feeling level. These feelings such as fear, grief, rage and anxiety, as uncomfortable as they may be, must be honoured, not vilified. Fear of my own feelings is the very thing that made drinking seem so attractive in the first instance, because it gave me a brief respite from feeling my feelings or needing to be on guard against them. 

Isn’t it odd? I almost drank myself to death, essentially to avoid feeling my own feelings! 

Why would I choke them down now or dismiss them in the name of forgiveness? This is only window-dressing for my soul. Which is inevitably futile; my denials will always catch up with me in some reflection or other.

I need to resolve my feelings in my own heart, accepting them all authentically, no matter how infuriating or terrifying they are. This is what I have been preparing for throughout the first eight steps, and it is no coincidence that this is where the promises are listed in the Big Book: Step Nine is a watershed, because it shows me I must make amends to myself for holding on to limited ideas about myself, the world I live in, and the nature of reality. 

At this point I am naturally becoming attuned to what feels right for me rather than what others tell me is right for me, or my perception of what others would likely believe what is right for me. Nobody lives in my body with my chemistry and my life experiences, so here too, after I’ve waded through the swamplands of the soul, I need to recognize the importance of making choices again. Before, my chooser was broken. It still may go on the fritz from time to time, as it can still be buggy. But it is mine, and I am only going to make it stronger and more reliable by using it, then surveying the outcomes of my choices—which is in effect Step Ten. 

Harmony is the overarching principle at play here, and Step Nine is the midpoint to achieving that—harmony with family, friends, workmates and the community of people around us every day.  It starts with finding some aspect of harmony within. 

Step Nine is where we transmute our stated intentions into concrete facts. The two spiritual axioms that underpin harmony are (1) trying to forgive anybody before I forgive myself will lead to empty words, and (2) I can’t have love for anyone else unless I have love for myself.

When I feel this, I can proceed. When I have this, it matters not what reaction I get from others as long as my intentions towards making the amend are clean. If I am releasing shame, allowing toxic bubbles of guilt to rise to the surface and break free of me, I am coming more and more into alignment. I begin to unify what I believe with who I truly am. This brings me into harmony with myself, and eventually with others.