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. 

Step Eight

Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step Eight is about getting real with the consequences of the way I have lived, and comprises an undertaking—a physical list, not some nebulous blob of names in my head—that has healing of relationships with others as its goal. Presumably this means means that I have already done a significant amount of healing within when I embark upon this list. I have to get the balance of my relationship to Self healed before I can hope to engage in real healing with others.

Healing my relationships with others doesn’t translate as making everybody happy with me. If I think of my relationships as concentric circles moving away from me, healing means being authentic enough to allow everyone to move to their right place with respect to me, and vice versa. 

In early white-knuckle recovery, when I wasn’t interested in AA any more than I was interested in church, somebody handed me a pamphlet with the 12 Steps written on it. I breezed through them: nope, nope, ha!, not doing that, no thanks, whatever, as if!...hey, oh ya, maybe—

Step Eight caught my eye, or actually Step Nine did, because it seemed to offer a valid excuse to call up an ex-girlfriend. And possibly get lucky! So, without a single meeting under my belt and no exposure to the Steps or a sponsor, I called up Ms. X to explain to her how I’d reformed my ways and hinted how she was, through my amend, lucky enough to have another shot at me. 

I don’t think we need to tell the rest of that story to surmise that acting in ignorance and without awareness of why I made the decisions I made, my attempt at an amend was likely more harm than good—for both of us.

Months later, after having gone through the rest of the Steps, Ms. X came up again in Step Eight, and my sponsor at the time suggested that the best way I could make amends to this woman in particular is to just stay out of her life completely. That was harsh to hear, and more painful to come to understand as truth. 

Sometimes our relationships may seem so broken that it’s difficult to know where to begin; I need to start by reviewing what I have learned so far in the Steps. I have to get it through my head that I am not now in the business of persuading anybody to buy into my newly minted spiritual worth. 

I am here to get authentic. 

When I reach Step Eight, I should have an emerging understanding that the resentments I am holding are often a reflection of what i am denying in myself. Now I have to shine this spotlight of experiential wisdom on all the relationships I have or have had. 

Let’s not pretend that I am responsible for saving or healing anyone other than myself. Yes, I have a Higher Power, but God isn’t going to sort through my feelings for me. However, and this is the ongoing miracle of recovery, my own healing will indirectly provide the help necessary for those willing to receive it. Trying to force healing is as damaging as some of the behaviours I used when I was still drinking.

I can’t get anywhere with this stuff until I accept that I am worthy of healing—and we all are, though it may require some significant trauma reduction work to understand this. 

I also must have a genuine intent to heal.

This is a sticky wicket, especially with years of practice in justification, rationalization and denial. If I simply say I have intent to heal but continue manipulating others by playing the role of denial, then I cannot heal. I can stick around in the rooms for years whining and pointing fingers, but this doesn’t mean I have ever actually moved into the belly of the whale that is the recovery journey, what Joseph Campbell has called The Hero’s Journey. 

When I have a genuine intent to heal, I must recognize that others have the same spiritual rights that I am claiming for myself. 

How am I supposed to deal effectively with raging resentments and heaps of fear when everyone is telling me, at times rather smugly, to clear my side of the street? Sooner or later I’m going to have to deal with the fetid mess in the sewer on my side of the street. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to clear out in Steps Four, Five, Six and Seven—why would I want to dump more garbage in it now by pretending to ignore my resentments, as if there is a magic sober wand that makes my feelings about the other side of the street simply vanish? In truth, it is not simple. It is precarious work, releasing emotions without damaging others or myself. It’s far more effective than denying them.

I had to find ways to deal with resentment, and these ways are multifarious: acting it out with a trusted ally, writing a letter and then burning it, yelling at the top of a mountain, screaming in the belly of a cave. Whatever way I choose—and the best ways come from my own intuition—it is helpful if it can be witnessed by a trusted ally.

I have to get my relationships with myself and my Higher Power as right as possible. And here is a good opportunity to express some of the rage I am holding against  what some call God for these feelings of being terrorized, abandoned, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood. We each have our own version of the less-than-nurturing aspects of our own existence, and some rage about them. God can take it. 

This isn’t about blame; it’s about release, and release clears the lines of communication to let in more light. Unreleased anger and fear cut me off from others and from myself.  

One of the tricks of false spirituality that I subscribed to for a long time is the notion that either I am operating out of fear or I am operating out of love. Only recently have I discovered how this erroneous premise leads me further into denial by pressuring the fear I’m holding to hide itself under a veneer of centered bliss, or to fragment itself outside of me. Whatever I deny, I’ll eventually have to face in the reflections that come back to me. 

The answer for me is to accept terror and rage as part of love. If I don’t, part of me is outside of love, and that cannot be. As soon as I accept my feelings and allow them to move, something else gets released, one of the most toxic elements to humanity: guilt. 

At my first AA meeting some young punk had a Screw Guilt badge pinned to his jean jacket. It has taken me over a decade to fully understand this simple message: Guilt is never true. 

I can allow that everything has its place without needing to understand how or why; who’s to say I’m not a reflection of Divine fear or Divine anger? A preposterous notion for most, but even the smallest meditation on this prospect leads me further into the appreciation of how truly very little I cognitively understand. 

If guilt isn’t true, and Step eight is about relationships, I need to explore the limitations on intimacy, connection, and sexuality that I’ve learned and rehearsed during my time on this planet in this body. I’m looking for a sane perspective on relationships and a reasonable comprehension of where I stand in relation to others. 

This can’t be clear until I have an honest perspective on where I stand with myself and with God, Source, the Ultimate Reality. 

To glean the granular details about the beliefs I am holding, I’ll likely have to comb through my Step Four to review the recurring patterns in my behaviour and my life. 

One of the most important understandings I can have here is that while it is useful to have a sponsor as a sounding board, I am not evaluating harm in terms of someone else’s perspective, but on my current, active and most informed beliefs about how to treat another human in an honest and spiritually authentic way—not based on perceived slights that others may wish to hold over me. 

It is notable that being truly authentic is sometimes the opposite of conventional notions of what it means to be polite. 

This is precarious ground, because my own denials might wish to convince me that I am not in the wrong when in fact I have done harm. I can’t engage in ‘purposeful forgetting’ when attempting a ‘deep and honest search of motives and actions.’ 

I’ve heard a lot in AA that my instincts are garbage, and that I shouldn’t trust my own feelings, my feelings aren’t facts, and that they are just going to get me drunk. This is true on the one hand, if I’m having the feeling that a single malt scotch wouldn’t be a bad idea to enhance my research on recovery. 

On the other hand, there has to be some trust in my intuition as my own will comes into alignment with Divine will.  

As nobody else lives in my body with my history and my chemistry, nobody should be given the power to tell me what to do or how to feel here. My sponsor—if I have an honest one, not one interested in supporting his own beliefs my making me parrot them—can offer a helpful reflection here. 

I need to do much inner work and release to gain the perspective necessary to understand the nature of my relationships. This is what the Steps leading up to number Eight have been all about.  Then I can examine the relationships I have and have had, starting with the circle closest to me, and moving outward, applying the new perspective I carry to my actions vis-à-vis these relationships of my turbid past. 

The formation and substance of my Step Eight List will shift every time I gain a new insight. As Ghandi said, I must be dedicated to truth, not to consistency. 

This process is potentially painful, but ultimately proves to be an edifying and uplifting one. 

Where have I been an energy vampire? Where have I enabled others to use me as a doormat in order to get the benefit I feel from playing the victim? I need to have a clear understanding, an intuitive knowing, about which releases of anger and fear are cleansing and which are damaging. I also need to define what selfishness means to me, and whether or not I am going to subscribe to a general, vague interpretation of it, which often gets misconstrued and remedied with the erroneously harmful act of putting the needs of others above my own. 

This is playing the martyr, a passive type of victimhood that kills the very thing it is attempting to uplift and protect. 

More and more, the understanding is that I need to stop treating my physical body as a rented vehicle, and treating my emotional body and will as a whipping boy to conform to the ideals of ‘Spirit’. It is all one package that must find its balance in the Heart. 

Step Eight, if done with right intention, can go a long way to accomplishing this, and lifting the veil on a whole new way of living, which has been called the beginning of the end of isolation from others and from God. 

I would also add: from Ourselves. 

Step Seven

Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

It took me longer than I would have liked to figure out that humility is much different than humiliation. Humiliation was the shame I felt from the degradation of my life circumstances that led me to the recognition of my need to do something about my life. Eventually, in the face of so much humiliation, it was extremely difficult not to admit my powerlessness. 

Humility is different, and is defined by the wisdom of honest experience, and the acceptance of this experience. The big book calls it being ‘right-sized;’ I think of it in terms of seeing things as what they really are, not as I wish them to be and not as I fear them to be. Humility is the experiential truth of my daily reality.

Before I can ask God to remove my shortcomings in Step Seven, I have to admit to them, and to admit to them I must be able to recognize them. This recognition of my own character defects demands the ability to see my inventory unadorned; it demands humility.

I have learned that it is possible for me to trick myself into thinking I am humble when I am anything but. For instance, I used to feel I was filled with anger;  I admitted freely to my anger, and shared openly about this character defect. I was probably on the right track at times, but at other times I had fear about how others perceived me, and I would deny this fear, even to myself, because I also have guilt about caring so much about what other people think. That’s how things get really screwy, because then I ended up sharing ‘honestly’ about my anger, falsely claiming the humility to do so, when really what I was doing was bragging about being a tough guy with a short fuse. 

Then there was a shift. As I did more work on the steps and spent more time breathing sober air, I saw the frequent connections between my anger and something else. What was it? I looked and I looked and eventually figured out a way to make myself feel it: FEAR.

I’d made a great discovery: fear is at the heart of my anger! A selfish, brooding, shame-based brand of fear. I ran to my sponsor with the news, explaining that I’d figured something out that would be of great benefit not only to AA but to humanity. My time had finally come. I had always known my brilliance would one day erupt and pour forth upon the miserable masses.

My sponsor laughed and had me read page 62 of the Big Book: “Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.”

I was deflated at first. My great discovery was written in a book that was printed decades ago. But my mood brightened when I realized that I had discovered this truth. It didn’t matter how many times it had been discovered before, or how many times I’d already read that paragraph without registering its true meaning. I now had experiential knowledge of it, which is true knowledge. 

This was the beginning of my sojourn into real humility, a journey which is ongoing. But still I didn’t have the whole truth, because I immediately began pronouncing that all my anger was fear masquerading as something else. For years I considered that I had pierced the nature of my own denial when I was actively living in it. It turns out that anger can be rooted in a sense of injustice as well as fear. It can be rooted in passion. It can be rooted in old rage and hatred that my psyche and my body so desperately need to move and release, but which I denied for years, decades, perhaps lifetimes as I have been taught that anger and rage and hatred is evil. I now know this to be rubbish. Acting on anger or hatred or rage in a way that is harmful to myself or others isn’t going to help anybody, but acknowledging that these emotions are natural, and that they have been denied, and demand release—often vocally, with sound. I personally like to scream from hilltops or play the drums and shout until I am hoarse. Rage and Terror are encompassed within spirituality: knowing this is a necessary step towards real cleansing and genuine humility. With authentic humility I understand that all feelings are appropriate and valid. 

Ignorance of my true feelings’ ties to guilt and denial is at the root of the inappropriate and harmful behaviours I exhibit. Fundamentally, the denial of my feelings and the need to express them safely is part of the original cause which led to my addiction. 

It’s impossible to ask for my character defects to be lifted from me until I know their essential nature. Knowing them is seeing them as they truly are, i.e. seeing them with humility. 

We need to acknowledge the Source from which we come. We need to acknowledge who and what we truly are. To negate the darker feelings that are in us through denying them, only makes them stronger and come out sideways; to suppress them or ignore them or shun them in any way, particularly in the name of recovery, is only setting us up for potentially catastrophic outcomes in future reflections of this denial. 

There is no avoiding what we are carrying. We might as well get real with it sooner rather than later.

I am building a home for myself in recovery, as such, I need to be centered in my body, and it is my awareness that determines the quality of my foundation. I can either be thorough about the true nature of my habit patterns and their impact on me and others, or I can pretend to do the work, merely rearranging the surface of the problem while claiming humility and yet continually denying my heart, and my guts, their say in this left-brain driven maniacal world. 

Step Seven, for me, is about getting creative, getting intuitive, and realizing that Love is what’s left when I let go of everything I don’t need. In this state I am independent of my shortcomings, and can put them outside of myself at least long enough to see them objectively and ask that they be removed. And yet I can cultivate at the very same time an abiding compassion for myself in the form of unconditional self-acceptance. Herein lies my need that I copped to already in the very first step: lack of Power. I must draw on source and find gratitude for having the willingness to do so, while still seeing that there may be some niggling doubt, objection, fear, or rage about this incessant dependence. 

In the bud of awareness of this dependence blooms the reality of my newly functional state of interdependence: life, including recovery, is done neither by myself alone nor done without my active involvement.

Denial and guilt can double-team me if I am not connected to Source. Together they weave the blanket of obfuscation that prevents me from seeing the genesis of my suffering. 

I believe that this is how so many people who claim to be in recovery are beset by other behavioural (porn, sex, gambling, internet, TV, playing the victim) or chemical (nicotine, caffeine, sugar, fatty foods, pills, anti-depressants) addictions in an effort to quell the discomfort and pain that denial causes. 

The blanket weaved by denial and guilt is reinforced with the thread of resistance. When I attempt to probe my own mind through meditation, I can often be filled with doubt—doubt about my own abilities, the technique of meditation I am using, meditation in general, AA or recovery as a whole. Sometimes I can skip doubt altogether and move right into unconsciousness. There are periods where every attempt at meditation seems to instantly bring torpor. When trying to find humility, my habit patterns react and make me, literally, go back to sleep. Other times I become hyperactive: one moment I am sitting on my meditation cushion watching my breath, and suddenly—what happened?—I am updating facebook or wiping my kitchen countertop. How did I get here? This is resistance, a desperate kick from within to keep me stagnant in the rut of my familiar patterns. 

Most times it is difficult to rationally understand what is fear and what is anger, and where guilt, shame, denial, aversion and craving fit in. It’s not a rational process. It is a feeling process. We cannot think our way through to humility. 

When I am hungry, I should eat, and eat food that is high in vibration. When I am tired, I should take rest. Similarly, when my Will wants to move and release old stuff, I should allow Her to do this without judgement of what it looks like. Sometimes it gets a bit messy in recovery before things start looking cleaner. The Will has been beaten into submission by our systems of education, economy, and politics. Even in AA, we often hear that our own will is garbage and needs to be shunned. 

Bollocks. The Will needs to be felt, acknowledged, and released in order to align with Divine Will. In fact, the two are one and the same. 

One part is just lost.

Step Six

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

The more I involve myself with the Steps, the deeper I understand that each one is a practice, not a finite event. It is the practice that whets against the edges of insight, honing it. As insight grows sharper, it is able to cut deeper into ignorance and open space for more profound humility and a deeper peace. But first, I must practice. 

Part of removing ignorance is removing denial. 

denial |diˈnīəl|, from Apple dictionary:

noun

the action of declaring something to be untrue: she shook her head in denial .

• the refusal of something requested or desired: the denial of insurance to people with certain medical conditions.

• a statement that something is not true: official denials | his denial that he was having an affair.

• Psychology failure to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defense mechanism: you're living in denial .

• short for self-denial.

• disavowal of a person as one's leader.

Denial, as it applies to our lives as humans on this planet, is essentially the disavowal or failure to acknowledge some truth that appears unacceptable to either our psyche or to social norms. Denial has a strong presence in most alcoholics because we need it in order to go on hurting ourselves and others in order to continue consuming vast quantities of the substance that is killing us. In the most blunt example, we are in denial of our own disease until we decide that we are in recovery and we need help.

Yet there are multiple layers of denial, and they grow subtler and subtler in turn. I cannot ask for any character defect to be removed if I don’t do the work of recognizing it; to see my character defects, I need to release denial, and to do this I must cultivate humility. With humility I can see things as they truly are, and how shame and guilt have been blocking me from the abundant reality that I inherently understand to be my birthright.

I have learned that I mustn’t turn my back on shame and guilt. I need to feel these things, and all the rage, pain, fear and sadness that accompany them—but I need to feel this without judgment of myself or others. At first this seems like an impossible task; we may be trying to do this while we are still severely wounded. Whatever emotions come up, they need to be accepted, not pushed away or denied further. This is a challenge for me, because when I was younger some emotions, particularly anger, were unacceptable. This creates a lasting impression on my psyche, and it is sometimes difficult to convince myself that feeling my anger is safe and in fact very helpful. Feeling these things releases them.

I used to drink, I can see now, as a way of not feeling, when in fact the feelings I feared would have been the easiest path to freedom. There’s no way of realizing this other than by experiencing it, and as with other elements of recovery, I am often only able to experience it when driven by suffering.  

This step sounds so bloody absolute, though—do I really have to be entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character? I sense attachment rearing its sticky head immediately. This is why non-attachment is so important in this step. I can only be open to solving my problems if I am open to change, and in Step Six I am repeatedly given the opportunity to let go of ineffective, low-level and limiting beliefs, perceptions and practices. 

Again, this tricky notion of letting go. I can’t count the number of times I ‘let go’ of my anger, often right before losing my temper. What does letting go entail, then? I believe it involves unconditional self-acceptance and the courage to FEEL whatever comes up. By feeling something I am vibrating it, and when it vibrates, it moves, and if it’s moving, it can be released. But nothing is going to move if I don’t trust myself or have compassion for myself. This has been a very important learning point for me. So my job is to feel whatever comes up, remain equanimous, and have compassion for myself. Otherwise I am bound to revisit the same old cycle of thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours that keep me on the merry-go-round of problem-reaction-problem.

Stop reacting. Feel. Let time pass. Breathe. Trust the process. 

Part of this process leads me to take a closer look at my thoughts and beliefs; I need to determine which ones are borne of true insight based on my own objective analysis of my life experiences. The answer: almost none. 

Most of the thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes I had been carrying were borrowed from parents, teachers, media, and the norms of society at large. These were not actually my beliefs, but habit patterns engrained in me through training and practice. Habits become pervasive; they define, both in the mental and physical realm, most of our thoughts, words and actions.

In habits, we’re stuck. 

Thus, I need to unpack my habits, which I have done in Steps Four and Five, in order to have at least a superficial awareness of what isn’t serving me and what needs letting go of. 

This non-attachment, this letting go—particularly of deeply engrained habits—can make me feel as if I’m coming unhinged, without any point of reference. It may also involve the re-experiencing of old grief, fear or trauma, as many of our character defects can be in place as survival tools. The truth that we need to experience ourselves is that these old tools can’t work in recovery and become cumbersome and self-limiting. 

It is crucial that I gain some insight in Step Four in order to see how the elements I share in my Step Five are still exerting active power in my life. I need to bring my awareness into the present moment, and to do this, I may require some emotional releasing in order to achieve truly effective self-scrutiny. Anger may come up. Resistance may raise its toothy head. A tsunami of ear and guilt may wash through me.  

I must not ignore these things or turn away from them. They have a right to be felt. It is my job to feel them. If I need to release, I must release in safe ways. Maybe I find a small hilltop and I scream to the heavens from it. Or I could spend a weekend watching tear-jerkers and bawl my eyes out. Maybe I join a punk band. Perhaps I dance like Napoleon Dynamite until I drop. Whatever safe way to release comes up naturally—and often for me this is by expressing some kind of sound, intelligible or not—I have to trust that at some point, a point known as ignition, the body will intuitively know what it needs to do to release. I have learned that I should follow it, no matter how silly it seems to convention.  

Convention even slips into the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which states that “no matter how far we have progressed, desires will always be found which oppose the grace of God.” I’d like to meet the person who thinks he is in charge of deciding what opposed the grace of God for me, personally. Nobody lives in my body with my chemistry and with my connections and experiences; therefore, nobody has the ability to understand an appropriate moral code for me, much less impose one. 

The other issue I take with “conventional wisdom” is the perseverance of the harmful themes, the most notable example being that sex is somehow dirty or sinful. AA literature asks us “how many men and women speak love with their lips, and believe what they say, so that they can hide lust in a dark corner of their minds?” This question presumes love is a precursor to, and thus divorced from, any expression of the body. It also assumes there is a conventional understanding of and abhorrence for what is commonly considered to be ‘lust’. One woman’s lust may be another woman’s passion. One man’s perception of lust may be another man’s source of creativity and inspiration. We are so quick to judge others, as well as ourselves. More than one great thinker has determined that most of the problems of the West, including addictions, come from sexual repression. This is a valid consideration in Step Six because it is vital to me that I understand if my actions are truly harmful to myself or another, or if they simply lie outside the acceptable (read: harmful) conventions of my Judeo-Christian upbringing. This is a key part of stepping into my own freedom and guided by Divine intention.

Understandably, it is often easier to list our character defects than to willingly release them. The blockage to change is almost always fear, and one of the deepest fears we can carry in recovery is that it is not safe to feel what is present. Once we release old fear, doubt, denial, ignorance, we are truly ready to allow our will to naturally align with Divine will. Form this point forward, we will rarely forget that we are never alone.