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 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. 

Step Five

Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

The practice of confession, to have the awareness of the nature of one’s own flaws witnessed by another human being, and thus sanctified in spirit, is widespread among numerous religious and spiritual traditions. The practice speaks to the very inherent instinct for cleansing.

It is notable that Step Five is the first step described in the chapter entitled “Into Action” in the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous. The completion of my inventory in Step Four means I have stirred up the silt of my past to take a look at the granular details of the shifting moral foundation I have built my life upon. Step Five is the crucial step to begin the repair of this foundation by recognizing and admitting my responsibility for the detritus in my life. This stirring of muddy waters can sometimes make for a pretty murky view, and if I hang on to this inventory by myself for too long, it may be difficult to remember that this is the way to light. 

There is a risk involved in Step Five; this is the hero’s journey, where Jonah leaps into the belly of the whale. We face the darkness, knowing not where it will ultimately transport us. In our minds, there is the risk of being rejected, of ridicule, of full exposure to the depths of the shame we have been carrying, and as alcoholics who are almost universally sensitive to criticism, Step Five can be intimidating. 

The only solution I’ve found is to, yet again, surrender. I need to open myself completely. I wouldn’t advocate making oneself completely vulnerable to this process if there weren’t tremendous gains to be made in doing so. No matter how much the vulnerability scares me, it serves me, because it provokes me to step out of isolation. When I step out of the old pattern of sequestering my spirit, I step out of the illusion that I am separate from others or from Source. 

I sought my soul,

But my soul I could not see

I sought my God,

But my god eluded me.

I sought my brother,

And I found all three. 

—Anonymous

Sharing this stuff, particularly if I have been unflinchingly honest, can be a daunting task; what generally prevents us from bringing all of our story to another person is shame. Shame is at the root of endless diversions, justifications, rationalizations, and general delays of putting Step Five into practice. It is important to contemplate how, left in the darkness of self, my Step Four is bound to fester. My moral inventory, and my awareness of its implications upon the habit patterns of my actions and attitudes, needs to be exposed to the sunlight of the Spirit in order to be transmuted into a lasting gift of awareness. 

If I have reached this stage, I have my personal moral inventory in hand; now I need a witness. It is important that the person who hears my fifth is not someone who has all the answers. I need to trust my gut and find someone who has humility and a sense of humour; humility will enable my witness to detect which shame belongs to me and what I have been carrying for others. A sense of humour will ensure that I don’t take myself too seriously. I needn’t panic over who is going to share this experience with me; if I have done my work, the right person will appear.

All my ancient, twisted karma,

From beginingless greed, hate and delusion,

Born through body, speech and mind,

I now fully avow.

—Zen chant for Ryaku Fusatu

Once I make a commitment to have this undertaking validated by another human being, I will become aware of what an empowering process it can be. The relief from the burden of my secrets and my ignorance will be commensurate with the level of honesty I apply to this step. The power of one spirit coming to another with humility and vulnerability calls in the sunlight of the Spirit and sanctifies the act of surrender. Here, I can break old patterns of isolation—spiritual and otherwise.

If I balk too long or refuse this step, I risk retreating into denial. I need only review Step One to remember that there is no peace in a life of denial. 

The first time I took this vital step, I stumbled for a while on another major hurdle: grief—grief over losing myself, the only identity I’d been consciously aware of for years. Even if I have recognized and inwardly admitted to old beliefs, judgments and patterns of denial that don’t truly belong to me through the process of taking a moral inventory, the prospect of overtly admitting to them in a Step Five might provoke a kick from within. For instance, I may suddenly become forgetful, and have a blank mind. Or doubt may raise its head. 

There are many varieties of doubt: doubt about AA, the Steps, my sponsor, my own abilities.

The good news is that this resistance is a last-ditch effort of the old framework of living to re-assert itself, because once I take Step Five as fearlessly and honestly as practicable, this old scheme of interacting with the world and the things in it is utterly altered. Just as darkness cannot stay in a room when a light is turned on, the film of ignorance and denial that I’d cloaked myself in will no longer fit. 

I need to treat myself like I am someone I can trust. 

Step Five is not just about admitting my wrongs, but about becoming vulnerable enough to share how and when I have suffered. Tough love in this program is for suckers; it may seem easier because I’m used to beating myself up and haven’t had much cause to trust others, but we’ve had enough of tough times, haven’t we? I suggest trying tenderness.

If this step is causing me to shut down emotionally, I may need to get outside help and do grief work or trauma reduction. I can also always look to Step Eleven for support and guidance. Often this stuff that we are dragging up through this process gets stored or stuck in the body, and this is where breathing techniques, a healthy diet, yoga, massage and energy work can all be helpful in getting through Steps Four and Five. These steps are as much about moving from the brain to the heart as any other; this cannot simply be an intellectual exercise in truth-telling. We have to feel our way through this process, and we need to feel it without reacting in order to surpass the small idea of our once-disconnected selves to the Unity with our true and highest selves that is our birthright.

Step Four

How do we find a reality that we can own? We need a map. “Start where you are,” advises Pema Chodron. There is really no other place for us to begin, obviously—but most of us alcoholics aren’t sure where we are. 

We were initially thrust into reality with the admission of the true nature of our relationship to alcohol in Step One, and then continued the process by observing what resources were available to us by considering Steps Two and Three. Through this process, we invariably examine the tip of the iceberg that is our persistent denial and penchant for magical thinking. We begin to suspect that there is much more to our habit of judging ourselves and others, and the cause-and-effect in our broken lives. In Step 4 we roll up our sleeves and, as fearlessly as possible, do our work of mapping our own attitudes and actions. Step 4 provides the training necessary to obtain, and then use, the insight necessary to find ourselves in bumpy terrain of our own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual geography.

Until we sober up, we are unable and unwilling to recognize that our dismal consequences are the direct result of our own volitional activity. As my meditation teacher likes to say: “You can’t continue to plant bitter neem seeds and then cry out for sweet mangoes!” So in step 4 I need to acknowledge my own participation in the creation of my own life: what I do matters. Moreover, what I think matters: thoughts are waveforms of energy, and they have an impact. The sooner I stop casting myself as a victim of external circumstances or other people, the healthier I will be. 

Once I understand this, I understand that I have created the environment of my current circumstances with the thoughts, words and actions of my past; now that I am sober, however, and committed to engaging outside help to compensate for my lack of power, I have a choice in how I respond to whatever my present situation may be. 

At first the word moral was slightly off-putting to me; then I came to the understanding that immoral simply means anything that transgresses my inner knowing of right action, word and thought, and while this concept implies a certain universality, it is ultimately subjective. Some of us are so confused by an off-putting and self-interested system of morals we grew up with, that Step 4 can seem daunting, even insurmountable, especially if we clearly no longer ascribe to this system. Others of us may be so deeply programmed with the corrupt values systems of others—commonly through trauma—that we are not yet aware of what value systems are motivating us. 

The good news is that there is a sure way out, as long as I am still subscribing to the spiritual principles of Steps One, Two, and Three, namely: honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness. These magic three principles give birth to the fourth, which is insight. And this insight enables us to do the work of Step 4. 

I need a value system against which to judge the morality of my own thoughts, words, and deeds. It is important for me to keep in mind that my value system doesn’t necessarily apply to others, so there is no need or point in judging them; this just creates more knots for me to untangle. 

One thing I can say is that in sobriety it quickly becomes clear that ethical conduct is highly pragmatic, because it is impossible for me to have peace of mind when I am transgressing my own value system. For a while, when I was drinking, I could squelch this inner turmoil with booze. But Step 4—the mechanics of which are clearly laid out in AA literature and which I need to go through with a sponsor—begins to show me that alcoholism was not my root problem, but actually the temporary and unsustainable solution to my internal disquiet and spiritual torpor. When I understood this, I knew inherently I had made a solid beginning on Step 4. With persistent work and feedback from my sponsor, I began to see the nature of my relationship not only with alcohol and others, but with fear itself; when I see my own ignorance and fear as reflexes to protect the self from imagined threats to its integrity, I have truly made a significant step in the acquisition of spiritual insight. 

Step Three

My sponsor says that in developing the willingness required for this step, we need to develop a readiness to go beyond physical, intellectual and emotional living to allow ourselves to explore spiritual living. But how am I to even imagine this concept, let alone implement it? I am stuck in this body; while human, there is no escaping the reality of these bones, the flesh that surrounds them, and the fascia that wraps and re-wraps, hugging the whole works together beneath my miraculous skin. How am I to drop my emotions when they seem to arise of their own accord, just because I want to be willing to have a spiritual life? 

I think all alcoholics crave transcendence, and this is why we drank. As Carl Jung wrote in his letter to Bill W: The craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God...'alcohol' in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a higher power.”

Spiritual principle: Willingness

I think it is helpful at first to re-establish that in Step 2 it is neither necessary nor desirable to narrowly define the nature of my higher (deeper, broader) power. It is also ill-advised for me to get hung up on technical details of what exactly constitutes sanity - this searching for definition keeps me living in my left brain, in the world of the rational and logical, which never served me in my active addiction and which has a tendency to want to take over and fix, manage or control the areas of my life that are not flowing, i.e. that are stuck. In Step 3 I need to cultivate the willingness that will allow me to leap forward without logically understanding what the outcomes will be and absolving myself of the fiction that I can control these outcomes anyway. This leap forward, from what Joseph Campbell would describe as 'the jumping-off place' into the belly of the whale, is the 'decision' we must make in Step 3. 

The literal meaning of the word 'decide' is 'to cut off'. The way this decision is made is as unique as our fingerprints, but essentially we are cutting ourselves off from not only our old way of living, but from our old way of thinking. Clearly, this decision is an active undertaking, and is not a one-off affair. We have to make the effort to come willingly to this decision again and again, open with an honest heart (not logical head) for the transformation that allows us to live outside our comfort zone even as we slip back into it. To continually choose the path of healing, awareness, and growth requires a sustained effort to be able to let go of our old ideas at the moments when they seem to offer us the most comfort.

In a way it appears deceptively simple; the power that we have come to have some belief in through Step 2 is still here for us. All that's being asked of me, then, in Step 3, is that I drop my defences and allow that power to help me out. In order to work the rest of the steps, this willingness for a personal spiritual connection - a connection I understand to be my own. This decision to give up the illusion of control can be frightening and requires consistent practice - a daily practice. At this point, prayer and meditation might prove invaluable. I understand that it is very often heard at AA meetings that "the steps are numbered for a reason,", implying that we should do them in order. I can't find that information anywhere in AA literature, however, and it only makes sense to me that waiting until I "arrive" at Step 11 before I try prayer or meditation would be unnecessarily hamstringing my own recovery. The benefits I receive from attempting my own versions of prayer and meditation support my ongoing efforts to make the decision required of me in Step 3. 

The other thing I "cut-off" in this step is the idea that I can walk back into the faulty paradigm of my addictive thinking and behaviour, that I can somehow make the old way of life work. I cut off the idea that that house of cards can hold me any longer, that alcohol can still offer me refuge from the pain I feel. In spiritual terms, this pain is a gift, and feeling it with awareness and equanimity (as opposed to numbness and aversion) is what brings me greater spiritual insight and freedom. Cutting off this old behaviour and thinking opens up greater humility, which is, in essence, the ability to see things as they really are--not as I want them to be or as I fear them to be. Greater humility brings greater willingness to choose freedom from my rusty ideas of who I am and who I can become; in a sense, it is the process of deconstructing my own story so I am not bound by it any longer: this is why, in the Third Step prayer, we asked to be relieved of the bondage of self, which means returning to a place of not knowing. 

If I accept "not knowing," then I do not need to fix, manage and control every detail of my life. I can experiment with this step, using my craving and aversion as a diagnostic. Gradually, I see progress and my reaction time towards making a conscious decision to try something new becomes less and less. But this step, and this process, is not done in my head - for me, anyway, the logical, reasoning brain on its own is not the portal into the realm of the spirit within. I need to start with my body.

We don't hear this very often in AA meetings, but the process of "turning it over" to a higher power is, in large part, a physical one. We are burdened with toxins, fear and disease, which find their way into our physical beings where we store them up and store them up and, in active addiction (and often in recovery) ignore them. We somehow remain incapable of seeing the direct correlation between our anger and fear and our physical ailments. This is why I see the body and, particularly, the breath, as the key gateway to the inner sanctum. The breath is the bridge between the unconscious (which is never unconscious, even when we sleep) and the conscious mind -- it functions autonomically and it can also be controlled. The breath used in tandem with physical movement and awareness, accepting everything just as it is, is called yoga. I believe that yoga, as a practice, is directly in line with the spiritual principles of the 12 steps and that, in fact, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the first codified system of yogic technology, parallels (in many ways) the 12 step process. 

Willingness to let the pus come out of the wound, in emotional terms, is not always an easy state to come to, especially for someone who is so used to avoiding mental and emotional pain through the use of booze and drugs. But as we re-learn how to breathe, and give new life to our bodies by stretching them, giving them exercise, and reducing the toxins we put into them,  it is not only our physical bodies that become strengthened, but our subtle bodies as well. Locked so long in the spiral of shame and self-degredation, we enter an upward spiral in line with the law of nature, and the less we try to control this process and accept it as it comes, the more elegant and joyful it can be. Eventually we stumble naturally onto our own meditation, where the mind is alert, concentrated, focused - not relaxed and half-asleep, but vibrant. Awake. 

But we start small. Maybe with a couple of deep breaths, a positive thought, a short gratitude list. Maybe just a bow in the morning, an acknowledgement to the light that resides within, whatever name we give it. When I bow I sense that I am bowing internally as well as externally; as within, so without. In this way the connection does not escape me, even if I am at a loss to name or define it. Faith is an attitude of mind rather than subscription to a specific philosophy or dogma.

I make the decision in Step 3 to investigate this life of mine, every moment of which is precious. With the repeated practice of this step, I have come to see that every element and every dimension of life exists and thrives on the spiritual plane, even the mundane.