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.