Step 2

The Heart and Soul of the Matter

/ Tim / Leave a comment

“The mind is the last part of yourself to listen to. It thinks of everything you can lose. The heart thinks of everything you can give, and the soul thinks of everything you are.” Neale Donald Walsch

We all have that voice inside of us that we tend to ignore on a regular basis. I ‘know’ when I have done something I shouldn’t have done, that it goes against who I am trying to be, but I still do it.  Why? Because I think that if I don’t, I’ll be missing out on something or I can ‘get’ something by doing it. My mind is analytical and it looks for things to flow logically, it looks for patterns, it looks for cost-benefits. If my mind says I should do it, then I often do, regardless of what my heart and soul might say. I know this is true because most often I would give into the temptation of my addiction even when, at the time,  I was completely clean and sober. I wasn’t considering the negative consequences of taking a substance. I was allowing my mind focus on what I might miss out on rather than what probably would happen.

That’s probably why I was told that my thinking was no good when I came into recovery. It wasn’t trustworth. My mind could find a logical reason when it wanted to get loaded. E-VE-RY TIME! My addiction was my answer to my problems. That’s what my mind believed and why it won every time, until the last time.

I’m not quite sure why my heart and soul won out in the end. Graveyards, prisons and psych wards are full of those whose souls lost that battle. Call it a moment of clarity, gift of desperation, an open door that for some reason I espied being open and I walked through. I really don’t know why I’m living a life that’s happy, joyous and free and so many of my sisters and brothers are not. I do know that I have received a gift. And I intend to offer this gift to others because I know that by keeping it or trying to hold this gift to myself, I will lose it.

My mind, after seven years in recovery is now more conscious of what I would lose should I decide to return to my former way of life. My mind knows what happens to people who do. It’s seen, first hand, what happens. It knows that I am not an exception, that I would again head down that rabbit hole of addiction so fast it would make Alice think she’s having a hallucination.

I have had to train my mind to think in a different way. I continue to train it by working my program, by attending meetings, by doing service work. Step two told me in a nice way that I was insane when it said that a Power Greater than myself could restore me to sanity. And it has. I can trust more of what my mind has to tell me. However, I have learned to listen to my heart and soul because my mind can still try that trick: every once in a while my mind tells me that I’m missing out, that it would be okay, that this time it will be different.

So while in most areas sanity has returned, when it comes to addiction, I turn to my heart and soul. When the thought comes to mind that I can ‘try it’ this time, my heart and soul tell me through a very real feeling in the pit of my stomach that my thought are wrong. My heart reminds me that I have so much to share with others and my soul reminds me that I’m no longer that person I used to be. And for that, I am grateful.

white and red plastic heart balloon on sky during daytime

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Act as If

/ Tim / 1 Comment

“I’ve got this!” Famous last words of many folks who had no idea of what or how things could go wrong. Suddenly they will be nominated for a Darwin Award: a prize given to those who contribute to our gene pool by removing themselves from it. It’s a fitting crown to an otherwise obscure tombstone.

So often we think that we’ve ‘got’ it, and we don’t know how close we are to ‘lost’ it. There are so many variables in life that it is impossible to have sufficient contingency plans for everything. A tire will explode; a dog will cross your path; the ladder will break. It’s not a matter of good or bad karma. Things happen. It’s often the timing and the consequences of those things that we judge to be good, bad or indifferent: how do I perceive it?

Take for example the tire exploding. If it happens when the car is parked, just after we got home then, “Well, it’s a miracle that we made it!” If it happens just before we are about to leave then, “What bad luck, now I have to change the damn tire!” If it happens while driving too fast down a gravel road in the mountains, we may not survive to make a comment.

I’m learning that I simply don’t have control. I have plenty of evidence that gives me the illusion that I can control things: it worked today, so it will work tomorrow. However, there is never a guarantee that walking to work today will be as uneventful as it was yesterday or the day before, or the ride I’m about to take on my motorcycle will end with me safe and sound back in my home. The guy who said, “I got this!” might have done the same thing 25 times before without turning himself into a human torch. The unexpected happens. We all know this is true on some level, yet we still venture out into the ‘unknown’.

Why aren’t we paralysed with fear? Why would we ever leave the ‘safety’ of our homes? I think it is because we know on some level that we have to ‘act as if’ things are going to be fine, that they will run like clockwork and we’ll be tucked safely into bed at the end of the day. It’s an agreement with life that we will act and think as though things will happen as we intend them to happen. And for the most part, they do.

When I came into recovery I began to ‘act as if’ I was sober and clean. I ‘acted as if’ I could spend the rest of the day without consuming. I went to meetings, I worked the steps and talked to my sponsor because I was ‘acting like someone in a recovery program’ until I actually began to feel that I was no longer acting. And when I ‘came to believe’ in a power greater than myself, I was opting into the same belief system that I was operating with before: that if I would ‘act as if’ there was a Higher Power in my life until I could really believe and trust. The program has given me a new perspective. Now I don’t have to ‘act as if’. Now I know, “We got this!”

A Journey to Belief

/ Tim / 1 Comment

In Step Two we come to believe in a power greater than ourselves that can restore us to sanity. As with all the steps, it’s a process that takes some time. I still had a belief in ‘something’ when I came into recovery. I can’t say that I could have articulated exactly what I believed, but there was something ‘up there’ I figured. It certainly wasn’t the god I was raised with, and I was very relieved that the program allows me to believe in a god of my own understanding.

When I started to come out of my self-induced haze I had to admit that I hadn’t been doing all that well in the running of my life. And here were some folks who were telling me that they had turned things around in their lives and that part of that was a believe in a Power greater than themselves. I couldn’t argue with the results they were telling me about. And by the time I arrived at recovery’s doorstep I really was ready to give it a shot. After all, I was told, I didn’t have to believe in the god I was made to believe in, I could choose the god that I came to believe in.

I remember a friends description of his journey through Step Two. Joe was an atheist. He couldn’t accept that there was some sort of a god up there somewhere doing stuff to us and allowing all of the bad stuff to happen. As Joe tells it, when he was five, his grandfather, for whom he is named, died. He and his Papa had a very special relationship. At the funeral the priest said that God had called his Papa to be with him in heaven. What Joe heard was that God had stolen his grandfather away.  What a mean and selfish God. At that point, though he was very young, Joe stopped believing in God, gradually, with time, declaring himself an atheist.

Through the journey of life, Joe became an addict and alcoholic and eventually found himself coming into a rehab centre and recovery. He was having a great deal of trouble with Step Two.  During one of his discussions with his sponsor he shared his experience of his grandfather’s funeral. “What would you say to this god if you had the chance?” asked his sponsor. And Joe began to rail against this god who took is Papa away from him. “You sure have a lot of hate and anger against something you say you don’t believe in,” said his sponsor.

Joe was stunned. He couldn’t deny that what his sponsor had just called him on: he must still believe in some kind of a god if he had such strong feelings toward him. And that was enough to open the door for Joe. He continued to work with his sponsor and had come to a strong belief in a god of his own understanding. He came; he came to; he came to believe.

Thank you Joe G.