Spirituality

Awakenings

/ Tim / 3 Comments

By the time we get to Step Twelve in the program of recovery, a lot will have changed in our lives. A lot changed in my life. I recently was reflecting on my life before and after that Gift Of Desperation that I had several years back. I thought my life was manageable. I thought I had things under control. I didn’t think anyone really knew how much I was using and that I was covering things up pretty well. Yeah…right…

Looking back on my life I can see now that somewhere along the line, my addiction became my “go-to” for dealing with things in life. If things went well, I celebrated. If things went wrong, I commiserated. All is good in the world? Time for a drink. There’s a threat of war? Time for a drink. The only way I dealt with anything was by either floating on the red sea of wine or jumping off to drown my sorrows. I had no other way of dealing with life any more. If I had used any other ways of dealing with life, they had been discarded somewhere along the way. And of course, I was only pretending that I was dealing with life. In reality, the world began ignoring me and moving on without my not so imperious presence.

Upon coming into recovery, I found that life was very difficult to deal with life. I no longer had my crutch. I had to learn or relearn what I was supposed to do. I listened at meetings. I read our literature. I talked to my sponsor and to other recovering members. Gradually I learned how to do simple things like say ‘No, thank you,’ and ‘I think I’m going home. Thanks for a nice evening.’ As time went on I learned that I can stand tall against tragedies as well as triumphs without falling back on my old stand-by. My thinking changed. I was no longer doing the same things that I used to do. I was facing life and managing.

This, for me, is the spiritual awakening that is talked about in Step Twelve. A change in my spirit, my response to life. It’s a change in mindset: a new approach to life. And it’s just an awakening: it doesn’t mean I’ve got it all figured out. I see a spiritual awakening in the same was as I look at waking up in the morning. When I first start to become conscious in the morning I slowly open my eyes, come to realize where I am. I get up, put the coffee on and maybe after that first coffee, I can say that I am awake. In the same way, I see a spiritual awakening as that first opening of the eyes in the morning. It will take a while before I am fully awake spiritually.  A few more cups of ‘spiritual’ coffee, if you will, before I am spiritually conscious. More will be revealed.

I am grateful.

 

 

Sharing Solutions

/ Tim / 1 Comment

I was talking to a friend yesterday who is in recovery. She mentioned that she goes to very few meetings. Why? Because her home group meetings tend to focus on the using stories, you know, the war stories, the drunk-a-logs, the remember whens. It’s often a negative experience for her. Unfortunately there aren’t many options for her in her town and not having a vehicle, it’s difficult to get to other places where meetings aren’t always looking at the problem.

I am grateful that my home group has good recovery. We read that we don’t need to regret the past or shut the door on it, but rather, learn from it and apply it to our lives today. And yes, there are days when there seems to be a table full of members complaining about their problems with relationships, neighbours or finances, but the sharing somehow always comes back to living in the solution.

How does the group achieve this? I believe that it is taught by continued good sponsorship. When I was young in the program, I think I had maybe three or four months of being clean and sober, I became very aware. Now that substances weren’t clouding my judgement, I could see my defects and deficiencies. As they say, a horse thief who isn’t drinking is still a horse thief. I was beginning to see who I really was. I used a meeting to complain about the program, the pace of my recovery, my fears and worries. I can see now that I was focusing in on my problems at the meeting.

Fortunately for me, after the meeting, an old-timer asked me, “Do you have a sponsor?” I was rather taken aback by his directness, but replied that I did. “Then I suggest you use him,” he advised. Fortunately I was willing to listen to this advice and learned a valuable lesson: Bring your problems to your sponsor and your solutions to the meetings.

Yes, it’s important that meetings are places where one can go and vent about what is going on in ones life, but I don’t think my friend is wrong in her assessment of her local meeting. We need to hear solutions. We all know the problems but we often have difficulty, especially in early recovery, in using our program and applying solutions to those problems. That’s what I need to hear. I don’t want to hear about your problems at home, I need to hear about how I can apply the program in creating solutions. We all have an irritating coworker or someone who cuts us off on the road, but tell me how you are finding serenity in the midst of it all. I don’t need sympathy and compassion, I need to know how you managed a similar situation. My sponsor or the person beside me might share a new perspective or idea from their experience, strength and hope.

I get those solutions from working my twelve step program with my sponsor and by having these same people sharing around the table. I get the solutions because we have a policy of no cross-talk: no giving direct advice to a person. Rather than commiserating with the person or telling them what they should do, we share how we dealt with people, places, things and events that happened in our lives. I get the program because sponsorship is encouraged and promoted. That for me is the program in action, and in action in a very positive way. If you’re not hearing solutions at meetings, perhaps it’s time to look for another home group. There’s a lid for every pot; find look for one that fits you well.

 

Conscious Contact

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In the eleventh step we seek to improve our ‘conscious contact’ with our Higher Power. We can do that through prayer and medication, er, well, no, sorry. That was before. Now it’s prayer and meditation. Silly play on words, but in fact, that’s exactly what we had been doing before we came into the program. We used drugs and alcohol (also a drug that often mixes well with orange juice) to take us out of ourselves and somewhere else. Only it never quite got us there. Funny thing about conscious contact, you have to be ‘conscious’ to make that contact and the substances caused loss of consciousness and are detrimental to our body, mind and spirit.

What does ‘conscious contact’ with my Higher Power mean for me today? Let me start by saying that it doesn’t mean spending my days in the lotus positon, chanting a mantra and meditating on the meaning of life. I can’t ‘do’ the lotus position. My body doesn’t fold that way. I must have big joints in my hips and knees. My mind never seems to quiet down enough to stop wandering after five minutes and when it does, I don’t meditate, I wake up, about a half an hour later. For me, the only thing close to chanting a mantra is repeating the Serenity Prayer over and over in times of stress until I find some peace and calm. At this time, I guess my mind needs more structure than the free form meditation. Fortunately for me, there are many ways to have contact with my Higher Power.

I believe that what this step is leading us to is the change in our thinking. We learn to filter our thoughts and deeds through what we learn in our program. We seek to think before we act. We stop and ask ourselves what might happen if we were to do this or say that. We look to where it might lead us. We ask how this might affect those around us, our friends and family.  We think about how it may affect us and our program of recovery. Only then make a decision on whether or not to do it.

It starts slowly.  Like everything in our program, it is a process that takes time. At first we become conscious of something after the fact. After we say or do something that is not how we want to act, we realize it later.  Perhaps when doing a review of our day, we acknowledge that we could have done or said things differently.  Later, with more time and practice we begin to realize when we’re in the middle of it. It’s the ‘Oh shit, I shouldn’t be doing this should I,’ experience. We’re in the middle of a defect of character, perhaps anger, and we have a mini ‘aha’ moment. At first we’re so caught up in the moment that we are unable to stop, though we know we should. It part of the process we are learning. Then we will learn to stop when we see a defect and change our tack in mid-stream.

The final part of this process is when we filter our thoughts and action through our program before acting upon them. That I believe is where we begin to touch conscious contact with our Higher Power. We are aware of who and where we are. Anger, jealousy, and fear do not guide us. Our recovery program does.

All of this takes time. Usually we have to do it for every one of our defects. We have backslides and go back to our old way of thinking and doing but we recognize that it’s not the way we want to live and strive to improve. As was told to me, in order to be successful at this, all I have to do is get up one more time than I fall. It takes time and practice.  There are bound to be lots of ‘oh shit’ moments in everyone’s recovery. With time and with ‘conscious contact’ with whatever Higher Power you have, you will get better at it and those moments will occur less and less.

Recovery takes time. Don’t throw in the towel because you screwed up once. You deserve recovery: trust the process and keep plugging away. You’ll probably find that you’re already more than halfway there.

Photo Credit: Rodney Conrad