AA’s Step 11 reads, “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God,” but many newly sober alcoholics – and people with time – have trouble knowing where to start. I was moved after my morning meditation to record a spontaneous YouTube meditation for this blog, so I did. Such reflections free me from my fears and self-criticisms (see bedevilments, p. 52, Big Book).
Close your eyes and hang out.
This is a shareable (but unlisted) link. Feel free to share it with anyone you think might benefit or post it on recovery pages. Please let me know in the comments if you’d like me to make more.
No hair combing, zero make-up, not trying to look presentable. House jammies and bedhead and reflecting glasses. The focus is inward toward source and outward toward you.
Here’s my sweet Alice a month after being rescued from starvation in the Rio Grande Desert. Her stunted body did catch up with her head and paws a little once she got regular nutrition, and she is often happy.
I’m an alcoholic who loves god but kinda wants to kick religion’s ass. I never capitalize “God” in my own writing because that big “G” smacks of scripture. Every time I hear an AA newcomer, potentially dying, say they can’t get over the “religious” aspect of AA, I want to yell toward the ceiling, “Are ya HAPPY, Religion?? See how you’ve fucked up god for BILLIONS of humans?!”
This probably has more to do with me than religion. More often than not I’m sitting in a churchbasement, after all, kindly rented to an AA group for cheap. Churches do mean well.
The first time I read “We Agnostics,” 28 years ago, I called myself an atheist — despite having had a Near-Death Experience during which I was bathed, for just a short while, in the brilliant intensity of god’s love. That and the paranormal after-effects it brought on were memories slammed away in a DONTTHINKOFIT vault.
Alcoholics can do that.
So I was shocked to find this chapter did open my mind to a higher power, simply by means of its water-tight argument(s). Here’s my version of how it proceeds — though of course, you should read the original.
We Agnostics…….
If you’re a bona fide alcoholic, you have only two choices
a) be doomed to an alcoholic death (my note: perhaps slowwwly)
b) live on a spiritual basis
Lots of us thought we couldn’t do (b), but we have – so you can, too.
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IF we could think our way out of addiction, we’d all be fine. We had tons of moral and ethical resolve, but even when we willed with all our might, we got drunk. What we lacked was power — a power greater than ourselves.
Guess what this whole book is about? Finding that power.
“Let’s go kill anyone who won’t believe in me!!”
We know you’re going to bum about this. We know religion makes you puke. We know even the word “God” might bring up the shit thrown at you in childhood. We all thought [NEXT PAGE] reliance on God was a crutch for cowards. We thought about all the destruction religion’s caused and all the hypocritical assholes in media and small towns posing as holy. We couldn’t even wrap our brains around a Supreme Being, anyway. We know, we know… we felt all this, too.
AND YET…. sometimes, especially in the beauty of nature or awareness of the vast universe, we felt a fleeting sense of awe. As soon as we could just become willing (or willing to become willing), as soon as we said, “Mayyyybe I can kinda believe in a power greater than me,” shit for reals started to change in our lives.
Don’t think about anybody else’s God. What feels like GOODNESS? Open to that. God is basically hanging out by the phone waiting for you to call.
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So, when we say “God” here, just think about whatever works for you (ask why you want to live — it has to do with god). Don’t let all that negativity stop you from looking deep within.
Ask yourself, “Am I willing (to be willing) to believe there’s something good out there more powerful than me?” If you can say yes… dude, you’re on your way!
We’d aways assumed we’d have to drink major Kool-aid to jump through this hoop, so we were stoked to keep it simple.
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Being pissed off about spirituality in general — we had to quit that crap because, let’s face it, we were dying. Alcohol was thoroughly kicking our asses, so we had to open our minds. You’re asking, why believe? We’ve got some good reasons.
People love evidence-based stuff, but most of us accept all kinds of explanations we’re clueless about. We’re like, “Yeah, um, electricity is like electrons jumping from one atom to another. Totally!” And we let it go without needing to really understand because we just want to use our goddamn phones and appliances. They work, and that’s good enough.
There’s all kinds of shit like this we believe without proof. Even science itself holds that appearances don’t mean jack.
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Let’s take your average steel girder (I-beam in a sky scraper) It’s really a bunch of electrons whirling around a crazy speeds according to laws of physics (my note: PLUS it’s 99% empty space and the electrons pop in and out of existence with all kinds of quantum weirdness, dark matter, and anti-matter — and WE are way too dumb to understand any of it.) We’re all like, “Cool, I got it.”
BUT as soon as somebody suggests there’s a guiding, creative force behind the universe, we say, “Hold my beer! Let me use my grapefruit-sized brain to determine the nature of the universe!” If our atheist arguments were right, then life would exist for no reason and mean nothing. We like to think we’re the smartest game in town.
You know, even organized religion isn’t all doo-doo. We’ve all seen religious people we had to respect. In fact, a lot of them have had their shit together WAY more than we ever have.
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We were too busy judging to see the upside. We accused religious people of being intolerant, when we were actually the intolerant ones.
If you read the stories in the back of this book, you’ll see how each person found their own higher power their own way. What they have in common is that every single one believes their higher power worked fuckin’ miracles in their lives.
You’ve got thousands (millions) of people who’ve lived hardcore but who swear that since they opened their minds to an HP and started working the 12 steps sincerely, their whole world has flipped from despairing to happy. [NEXT PAGE] They tell about how they were the ones screwing up their own lives, alcohol aside. When all these (millions of) people say God changed them, CAN you really dismiss all of us as feeble minded, gullible, deluded cult members?
Progress in science and technology gets hampered when people cling to fixed ideas. Columbus, Galileo — people said they were nuts. Aren’t you just as stubborn about spirituality as those guys were about science?
For example, in the Wright Brothers’ day, NOBODY thought humans could fly. EVERYBODY was sure that idea was bullshit — how could heavy, big machines possibly go zoom in the air? But 30 years later, airplanes were just a normal part of life.
If you showed some average Joe / Joette an article about going to the moon (or now Mars) and they’d say, “I bet they will.” More and more, people can throw away the theory or gadget that doesn’t work in exchange for one that does.
Dude — what’re you doin’ clinging to self-sufficiency? It doesn’t work! Try the new gadget, for chrissakes.
We were bedevilled by shitty relationships, roller-coaster emotions, misery and depression, money problems; we were scared and unhappy and useless. Wasn’t fixing our lives by ANY means more important than seeing proof? Duh!!!
Orville and Wilber Wright
The Wright brothers built a plane that flew after 50 million failed attempts because they BELIEVED in their dream so purely. Alcoholics who’d rather suffer than try the new thing — they’re just like those cynics who scoffed at the Wright brothers’ naïveté.
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Logic is great. Let’s think about how to have faith is actually more logical than the soft and mushy thinking we settled for in our agnosticism. As alcoholics, we were dying (or wasting life). We had to get fucking honest: either
a) God animates everything, or
b) God is nothing.
We HAD to DECIDE.
[Here’s a bunch of corny shit about some bridge that I wish they’d cut.]
Come to think of it, we’ve always had faith in our reasoning skills,
Life / god happens.
even though we’re wrong a lot. We’ve all worshipped cool people, sentimental icons, commercial STUFF, $-money-money-money-$, and our private imaginings of someday being badass. But at the same time, we’ve all felt reverence for a sunset, for the ocean, for a flower. We’ve all loved someone. And NONE of these things had jack shit to do with pure reason. Our lives are made of love and faith and feeling, and would be totally empty without them. We believe in life, and we know, deep down, it has meaning.
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Just think about all those alcoholics who were trapped wallowing around in their own mess for sooo long, and how they say God showed them a new way to live, and how we liked to privately smirk about it.
We were actually full of shit, because we knew, deep, deep down, that God is. That core knowledge may get obscured, but it’s there, always. Looking inward, we find a lifesource that loves us, that is part of us.
Okee-doke! That’s all we can do to help! Time for YOU to get honest — but we know you can do this.
[Here’s a corny story about some minister’s son having a HUGE, DRAMATIC spiritual awakening.]
If you just find the humility to let down your guard and honestly ask God to help you, God will show up. But you’ve gotta ASK.
Ta-dah! I hope this little Cliff Note session was helpful. I’m one of those people whose lives have been completely transformed by god. I never thought that could happen. I hope eventually you’ll love this chapter exactly as it stands and help your sponsees understand it, too.
Short answer? Terrifying. Terrifying because to live without drinking was unimaginable — like a layer of my identity being ripped from me. I had reached the point where I could not imagine life either with or without alcohol.
Today, at 27 years sober, those days seems distant not just chronologically but because my reality is completely transformed. The only experience I can compare with getting sober is having kids: imagining how it might be to have kids is a world away from actually becoming a parent, supporting the lives of your children in countless ways and loving them more powerfully than you ever dreamed possible.
The same was true for me, but the child in question was my authentic self. There’s an apt truism that goes like this: You don’t know what you don’t know. In other words, we think what we know must be all there is to know about sobriety because we’re ignorant that a whole different realm exists.
Zealousshadow
I was sure I knew who I was. I was sure I knew the role booze played in my life. And I assumed I could guess what a life without booze would look like.
Wrong on all three counts!
Amputating a Limb
To guess at what life would be like without booze, it seemed reasonable to work this equation:
What would it be like, I wondered, to hang out in bars and NOT drink? Would I still play pool and darts, and, of course, smoke? How would I sit around on my stoner friends’ couches and NOT get stoned? What would be the point of hitting up a party if not to get drunk?
And what about life at home? How would I watch movies without booze? Cook or work in the yard? How would I ever relax and chill out?
Subtracting alcohol, I believed, would leave a gaping hole in my life. This void seemed inevitable because I’d lost track of both who I was and what life was about. The goal, I’d come to believe, was always to FEEL BETTER. I knew only two ways to do that: 1) booze and cocaine and 2) esteem from crushes and “cool” people.
Happiness through a heart connection with the inherent goodness of the universe wasn’t even on the table.
Here are some journal entries from my first year:
1 day sober: “I went to an AA meeting tonight. Was so uncomfortable and out of place and felt I will never, never stop drinking, so why even want to? I know drinking so intimately. I know me with a glass of wine or a beer better than anyone else in this world. I love to drink. I love it like freedom and happiness. I want never to stop.”
65 days sober: “I really do think AA has saved my life. I couldn’t have done it — stopped the drinking, the downward spiral — alone. I wanted to let myself go, let it end. That’s why crashing my car seemed the best way… But now I live in fear. I fear every coming minute, every hour of consciousness that I have to get through on my own — just me and the world. But the good side is, I know I CAN get through it if I just hold on and keep going. And that is courage. I am rough-riding the world, life, being me. And every moment I do is a triumph.”
222 days sober: “I’m seven months sober. I am very messed up. Even writing doesn’t seem to do any good, because I am so TIRED of being messed up. There’s never a break. Today it got to be too much for me. Sitting in a women’s meeting, this woman told her story, very low bottom. And while I was moved during it, afterwards my disease started creeping up from the back of my mind, my old love affair with drinking, missing it and the sense of REBELLION and SECLUSION and FALSE SELF-SUFFICIENCY I got from drinking. I missed feeling okay when I was drunk. I started feeling it was too much to say I’d never drink again.
“So I started planning my relapse, peeking at how I could, how the bail money was right there. Just drink. Drink like before. I do know I couldn’t control it for long. I drink to get drunk, not for one drink. There’s always further to go and I always want it.”
Notice that in the first quote, I have no faith whatsoever. Drinking is still my whole world. In the second, I’m courageously pioneering unknown territory. In the third, I finally recognize that I’m up against a disease that tells me I don’t have a disease, one that lies to me about how to fix everything. I know it’s lying, but I’m still extremely uncomfortable.
Time Takes Time
This is another simple truism from the program. Newly sober people pass through another childhood. When we take away the layers of self-stupefying to “take the edge off” and self-delusion that we can somehow feel what others think of us, we have to learn to live all over again.
Inwardly, we have to learn how to be okay with consciousness, how to feel difficult feelings like awkwardness, tension, boredom, guilt, discontent, uncertainty, jealousy, and so on. We learn that A) they won’t kill us, and B) that instead of numbing them away, we find the courage to change the things we can so we’re able to grow and cope. Each difficult feeling can serve as a spur for growth.
On the other hand, we also get to taste genuine aliveness, a full awareness of Earth’s beauties, tenderness toward people we love, and satisfaction from accomplishments both humble and huge. When we experience our first glow of true joy — not hyped up giddiness — or our first sense that maybe we DO belong, these experiences can be mind-blowing. Peace can be mind-blowing.
As we nurture a connection with our higher power, we begin to perceive it not as some deity overseeing the world but as an energy infusing everything, the force of goodness generating all that lives and evolves — not just biologically but (let’s hope) ethically. Through working the 12 steps, we learn that we can align ourselves with that divine unfolding to gain a strong sense of dignity and purpose.
All of these new feelings and awarenesses grew in me at their own pace, as they do for everyone new in recovery. Gradually a secure inward peace replaces early sobriety’s raw vulnerability. Our new job is now only to become the fullest possible expression of ourselves. Ours is the work of thriving.
Yes, this blog’s main topic is recovery from alcoholism — BUT it’s based in my own recovery, which has a lot to do with my 1982 Near Death Experience and the many paranormal aftereffects it brought on. My spirituality is all about these ongoing encounters with the spirit world. I’m currently writing a book about them titled Die-Hard Atheist (as opposed to my addiction memoir, which is 90% alcoholism/love addiction and 10% NDE-related).
Describing paranormal experiences that contradict the mainstays of mainstream science is hard. You become vulnerable. Most people who haven’t had such experiences assume you’re either a) making stuff up for attention or b) so dumb you mistake normal variations of mind for metaphysical stuff. But here goes.
In November 2019 I communicated with my father, who died in 2008.
Since my NDE, I’ve accidentally read people’s minds on many occasions, in addition to foreknowing events and hearing from my guardian angel on the regular. In the fall of 2019, I attended a conference of the International Association of Near Death Studies (IANDS), where I described these experiences to a fellow NDEr with powers of mediumship. I’ll never forget the moment she smiled at me and said, “You’re a medium, honey! You just haven’t developed it.”
The communication with my father took place at our family summer cabin — a place he dearly loved. The cabin is rustic and constantly trying to go back to the earth, so my dad used to always keep busy with maintenance and fixes, saving money with DIY repairs. That’s exactly what I was doing — replacing the mossy, rotted shingle roof on the toolshed after a falling tree branch had crushed a corner of it.
All day Saturday I worked up there in the pouring rain, shielding with tarps whatever needed to stay dry. I kept feeling my father’s presence in a way I often do when I’m fixing stuff around there. He seems to be witnessing my work, approving. Over the course of the day, I was steeped in this feeling of his presence, which I loved and missed. Nothing paranormal about it — just a sense we all get at times.
My dad had died 13 years after I got sober in AA. For me, watching his alcoholism progress was especially painful because he did not want what I had. Instead, he continued to believe the same lie he’d told himself for decades, that though he needed to drink less, alcohol was still his best friend. After he was forced to retire at 70, his “start time” for drinking gradually crept into the morning hours — he’d pour wine into his tea cup. His liver and heart enlarged, and his brain shrank, but he dismissed these medical warnings as absurd until he succumbed to alcoholic cardiomyopathy at age 85. That’s not young, I know, but just 15 years prior, he’d been beating his law students in games of squash.
Early Sunday morning at the cabin, I decided to try to reach his spirit. I was alone but for one friend in the second cabin who would, I knew, sleep in late. So I made up my mind: I would seek Dad. I was sitting in what used to be his place at the table, facing the row of windows that fronts the cabin and looks out at Puget Sound.
I closed my eyes to meditate, focused on the crackle of the fire and my own breathing. I had no more clue than you do how mediums work, so I just tried to call up that feeling of closeness I’d had with Dad the day before. Then I began to inwardly address him. “Dad, please say something to me. I want to hear from you. Please come to me. Please speak to me. I am ready. I am listening. Please.”
Nothing happened. I kept trying. More nothing.
This lack of response seemed to drag on for ages, but in reality it was probably about five minutes. I never lost faith that Dad could hear me. I knew there was some veil separating us, keeping me deaf to him. Then, among the many invitations I’d tried, I framed this particular question: “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
WHOOSH!!!
You know when a powerful gust of wind hits you full in the face? That was the experience I had, but energetically. My dad’s presence, his personality, his unique energy as a living man — not just as my father but the whole man he’d been — swept over me. This wasn’t the guy I’d been seeking, the weary, discouraged, beaten-down father I’d known for his last fifteen years. He was young! I didn’t see him, but he filled my awareness with the powerful charisma he’d had during the years I’d loved him most intensely, when I was about five and we read books together and I learned from him to ride a bike and tagged along through all his yard work and snuggled with him on the chaise lounge in the sunshine. This was he! But I also felt his ambition to be, to do, to love! He was powerful.
Next, I became aware he was showing me an image: something white with squares of fine wire mesh. It was the old crib! My parents had used a really weird crib for all four of us kids; instead of bars it had rectangles of bug screen, along with a foldable top that would keep out bugs entirely — though we lived in Seattle with very few bugs. I saw it again at closer range, and then closer still. I realized I was seeing his view of approaching it; I was inside his memory and he knew that his baby — I — was in the crib, though he stopped short of where I might actually see myself. Huge amounts of love radiated from him for that infant, HUGE love, along with tremendous joy and excitement and gratitude that I had entered this world via him. It was a sacred honor to him — then and now — that I had come into my lifetime through his.
Blown away as I was by all this, it took me a few seconds to sense his actual response to my question, the thing he’d broken through the veil to tell me. It was this: “All of you was there then, all of you in that tiny baby — and when I lived, I loved THAT!”
My mind still faltered to understand his meaning, so he added, “You didn’t have to do anything.”
Now I understood. He was right: all my life, he’d pushed me to excel. If I got an A- on anything, he’d pretend to get very grave about it — a joke, but not really a joke. When I decided not to pursue a PhD, when I came out as (temporarily) gay, when I left a tenured teaching post — always I’d encountered his will, however subtle, that I be something more. What needed amendment, what he’d crossed the veil to give me, was the knowledge that always, in his heart, he had loved me without condition and with tremendous rejoicing.
I understood. I sent him my deepest love and told him how grateful I was to be his daughter. But then my skeptical mind butted in: What kind of craziness was this — communicating with my dead dad?! So I asked him directly, “Dad, how do I know this is really you?”
Again, he showed me an image — something I’d never seen in my own life. In the corner of that crib sat a bright pink, brand new Teddy bear. It was downright garish. But a moment later, I recognized it as the old, one-eyed, much-loved, squashed, and faded Teddy bear I’d known in my childhood. “This was the first stuffed animal we got you,” Dad told me, “…and you named him ‘Áha.'”
With that, he was gone.
Amazement filled me. Yes, yes, the name of that Teddy bear was Áha! I’d not thought of it in 45 or years or so, but I remembered! Áha held special meaning for Dad because one of his morning routines for many years was to make my sister’s and my beds, on which he would set up little pageants featuring our carefully posed and balanced stuffed animals with various toys or props. Áha might have on a Halloween mask and be scaring all the other stuffed animals; he might have a little book and be reading to them; he sat with the others at a little table with toy foods. Every day, Dad poured his love for us into these little games. Though I’d much preferred other stuffed toys myself, he’d always given leading roles to Áha. Now I knew why: Áha had been the first.
Dad had was gone — of that I was sure — but the knowings he’d given me continued to resonate. I was amazed at the succinctness, the iconic concentration, the genius of each message! As a mother, I knew the feeling he was describing — that immense love for one’s baby. I can also remember toys my grown son has long since forgotten. How had Dad picked out an image only he (& Mom) could know — bright pink new Áha sitting in the corner of the crib — and connected it to a name I couldn’t have recalled for a million dollars without his prompting, but knew was right?
I’m happy to know my dad has regained all his power on the other side — all his joy and love and vibrancy. Alcoholism burdened him and masked them later in his life, but it’s an illness of the brain, that fatty labyrinth of neurons we use to navigate on Earth. It can’t touch our spirits, which have love as their sole source.
You’d think that, having discovered I have the capability to connect with the dead, for cryin’ out loud, I would find the time to “develop” my mediumship skills. It seems a pretty huge gift, one worth cultivating, even if you’d have to sacrifice other interests to make space — right? But how many things do YOU want to do that you can’t seem to make time for? Earning a living is quite a grind! Keeping the house from getting totally gross and falling apart is a grind! And I LOVE to climb mountains, so staying in shape physically takes a lot of my time. I’ve tried a few other times to reach Dad or my sister or AA friends lost to overdose, but always my head is just too full of clutter and unrecognized fears that block communication.
Maybe I’ll try again at the summer cabin this spring. Until then, here’s a new video of me telling the story of my NDE and some paranormal aftereffects.
[No link? See “JeffMara Podcast” on YouTube or remove spaces from https: //youtu.be/ RXp2jbLWuD0 ]
Now and then a serious drinker, being dry at the moment says, “I don’t miss it at all. Feel better. Work better. Having a better time.” As ex-problem drinkers, we smile at such a sally. We know our friend … would give anything to take half a dozen drinks and get away with them. He will presently try the old game again, for he isn’t happy about his sobriety. He cannot picture life without alcohol. Some day he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol or without it. Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping-off place. He will wish for the end.
— Chapter 11, Alcoholics Anonymous
I hit bottom on 01/29/95. On that day, I could no longer imagine life either with or without alcohol, and I truly wished for the end. The August prior, I’d quit alcohol for 30 days just to show I didn’t have a problem. I was staying in a friend’s vacant apartment because my partner had banished me from our home, having read my journal and discovered some of the sickness I’d been concealing. But oh, well.
I hung a calendar on my friend’s kitchen wall and drew a big X through each day I passed without a drink. I felt healthier, had more energy, was cheery at work. But LOVE not drinking? What are, you, nuts? I could hardly wait for the month to be over so I could drink again, because any life without drinking struck me as beyond dull — it would, I knew, be brash, relentless, barren, and joyless. Alcohol, I felt, was the oil in the engine of my life.
So on September 1st — cheers! — I was back at it. But by 01/29/95, much had changed. A thick, murky self-disgust filled my consciousness; I saw no hope of ever enjoying life; and alcohol, almost inconceivably, no longer helped. There’s an explanation for what was going on at the brain level, but all I knew was that, no matter how much I drank, I felt no levity. The world had gone devoid of all color and charm; other people seemed self-sufficient judging machines. I just couldn’t deal anymore.
My idea of a fine suicide was guzzling a gallon of vodka — a scheme I knew my stomach would allow. But FIRST, because I couldn’t do it after, I dialed the number a sober friend had scrawled for me on a scrap of paper, and that night I went to my first AA meeting. I no longer gave a shit whether life was brash, relentless, barren, and joyless. All I knew was that nothing I’d tried could render it tolerable, and several people had claimed AA would.
If you’d told me then that in 25 years, sobriety would comprise the gem of my life, that I’d love my AA homegroup as my dear, motley family, and that pretty much all my friends would be in AA or NA, I’d have said, “You must be talking about somebody else.” And you would have been, because the psychic change that comes with thoroughly working the steps through several iterations over the years has transformed who I am.
What Happened?
To realize that we hold a limited perspective, I think, goes against the basic nature of human consciousness. Our brains tell us that the world is what it is and that we’re perceiving it accurately. If there’s a problem, it must be with the world, not how we process or think about the world.
Even at that “let’s kill ourselves ’cause it’s a good idea” rock bottom, my perspective felt both certain and precious to me. My pride was rooted in it. My attitudes and values had built up over my 34-year lifetime, crafted through countless efforts to deal with the tricks and pains of living. I truly believed they were me. To say they were distorted was to steal all I’d worked for. And to say that in some outdated white-guy book and in church basements full of strangers, a better perspective could be attained — well, that was just plain shallow.
NO ONE likes to think that other people have answers we lack. If millions of sober people tell us they struggled with the god thing but it eventually became the foundation of their happiness, we feel we’re different, put up a wall, and say, “They must be simpletons.”
I’m special!
My first months without alcohol did indeed prove brash and relentless — a place where many stay stuck. Yet for me, they proved not altogether barren and joyless because I’d begun the long process of growth. Through incremental acknowledgement, over and over, I began to see that my ways kept leading me toward depression and emptiness, whereas each time I tried a little more of their way, life got better. Two years in, I worked the steps whole hog.
Rather than being brainwashed, I found I became more me — little Louisa was still in there, and she was cute and creative and love-filled, and all the things she’d been before she lost the key to life: loving from the source of god and sharing goodwill with others. Children do this without needing a reason. Yet at some point I’d changed to one who wants from others, and it nearly killed me.
I understand now that one drink will inevitably lead me to thousands, and that whenever I’m drinking, I’m cut off from god like a plant inside a box. To drink, for me, is to wither spiritually, even if my outsides are puffed up with false revelry.
Willingness is the key. For me, that meant relinquishing my grip on being right, knowing best, and being a smarty-pants in general, because otherwise, I stayed locked in my old perspective. And the relinquishing never ends.
Today, when I say I love my sobriety, what I’m really saying is that I love this life — its fleeting beauties, its inevitable struggles, its poignant fragility. Sobriety is the honesty that lets me behold it.
Recent events have reminded me how, for so many years, I lived trapped in relentless self-criticism, how I suffered in hating and pitying myself, and how blindly I sought escape from that tangle of feelings. The emotional health I’ve gradually been graced with is paradise by contrast, but living here causes me to forget how lost I used to be — an amnesia that dulls my compassion.
My son came to me last night and shared that he’s in tremendous emotional pain. I’d had no idea. The news came as a shock. I remember when he was 6, he told me one night in his sweet, piping voice, “I feel sorry for anyone who has to be around me — because I’m such a horrible person.” I did what I wished my parents had done for me: took him seriously. I explained that he mustn’t listen to what the “mean voice” said to him, that it would always find fault with him just for existing. I explained all the ways I cope: identify it, label it, question it. Whenever I checked in with him in the weeks and years that followed, he told me the mean voice had gone away. Last night I learned that’s not the case. As he’s grown to a 6′ young man, so, too, has his self-loathing swelled to a powerful announcer of worthlessness.
And here I hit up against my own powerlessness to lead him out of his pain, as much as I wish I could. Because the resounding, unavoidable fact of life is that we each must find our own way. I know I could never have healed without the loving community of recovering alcoholics to which my higher power guided me. But my son, like every person ever born, must find his own path. Will I send him to counseling? Of course! But even an excellent therapist can only clear the ground and help us give names to the various forms of suffering and trauma we carry. To step out of those to a higher plane — that’s something each must do for themself, collaborating, whether consciously or unconsciously, with god.
No one can hand you freedom. The whole problem with drugs, alcohol, or any addiction is that they seem to — so we chase them, no matter what anyone tells us.
In fact, my powerlessness to help my son brings me up against my powerlessness to help anyone; it makes me question the whole premise of this blog. So often I write about the view from this safe, cozy ledge of sanity I’ve settled on, forgetting what it was like to dangle above that dark chasm, clinging to whatever false fix of the day. I wish so much I could hand over to the world all I’ve been given — but life doesn’t work that way.
Image: Mario Sixtus
I come back to my core belief: that we are all incomplete without god, that we’re each set down on this Earth with a mission to reforge that connection, and that to the extent we succeed, we expand the power of love/god. “We all live inside of god” — that’s how a Near Death Experiencer I recently interviewed put it. And yet we bubble ourselves off inside fear, anger, and ego, languishing in isolation. Each time we pierce the bubble by reaching through with love, we express the energy of god. We are god’s tendrils, its nerve endings, the leaves of its vast tree. But if a leaf seals itself off from sustenance because for some reason it’s denying the tree’s existence, it withers. And withering hurts.
My father, I, and now, I learn, my son were all given minds wired for self-condemnation. Until last night I believed that, because my son doesn’t use drugs or alcohol, we’d somehow broken the chain. Yet today I consider that, although I was 6 years sober when he was born, I remained a confused woman clinging to a dysfunctional, codependent relationship. When that relationship fell apart, my son, who was then only two and a half, lay face down on the carpet and spoke the words, “My family is dead.” I tried so hard to love him so much that the pain wouldn’t sear his little heart — but for whatever reason, I couldn’t spare him. I don’t know that I could have done anything differently. All I could do was be honest and love him — and that’s more true than ever today.
Last night I tried to speak to him of god, of the crucial importance of seeking out whatever font of goodness lies within our cores and appealing to it for help. Doing that, I said, saved my life. How lame my words sounded! How lame they sound here! Because finding god is an inside job, while words are just outside symbols, and never the twain shall meet. That’s why religion rings so hollow for most of us.
Yet the same is true here. Words, words, words!
My own truth is that god has led me every step of the way through my own messy, twisted, often sick-sick-sick story, though I never knew it in the moment. That fucking cliché poem about only one set of footprints in the sand? That has been my experience. For instance, without that dysfunctional, codependent relationship, I might not be here today, because that partner was sober in AA when we met, whereas I was a dying drunk.
Every pain I’ve walked through has been my teacher, a way for god to suggest a deeper truth if I was willing to see it. Pain — listening to it, not fleeing it — has shown me what works and what doesn’t. In essence, it’s been like an electric fence bordering my own unique path toward happiness. I’ve had zap myself repeatedly by straying after various dumb shiny things before I’d become willing to abandon them and proceed along a wiser tack. Slowly, gradually, I’ve learned how to live.
The same, I pray, will be true for my son — and for you.
“The god part” is, without question, the biggest hurdle of the AA program for countless sick and dying alcoholics and addicts. For me it certainly was, because when I read that word “God” coupled with “He” in the 12 steps, I immediately thought of religion, of versions of God as a humanoid king or judge. And that image made me barf. It seemed extremely inconvenient that the only thing AA could offer to save my life was something so hokey as a higher power.
At the time when I was hitting bottom and, thanks to countless contingencies I now see as guidance, finding myself in my first AA meeting, I was an atheist. An avid, even rabid one. However, I was also trying to bracket some extremely weird shit that had been happening to me — inexplicable experiences our culture would label delusional or make-believe.
What sort of weird shit do I mean?
During an early morning rain storm, I saw an old man on an ocean beach in Gloucester, MA, dressed in what appeared to be antique rain gear and walking from the dunes on my left toward the waves on my right, perpendicular to my solo progress. I made up my mind to ask, as soon as I got close enough to communicate over the strong wind and thundering waves, where he’d found such authentic-looking yellow Mackintosh garb. But as I got closer I saw he was staring toward the horizon as if in some intense emotional pain. I tried to look for what he might be seeing, but the clouds hung so low over the water, there was nothing to see. So, when he crossed directly in front of me, close enough that I saw the fine wrinkles and red capillaries on his face, I said only “How’s it going?” He did not reply, and when I had walked a ways further, I looked back, angered by his rudeness, only to see — no one. An empty beach. I tried to figure out where the old guy could have got to so fast. But when I went back to look for his tracks, I could find none but my own. This happened five years after my Near-Death Experience.
A few years later, I knew my unborn nephew was destined to die, and that my brother was going to plunge into profound sea of grief at his loss. Then exactly that happened.
Weeks before I hit bottom, I’d driven home absolutely hammered, speeding along winding woodland roads, threading the needle amid a blur of reflectors on a narrow bridge. When I reached my house and stood congratulating myself, hanging onto the door for support, a voice shot through me like a bolt of knowing: This is the last time I can help you.
A few weeks later when my dog got hit by a truck and foiled my plans to attend a “vodka-slamming party” and just not drink, that same voice addressed me again: Look! My eyes at the moment were on the blood trickling over the asphalt from under my dog’s body, and the message was that my future would involve something similar if I didn’t cut the shit.
So that’s some weird shit, right?
Then I walked into an AA meeting (actually, the dog incident happened after my first half-assed prayer when I was 2 weeks sober) and I read “Came to believe in a Power greater than ourselves that could restore us to sanity.” I made absolutely no connection between those words and the voice that had, so to speak, hacked my consciousness.
Why not?
If you’re an alcoholic or any type of addict in recovery, then you know firsthand the isolating effect of relying on ego to navigate life. Ego tells us we are different. It sometimes tells us we’re special and better than others, but it can also tell us we’re worse than others, and that our various struggles are unique. In fact, living in ego’s lonely “I” rather than the heart’s “we” is what generates the pain we drink to escape.
But of course I did not know that.
I classified all my paranormal experiences as something I should keep to myself just as I did my obsessive infatuations or harshly manipulative thoughts of using mildly cool people to connect with their hella cool friends. The inner workings of my mind were a source of shame, and so these woo-woos, I felt, were shameful. They might point to a fried brain or neurosis, but certainly not to an active spirit world that could free me from addiction.
My own journey to arrive at working model of god has been long. Weird woo-woos continued to befall me until I broke down in about 2004 and accepted the spirit world as real. That acknowledgement eventually led me to seek out fellow NDErs in the Seattle chapter of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS).
What goes on in an NDE is that the spirit leaves the body; consciousness exits the brain. I recently heard a fascinating interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson*,a psychologist who’s been researching NDEs for about 40 years. Greyson theorizes that the brain acts as not only an interpreter of sensory input but also a filter against cosmic and spiritual input. Its primary function, he reasons, is our physical survival, so anything extraneous to that gets filtered out. We see and hear only those ranges of light and sound that are useful for filling our terrestrial needs. Input from an alternate plane of reality, Greyson theorizes, would distract us from those needs and thus detract from our chances of survival, so we evolved means to exclude it. The brain’s filtering capacity can, however, be suppressed by psychedelic drugs or even damaged by NDEs so that it ceases to work effectively, thus allowing spiritual energies to enter.
Greyson’s theory both differs from and aligns with my own. I believe that conscious beings are encapsulated in what I call a “god-phobic energetic membrane” analogous to the hydrophobic fatty membranes that encapsulate living cells. In other words, to function individually as a water-based mechanism in a water-based environment, each cell requires a membrane that repels water. Similarly, as we are bits of god swimming in god-energy, we need a god-repelling membrane in order to function independently. If we leave the body during an NDE, we somehow rupture the membrane, which closes faultily after our return so that other spirit energies can seep in. A medium is basically someone with a leaky energetic membrane.
My first IANDS meetings in 2012 felt very much like my first AA meetings. Just as in AA I marveled every time a fellow alcoholic articulated experiences I’d assumed to be mine alone, so at every IANDS meeting, I heard bits of “my story” told by others and came to realize I’m just a garden variety NDEr. Many, many NDErs had experienced a “voice” like the one I “hear” — which by that time had saved my life on multiple occasions — and referred to it simply as their guardian angel. One NDEr, upon reviving from death, had been able for a short while to see beings behind the people helping him — beings who were “helping them help me.” For lack of a better word, he said, he calls them angels.
Once I started to think of the voice randomly hacking my thoughts as my guardian angel rather than god itself, a lot of stuff began to make sense. I began to see that my angel greeted me on the other side, sent me back to Earth to accomplish something, and stays with me constantly. Sometimes my mind seems to hit the right “frequency” to pick up messages my angel conveys — often a variant of c’mon,you can be more honest! Rarely does my angel bust through apropos of no request, unless I’m in mortal danger or he has a life lesson to tell me in the moment.
I wish I could pass on to fellow alcoholics and others my certainty that the spirit world is real — but I can’t. Each life must ask directly, I’ve been told. Seek a god of your understanding. What weird things have happened to you? What synchronicities, what surprisingly accurate intuitions? Do not let the cultural construct of religion “deter you from honestly asking yourself what [spiritual terms] mean to you.” [p. 47]. You wouldn’t have read this far if you did not sense, at some level, leaks in your own filter or membrane allowing in wisps of the spirit world.
As I write this, the world is in a bit of a panic about COVID-19 — and understandably so. Much is unknown. Many will die.
Fear is huge right now because much of the world is a stranger to this degree of powerlessness. Nobody likes sudden, involuntary changes: being told to work or school their kids from home, to avoid contact with others. It’s tough. Disruptive. Confusing.
In times like these, it really sucks to have no higher power or faith in an afterlife. If we lack faith, we fight out of an amorphous, unrelenting fear. If we possess a working faith, we attend with care to each precaution, surrender what’s beyond our control, and trust that, though perhaps in ways beyond our understanding, all will be well.
For that matter, all may be better. Considered from a broad enough perspective, COVID-19 can be seen as a gift. This pandemic is teaching humanity, more vividly than anything heretofore, the crucial, overdue, and catastrophically-denied lesson that all of us share one planet. Humanity is, in fact, one big global community. National boundaries mean no more to this virus than they do to impacts of climate change. Both are everyone’s problem.
Surrender is simply saying, “What is, is. I have no power to change X, but I do have power to perform Y.” For instance, in the case of alcoholism, X is that we have it — a fact that won’t ever change. Y is our program of action: going to AA meetings, doing stepwork, and being of service to others.
A continuing counter-intuitive surrender for me is the fact that I’m a spiritually leaky bucket: No matter how many meetings I’ve gone to, how deeply I know the steps, or how much service I’ve offered in the past, my spiritual bucket gets empty again if I don’t continue filling it. My mind tells me, “Oh, I’m so smart now! See how my Big Book is read to tatters? I can stay sober on my own!” I certainly want to believe that. I certainly don’t want it to be my ticket to misery and an early death. But it would be. I need to believe what I want not to believe.
Surrender to the afterlife and spirit world has, weirdly enough, posed an even harder, more counter-intuitive challenge. I’ve had to say, “What is, is.” In this case, I mean both the reality of the spirit world and society’s disdain for it. I’ve experienced so many paranormal phenomena that I can no longer subscribe to the culturally dominant model of reality as exclusively material. That model stands in blatant contradiction to my Weird Things — direct experiences of seeing a ghost, prescience, clairvoyance, and communications/interventions from the dead and from my guardian angel.
I never wanted a Near Death Experience (NDE) any more than I wanted alcoholism. Following my NDE, I denied it as doggedly as I did alcoholism, clinging to my familiar materialism as much as I did to familiar drinking. I kept right on refusing to change when I saw a ghost, knew my nephew would die, and began to hear a voice that advised the opposite of what I, myself, had decided. Materialist science would lump all these together as delusions — my mind playing tricks on me. For decades, I simply shut away whatever materialism could not explain.
But there came a point when I could no longer hold out. I had to say, “What is, is! I have no power to change X — that I know the spirit world firsthand and that society dubs me a moron for saying so. I do, however, have power to perform Y — find others who share my truth.” Finding the sanctuary of IANDS, where everyone’s materialist schema has been pried from their equally reluctant intellectual grasp, has solidified my outlook.
What does all this have to do with COVID-19? Today, I volunteer for Seattle IANDS by interviewing NDErs and writing up their stories for our bi-monthly newsletter (print only, at this point). During the time they were dead, several interview subjects were shown, each through their own visual metaphor, that the spirit world is constantly working to guide humanity forward toward the light of universal love. Here are two interview excerpts:
“The largest light table was behind those two, a huge one with many saints around it. I couldn’t hear, but I knew they were talking about the planet – how to help it. More than any of the others, these saints had to allow. They were so serious because of all they were letting unfold.”
“I saw a city of diamond brightness. I knew the city contained highly advanced beings – angels and great souls [who] were building the future of humanity. I was given the revelation that… sometimes the intended purpose doesn’t unfold.”
Each seeks words to describe a hybrid of guidance and letting be. Both chose the word “unfold.” I’m reminded of the way we teach small children: we present them with a toy or a problem to solve that we think offers them an opportunity to learn; then we let them have at it.
God, according to countless NDErs, wants us to learn. Many were offered a choice to return and complete their learning in this life, or proceed unfinished to the next — but lose all they’d learned. “I viewed it much the same as having to repeat a grade in school,” says one who drowned river rafting.
CO2over China before & after COVID-19 lockdown
When I put this whole picture together, I see a benevolent god calling some souls home while giving humanity at large a nudge to wake the fuck up. In the single month since COVID-19 went international, the entire world has radically changed its ways of daily life, ceasing to commute, flying less, and producing less stuff — with the cumulative global effect of slashing our CO2 output beyond anything ever dreamed possible.
Learn, god is urging us, that all is one! — humans, animals, plants, Gaia, and god.
Everywhere I look, I see a big fat dead mosquito. Over the years, this insect has taught me a lot about life.
It’s inside my eyeball. Hiking across Glacier National Park in 2007 (left), at the moment I reached Triple Divide Pass, the spot where waters flow into three different oceans, it happened: a big fat dead mosquito appeared against the bright sky, like bunny ears cast on a movie screen. I could see the head and proboscis on its body, from which dangled several crumpled legs.
Having good insurance in those days, I soon saw an ophthalmologist who referred me to an expensive specialist with a computerized magnification system that let him tour around in my eyeball as if it were a museum. He looked and looked, asking me to move my eyes in various directions. Finally he scooted back from the machine.
“You’re right,” he said. “It looks like a big fat dead mosquito.”
Unfortunately, he explained, nothing could be done. A clump of cells had sloughed off my hyaloid canal, which connects the lens and optic nerve, but was still attached, drifting about in my ocular fluid and casting this distinctive shadow on my retina. Even if I’d wanted surgery, the risk to my optic nerve would be too great. Perhaps in time the cells would fall off and settle, like most floaters, to the bottom of my eyeball. Until then, he said, I’d just have to live with it.
Twelve years have passed, but my Big Fat Dead Mosquito (BFDM) has not. Often it floats far enough toward the front of my eyeball to become blurry and easily ignored, like bunny ears flashed too close to the projector. But every few months, it moves toward the back so its shape jumps out at me in all its buggy detail. I look fast to the right, and it continues drifting after my eye stops. That sort of thing.
Teachings from the BFDM
At first I was, as you can imagine, severely bummed at this permanent visual impairment, as in, “You’re fucking kidding me — I’m gonna look at this thing the rest of my life?!” But as a sober alcoholic, I can’t afford to hang out in victimhood (“poor me, poor me, pour me another drink…”). So early on I decided to make the BFDM into a symbol of that very fact: I have alcoholism. I did not ask for it. Yet when sorted according to the Serenity Prayer’s flawless rubric, both my alcoholism and my BFDM fell into the same category: “things I cannot change.”
This strategy worked well. Whenever I’d be contemplating a puffy white cloud in a lovely blue sky, and across it would glide, like the Goodyear blimp, the looming shape of my BFDM, I would practice acceptance. Ditto sunsets, snow covered mountains, and, of course any large, white wall. I had no choice but to share them with this squashed bug, just as I had no choice but to go to AA meetings, do 12 step work with sponsors and sponsees, and, of course, not drink booze for the rest of my life. I would think something like this: “Hey there, mosquito. I guess you’re with me for good, just like alcoholism.”
Years passed, and while the mosquito remained, my sense of alcoholism as a burden did not. I came to recognize that god had actually done me a huge favor by making me alcoholic, forcing me to choose between paths of self-destruction and spiritual growth. I began to see that even normal drinkers are bullshitting themselves when they drink — denying damage to their brain and body, imagining they’re more fond of others than they truly are, and denying themselves the practice of manually breaking down ego’s barriers to trust and affection. I saw that not only are all paths to wisdom and integrity at best obscured and at worst blocked by alcohol, but that the 12 steps offered a me stairway to happiness I’d never have found without AA.
Gradually, the BFDM morphed as well, becoming a symbol for something else: compassion. When I’d be talking to someone in bright light and they’d remain oblivious to the huge squashed insect bobbing around their face, I’d be reminded of the subjective nature of experience. That person had no idea I was having to ignore a BFDM to be fully present, and by the same token, I knew nothing of the the various obstructions through which they saw me: scars they carried, fears they battled, emotional distortions they couldn’t help. I learned to temper my judgements, thinking, “Hey there, mosquito. Ain’t it true that I’ve never walked a day in this other person’s shoes?”
Then, about eight years after it first popped into my vision, the BFDM finally lost its legs. Today only the head and body remain — a shape most would describe as blob, and I alone think of as a big fat dead mosquito amputee (BFDMA). During these past few years, compassion has become reflex for me, while frequent contact with the Near-Death Experience community has homogenized my faith in god — meaning not that my god is a dairy product but that the power of my faith no longer comes and goes. I know in every moment of consciousness that god is real, god is love, and that a vast spirit realm is rooting for humanity from the sidelines as we try to untangle the childish mess we’ve made of our world.
Today, whenever by my BFDMA meanders close enough to my retina to cast its distinctive shadow, I am overwhelmed with wonder and gratitude to my maker: “Hey there, mosquito. Can you believe I have a fucking movie screen inside my skull? A surface of cells so sensitive to the universe’s energy (borne by little photons that bounce off everything) that it can encode the patterns received and send them into my consciousness?? Who made us, BFDMA? Who guided the astounding evolution of this gift, and what a spoiled brat am I that the tiny malfunction of you — a few fallen cells — once upset me??”
The soul grows not by addition but by subtraction. So said Meister Eckhart. Today, the mere fact that I am alive inside a fantastic machine that lets me navigate a beauty-filled world, forging a unique path represented by my quirky shadow friend — this alone is a miracle worthy of constant rejoicing.
We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.
— Alcoholics Anonymous
Saints are supposedly perfect people, whereas mystics are visibly imperfect people who have been convicted by moments of very real divine union.
— Richard Rohr
Put even more briefly, saints embody goodness while mystics embody love.
— Carl McColman
Alcoholics who merely stop drinking without drastically changing their approach to life remain ill and, consciously or unconsciously, suffer. All the emotional dysfunction that spurred them to seek relief through alcohol persists; only their fix is gone. They live “dry” rather than sober, inflicting pain on those around them as they vent pent-up frustration, some a little at a time and some in binges, just as they drank.
Pride blocks the dry alcoholic from true recovery.
A truly recovering alcoholic experiences a “psychic change.” As Carl Jung described the shift, “Ideas, emotions and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.” Dude was right! Ideas, emotions, and attitudes — completely switched.
The 12 steps, worked with a good sponsor, transform all three. During steps 1-6, we let go self-centered ideas about our place in the world and how it ought to work; emotions of anger, shame, and envy; attitudes of victimhood and arrogance. In steps 7-12, a new set of conceptions begin to develop — because our vision has cleared! Somewhere in the mix will be new ideas of what god-reliance means, new emotions of gratitude and unconditional love, and new attitudes usefulness and even — on our best days — humility!
In my own sobriety, I go through dry periods when I “forget” the way of life AA has taught me. I start to imagine I have some power and the right to feel a bit prideful until, without realizing it, I’m navigating based on projections about how others perceive me. My pride is effectively running the show.
Here’s the cool thing about psychic change, though: it’s not kick or phase. It comes with its own safety-catch, because shit always hits the fan. And thank goodness it does, because when a big chunk smacks me, I don’t puff up my pride to chest-bump against reality. Rather, I fold — and fast! I surrender with a prayer like this: “I don’t know what’s going on, but I trust you. I thought I knew stuff, but it looks like I was wrong. Please guide me.”
Just one prayer lets me see that my whole arsenal of I-know-best weapons was made of sand. All slips away and I remember that I have no power in this life but to love. None.
Mysticism sounds like a remote, woo-woo concept. It ain’t. According to Merriam Webster, all it refers to is a “direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality [that] can be attained through subjective experience (such as intuition or insight).”
Historically, mysticism has acquired a shitty name from various religions. It’s easy to see why. Direct knowledge of god cuts out the middleman — the church, temple, or mosque — so many religious authorities have safeguarded their bread and butter by denouncing it as a dark, occult practice. “What?! Seek God yourself, from your own heart on your own individual path? What if it’s Satan yer talking to?”
Today, widespread mysticism is, I feel, the only thing that can save humanity — not from damnation, but from irretrievably defiling our planet. Religion has posed a stumbling block for scientifically educated people in recent centuries: distaste for religious dogma translates to distaste for god. Today, ego (god’s antithesis) rules at the societal, economic, and political levels. Results include climate change, oceans choking in plastic, and an entire countryside soaked in cancer-causing glyphosate, to name just a few. If this isn’t an apocalypse, I don’t know what is.
God itself is about only love — simple, direct, and freeing. NDErs from all walks of life encounter the same force on the other side: overwhelming love, a love so omnipresent that, like the brilliance of the divine Light, it erases petty differences, competition, all the conflicts and cross-purposes of ego. God envelops us because we ARE god. God rejoices when we are loving and is pained whenever, in even the smallest ways, we harm self or others.
Religion, by contrast, if chock full of human pride and ego. A jealous or vengeful God? A God who plays favorites? Rewards an “elect” of saved cool cats? Gross! And yet, these depictions taint the idea of god for billions of people.
Joel Osteen’s megachurch
A dry alcoholic friend of mine who swears by evangelist Joel Osteen had me listen to some YouTube sermons that, for me, epitomized religious pride and ego. From a huge stage in his Houston megachurch, Osteen tells many thousands of followers, “What God has in store for you is going to amaze you! The people He’s going to bring across your path, the influence He’s going to give you!… You are not working to get victory, you are working from victory. When you know that you’ve already won, there’s a rest. You know the outcome…God said, he always causes you to triumph….”
Osteen’s message is clearly that if we kiss god’s ass enough, we’ll win! We’ll get a leg up over all those other bastards and one day they’ll have to eat our dust in the wake of our victory! Hey, it’s sure worked for Joel! My poor friend, by contrast, is constantly deciding God must hate him.
Nothing could be further from the god I know. And no venue could be further from the humble approach of mysticism: simply disregarding our thoughts (“be still”) and opening our hearts (“and know”) to god from the privacy of our own homes. (Yes, the bible has some good lines!) Meditation and prayer. Step 11.
Pride builds a wall around us, inside which we languish awaiting our day of “victory.” Seeking god opens the door to joy right here, right now — the simple freedom to love and be loved.
.
.
PS: In TOTALLY unrelated news (except maybe that it involves humility while livin’ large & sober 😀 ), friends & I attempted 14,410′ Mount Rainierlast weekend but had to turn back just 1,200 feet from the summit due to delays and high winds. Short movie account here: https://youtu.be/g8OSqqjcoJ0
In 1982, I didn't know what a Near-Death Experience was. I didn't believe in god or guardian angels. All that has changed. Paperback $13.95 Kindle 4.95
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(It's lo-ong, sorta like a 10-hr speaker's mtg)
I passed without a drink. I felt healthier, had more energy, was cheery at work. But LOVE not drinking? What are, you, nuts? I could hardly wait for the month to be over so I could drink again, because any life without drinking struck me as beyond dull — it would, I knew, be brash, relentless, barren, and joyless. Alcohol, I felt, was the oil in the engine of my life.
“The god part” is, without question, the biggest hurdle of the AA program for countless sick and dying alcoholics and addicts. For me it certainly was, because when I read that word “God” coupled with “He” in the 12 steps, I immediately thought of religion, of versions of God as a humanoid king or judge. And that image made me barf. It seemed extremely inconvenient that the only thing AA could offer to save my life was something so hokey as a higher power.
My first IANDS meetings in 2012 felt very much like my first AA meetings. Just as in AA I marveled every time a fellow alcoholic articulated experiences I’d assumed to be mine alone, so at every IANDS meeting, I heard bits of “my story” told by others and came to realize I’m just a garden variety NDEr. Many, many NDErs had experienced a “voice” like the one I “hear” — which by that time had saved my life on multiple occasions — and referred to it simply as their guardian angel. One NDEr, upon reviving from death, had been able for a short while to see beings behind the people helping him — beings who were “helping them help me.” For lack of a better word, he said, he calls them angels.
A Spiritual Evolution 