Tag Archives: 12 steps

April 29, 2016 · 7:00 am

The Wisdom of the 12 Steps

Context:

Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol… They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks…

— “The Doctor’s Opinion”

Alcoholic Anonymous

A dry alcoholic – one who’s merely ceased drinking – is a miserable one. I certainly was. I needed booze. For over 15 years it served as my medicine, my magic doorway to relaxation and social confidence.

Throughout my first two years sober, intense nervousness and insecurity made me miserable. Tension ran me so ragged that my body eventually decided, “Can’t do this anymore; we’re shutting down” – and I sank into a depression no Zoloft could touch. I had not worked the 12 Steps.

Once I worked them, I discovered lasting relief. The unbearable uptightness of being doesn’t vanish in minutes as with as with alcohol, but by slow degrees as the steps change the way we view ourselves and the world.

A book called The Art of Happiness recently fell into my hands. Quick story: after meeting a young Saudi Arabian friend for a farewell coffee before she returned to her country, I took her to my favorite Tibetan gift shop nearby. It stands about a block from where recently a huge natural gas explosion obliterated three businesses and shattered every storefront window for blocks, so they’re still boarded over. All except those of the tiny Tibetan gift shop. It’s owner, a likewise tiny man, is constantly cheerful.

“And why didn’t your windows shatter?” I asked him with a half-smile.

To what was clearly a frequent question, he shrugged: “Mine shattered in a past life.”

I chatted about having heard the Dalai Lama address a university crowd in a crammed sports arena about ten years ago. “What you could see was that he was really having a great time with it. The school was giving him this honorary degree, so he was supposed to be all solemn, but he kept making these silly asides and cracking himself up. He was just too happy!”

The little shop owner handed one Dalai Lama book to me and another to my Muslim friend. “You want these,” he said simply – and offered us a screamin’ deal. We three corners of the world smiled at one another.

The wisdom of the ages for how to live life is, in my opinion, distilled in the 12 steps of AA. That’s why every suggestion from the Dalai Lama in this book (penned by an American psychiatrist dude who interviewed him ) aligns with their principles – though his words are based on 2,500 year old teachings and ours on a 1939 text by a New York stock broker, an Akron proctologist, and 100 newly sober drunks.

Trust in the innate goodness of all beings – oneself included. Though in the wake of two world wars many Western anthropologists jumped on the “humans are intrinsically selfish, aggressive assholes” bandwagon (African Genesis, The Selfish Gene), Buddhist traditions maintain the opposite. The Dalai Lama points out that “a calm, affectionate, wholesome state of mind has beneficial effects on our health” not just emotionally, but physically, implying it’s how we’re designed to operate. The 12 steps are founded in this same assumption, that beneath our self-centered, erratic behavior lies our truer nature. We look to our higher power to “restore us to sanity” via the spiritual cleansing the remaining steps provide.
We cause much of our own suffering. “In general, if we carefully examine any given situation in a very honest and unbiased way, we will realize that to a large extent we are also responsible for the unfolding of events,” says the Dalai Lama. This is the heart of steps 4 & 5, where, arriving at the fourth column of our inventory, we identify our part in what happened.
Happiness differs from pleasure. “True happiness relates more to the mind and heart. Happiness that depends on physical pleasure is unstable; one day it’s there and the next it’s gone.” This quote correlates to a passage from Step 7 in Twelve Steps and Traditions: “Never was there enough of what we thought we wanted. In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned, …[w]e had lacked the perspective to see that character-building and spiritual values had to come first, and that material satisfactions were not the purpose of living.”
Happiness springs from compassion. The Dalai Lama emphasizes repeatedly, “We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, we must develop basic good human qualities – warmth, kindness, compassion. … Genuine compassion is based on the rationale that all human beings have an innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering, just like myself. And, just like myself, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration.” This view lies at the heart of steps 8 and 9. When we make restitution to former rivals, we go to them in this spirit of compassion.

Service to others is our purpose. “There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here… I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings.” This idea lines up with a passage from the Big Book not quoted enough, probably because it runs so counter to self. “At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us.” (p.77)
Recognize suffering as a teacher. Dalai Lama: “By… eliminating afflictive states of mind such as craving and hatred, one can achieve a completely purified state, free from suffering. Within a Buddhist context, …[pain] serves to encourage one to engage in the practices that will eliminate the root causes of suffering.” Here’s the same idea in AA’s 12 & 12: “Under these conditions, the pains of failure are converted into assets. Out of them we receive the stimulation we need to go forward. Someone who knew what he was talking about once remarked that pain was the touchstone of all spiritual progress. How heartily we A.A.’s can agree with him, for we know that the pains of drinking had to come before sobriety, and emotional turmoil before serenity.”

There are many more parallels, but I’m out of room.

Thanks to the steps, ease and comfort come to me now because I enjoy the world I live in, not because I’ve vanquished it for a few hours. But there’s still a long way to go. For instance, the Dalai Lama says he never feels lonely or wishes he could marry, whereas I still get lonely quite frequently and am codependent as hell. But that’s okay: it’s progress, not perfection – right?

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March 5, 2016 · 6:30 am

The Power of Powerlessness

About a year ago, I used to frequently pass a billboard claiming thousands of “stubborn” men who avoided seeing a doctor would die that year. This photo isn’t from my street, but our local billboard met with the same (funny) response:

While I don’t know about the billboard’s claim, I do know when it comes to stubborn alcoholics, even more will NOT seek out a program of recovery this year, which is why in the U.S. alone 2.5 million years of potential life will be lost, shortening by an average of 30 years the lives of those 88,000 who’ll die.* Instead, despite an inner knowledge that they’re addicted to alcohol, millions will (yet again) marshal their willpower to decide not to drink so much. Never mind how many times such resolutions have failed! Never mind that they and everyone they live with can recognize night after night that they’re drunk as usual! They’ll simply refuse to accept the fact that they’re powerless over alcohol.

The Big Book tells us, “The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it to the gates of insanity or death.”** But even more simply resign themselves to permitting the self-disgust, degradation, and pathetic caricature of chronic drunkenness to taint their inmost conscience and closest relationships for the rest of their lives.

Why? Because they believe so ardently in the preeminence of their own minds! They insist their brains have the power to enact choices of free will that, research increasingly indicates, they simply do not have. For an addict, Emersonian self-reliance means, in fact, an imprisoning cycle rather than freedom of choice.

Gabor Maté, in his book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, explains our predicament as follows:

We may say, then, that in the world of the psyche, freedom is a relative concept: the power to choose exists only when our automatic mental mechanisms are subject to those brain systems that are able to maintain conscious awareness…

Electrical studies of brain function show that… the interval between awareness of the impulse and the activation of the… impulse is only one-tenth to one-fifth of a second. Amazingly, it’s only in this briefest of intervals that the [cerebral] cortex can suppress behavior it judges to be inappropriate. …[But] in the split second before the impulse emerges into awareness… the brain carries out what is called preattentive analysis… the unconscious evaluation of what [is]…essential or irrelevant, valuable or worthless. The cortex is primed to select actions that will achieve [these] goals…

“Those habit structures are so incredibly robust, and once they form in the nervous system, they will guide behavior without free choice.”***

In other words, before we even know we’ve thought of having a drink, the brain has cleared the impulse. The cortex may occasionally summon a “but wait!’ counter-insurgence, but more often the drink idea advances to GO and collects $200. Maté calls this condition “brain lock.” AA calls it the “curious mental blank spot.” In either case, with an internal sigh of “oh well!” we take the drink (just this one time) and tell ourselves we decided to.

Our brains are broken. They cannot be fixed.

~

I knew none of this when I came to AA wanting to die. When I first heard the statement, “I can’t fix my broken brain with my broken brain,” so much became clear to me! For one thing, I understood why I’d fought tooth and nail against “surrendering” to AA. Who wants to admit she can’t trust her own brain? No one.

The ego lays claim to omniscience, at least within ourselves: I know all about me. My thoughts are accurate. To admit a glitch in my thinking has rendered me unable to choose, unable to correct myself, unable even to see what I’m doing while I’m doing it – this goes against all instinct. It’s on par with admitting mental illness or, as Step 2 forces us to swallow, insanity.

Yet a deeper part of me – my soul – heard the resounding truth of that phrase. I realized I had no answers, and that AA, no matter how foreign, offered one.

So I gave up.

I admitted I was powerless.

And do you know what happened? Miracles!

First, I quit drinking. Second, I began to see I was maladapted to living, that I’d never developed the skills and insight to “manage” life’s choices. Third, I discovered it wasn’t too late to learn.

The remaining 11 steps reconnected me to the god of goodness I’d known in earliest childhood – to the nurturing powers of Love and divine wisdom. To maintain contact with them, all I had to do was adopt the 12 steps as a way of life.

At first, mind you, that idea repulsed me, too.

Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything about a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry AA’s message to the next sufferer? ***

Not early sobriety Louisa! I did these things because I had to. Today I do them because I get to – because they fill me with freedom and fulfillment. Drunk, I blathered about climbing Mount Rainier. Sober, I did it – 3 times! Drunk, I dreamed of writing a book. Sober, I wrote it – check the sidebar! Drunk, I longed desperately to be liked. Sober, I love more people than I’d ever have believed possible.

Mount Rainier: click to enlarge: 14,411′

THAT is power, guys. It’s just not mine.

~

The most important 1st step is the one I take today, the one I re-experience every morning, every hour. My compulsion to drink is 100 times stronger than my cortex’s resistance. Alcohol kicks my ass, has its way, calls the shots, rules my mind. But luckily, it’s the same for you! Alone, each of us has no power to fight this thing. We bloat, soggy and mollified in the dregs of our lonely cups. But connected to god and fellow alcoholics through AA, we tap into a Power that lifts us above the limitations of our broken brains – to heights we never dared imagine.

* http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm

** Alcoholics Anonymous p. 30

*** In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Chpt. 26

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Tagged as 12 steps, AA, Alcoholism, drinking, recovery, sobriety, Step 1

January 9, 2016 · 5:50 am

AA Newcomer Fears

My newest sponsee and I were reading the Big Book together the other night, with me passing on to her all the margin notes my sponsor passed on to me so many years ago. When we got to this passage in The Doctor’s Opinion, I had her change the pronouns as my sponsor had had me do:

~~Men and women~~ I drink essentially because ~~they~~ I like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while ~~they~~ I admit it is injurious, ~~they~~ I cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To ~~them~~ me, ~~their~~ my alcoholic life seems the only normal one. ~~They are~~ I am restless, irritable and discontented, unless ~~they~~ I can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which ~~they~~ I see others taking with impunity. After ~~they~~ I have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, ~~they~~ I pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless ~~this person~~ I can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of ~~his~~ my recovery.

Next I asked her (as I’d been asked) to read it aloud and tell me if she identified. Over the years, the response has varied, but for newcomers seeing this passage for the first time, it’s often tears. One tough, independent woman of Inuit descent, single mom to a disabled boy, could not finish reading the passage for weeping. She murmured, “This is me. This is my life.”

(But her life changed. She’s been sober nine years.)

My current sponsee has a few years sober, but she, too, was moved. In the silence following her simple “Yes,” I could see her travel back in time. She said, “I remember… I came home after my first AA meeting, and I sat on the couch, and I just cried and cried and cried. Life seemed over. I couldn’t see the future – anything – without alcohol.”

Though it’s been almost 21 years, when I’m sitting with an alcoholic who remembers, I, too, remember my first meetings. I knew I was an alcoholic. I still couldn’t speak those words, but inside I’d rounded that corner. Yet the vacuous terror of living without booze, of identifying with AA crap, and going to meetings for the rest of my life, felt like such a horrific, endless nightmare that I almost preferred to slop my drunken way toward death – privately.

Here are some of the things I feared:

My life would be boring
I’d have to pretend to like stupid AA people
AA would feel cultish like an Amway scam
I’d never feel deeply relaxed and happy again
I’d never feel wildly excited and happy again
“Psychic change” was mumbo-jumbo – I’d feel this bad forever
Steps 4 and 9 would be degrading, so I wouldn’t do them
Step 12 would mean consorting with weirdos, so I’d never do that one, either

Now, AA works by attraction, and I don’t mean to promote anything. I can only report what I’ve experienced and how I’ve changed, and maybe offer tidbits of advice. I’m just one sober drunk.

Meetings vary tremendously, but if they’re based in the Big Book, they’re about the solution. I got sober at folksy meetings in Olympia, then switched to lesbian meetings in Seattle. For a few years I preferred hipster meetings where everybody had tats and pierces and spoke in strings of profanity. I’ve also felt at home at meetings in Boston, LA, Hawaii, and Greece. Yet any meeting is only as good as the stepwork of people attending. I avoid informercial (“everything’s wonderful since I worked the steps!”) meetings, and bitch sessions (“but at least I didn’t drink!”). Look for meetings with fun people who exude the energy you want, who speak honestly of their struggles but apply the solution.

Friendships formed when I started going to gatherings outside meetings. Old friendships deepen, but I keep making new ones; today I have more friends than time to see them all. This Sunday I went snowshoeing with five kick-ass sober women who say ‘fuck’ a lot. We laughed and shared frankly and the young ones dropped their pants for bare-ass-in-the snow pics – which I can’t show you ;). But each of them has a quiet side, as well; each has known devastating misery.

Ks bdaysnowshoe

Boring is how I’d describe my life of drinking and faking coolness in contrast to the wide-awake, life-savoring ride of sober spiritual growth. Even the most painful experiences, walked through sober, are valuable teachers.

Conformity is an anathema to every alcoholic. It’s the disease that’s the same for all of us, and the “way out” – i.e. living by spiritual principles. Through trial and error, we each find our unique spiritual path. “And how’s that workin’ out for ya?” is all a wise sponsor need ask.

The psychic change grew in me oh so gradually as I worked the steps. Taking Step 3 made me ready for 4-7. Doing 8 -11 finally opened the door for 12. Each time I repeat all 12 steps, I see a little deeper.

Have I changed much? Hell, yeah. For instance, these past few months I’ve gotten up early every first Saturday and driven downtown to help cook breakfast for about 150 homeless people. In the past, it was all about me. But last Saturday, on a freezing cold morning, I was dishing out cheesy scrambled eggs, first server on the line. I greeted each person directly, recalling a few names, with my heart overflowing. “Nice hat! Cheesier or less cheesy? It’s nice and warm in here, and so are these eggs!” Faces lit up – they thanked us, wished us Happy New Year. Some laughed with me. The sausage guy next to me remarked, “Boy, you sure are Miss Sunshine, aren’t ya?”

And I am. Except it’s not me, not my light. It’s Light that shines through me because of all I’m connected to. Today, I have something to give. And, as that new sponsee texted me the other day, “I’ve never felt so happy in my life!”

Hey, guys! We are everywhere! Thanks for 290,000 views in 2015 – and that ain’t even counting RSS, email, or most Facebook tags. WordPress says you visited from 166 nations. I never dreamed my little free blog would attract so many readers.

If I’ve helped any of you anywhere to stay sober another day, I’m super grateful. I mean, sure, I’m glad if people like my writing and stuff, but even gladder that we all share this thing, this gift, and this connection – and “get” each other. Love to all of you!

Nations in white had no views, yellow few, greenish more, blueish LOTS.

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September 15, 2015 · 8:10 am

The Serenity Prayer

The word prayer repulsed me in early sobriety, and in some ways it’s still glitchy. It can call to mind a penitent worshiper hunched over clasped hands in some austere setting – and for the non-religious, that just ain’t us! So I’ve come up with ways to make prayer real to me – since fortunately, religion has no monopoly on access to god.

It’s amazing how many people assume it does – that spiritual seeking and religion are inseparable. That’s like claiming I-5 is the only way to get from Seattle into Canada. Not true. Recently, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I jumped in and out of Canada about five times in few seconds, just for fun. You can always find your own pathway to god; the important thing is that you seek it with your deepest sincerity.

So instead of prayer, I just frickin’ talk to god. I may gab away and cuss and laugh, or I may get on my knees and weep, depending on how I feel. I may address my lost sister, or guardian angel, or the font of all that lives. Whatever works.

But what do I say?
Fear-based prayers are an extension of self – and a very natural one. All day, from the moment we wake, we’re responsible for meeting our own material needs. We engage our brains and bodies to make shit happen. I want a bagel so I open the fridge and get one. I want it toasted, so I get a knife to slice it and then pop that baby in the toaster. By applying skills, I get what I want.

Problems arise when we apply this approach to spiritual life: I feel restless, irritable, and discontent, so I gulp down some booze and get what I want – relief. Great! But fast-forward to the point where that survival tactic has quit working, so I’ve suffered agony at the level of emotional disembowelment, finally become willing, and – with god’s help – gotten sober.

Now I need new ways to fix those old pains, but I don’t know it. So it’s only natural that I try a skills approach: I identify the external problems I think are responsible – the people, places, and things I perceive as fucking up my happiness – and try to manage them to suit my needs.

It doesn’t work. Dammit! So I try harder. Still, no dice.

Now I’m freaking out. Will I ever get X? Oh my god, does this mean I’ll always be stuck with this crappy Y? What’s that I’m hearing in the rooms? Ask god for help?

Okay… I turn to prayer: “God, please put this damn life-bagel in the goal-toaster for me. It should be toasted. Surely you can see this. Thank you! Your child, Louisa.”

I may think of it as supplication rather than giving god orders. Still, however respectful I may be, I’m backseat-driving the universe. And it doesn’t work! Yes, god may make some related good of my prayers (especially if they’re for others), but it won’t involve my specific bagel. The great danger here is that I can feel ignored and get pissed… and turn my back on god.

True prayer, as Richard Rohr and others have written, is not about managing the world. It’s about changing ourselves. It’s about strengthening our relationship to god and accessing the power that god can channel into our lives.

Enter, Serenity Prayer

Thank you, Reinhold Niebuhr, for writing this gorgeous prayer for a Sunday service in Heath, MA, in 1943.* You could not have imagined the role it would play in so many lives today.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The prayer asks god to change us, to help us grow beyond whatever we ourselves can muster. We can say it over and over, thinking about what it means, how it moves us. At different times it takes on different nuances.

Here, unpacked and named, is some of what this prayer can mean for me: God,

grant me	=	help me, because I can’t seem to do this myself; I need your love, your guidance, your gifts
the serenity	=	to fricking calm the fuck down about this stuff, to quit panicking, to quit judging, to let go this urgency
to accept	=	to allow into my reality, to acknowledge as what is, to give up shoulding on and just let it be true – because it already is
the things I cannot change,	=	the past, what’s happening, how this person is, what they won’t do, everything I don’t like and wish were different… that isn’t me
the courage	=	a conviction, faith stronger than my fears, a power drawn from my inmost heart, a little spark of you
to change	=	to take action, to re-see, to step out into empty space, to quit procrastinating, to dare, to just do it !
the things I can	=	attitudes & assumptions & habits that don’t bring goodness, cycles I’m stuck in, people I hang out with, my default defects. Reluctance to begin those baby steps of action I’ve been too afraid or proud to take
and the wisdom	=	god-inspired honesty, open-mindedness, faith, harvest from the experiences you’ve already given me
to know the difference	=	to intuit what’s my business and what’s yours

Good thing it’s a lot shorter, eh? But for me it still carries all that meaning.

Resistance
I don’t know that I’ve ever, in 20 years of saying this shit, had a problem instantly vanish. With bigger issues, sometimes the best I can hope for is for me to shed a layer of denial or feel a little less pain.

But the courage part has been literal and concrete. This prayer has emboldened me to act where I’ve been scared and reluctant: I’ve made phone calls, shown up at events, applied for jobs, thrown parties, forgiven people, entered dance studios, climbed volcanoes, started a business, and walked into the mountains alone – all deeds inspired by this little prayer. And those actions do transform my reality incrementally, with a cumulative effect beyond anything I could envision or orchestrate.

Ultimately, the Serenity Prayer condenses into twenty-seven words the essence of all 12 Steps: surrendering of self and the willingness to collaborate with god to cultivate meaning and integrity in our lives.

Never underestimate it, no matter how many cutesy places you see it embroidered! It’s a compact tool we can carry in our back pockets like a humble but priceless compass.

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/15/serenity-prayer-origin_n_5331924.html

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June 30, 2015 · 7:32 am

Psychic Change

Toward Alcohol

When we hit bottom in our drinking careers, we’re pretty much forced to change. We’re truly sick and tired of being sick and tired; we recognize, however faultily, that our way is not working. We become teachable. That is, we’re desperate enough to try out AA’s approach even though it feels foreign, artificial, and disorienting.

For me this meant giving up the belief that I knew everything. I’d always felt sure I could perceive the lay of the land in a snap and choose the best course, which I then acted on with chutzpah and a dash of fukitol. Drinks made me feel better, so I frickin’ took ’em. Certain designated figures, also known as cool people, carried what I craved, so I chased ’em. Responsibility and integrity felt cumbersome, so I shrugged ’em off – free to follow my whims wherever they might lead!

And where was that? Loneliness so lethal I wanted to scream for eternity and futility so rampant I wanted to break and trash and burn every fucking thing that ever touched my life – that’s where my knowing everything took me.

AA – the supposed solution – seemed as silly as a cake walk. The 12 Steps, anyone could see, held no more wisdom than a hopscotch grid, and yet all these AA dolts claimed that if you sincerely played hopscotch, if you landed in each arbitrarily chalked off square, you’d bust through to frickin’ Narnia or something – whatever they meant by this “4th dimension of existence.”

But since a U-turn could lead me only back to the hell, I went ahead. I gave up control, followed directions, did the dance. And I commenced to change – to heal and grow and behold countless unexplored and rich possibilities hitherto invisible to me.

From somewhere inside me, I began to sense a direction besides my thoughts. They – my thoughts – were still as dumb and which-way as ever, but this new chord, this voice within – it began to lead me instead of them. Guidance I heard and talked about in AA aligned with this voice, but did not constitute it. Rather, I had “tapped an unsuspected inner resource” previously drown out by all the fears, demands, and clutter spewed by my ego.

I’d experienced a psychic change. I’d begun to develop a spiritual life that edged out my craving for booze.

Toward Life Itself

“Our liquor was but a symptom,” says the Big Book, of our messed up approach to life. If we merely take away the faulty solution of drinking, life hits us full force and feels unbearable. The lasting solution is to live on a spiritual basis which flows in tune with reality rather than fighting it.

Spiritual evolution is not a matter of content. That is, it’s never a matter of learning X, Y, and Z, passing the quiz, and graduating. Rather, it’s a habit of cultivating open-mindedness and reaching for growth. In other words, the conditions for continuous growth are the same as those that freed us from compulsive drinking: I elect not to buy into my thoughts, not to obey my ego, not to fall for the idea that my way is right. Only by turning away from these easy-to grab reflexes can I open myself to another voice – the more fundamental guidance of a higher power.

Day by day, growth happens at the juncture between what I’m exposed to and how I react to it. In that immediate crucible, I make more tiny choices than can possibly be noted, but collectively, they coalesce into a “gear” for my outlook. I plop into good-ole self-pity or reach for seemingly impossible gratitude – though I may end up somewhere between. What matters is whether I ask my higher power to guide those tiny choices, and whether I commit the incremental shards of my awareness to pursuing that guidance.

Growth can’t happen when ego takes over. The world becomes scary, because if what I’ve decided is supposed to happen doesn’t, I’m gonna be screwed. There’s never enough, so I lock into my plans. I get tunnel vision – which means I’m sealed off from potential good outside my will. I consign myself to stagnation.

The openness of faith reminds me life is always a collaborative effort – mine and god’s. Sure, I still plan and take action, but with built-in acceptance of whatever plays out. Even if things fuck up and fall apart, I’ll still be okay. My “enough” originates not from stuff or status, but from the power of god’s love flowing through me, the strength to generate and nurture and delight.

Jesse & Chip (by permission) 1 month post-flood: “The joy of living [they] really have, even under pressure and difficulty.”

Consider some dear friends of mine who moved to Wimberley, TX, last year only to lose everything they owned in a recent river flood. One day things were dandy, and next their home was was missing two walls and contained only mud and somebody else’s overturned couch. They had no renters’ insurance. Can you imagine that? I mean, can you really imagine losing everything? Yet these are two happy and thriving, not only because they’re sober, but because they live on a spiritual basis. They don’t lament. They have their precious lives, their energy, their love – a flow that’s providing all they need to rebuild what was lost, even as they pitch in to help neighbors… or support a faraway friend (me) processing a painful break-up.

The psychic change to living on a spiritual basis means we accept life’s uncertainty, taking our best shot and leaving the results to god. Failure’s fine. It happens. Floods happen. Betrayals happen. We can only keep listening for the voice within and trying to follow it toward good actions and good people, but with no guarantees. Because, while it’s true we each reap what we sow, it’s also true we’re scattering seeds from an unmarked, mixed bag. What will take root and flourish depends, we know, as much on the rain and sun as our work. Yet we do it anyway – and cheerfully.

The Sower, J. F. Millet, 1850

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May 5, 2015 · 6:42 am

Essential Prayers: Please and Thank You

Rejoice always,

pray without ceasing,

give thanks in all circumstances…

(1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

I ain’t a Christian, but them’s some wise words for how to tackle the challenge of living a happy and meaningful life. For some, the “always,” “without ceasing,” and “all circumstances” parts might present a problem. Actually, they’re problematic only if we segregate our spiritual life from the rest, as if the little things we did all day had nothing to do with our spirit. The fact is, they have everything to do with it! Our spirits are just as present when we’re comparing cans of beans at the store as when we’re kneeling by our bedside doing what we label “prayer.” We’re just too caught up in piddly-shit to be aware of our awareness – to focus on what we actually are.

In the rooms of AA, we often hear the advice to use two simple prayers – Please and Thank You – to forge a relationship with our higher power. This is an excellent start! For newcomers who have no idea what might be entailed in talking to their god, these instructions open the door. It’s suggested that when we wake up, we ask god to “Please help me to stay sober today.” When we go to bed, we pray, “Thank you for keeping me sober today.”

But there’s a whole lot more potential behind these two simple prayers. They can change your life. Just as step 1 is the only one to spell out the word “alcohol” while the remaining 11 deal with the matters that made life so painful we needed a damn drink, so the lens of the Please and Thank You prayers can be dilated from mere drink avoidance to apply to all of living.

Please. By all means, when we wake up, we can ask god to keep us sober today, but we can also expand that request to “ask God to direct our thinking.” What I ask is, “please guide me today,” by which I mean not only my thoughts and actions, but my level of awareness. I might even say, “help me stay awake.” What I mean is, god, help me to stay in contact with you all day long; help me remember this life is not about my little fears and agenda, but about being the best human being I can be today; help me know that whatever’s going on right now is just a single pace in the journey of my life, so when it gets tough I can hang onto hope.

As I proceed through my day, my biggest challenges all center on emotions. Not what happens, but how I feel about what happens. I’m a wa-ay codependent child of an alcoholic, which means that, left to my own devices, I tend to be a “reactor” more than an “actor.” Boy, do I hate that! It sounds so wussy, but it’s true. Most of the time, what you think (or at least what I think you’re thinking) carries more weight than what I think or do. I need you to be okay with me. Better still, I’d prefer you be favorably impressed. That way, you’d hand me a chit of personal worth I could add to my lowly little scrap heap.

But, damn it, I don’t want to live that way! So I pray pretty much “without ceasing.” I ask god, not to strike me well, but to show me, “If I were well, how might I see this?” My experience has been that god nudges me toward compassion – for myself and others – which helps me reframe what’s going on and strengthen new neural pathways so that my thinking will change over time. And slowly, gradually, it’s been working, which brings us to…

Thank You. Again, it’s fine to start with the matter of whether I swallowed any booze today. Even after 20 years’ sobriety, I still hop into bed some nights and think, “Geez! I didn’t drink or even think about drinking all day!” I still get this little image of my insides as all clean and healthy compared to that slimy feeling from back in the day. And I thank god for it, for having let me be just one of Earth’s creatures, a gizmo fit to walk the planet exactly as I was made.

But I also “give thanks in all circumstances.” What a trip it is to be alive! What a freaking awesome world this is to cruise through, filled with miracles we can take for granted any time we switch to autopilot. Bits of nature (outside my window, a finch just landed amid the gently stirring leaves of a cherry tree), goodness our culture has produced, signs of caring between strangers, and my chance to be part of it all – I thank god for this over and over. Sure, there’s plenty of darkness; just read the news. But there are also many who unite in trying to combat it, connecting in their commitment to… love.

Growth. How can the “Please and Thank You” prayers change your life? For me, they’ve expanded my awareness a tiny bit, like the rings on in a tree, with each challenge I walk though sober.

I am a tiny bit more aware. It’s how we grow in sobriety.

At the core of my consciousness is my spirit. It’s not my body: my body includes all my brain’s thoughts, all my body’s issues, and all the emotions they stir up between them. I love those guys – don’t get me wrong – but they’re not my spirit. My knowingness, my receptiveness, the live wire of my presence – this is the essence that sprang out of my body during my Near Death Experience, but it’s also the core of what I am as I brush my teeth or drive to Goodwill. I am a little piece of god. So are you. And that reality becomes slightly more vivid to me with every clod I break as I plow through the lumpy terrain of being alive. I am the plowwoman, the driving force behind one individual human experience. I need help to push on (please), but with every step taken, I see a little better what a tremendous privilege I’ve been given (thank you)!

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Filed under AA, Al-Anon, Alcoholism, Codependence, Faith, God, Recovery, Sobriety, Spirituality

Tagged as 12 steps, AA, Al-Anon, Alcoholism, recovery, sobriety, spirituality

March 30, 2015 · 7:52 am

Being Right vs. Just Being

If you happened to see last week’s blog, I was pretty hot under the collar. I have plenty of beliefs about anger, but none of them seem to show up when it’s flaring in my system. angry-face “Anger rises up in defense of something sacred,” I’ve been told, which was certainly true in this case – AA is precious to me, and I felt it had been attacked. But that anger’s gone now. Gabrielle Glaser makes some good points. AA is not for everyone. Some heavy drinkers do have a mere “bad habit,” and no clear line distinguishes their condition from the sort of fatal alcoholism that has ravaged so many lives – which I do believe only a spiritual experience can conquer.

In other words, for some, Glaser may be right.

“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” That question, often voiced in AA and Al-Anon meetings, has always bothered me a bit, because I don’t experience the two as a direct trade: being happy may not come in exchange for releasing my grip on rightness. Today I settle instead for the peace of being uninterested. That’s why I prefer to frame the choice in these terms: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to just be?”

In the heat of anger, my world shrinks down to two dimensions: right and wrong. Only one of us can claim the “right” end of the stick, and the loser is left with the “wrong” end, because they’re… well, a loser. But life is way more complicated than that! If I can keep my mind open, I can drop the stick and say, “I have this perspective, which differs from yours.” That way, I open an avenue to peace. I may argue and stay pissed a while, but either way my goal is to move on, to continue with the business of living my life while you live yours as you see fit.

The largest single organism on earth is currently thought to be a colony of honey mushrooms living in the Blue Mountains of Oregon which occupies an underground area about the size 1,665 football fields. It’s a system of genetically identical cells communicating for a common purpose – i.e. one living thing. Now, if I were to pick a single one of these mushrooms and contemplate it as an individual entity – that would be analogous to assessing the behavior of a person in a particular situation.

Because behavior is only the tip of the shroom colony! Sprouting that person’s choice is the vast underground network of family, culture, and life experience that has cultivated that person’s principles and beliefs, along with the vast simultaneity of feelings and motives churning beneath their surface in the present moment. But I don’t consider all that. I see only something that contradicts my own ideas.

What do I want to do when I feel someone else is wrong? Judge and gossip. But, no, wait! I don’t judge – I morally evaluate. I don’t gossip, I process verbally with people I trust. The temptation, in any case, is to “prove” that my truth beats the hell out of that asshole’s skewed rationalizations. In the process, I can get downright mean. In my Glaser rebuttal, for instance, I resorted to sarcasm: “Gosh, Gabrielle, that’s right! …Oh, I see!” I could have made the same points without mockery.

An even crazier response is trying to change the person, also known as “trying to talk some sense into” them by driving home something that will make them see they’re wrong “for their own good.” What I’m trying to do is uproot the entire underground spore system by yanking the “right” way on a single mushroom: it’s just not going to work!

I do wish my boyfriend would give up his traveling job and go to AA. I also wish he’d quit saying “oriental” and badmouthing Obama. Having told him these things, I get to decide if I want to accept him as he is – or leave. In the same vein, I wish my siblings would live by the principles of Al-Anon, practice loving kindness, and respect my sobriety, but I can’t make them do so. What I get to decide is whether I want to hang out with them.

My job is to build my own meaningful life. That’s it. You get to do the same.

In Herman Hesse’s novella, Siddhartha, the young Siddhartha abandons everyone close to him in his search for truth. He leaves his father, the monks who’ve taken him in, his best friend, and even the Buddha himself, eventually landing in a life of material and sexual indulgence that slowly sickens him. A few decades later, after having “awakened” from this stupor, he’s built a new life of spiritual purity assisting a simple river ferryman when his illegitimate son comes to live with him. The son is a major asshole: spirituality’s a bore, dad’s a loser, and he runs away as soon as he’s old enough. But when Siddhartha anguishes that he can’t teach his son how to live, the ferryman sets him straight: “Have you forgotten that instructive story of Siddhartha…? Could his father’s piety, his teacher’s exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path?”

I take two points from this story. The first is that I can’t impress my views on anyone who isn’t open to seeing them. But the second is to live my own life fully, to blunder ahead at times as I blaze my own path of learning – along which, really, there are no mistakes!

There’s nothing wrong with being “wrong” sometimes. Accept difference? Are you kidding? Of course I’ll still get pissed off! Of course I’ll think I’m right and those assholes can stick it where the sun don’t shine! Screwing up is part of being human – part of how we steer the course of who we do and don’t want to be. That’s why Step 10 exists – because the process never ends.

I’m certainly no saint. But loving tolerance remains my North Star, the direction in which I seek to move a little further every day. That’s the point.

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Tagged as 12 steps, Al-Anon, Anger, codependence, recovery, spirituality

March 23, 2015 · 8:12 am

Trashing AA as “Irrational”

Maybe you’ve seen Gabrielle Glaser’s Atlantic Monthly article entitled, “The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Glaser, a self-proclaimed normie (i.e. non-alcoholic), attempts to illuminate the scam of Alcoholics Anonymous, which passes itself off as the sole antidote to alcoholism, and advocates instead for newly developed drug treatments as a solution more “scientific” than AA’s program of abstinence and spiritual growth.

Maybe you’re indifferent to both this article and AA. But if you love AA for having saved your life and yet this article doesn’t anger you, you work a WAY better program than I do! I am angered and for many reasons – the foremost being that I am fond of truth, and the article is rife with inaccuracies. A second is that I don’t believe in increasing people’s suffering for the sake of a snappy article (or book sales). Nothing can be gained by slamming AA, but so much can be lost!

The most glaring error, to me, is Glaser’s lumping together AA, which makes no money for anyone, with the treatment center industry that rakes in tremendous profits from addicts and their stricken families by “selling” what one can find freely in AA. Yes, without question, some treatment centers place under-qualified counselors in positions of power and exploit the crisis of addiction to charge exorbitant fees in exchange for a Big Book and an introduction to the steps – but they are not AA! Quite the converse, they embody every disaster that Bill, Bob, and other pioneers of AA tried to avert with the 12 Traditions.

Wrong also is holding AA responsible for the judicial practice of “sentencing” people to AA. I can’t imagine anything further from the 11th Tradition of “attraction rather than promotion.” As we often hear in the rooms, “AA is not for people who need it; it’s for people who want it.” But thanks to the courts’ total disregard of this policy, many people are forced to attend AA meetings. Like the treatment industry, the U.S. punitive system exploits AA, funneling unwilling people into the program simply because it lacks the means to otherwise deal with them. (That thousands of lives have been saved this way, however, can’t be denied.)

Glaser’s allegation that AA touts itself as the sole solution to alcoholism contradicts a clear statement in the Big Book’s forward to the second edition: “Upon therapy for the alcoholic himself, we surely have no monopoly. Yet it is our hope that all those who have as yet found no answer may begin to find one in the pages of this book…” [italics mine]. In other words, if you CAN’T find any other way out, we have something to offer you here.

Glaser implies that Marty Mann and her 1940s fellows in the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism were scheming to promote AA: “But AA supporters worked to make sure their approach remained central. Marty Mann joined prominent Americans…” Gosh, Gabrielle, that’s right! They were trying to hog the spotlight so they could get…uh… money? fame? Does it ever enter your mind that their sole intention was to help dying alcoholics who had not yet heard of any solution? Do you ever consider that such is what AA is all about?

Perhaps most irritating to me, but indicative of a larger societal misconception, Glaser confounds AA’s higher power with religiosity: “‘Alcohol- and substance-use disorders are the realm of medicine,’ McLellan says. ‘This is not the realm of priests.’” Excuse me, but what the hell do priests have to do with AA? Absolutely nothing! AA is a spiritual program, not a religious one. Why is this distinction so difficult for so many to appreciate? Religion tells people what to believe; spirituality calls for an inward search for meaning and truth. The only goal dictated by spirituality is growth toward loving kindness.

Science, Glaser claims, does not support this charlatan program of abstinence and spiritual growth. In this oversight, she ignores a wealth of scientific research supporting the success of AA (see Substance Abuse: Alcoholics Anonymous Science Update), simply because no study can figure out why it works. Spiritual growth does not show up under a microscope – so it must amount to nothing!

If Glaser were to succeed in leading alcoholics away from AA, what great gains would be made? If alcoholics took opioid antagonists like naltrexone or the muscle relaxant baclofen sensibly as Glaser propounds, if everyone would stop this silly business of abstinence and spirituality, from what would Glaser be rescuing people? “The prospect of never taking another sip is daunting, to say the least. It comes with social costs and may even be worse for one’s health than moderate drinking: research has found that having a drink or two a day could reduce the risk of heart disease, dementia, and diabetes.” Oh – I see! Abstinence is scary, so we shouldn’t attempt it. And not drinking, based on a handful of studies in the past 2 decades, suggests there might be potential benefits for some people from drinking moderately.

For alcoholics, these potential benefits from 1-2 drinks per day do not put much on the scale against death or the misery of living with full blown alcoholism. Sadly, I am willing to bet that Glaser’s article will, for scores of people in the difficult, early stages of sobriety, serve as excuse for relapse. Of those, how many will die? Will Glaser ever know? Does she care?

There is so much more to AA than not drinking! People in the program evolve into their best selves. In a matter of a months, they realize a potential that could not have been brought about by years of opioid antagonist pills and therapy. In AA I learned to seek a guiding voice other than my ego’s, to love imperfect people as I am imperfect, and to be of service – the most rewarding pursuit life has to offer. For the first time in my life, I discovered what it is to be happy from the inside out. I am a different person today because of AA: quitting drinking is only a small part of that. How tragic to think that Glaser’s finger pointing may rob others of what I have found!

if you agree!

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Tagged as 12 steps, AA, Alcoholism, Gabrielle Glaser, Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous, recovery, sobriety, twelve steps

March 16, 2015 · 7:43 am

What the Heck is a Spiritual Path?

A number of people dear to me in AA just can’t seem to stay sober. Their recovery looks hopeful at times: they’ll string together a few months or even a year, but then they go out again. At some point they drag themselves back looking haggard and beat up and often shockingly aged. They share about being totally defeated, about knowing they can’t drink, and about their rock solid determination to stay sober this time. Sadly, though, a few months or a year later, they’re gone again.

The Big Book tells us why: they “failed to enlarge [their] spiritual life” (35). During my drinking, I very much wanted to be a good person so I could be happy – to be true to my partners (at least in everything they knew about), to be honest (enough), and to contribute to the world (so I’d be respected). If I had brought that same approach to getting or staying sober – reliance on self – I’d be drunk today.

Here’s the deal: There are two ways to live in this world – by the guidance of ego, or by the guidance of something greater than ego. Practicing alcoholics, when they look inward, consult with the authority of ego, which has one sole criterion for direction: me. “What will make me feel good/get me what I (think I) want?” I may desire amazing personal experiences, or to feel attractive or valued. I may want money and a sense of importance – the recognition of achieving great things.

The active alcoholic may sincerely wish to live by higher principles because doing so might help them grab the things they link to happiness – like a career, a relationship, or esteem among peers. But in all their navigation, the joystick always remains firmly in the grip of ego, whose sole objective is to get what it wants. That’s why most practicing alcoholics harbor secrets. That’s why their love is striated with selfishness. And it’s why they’re never immune from the seduction of alcohol, because ego assures them a drink will feel awesome – or at least bring relief – and they take the bait.

What’s the alternative? To be holier than thou? To renounce earthly life and pursue some lofty enlightenment?

No. It’s to admit we’re irreparably flawed, and to commit to trying every day to be a slightly better person than we were yesterday – not by the criterion of what feels good, but by the light of what, in our deepest heart, we know to BE good. Pursuit of goodness – however we define it, however faultily we seek it, and whatever that progress may look like – is the essence of a spiritual path.

Let’s look at this idea in pieces. First, admission. The ego howls against broken vase the idea that we are irreparably flawed. “I can fix myself!” it insists. “Really! I know best!” To admit we’re permanently confused and lacking integrity requires the two greatest forms of ego Kryptonite on the planet: honesty and humility. This first step is the foundation on which every alcoholic bases a new experience of living.

Next, commitment. A spiritual path requires that we accept the futility of living by self-propulsion. Though society at large touts “taking control,” a spiritual path requires relinquishing the claim that we’re qualified to call the shots. In AA this means we commit to the steps, the fellowship, and service work. For non-alcoholics, too, some form of spiritual community is often involved, whether a sangha, a church, a yoga or meditation group, or some other family of like-minded people also trying to grow spiritually. We begin to test our own thinking – which we have admitted to be flawed – against the wisdom of this sounding board.

What we know to BE good is the thing we commit to. The Big Book tells us, “deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God.” Unfortunately, many people assume this idea should equate to the God of religion, which may or may not be found anywhere in them – let alone deep down! My own god has nothing to do the God of any religion – that’s why I forgo the capital ‘G.’

My god is the tremendous power of unconditional love in which all life is swimming. Not everyone needs to go to AA to find and tap this source, but we all need it to get and stay sober. This power is available to anyone by any name or in any form – as innate goodness or a religious deity or the frickin’ Force from Star Wars: how you conceive of it does not matter. What changes your life is that you trust its goodness and ask it for guidance in all actions, at each juncture.

Of course ego still elbows its way in countless times, because we’re still flawed. But our intention remains to shift our point of reference away from ME! to a deeper sense of what is right and good. We try to pause before we act – especially when we don’t want to – in an effort to discern the two courses. That is the path – intention and effort. We hang onto a faith that if we keep earnestly seeking one day at a time, we will be guided.

Ironically, this course usually brings us a richer life than we could ever have imagined. At my home group last night, the chair took issue with the saying, “My worst day sober is better than my best day drunk.” He pointed out that he’d had some “fuckin’ awesome times” in his early drinking. But when I was called on, I cross-talked a tad: I recalled that all my “awesome” drunken times boiled down to feeling awesome about ME! Even if I said, “I fuckin’ love you, man!” I really meant, “Wow! – I don’t feel alienated and alone!” The spiritual path opened by AA has nurtured in me the gift of genuinely loving others – of living for something larger than myself. That’s what we’re here to do. And really, it’s a high no glory days can touch.

Searching for Honesty

Honesty is such a lonely word.

———————–– Billy Joel

It seems as if nothing should be easier than knowing what we want, knowing what we feel. We should be able to look inside and, fast as checking what time it is, say, “Gosh, I feel angry,” or “I fear change,” or maybe “I want ____ more than _____.” Based on that information, we should have no trouble making big decisions in our lives. Happiness should twinkle straight ahead as clear as the North Star, and we should be able to navigate toward it. Drop this relationship to steer more starboard. Go for this job to steer more to the port. That’s how I tried to live throughout my drinking, through shipwreck after shipwreck.

Why doesn’t it work like that? Clarity on what we think and feel – is that so much to ask? As it turns out, the compass is buried deep inside us where it can be extremely difficult to read. For me it takes a long, long time to know what I truly feel about anything complex and important. I have to live with the question for weeks, sometimes months, viewing it from different angles and slowly gestating some fetus of recognition in my gut. I’m reminded of the 9-day hike I took around Mount Rainier a few years ago, 100 miles up and down many mountain ridges that extend like arms between its huge glaciers. Every day I hiked, that mountain was in my sight, and every day it showed me a different face, a different aspect. I often feel as if there’s a spiritual Rainier within me that my consciousness hikes around – my truth – and that it reveals just as many faces.

All forms of honesty are related. That’s why it’s only by practicing honesty across the board that I’m able to stay sober. The most basic form is monetary. For instance, while shopping recently, I picked out a freezable lunch bag for my son that I considered vastly overpriced at $22. When the cashier rang me up, miraculously the sum total of all my groceries was only $26! It took me a moment to realize she’d assumed I’d brought the bag in with me as a reusable shopping bag. After a tiny flinch of glee that I could get the damn thing for free I said, “I think you forgot to charge me for that bag.” She was surprised. But I’ve run back into stores for items much smaller that somehow made it out to my car unpaid for – a little jar of stevia or stick of glue the cashier didn’t see.

There’s also honesty with other people. Sometimes when I’m telling a story, I still hear myself embellish and have to backtrack to what’s real. I’ll say “a whole bunch of…” and then admit, “actually, only two…” or I’ll quote someone saying something far more emphatically than they actually did, then have to go back and recount what, to the best of my recollections, were their actual words.

Those two are easy, and while it might seem incredible that my sobriety hinges liar on the price of a lunch sack or whether someone said X versus Y, for me, it does, because when I lie to others – even in piddly-shit lies or perhaps especially in piddly shit lies – I lose credibility with myself. I get a sense that it might be okay to be just a smidge full of shit. If I don’t need to be honest with others across the board, I can go ahead and compartmentalize, behaving in ways I plan to conceal. What’s the big problem with that? What does it do to me?

It cuts me off from my god. The most precious thing in my life is my connection to the higher power that keeps me sober and lets me live with some degree of dignity and serenity. Without that connection, I’m lost in a dark world where my ego craves a bright spotlight on ME and manipulates others pawn1 to get it. Withholding the truth from others, even in minor things, is actually using them like game pieces to get what I want. God exists only in genuine reality – the truth of what is. When I lie to anyone, I’m turning my back on that, trying to play god by feeding them a false reality that’s a product of my ego. I can make a cashier complicit in my theft of a freezable lunch sack. I can pose as an expert to get attention. I can cheat on my boyfriend to feed my vanity. And I can take a drink no one needs to know about.

Then it’s on – and I’m right back in the hell I escaped twenty years ago.

What is a spiritual connection? What part of us connects with god? The inmost truth of our awareness and consciousness is where we find god. Our I-AM-ness seeks its source. When I meet god in prayer – which for me is almost constant – I like to show up humbly naked. That is, I bring my whole self with all my vulnerabilities and flaws and say, here I am again! To do that, I have to know who and what I am. If I’ve been deceiving others and rationalizing my own lies, I’m shrouded in falsehood and pride, both cohorts of the anti-god, fear. I am blocked.

The arms of honesty extend into every facet of spiritual wellness. It’s honesty that lets us see the selfish fear that fuels our resentments. Honesty that lets us see how we set ourselves up to be hurt, how we’ve hurt others, where we’re in the wrong, and what we might do for others to be better human beings. Yet the honesty of knowing myself is more a journey than light bulb. It’s taken me 20 years of sober seeking to acknowledge that I don’t really know myself. What makes life seem so complicated is my web of as-yet unacknowledged fabrications. I still can’t see all I do to hold myself back from living in the simplicity of joy – which I believe is what god wants for all of us.

I keep seeking, though. That’s all we can do.

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Tagged as 12 steps, Alcoholism, recovery, sobriety, spirituality

Tag Archives: 12 steps

The Wisdom of the 12 Steps

The Power of Powerlessness

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* http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm

** Alcoholics Anonymous p. 30

*** In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Chpt. 26

AA Newcomer Fears