Purposeful Purpose

Our desires for emotional security and wealth, for personal prestige and power, for romance, and for family satisfactions --- all these have to be redirected. We have learned that the satisfaction of instincts cannot be the sole end and aim of our lives. If we place instincts first, we have got the cart before the horse; we shall be pulled backward into disillusionment. But when we are willing to place spiritual growth first --- then and only then do we have a real chance.

TWELVE STEPS

 AND

TWELVE TRADITIONS

STEP TWELVE (p. 114)

*****

It was impossible to see the true purpose of my life. Pat answers came and went. I strove at any rate… strove hard and long… sometimes successful and sometimes a complete failure at one or the other. But I tried to make one of these work. I tried with all my heart to become a good husband and father but failed. I tried at the same time to establish a career in the arts with a little success but failed in the end. I was like a farmer who was there for the plowing and sowing of the fields but never stayed long enough in one spot for the harvest. With no home, I wandered restlessly until I lit in one town and surrendered to the horror that my life was going nowhere.

            Thankfully, when the spiritual path I’m on revealed itself to me, I understood it at last. Furthermore, while many others were spiritually/genetically geared for all the goodies of life that I had hungered for and were able to find meaning and purpose in them, I was not. It was as though God spoke to me saying, “George, you are here for a purpose, now get out of the way and mind your own business!”

            From there I have been restored from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. I became open to all of the possibilities life offers once I simply put my emotional well-being first. It is amazing how much has been restored to me since then. I was a big, “Oh, I get it!” moment.

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Pause

Like most people, we have found that we can take our big lumps as they come. But also like others, we often discover a greater challenge in the lesser and more continuous problems of life. Our answer is in still more spiritual development. Only by this means can we improve our chances for really happy and useful living. As we grow spiritually, we find that our old attitudes toward our instincts need to undergo drastic revisions.

TWELVE STEPS

AND

TWELVE TRADITIONS

STEP TWELVE (p.114)

*****

The rent has to be paid, the laundry needs doing, doctor appointments must be met; commitments to family fulfilled; the car needs new tires… again; neighbors are too loud, the traffic on the freeways is backed up from here to Eden; all of these and more are situations that drive me to dig in. I can be paralyzed by the overwhelming accumulation of stress that non-alcoholics don’t have any problem with. I can be tempted to run or hide from responsibilities that others face with ease. It is time to take account and seize the opportunity to open myself up to guidance… direction… breathe… to remember to pause when agitated or doubtful.

            Before I run headlong into my problems, send off a nasty email or otherwise make a fool of myself, I need to stop and count to ten… maybe hold my knees and take three deep breaths… if a car cuts me off on the freeway I might chant a mantra: “Om ah hum!” I even found that I had to change my curses to blessings. Just saying God bless instead of God damn does a subtle job on my consciousness. It just feels better to bless rather than to curse… even if I mean in my heart the opposite.

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An Ocean of Grace

Practically every A.A. member declares that no satisfaction has been deeper and no joy greater than in a Twelfth Step well done. To watch the eyes of men and women open with wonder as they move from darkness to light, to see their lives quickly fill with new purpose and meaning, to see whole families reassembled, to see the alcoholic outcast received back into his community in full citizenship, and above all to which these people awaken to the presence of a loving God in their lives --- these things are the substance of what we receive as we carry A.A.’s message to the next alcoholic.

TWELVE STEPS AND

TWELVE TRADITIONS

(p.110)

*****

My first weeks of sobriety were full of wonder as the obsession to drink was lifted; and, experiencing a taste of the awakening to come, I hungered to pass on this joy to all my drinking buddies. Most nodded in agreement that I had found something good for me but they weren’t ready, or didn’t want, whatever I had discovered. Some even yawned, having tried AA before. These had tried so hard and failed… they turned away and stopped coming around. Others were eager to try but somehow couldn’t get motivated. I dragged them to meetings but it did no apparent good. I realized through my failures that I needed to work on myself before I could affectively pass on to others what I had found.

            After those attempts, I came to understand that I could be more useful doing the little things around the Fellowship; like cleaning the coffee pots after meetings… greeting at the door… making myself available for rides to meetings and simply extending an open hand. The open hand that once took from others was transformed into an open hand that gives. I now swim in an ocean of grace that inspires, encourages and motivates rather than evangelizes.

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God, as We Understand God

So, practicing these steps, we had a spiritual awakening about which finally there was no question. Looking at those who were only beginning and still doubted themselves, the rest of us were able to see the change setting in. From great numbers of such experiences, we could predict that the doubter who still claimed that he hadn’t got the “spiritual angle,” who still considered his well-loved A.A. group the higher power, would presently love God and call Him by name.

TWELVE STEPS

AND

TWELVE TRADITIONS:

STEP TWELVE

(p. 109)

*****

I was taken aback when I first read phrases in AA literature such as: “he… would presently love God and call Him by name”. I had no problem with loving God but I wasn’t all that ready to cede to giving God any name at all. My suspicion was “Ah-hah! See, AA is a recruiting organization to make good churchy-Christians out of us!” Truthfully, any association by name or gender of God carries with it too much religious baggage for my tastes.

My reticence to put a tag on God doesn’t mean that I can’t accept another person’s religious perceptions of God, but rather, it opens me up to the beliefs of others if I simply call my God, The Heart of Compassion (whether they call their Higher Power, God, Jehovah, Allah, Krishna or Jesus… even the non-deist spiritual experience of Buddhists or the atheistic, existential, purity of the physical sciences pose no threat to my own beliefs). The Heart of Compassion is a description more than it is a name and it was the Heart of Compassion that lifted me out of the darkness of my disease and gently guides me through the trials of today. The grace of this acknowledgement that infuses my spirit is testimony enough to enthuse and empower the steps I take on the path to “happy destiny”. It is also important for me to affirm that I am secure enough in my own experience that I am entirely able to respect the experience of others as long as their God is a loving God. If so, they can call God by any name they choose…. i.e., love and tolerance.

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Your True Self

Your true self, God, or Higher Power is everywhere, particularly in its opposites. Like the Taoist yin-yang symbol, your original nature is present in both the dark and the light, in the male and the female and in the heights of ecstasy as well as in the pits of despair. Our Higher Power had never abandoned us, In many ways we had abandoned our Higher Power as a result of our diseases.

Mel Ash (The Zen of Recovery, p. 180)

*****

My friends in recovery sometimes refer to non-alcoholics or addicts as "normies". I believe this label is erroneous because I am hard pressed to find anyone that, at one time or another, hasn't hit such a bottom as the result of separation from our True Self. The truth is that most of us are born connected with God. This original consciousness and joy of discovery is what my relationship with the Heart of Compassion is all about. When I lost that I searched through the self-centered pursuit of that original enthusiasm (that some mistakenly tagged, "original sin"). We call this experience in the West, the Fall and, expelled from the Garden, we wander through life trying to retrieve our original nature. Through the dependency on the accesses of religion, of power, pleasures, property, security and prestige most of us were waylaid grasping for this lost special place. The self-centeredness we were born with was based on the necessary dependency of our helplessness. However, at some point most are able to reciprocate the nurturing we received and shed what was once useful, just as a snake sheds its skin. Are these "normies"? Are we special just because we went too far and drove ourselves over the edge and now need some form of spiritual discipline of recovery?

            I think not because there are no "normies" in this regard. I am not special just because I ruined most relationships through my addictions… the web of samsara.

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Taking Refuge

"Becoming a refugee is acknowledging that we are groundless, and it is acknowledging that there is really no need for a home, or ground. Taking refuge is an expression of freedom, because as refugees we are no longer bounded by the need for security. We are suspended in a no-man's land in which the only thing to do is to relate with the teachings and with ourselves."

The Heart of the Buddha

Taking Refuge

Chogyam Trungpa

~

This is not to mean that I don't have reverence for place. There are special relationships most indigenous people have with the island, the forest, the river or the plains on, or in, which they inhabit. There is stewardship but not ownership when it comes to where they are and, as they are displaced, a part of their soul is cut out. They are refugees. We hardly ever think of it but most of the Europeans that displaced Native Americans were themselves forced by economics, religious persecution or for political reasons, to hazard the journey to this continent. The error was that the Europeans who came here had not let go… had no reverence for the land as it was and persisted in driving out, corrupting and molding the land and its people to resemble Europe. The spiritual refugee that respects where he/she is opens the heart to new wonders on the dharma path.

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Answering the Call

Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. But certainly each genuine one has something in common with all others. And these things which they have in common are not too hard to understand. When a man or woman has a spiritual awakening he has now become able to do, fell. And believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and being…

TWELVE STEPS

AND

TWELVE TRADITIONS:

STEP TWELVE

(pp. 106-107)

*****

My bedroom was a room in the basement in my school years. I can recall… going back… Mom would call from the top of the stairs in the morning to wake me. I heard her call… I heard her well enough. I'd answer, "I'm up!" and roll back over to go back to sleep. If she heard no stirring after a few minutes, she would call again. I tried answering again, "I'm up, Mom!" She was persistent, however, and would finally holler, "Get up! I want to hear your feet on the steps in two minutes or I'm coming down!"

            It was only then that I jumped out of bed, fireman style, headed upstairs, showered and finally sat down to breakfast before putting on my coat and going out the door to school. The ascension up the stairs… the cleaning up from a long slumber… this was my awakening after, what seemed to be at the time, an annoying series of wake-up calls.

            This has been my experience with a spiritual awakening. It is a three stage affair: the call… the awakenings… the pestering calls… the arrests… the failed career… the ruined marriage… the self imposed isolation… despair… the jails and then awake and out of bed…. after so many calls and promises, I finally stayed awake. Once I rose to take the steps upward to the place of renewal, where I cleaned up and sat down to breakfast, I had only begun the second stage: the third stage was where I put on my coat, kissed my mom on the cheek, and headed out the door into the world.

            This is only the beginning.

---

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