Last night I had a hot bath and went off to bed with the Big Book of AA and lay with a mug of Horlicks reading through the Appendix on spirituality. I’ve always liked the low-key approach here and the truthfulness that comes from firsthand or very closely observed experience.
I miss direct AA involvement very much but the geographical isolation is a reality. There are no opportunities to do service in the hands-on ego-eroding sense of the word: to wash up, to hand out literature, to sit with others sweating blood in the very first days of sobriety. That lack impoverishes me and leaves me exceptionally vulnerable to darker moods and traumatic memories. I don’t have the steadying reminder all around me of lives healing and opportunities to witness the wonderful growth I have seen so often in others. I read through blogs and share vicariously in the lives of other recovering alcoholics elsewhere in the world, but, well, it is not the same, and not enough.
The second appendix is all about growth and transformation, but of a slow, incremental nature. That’s me. I would have thought of myself as a ‘Paul on the road to Damascus’ type, but that is not how it has worked for me.
Here’s the relevant quotation:
‘The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.
Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous.
In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our intention to create such an impression, many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming “God-consciousness” followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.
Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone. What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.
Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it “God-consciousness.”
Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual concepts. He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.’
That gradual understanding of recovery and transformed consciousness is my experience. It isn’t easy to put into words and I understand it best as a kind of ‘Letting go,’ the phrase I took for the title of this blog. To stay close to lived truth and surrender to another kind of wisdom — for so long I thought I could engineer my moods and put up brave fronts and simply act cheerful when it was required. I’m not a fan of the ‘fake it until you make it’ school. That inner controlling and pre-empting self was governed by fear.
Now I trust the process and just stay sober, receptive and as honest as I can through whatever happens. Even loss can become pure gift. I stay close to the miracle I have seen for myself in AA. And I surrender to what may not make sense to me yet in the lived wisdom of those who have gone before me: my own ‘years of self-discipline’ got me nowhere in the face of the devastation of alcoholism I tried for so long to control or minimise. When I gave up and found a community of recovering alcoholics, another journey began for me and that is the ongoing miracle of our life together.
Posted by louisey 