SERENITY AFTER THE STORM
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. . . .
— TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, pp. 93-94
When on the roller coaster of emotional turmoil, I remember that growth is often painful. My evolution in the A.A. program has taught me that I must experience the inner change, however painful, that eventually guides me from selfishness to selflessness. If I am to have serenity, I must STEP my way past emotional turmoil and its subsequent hangover, and be grateful for continuing spiritual progress.
Man, I've been avoiding so much lately. I've been avoiding the rest of step 4. Avoiding people I have let down, no matter how small, and avoiding things like completing my home office. I've been avoiding the pain of continued spiritual growth.
I reached my point of desperation a few years ago and the pain of staying where I was was unbearable; it made the pain of spiritual growth easy at that time. In the last year or so, I reached a place of happiness that was so much greater than the self-loathing I carried for the last decade that it felt "good enough". Now the comfort of where I am is making the pain of continued spiritual growth seem so much more daunting.
But I can seem that I was starting to slip back into selfish thoughts and avoidant behaviors. I can't ever repeat that in my life. I and the people I care about deserve so much more from me.
So here I am, working all the tasks at the office I've been procrastinating on, reaching out to people I've been avoiding, and putting my full heart into step 4.
We must constantly guard against resting on our laurels. As the fog we experience in the early days, weeks, and months of sobriety is lifted and we return to some semblance of normalcy, it can be too easy to being to think that we are self-sufficient. I was talking with a fellow AA recently and our topic of discussion was the third and fourth step. If/when we perform a thorough third step, we should enter into a new realm of thought, we have ceased fighting any or anything. We now place our lives and our trust in the higher power of our understanding. If we fail to repeat step 3 on a daily basis. We forget how to turn it all over. When this happens, some people are quick to say, "Thank you, God, for this gift of sobriety. I know I gave you my will and my life, but forget you, I got it from here! I can run this show well this time." How foolish! I must be willing to turn over every facet of my life to my higher power on a daily basis, I also must regularly identify resentments as they occur and make amends as expediently as possible, if appropriate.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to the pain that this daily reflection discusses, Id like to elaborate on that. As the fog of alcoholism lifted and I began working on my first fourth step I began to feel a lot of emotions I had not felt in a very long time. The things that i did to loved ones while using were horrendous. It was painful to look at my past behaviors, to examine how it made treat others, and, for the first time, to not place the Blame on anyone else, but rather solely look for my part in it. Prior to coming into the program I had "justified" reasons for resenting certain people. "So and so did this to me, so it's okay that I acted like a complete ahole." When looking at my resentments on my fourth step and not placing the blame on anyone else, I had to own up to the fact that I played a significant role in the resentments. It hurt me to have to own up to my actions, but in owning up to my actions and proceeding to step 5 (admitting to God and another person the exact nature of my wrongs) I was able to become free from the bondage of those resentments. I no longer had to carry them around and let them bring me down! Through the grace of my higher power I was granted a clean slate! I would not have arrived at my new found serenity and peace though of I had not experienced the pain of how my actons had harmed others.