What's Step Three About?

What’s This Step About?

Excerpted from Buddhism & The Twelve Steps Workbook

Step Three sounds as if it’s about God, but from the perspective of the archetypal journey, I think that’s a very limited view. Instead, I think it’s about making a commitment to a new way of living, to living in harmony with the Law of Karma, with the Dharma.

                  First of all, making a decision, any decision, for an addict is progress. We don’t “decide” to get drunk, crash the car, and wind up in jail; we don’t “decide” to binge or overdose or waste our lives. These are impulses, obsessions, addictions. So when we actually make a decision, that is, consider alternatives, make a choice, and act on it, we are already showing progress.

                  In Step Three, the decision we are making is to turn away from our previous addictive, self-centered, pleasure-seeking way of living, and turn towards something more healthy, spiritual, and ethical. If we’re approaching this process from a Buddhist perspective, a big part of this Step is to engage the Noble Eightfold Path, which I’ll talk about later in this Step.

                  Turning “our will and our lives” over is about two things: setting our intention to live differently, “our will,” and actually taking the action, “our lives.” This distinction in the Steps corresponds to the Buddhist understanding that all actions follow on the heels of intention. If we are trying to do the right thing, we are already in better shape. We may succeed or we may not—we may even relapse—but if we are clear about what we really want, we’ll be able to get back on track. Intention, as I’ll talk about later, conditions the results of our actions, that is, if we do something for the right reasons, the results will tend to be beneficial; if we do them for the wrong reasons—selfishness, pleasure-seeking, resentment—the results will tend to be unbeneficial.

                  So, this Step is about setting our direction and trying to stick to it. It becomes our touchstone. Finally the Step implies acceptance. If we are “turning it over” to something else, whether God or the Dharma, we are saying that our job is to show up and do our best, but that we don’t control the results. Therefore, we need to learn to accept how things unfold. A lot of the problem with the addictive personality is the effort to control everything, and when we can accept how things are occurring in our lives, there is much less conflict and turmoil, less stress. We come to see that, even if things don’t turn out exactly as we wanted, they are workable. And many times, what we thought was a “bad” result, turns out to have hidden benefits. Many times in my recovery I found that in the longterm, disappointing results led eventually to a much better outcome than the one I had wanted. This is what “turning it over” is about, and it’s key to maintaining serenity in recovery.

Exercise: Acceptance

The Big Book of AA says famously:

“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation -- some fact of my life -- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.”

            What does this mean to you? How true is it for you? What about things you don’t think you should accept?

            How much does lack of acceptance cause agitation, stress, and suffering in your life?

Begin to notice things you have difficulty accepting:

·       What is difficult to accept in your past?

·       What is difficult to accept about the world?

·       What is difficult to accept about yourself?

·       What is difficult to accept about your experience during meditation?

What's Step Two About?

This is an excerpt from my newest book, Buddhism & The Twelve Steps: A Workbook for Individuals and Groups. Available on CreateSpace or Amazon.

What’s Step Two About?

When I first read the 12 Steps I thought Step Two was saying, “If you just believe that God will fix you, the power of your faith will take care of everything.” This was a very Christian reading of the Step, which might very well have been its original meaning. I was willing to suspend disbelief and skepticism and play along—“God? Sure, why not?” That worked for a while. I kept doing the grunt work of recovery, everything from showing up at meetings, being of service, and writing inventory to getting a day job, going back to school, and starting to deal with my relationship issues. There was a feeling of magic that everything seemed to be falling into place, all those little “God shots” and synchronous moments. People kept showing up just when I needed them—teachers, employers, friends—and it all seemed to be happening because I “Let Go and Let God.”

                  That’s one way of looking at it. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that way of looking at it. Maybe. . .

                  Today I see Step Two in completely different terms. First of all, the way I understand it now is that the Step is saying, “There is hope. It is possible to change. Things can get better.” The reason that statement is important is that when you’re an addict, you don’t think you can change. In fact, that’s the whole point—you want to stay loaded all the time—you don’t want to change. One of the reasons it’s so hard to take Step One, to actually quit drinking and using, is that the question that looms in the background is, “What then?” How are you going to deal with not drinking? We have the sense that our life is going to be the same, only worse because we won’t have the relief of getting high. Why would we choose that? The whole reason we are getting loaded all the time is that we don’t want to be in our life as it is. Step Two is offering us an alternative; it’s saying that there’s a completely different life out there for us.

                  Okay, but the Step says “a Power greater than ourselves.” Just believing that it’s possible to change and for your life to get better doesn’t seem to involve some big power. But, if we think about it, for anything to happen, some power or force or energy has to be involved. To get out of bed, a lot of muscles have to be involved. To take a midterm exam, a lot of study and thinking have to be in play. Nothing happens without power. And the power of intentional change is the power of karma. Actions have results; that’s what the Law of Karma says. Drink and use all the time, and the result is addiction. Stop drinking and using and the result is being clean and sober. When we take Step One and stop, that’s essentially what we’re doing, using the Law of Karma to establish ourselves in recovery.

                  If we don’t believe we can change, if we think we are bound to stay addicts forever and that we can’t heal, then we don’t believe in the Law of Karma. We are saying, “No matter what actions I take, I am fated to be a suffering addict.” From a Buddhist viewpoint, this is called “delusion,” or Wrong View. It means that we don’t understand the way the world works. We believe in fate, that everything is preordained and we have no power to do anything about it.  Nonetheless, most of us, when faced with the question, “Do my actions have any effect on my life,” will say, “Yes, of course.” The Buddha said that if our actions didn’t bring results, he wouldn’t bother teaching people because there would be no way for them to achieve enlightenment; they wouldn’t be capable of change.

                  But this belief that we can’t change is implied in the despair of the addict who can’t seem to stay sober or feels stuck in negative emotional or behavioral patterns. That’s why it’s important to take Step Two, to confront this, often unacknowledged, belief consciously and see how we are being held back by our delusion. Once acknowledged, we can begin to consciously build a belief system. We can start to ask ourselves, “What do I need to do to change and grow?” Then we can begin to access the powers at our disposal, powers like love, determination, awareness, wisdom, the support of others, and, yes, faith. Whether we know it or not, as addicts we’ve been using powers, but mostly negative ones like selfishness, impatience, fear, and resentment. Recovery means working with the positive powers. The faith or belief involved in Step Two is when we “come to believe” that it’s actually worth changing our behavior and orientation. Once we believe that change is possible and that it’s worth making the commitment to a new way of living, we are ready for Step Three.

Exercise: Stop Fighting

If you have struggled with whether you want to go into a 12 Step program; with the idea of God; with “those people” in meetings; with your own ability to succeed in recovery, what if you just stop fighting? What if you put this all aside, and any other objections or resistance and just surrendered to the process?

                  Consider any ways you have been resisting the recovery process, whether they are about the program or about you or your beliefs, and ask yourself if it might be possible to simply drop that resistance, if only for today. Question yourself and your beliefs. Don’t believe everything you think.  

Beginning Step One

What’s this Step About?

This is an excerpt from my book Buddhism &The Twelve Steps Workbook, available on CreateSpace.com at https://www.createspace.com/4580491.
 

The language of Step One, especially the idea of being “powerless,” can distract us from what the Step is really about: quitting. As much as the Twelve Steps and Buddhism are spiritual practices, they are both founded in action, in behavior. And the starting point of that behavior in the Steps and in recovery is to stop doing what we’ve been doing.  This is the simple function of this Step, to change our addictive behavior so that we can start the work of recovery.

                  I also find it useful to view Step One as the beginning of a process, the archetypal spiritual journey. The journey starts in darkness, a “bottom,” that wakes us up to the unworkable nature of our lives as we’ve been living them. Just as Buddhism starts with insight into suffering, recovery starts when we honestly confront our own pain. This may be as simple as a persistent cough triggering the thought, “I’ll never see my grandkids grow up if I don’t quit smoking,” or as dramatic as waking up from a blackout in a prison cell—and not knowing why you’re there. No one can tell you what your bottom is. I’ve been amazed over the years of my recovery to see how little it sometimes took to push someone over the line into a program, or on the other hand, how resistant someone could be to recognizing their need for help even when everything in their life was falling apart.

                  Yes, Step One is about Powerlessness and Unmanageability, but both of those things are meant to motivate you to quit.

Exercise: What It Was Like

This exercise can be done as a writing process, a sharing process, or a contemplative process. The main thing is to be honest. Totally honest.

            When speakers tell their stories at 12 Step meetings, the classic format is to describe “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.” This exercise covers just the first part of that formula.

            Go through in detail every case where you acted on your addiction and the results weren’t good. Start with your earliest memories, maybe getting caught drinking, getting sick, blacking out; perhaps you missed school, crashed a car, got arrested. What about violence? Emotional outbursts?

            Did you waste money? Damage relationships? Waste professional opportunities?

            How many times did you act like a jerk? Take foolish risks? Sleep with someone you didn’t know or care about?

            How did your addiction affect your emotional states, causing depression, anxiety, anger, apathy, mania, irritability, or any other moods?

            You get the idea, and I’m sure you can come up with your own consequences. The important thing isn’t to remember every single event, but to establish in your conscious mind the persistent nature of the destructive effects of your addiction. This is fundamental to destroying any vestige of denial, so that you never again can tell yourself, “It wasn’t that bad.” Sure, it might not have been “that bad” every time or all the time, but if you look at the whole scope of your addiction, the years it dragged on and all the ways it hurt you and others, it’s bound to make an impression. That’s the result we want from this exercise.

            Writing all this down and sharing it with a sponsor or other trusted person is a great way to embed a basic truth in your mind: It doesn’t work!

The Way of Mindfulness and Recovery

This is an excerpt from my book Buddhism &The Twelve Steps Workbook, available on CreateSpace.com at https://www.createspace.com/4580491.

What is mindfulness? As this practice and Buddhist teachings have attracted more and more attention, the simple definitions once offered have been challenged by Buddhist scholars and dharma teachers, creating a bit of confusion about something that seems quite simple: the application of our attention to our mental and physical experience, moment by moment. I’m not qualified to enter into an academic debate on the topic, so I will give you my sense of the meaning of the word, and then encourage you to explore other sources if you’d like to understand more.

                  Mindfulness starts with being present, being aware of what we are experiencing through our five physical senses and what’s happening in our mind. Our natural tendency is to get caught up worrying about or planning the future or remembering the past. The first thing we try to do with mindfulness is notice these tendencies and start to train ourselves to bring our attention back to what is happening right now. This alone is a huge task because of our deep conditioning. Planning the future based on our experiences in the past is a survival strategy developed eons ago by our ancestors. Our capacity to do this is what sets us apart from other living things, and so our instincts resist any effort to act otherwise. Nonetheless, these habits take us away from a direct experience of life and obscure a whole range of truths, from the psychological conditioning that drives our behavior to the elemental realities that Buddhists call “the Dharma,” Truth or Natural Law.

                  With mindfulness we not only observe what’s happening in the body and mind, but how we react to things, how a sound triggers a thought and a thought triggers an emotion and an emotion triggers a physical response. We begin to see the bigger picture, the process by which we construct our understanding of our world and who we are. This deconstruction of our experience is vitally important for addicts in or trying to get into recovery because it allows them to see how their addiction works and that there is a way out, that it’s not inevitable or unstoppable. The process by which we become addicted is a mind/body process that can be reversed, and awareness is the first stepping-stone in that process. That’s why Step One of the 12 Steps starts with the words “We admitted,” because that admission is the bringing into our awareness the truth of our condition. Until we are aware of our condition, until we come out of denial, no recovery is possible. Step One is, essentially, an act of mindfulness, a clear seeing.

                  One of the things that’s always struck me as unique about the Buddhist teachings is that the Buddha started out by talking about the difficulties in life, the suffering. This doesn’t seem like the best marketing technique. If you want to sell a product, you shouldn’t start out by being such a downer. And maybe that’s one reason Buddhism seems to take hold slowly in a culture: it doesn’t start out by promising paradise.

                  The practice of mindfulness then has a role in building from this recognition of suffering. The Buddha asks us to sit down (literally) and start to watch our experience unfold. If you sit still for a little while what you’ll discover is that your mind is restless and filled with plans and memories that are agitating; your body doesn’t want to sit still and often will begin to hurt or at least get itchy or tense; you start to fall asleep when you’re trying to pay attention to the breath; sitting still becomes boring and tedious, not to mention frustrating as you try to follow the meditation instructions but fail repeatedly.

                  So, the first effect of mindfulness is to see the truth of the first Noble Truth—the Buddha was right, it’s hard to be a human being. If we keep watching carefully, tracking the process moment-by-moment as we notice the mind wandering and gently come back to the breath, we see that when we let go of our obsessive thinking, we get moments of relief. Thus, we see the truth of the second and third Noble Truths: our discomfort is caused by our clinging and ends when we stop clinging. We also see, as Step One says, that we are powerless, in this case over the arising of thoughts, feelings, and sense experiences—not that we can’t do anything about them, but that, just as with our addiction, they are going to keep coming up and if we are not going to suffer as they arise, we are going to have to change our relationship to them.

                  When an addict sees this meditative process clearly—and usually it helps if a teacher or guide clarifies what’s happening—the logic of letting go becomes indisputable. We see in microcosm the process of addiction and recovery.

                  I know a couple of people who say that seeing this was enough for them to get clean and sober. They didn’t have to go to rehab or AA or any other recovery program; all they needed was to see their addiction with mindfulness, and they were able to quit. But this is the rare exception. Before I got sober I seemed to be engaged in a pretty serious mindfulness meditation practice, even going on extended silent retreats, but still didn’t make the connection between the microcosm of moment-to-moment letting go and the habitual patterns of drinking and using that persisted between retreats. The power of addiction and denial was just too great for my mindfulness practice alone to penetrate. There simply wasn’t the willingness to go that far, and there wasn’t the clarity to understand the problem and the potential that sobriety might bring.

                  Nonetheless, today I regularly teach mindfulness in treatment centers and to newcomers who attend my workshops and retreats. And I find that, if people are willing to learn and are engaged in trying to deal with their addiction, the mindfulness practices are a powerful support to the process of recovery. I think it helps that I guide them to understand what they are experiencing. Sometimes the non-verbal meditation experience is difficult to interpret at first, and this is one of the main jobs of the meditation teacher, to illuminate what is already happening, to understand the felt experience.

                  When I’m introducing mindfulness at a treatment center, I feel the need to explain why we’re doing it. After all, when someone forks out money for rehab, it’s not with the desire to learn to meditate. They might wonder, “What does this have to do with recovery?” I tell them that mindfulness meditation has two key values for the recovering addict: one, it helps them to de-stress. Recovery is stressful, in the beginning especially, and having a method by which you can, on a daily basis, get some quiet, calm, and peace, is invaluable. Two, mindfulness practice helps us to become aware of our mental habits so we can start to catch thoughts like, “I need to have a drink,” or “What’s the point of this, I might as well get loaded.” Getting in the habit of watching and questioning our own thoughts is vital to maintaining recovery because the addict’s habitual thoughts are so often self-destructive, or just simply destructive.

                  Mindfulness isn’t magic or religious. Developing and applying mindfulness takes determination and effort. Nonetheless, it can have a powerful, liberating effect on our lives. All change starts with awareness, and when we cultivate mindfulness our awareness deepens far beyond our common way of experiencing life.

Tips for Practice

1.     Set up a place in your home devoted to meditation. This can just be a corner of a room, or a small extra space or alcove. Put your chair or meditation cushion in the corner, and perhaps a small table with some special objects. Having a space devoted to meditation acts as a reminder to practice, and reinforces the practice when you sit there.

2.     Schedule meditation into your day. Before you go to bed at night, decide when you are going to meditate the next day. You might have to get up earlier or leave some gaps in your schedule. You can meditate on a break or at lunchtime at work; you can meditate before dinner; you can even meditate before bed, though that’s not ideal.

3.     Commit to meditate every day, even if it’s only for 1 minute. This commitment helps you sustain your practice. It reinforces the idea that consistency is the most important thing, not perfection.  

4.     Find a meditation group and/or teacher. Nothing reinforces practice like regularly joining others to meditate. Just as with recovery, it’s hard to do it alone. Take advantage of the support that’s out there.