Alcoholics Anonymous is an instruction manual written by the founders. The result of the instructions, if precisely followed, would culminate in lasting sobriety for the suffering alcoholic. They didn’t write, “We just kind of threw together some ideas on what we did.” They used specific language, describing precise instructions that detailed a definite outcome.

Let’s say a person decided to bake a cake. He went to the grocery store and purchased a Betty Crocker cake mix. The box lists a set of instructions; empty contents into bowl, add ingredients, stir, place in oven at a precise temperature and bake for 30 minutes. If these instructions are followed precisely he produces a tasty cake. Any deviation from the recipe will result in an undesired outcome, an inedible mound of flour.

Many people come to AA. They attend meetings every day. They take commitments. They choose a sponsor. They relapse. They die. What happened? They followed the AA program!

NO, they didn’t. The AA program is outlined in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Too many of us confuse the whistles and bells (meetings and commitments) with the meat of the program (the 12 steps as presented in the Big Book) and end up a mess like the cake described above instead of a recovered member of the fellowship.

So take the course of action and PRECISELY follow the instructions in the Big Book as the founders intended. And welcome to an amazing life beyond your wildest dreams!

Now he had promised his mother that he wouldn’t touch the stuff.  But after getting a little taste of it he quickly discovered how good it was and found himself doing battle with the old dog inside hounding him to gobble up some animal flesh.

Sounds like heresy, right? I mean we all know Gandhi was a vegetarian, and besides that, a pre-eminent political and ideological leader.  During the Indian independence movement, Gandhi built and taught satyagraha, or resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience. It was a philosophy later employed by Dr. Martin Luther King among others, to rebuff the cruelties of segregation in the United States.

Satyagraha is founded in ahimsa, or total nonviolence. This is where the vegetarian thing came into play.  No harm to animals through eating, killing, abusing them.

I guess I find it interesting because I still walk into a parking lot and smell steak or chicken cooking and find myself craving meat (I’ve been vegetarian for about 5 months now).  I sometimes wonder when or if that feeling will leave me.  And I feel guilty for craving it. I remember feeling that way about alcohol.  But when I read this part of Gandhi’s autobiography, I realized that even this man, this great soul and spiritual leader of people, had this very human and carnal want inside of him. Even he was susceptible to pressure from others and to the idea of how others might perceive him.

He found it hard to eat while he was in London (by this time he was a devout, and from the sounds of it, kind of neurotic vegetarian.)  He hated the blandness of the food and missed the sweetness and the spiciness of the foods he had grown up with in India and in his mother’s home. But he later relates, “As my mind has taken a different turn, the fondness for condiments has worn away and I now relish the boiled spinach” which I used to find so distasteful.

What is most profound to me is that he goes on to say, “Many such experiments taught me that the real seat of taste was not the tongue but the mind.”

And that’s where this whole thing comes back to the condition of my …ism.  Many of my experiments, both loaded and sober, have proved that if I don’t recognize how cunning and powerful my  mind can be, I will never have any freedom from it. I have to learn to practice silence and stillness.  Even though I often resist those things and find them uncomfortable.

From Gandhi’s lips to your ears, “Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of…truth.  Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it.”

These dishonest tendencies are true for me. Whether it’s my head telling me to go on and take a drink or dig into some fried chicken. The power of my mind to convince me to go against my own principles and beliefs is quite strong. In silence I cultivate a different kind of power…an endurance so to speak. And it is this endurance that helps me see all of my life and its situations more clearly.

I was thinking about geographical cures this morning. How they’re only temporary and they may just prolong the pain that motivates them. Whether we change cities, states, jobs, relationships, meetings, programs or where we get our morning coffee…if change is inspired by the urge to get away from something we’re in for some rough times.

Instead of changing something, maybe what today calls for is stillness.  Getting comfortable with whatever (or whoever) is at the root of our urge to up and run.  In stillness we have an opportunity to be the detached observer. That means I can practice Step 11 by just watching the way I respond to the world around me without judging it. It’s amazing how powerful this practice is and how much freedom it gives me just to be human.

In detached observation I usually realize that I am unhappy with the way the show is coming off.  I may begin to think that life isn’t treating me right. (p.61)  I will almost always at this point exert myself more (that means I will mother, martyr and manipulate) in an attempt to ‘fix’ this perceived injustice.

I can always be more gracious and I can easily be more demanding.  Of course I may have a part in some of my dissatisfaction with (fill in the blank.)  But I think we both know you are a little more to blame. Before you know it…I’m angry, indignant, and full of self-pity.  What is my basic trouble?

Am I not really a self-seeker?

That means I’m in it for me. I’m looking for what I can get out of it.  I’m running the numbers, counting the beans, making sure it all makes sense….for me.

And even in my best moments…I can be a producer of confusion rather than harmony.

This little story is straight out of the Big Book. (p 61)  There’s a particular speaker I love and her name is Sister B. In one of her talks she explains how the Big Book changed when she put herself in it as I have just done above.  Next time you open it, try putting yourself in the story. It will change the way you interpret the message of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And take a little time today for stillness. Even just a few breaths can counteract our instincts to geographically change the way we feel.

The various human ideas and interpretations of God have both served mankind, and destroyed it simultaneously.  You doubt? Examine the history of the world’s religious wars.

But we can ask ourselves, “Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a power greater than myself?” Because as soon as we can admit that, we’re on our way to better living. And by better, I mean happier, more joyful, and with more freedom.  “It has been repeatedly proven” that this kind of faith can work.  We don’t have to prove the existence of a heaven or hell.  We don’t have to have a God that delivers parking spots or jobs or plagues to people who are misbehaving.  We can stop using the idea of God as a weapon, and let down our guard enough to begin using spiritual principles, which are represented in all major religions and faiths.

But the Big Book carries a warning.  It says we are handicapped by ”obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice.”  And for people like us that can be deadly. Because for whatever reason, “To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis” is a tough decision for us.

We are also handicapped by our hearing (or, should I say, our inability to hear.)  I was a few years into saying the 3rd step prayer when one of its lines smacked me right in the face.  It was as if I had never really heard it before. Have you had that experience in AA?

Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will.

Despite the fact that I am a highly verbal person, quite articulate, and scored higher on my verbal GRE than 95% of those who take the exam (I’m not bragging here…my quantitative scores were in the bottom 20%) I had up until that moment in my sobriety, failed to hear the word ‘self’ in that sentence.  Because of this failure I had not realized that the below list is what I was supposed to be asking God to relieve:

• ~Financial fear, indecision, greed.
• ~Regret and/or judgment of self for things done and left undone.
• ~Bitterness, resentment, and carrying the weight of the known world on my shoulders.
• ~Anything that could be defined as me operating from my usual stance of being ’President of the Universe.’
• ~Obsession with anything: drinking, using, shopping, sex, my checkbook, food, love, being perfect, saving the world. Add to the list as it’s appropriate for you.
• ~The idea that I can control any person, place or thing outside of myself.
• ~Mothering, manipulation and martyrdom.
• ~Worrying about the future (either my future or the future of the planet as a whole.) This includes the potential of civil war in Afghanistan, starvation in the Sudan, the mass incarceration of people in the United States and whether or not my oldest daughter will get into the GT program at her school.

You get the point, right?  I could write and write and write this list. This is self. It’s me talking. It’s me fearing. It’s me running, hiding, harboring, working really hard to ignore reality. It’s about my life, my feelings about the world, my experience.  See…I’m everywhere in it. That’s the problem.  I am all that I think about, and I justify that sometimes by spending time thinking about what I consider really important things.

When I started to pray and ask God to relieve me of the bondage of myself, I found so much humility. I realized that my entire life had been full of the pain of ‘me.’ And when I got that…when it made the 1,000 mile journey from my head to my heart, I started to heal from the scarring that living like that causes.

It’s been a long process. I still get into bondage. I was there yesterday. The difference for me is that I have some tools now. One of them is acceptance. Another is gratitude. And another is experience. I take a few simple steps, get out of God’s way, go to a meeting, call a friend, be of service to someone and get on with life.  I get really honest about where I’m at and how I feel, and I don’t try to make it all look good. In fact, I don’t care how it looks, because I know that I can’t save my face and my ass at the same time.  No matter how badly I feel…it’s going to pass and I’m going to feel something else. I know that because it has been my experience, one day at a time.

Hot sweats. Finger tapping. Leg shaking. Eyes tracking my surroundings.  Yeah. Craving. Even the remote possibility that I might never drink or use again used to have my ears ringing, heart racing, blood rushing up from my chest to the top of my head and pumping back down into my gut.  The whole time my head would be screaming at me between the ears, “Hey you piece of garbage, you’re not done. There’s no way you’re gonna stay sober. You’re a joke.”

Yeah, that’s called craving. And it’s one of the primary things that separates an addict from a potential alcoholic. “We believe… that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class (alcoholics) and never occurs in the average temperate drinker.” That’s straight out of the doctor’s opinion.

It’s lousy news. Others can drink and use with impunity. They can nurse their private pains, heartaches and hurts with a bottle of Jack Daniels and still function the next day. They don’t get in cars, cross state lines, get arrested. They can sit around a table in a bar with their friends and clink martini glasses and then show up for their life a few hours later. I know…mystifying.  Time and time again as alcoholics and addicts, we’ll say we’re going to stop. We see the pain on the face of the people who love us and we feel certain inside that this is finally it. But it isn’t.  In spite of the most adamant resolution not to drink, in the face of total chaos and destruction, the moment comes when we drink again.

Unless.

Unless we can experience a complete psychic change. (That means a complete displacement of the attitudes and responses that used to guide our entire lives.)

Oh. Okay. Total psychic transformation.  Well why didn’t you just say that. Let me get my magic carpet and zoom right over.

So here’s the advice:

Everything is going to have to change. That means you can’t hold onto stuff like your good ideas and all the reasons you can’t do the things we’re asking you to do.

You need to kick the old crowd to the curb. It’s impossible to stay sober when you’re spending the majority of time with people who drink and use like you do. I know this because I lived the first 6 months of my sober life in a house full of addicts and alcoholics. Very unpleasant. You are not welcome when you are sober because you become a mirror in which others see their disease.

It’s one day at a time…forever. So don’t use or drink no matter what. Learn to recoil from the drink (drug) as if it was going to reach out, grab your throat and choke you to death. Because the disease wants you dead. Period.

After a while, it will be unnecessary to recoil from the drink (or drug.) We are oddly placed in some position of neutrality when it comes to alcohol (I cannot really speak for drugs since I have not put myself around any drugs in my sobriety.)  The great fact for us is not just that we will not have to drink…but that we will not want to drink. That’s amazing stuff. Science can’t explain that. Religion can’t explain it. Your shrink can’t explain it. It’s a god thing.

Don’t get too hung up on God. If you’re down with God, amen. Keep doing what you’re doing and get to know your god a little better. If you can’t stand god…no big deal. Think of God as Group of Drunks.  I love that!  It kept me here. I hated god. I hated church. I hated religion. I wouldn’t say the Lord’s prayer because I was born Jewish. The story goes on ad infinitum but it’s all B.S., so I’ll leave it at this. If you stick around you will make your peace with god. Or you won’t. And either way it will be fine. A speaker I was listening to the other day said, “You only need to know 2 things about God: God is. And you aren’t God.

Go to as many meetings as you can. I easily clocked close to a 1,000 meetings in my first year. Why? Well, I was very very sick. And also, very bored and boring, and really had nothing going on that would prevent me from making 3 meetings a day. It was the first place I had been invited to return to in a long time. And there was always coffee. Sometimes there was cake. And I love cake. After a few months I started to know people…like really know them. People share all kinds of crazy stuff from the podium. I started to wake up, defrost. People would catch me in a meeting and they’d say something nutty like, “oh, it’s happening in you.” I had no idea what the eff that meant. I didn’t know that they meant they meant that when I came through the doors I looked like death warmed over and that I was starting to come back to life a little.

I’ve now seen that happen to newcomers. Sometimes I smile and tell them, “hey, it’s happening for you.”

Keep coming back to Alcoholics Anonymous. Always come back. Because you earned your seat. It is doubtful that you ended up here by mistake. And we love you. We really do. It’s kind of weird…I know. I’m not a particularly touchy feely person, but I have learned in AA how to open my heart to you and to my fellows. We have a common problem and a common solution, and that unites us. It’s an amazing thing to be a part of.

That’s powerful. At 11 years, it’s been a long time since I shook with fear trying to figure out how I was going to avoid taking a drink. But to see him, and talk to him, and listen to his story, was to be immediately transported back to those early days in sobriety when everyone in my life drank and used like I did.

We drink because we like the effect alcohol produces.  A sensation “so elusive, that while (we) admit it is injurious, we cannot after a time differentiate between true and false.” That means we have no idea what the reality of our situation is.  To us, the alcoholic life seems the only normal one.

So it’s a tall order to be asked to begin a new life. We may be restless, irritable and discontent since we are without the ease and comfort that comes from taking a few drinks.  And this restlessness, pacing the floor, wringing our hands, crawling out of our skin, can send us packing right back to the middle of our disease.

Someone told me when I was new to make a long list of things I could do when I wanted a drink. Take a walk. Spend 5 minutes focussing on my breath. Eat something. Make a phone call. Go to a meeting. Find someone who needed my help. I remember thinking, what a crock! How is this possibly going to fix all the stuff that’s wrong in my life?  There just didn’t seem to be a connection between giving someone a ride to a meeting and getting my car unimpounded and registered.

Lack of power is my problem. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous tells me that. And because it is my problem, it is always (even to this day) the main focus of the insanity in my head. If I can just manage it (my disease, my feelings, my circumstances…fill in the blank) all will be well.  But the dilemma of our disease is that there is no managing alcoholism. It’s cunning, baffling, and powerful.

Bill Wilson, in his story in the Big Book, talks of having a moment of clarity.  “I woke up. This had to be stopped.” But in the blink of an eye, he was drunk again.  He describes that in spite of knowing the severity of his problem, in spite of the incredible demoralization of being alcoholic, there was no fight in him against a drink.  He wonders, “Am I crazy?” And this went on for him for two more years.

I never EVER want to be new again.  I’ve had more than enough of those moments where I wasn’t sure how I was going to avoid a drink. Sometimes I avoided it by just doing the things they told me to do. Going to meetings. Taking commitments. Reading the book. Working the steps. Sometimes it was an act of God or luck that kept me sober. People just showing up where they said they would be as I was about to head off and get loaded.

JM often says something I love about the idea of drinking or using again. He says, “I’d so much rather be in a meeting thinking about a drink than drinking, thinking about how I need to go to a meeting.” I love that because I identify. The shame of drinking while your head is screaming at you to be sober is so much more painful than the restlessness that sometimes suggests a path back to our addiction.

Lots of love today for those just getting a hold of this thing. Just stay!

I woke up this morning in a mood–not wanting to do anything for anyone.  Even baking a boxed cake for one of the most precious people in my life feels like a grind today.  I’m standing at the counter mixing oil and water and egg and realizing,hey, something is wrong here–there’s no joy in this moment.

When you do a lot (and most sober people do a lot) you can get lost in it all. Sometimes that’s because you’re overcommitted. Sometimes, it’s because you have no boudaries. Sometimes it’s because you have no idea how to take care of yourself, and sometimes it’s just because that’s how life pans out.

So I’m beating the cake (by hand, mainly because I’m trying to avoid the extra step of washing the beater) and I’m thinking about the ‘why’ of it all.  Do you know why we beat the cake?  It’s because we need to get some air in it.  No air=dense, tasteless cake.  And that’s a great analogy of my week this week. Dense and tasteless. Bummer.

Because life is like cake batter ( I know you guys love these crazy analogies I come up with.) If you don’t get some air in it, it’s thick and dull, heavy and burdensome.  We need to breathe in our sobriety (read: humor, meetings,relaxation, time with friends.) Otherwise, we’re miserable.  So it’s great to have goals. It’s great to do a lot. But if you want life to feel good, you have to focus on what actually makes you feel good.

When I’m overburdened and overcommitted, I tend to act badly.  Call it my rebellion against ‘the man’ or ‘the system.’ I often try to justify my bad behavior with these excuses, but rebellion is just an outward sign that I’m not taking care of inner Nina.  And when I’m lonely and tired, stressed and depleted, I almost never choose something that would make the situation better (a meeting, yoga, a long talk with a trusted friend.) Instead, I almost always (still! at 11 years sober) choose isolation, mild depression, and sometimes more work (as if that’s going to help!)

I desperately want to learn to be more balanced, but the fact is that my definition of balance has to change in order to achieve that goal. Somehow, I learned that balance means that there will one day be a time in my life when everyone is doing what they’re supposed to do, acting how they’re supposed to act, and every obligation, demand and requirement will somehow find itself a perfect resting place in the 18 hours (on average) I find myself awake every day.

But of course, this is not the case in a constantly shifting world.  One of my favorite spiritual leaders, Pema Chodron, says that we are all looking for solid ground to put our feet on. But it’s an illusion. There is no solid ground. And our attachment to that drive for security, whether it’s emotional, financial, even spiritual, can cause us great pain.

The BHAGAVAD GITA, a spiritual primer that is perhaps India‘s greatest contribution to the world, says that when we have pure contentment, satisfaction, and peace of the Atma (the true self) we are fulfilled. It says there is nothing more to accomplish. No more obligations to meet. When we are firmly established in our true self, we have “no dependence of any kind on anybody and nothing to gain or lose by either action or inaction.”  Lofty goal, huh?

So the point is to do our worldy stuff, but to do it while letting go completely of the outcomes.  It has to be as automatic as our breath or our heartbeat. This is the way we merge with our higher power.

I wish you air to breathe today. I wish you the moist, rich, and delicious cake of life. And I wish the same for myself. As writers, we are paid to be experts on material. This is a dangerous proposition when writing about spiritual concepts. It’s important for me to let you know that no matter how well I intellectually grasp some of these concepts, I still struggle. I still suffer the pain of being human and being attached to my own self-sufficiency.

Blessings, and happy Friday.

People will attest they get their information straight from the literature. They will utter cool, easy to remember phrases with absolute conviction. They will encourage you, the newcomer, to believe what they say. Some of theses phrases have seemingly become part of the lexicon of AA. But like any urban myth or legend they have no actual place in reality. They certainly don’t have anything to do with recovery.

Let’s take the phrase, “Meeting Makers Make It.” Really. That’s news to me. I’ve been around a while and I am here to tell you the statement is FALSE. Not because of what I’ve seen even though the evidence of my experience supports the FALSE flag. But because of what the book says.

The chapter titled We Agnostics (pp. 45) in the book Alcoholics Anonymous tells us, “Its (the book’s) main object is to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself which will solve your problem.” That’s pretty powerful stuff. The start of step 12 states, “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps…” So it’s the steps, which gets us the spiritual awakening. It’s the steps that get me the Power greater than myself that has solved my problem. It’s the steps that get and keep me sober.

Seen a lot of people come and go in my 27 years. Some were “on fire” for “the program.” They went to three meetings a day, took commitments, cleaned the club, and performed service work. They did everything but enhance their spiritual life through working “the program” which is the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then one day they were gone.

The Three Legacies of AA: Unity, Service and Recovery. They participated in Unity and Service but never Recovery through the 12 steps. So learning from what the book tells us we now have a better and truer phrase than, “Meeting Makers Make It.”

“Step Workers Make It”

 May you be a step worker.

1. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it’s still on my list.

2. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

3. If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.

4. We never really grow up, we just learn how to act in public.

5. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

6. Evening news is when they begin with, Good Evening, and then proceed to tell you why it’s not.

7. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal ideas from many people is research.

8. Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says ‘In case of emergency please notify:’ I put ‘DOCTOR.’

9. I didn’t say it was your fault. I said I was blaming you.

10. A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory.

11. You can ask God for a bike, but God doesn’t really work that way.  Maybe it’s more effective to steal the bike and ask God for forgiveness.

12. You don’t need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.

13. There’s a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can’t get away.

14. To be sure of hitting your target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

15. A diplomat is someone who tells you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.

16. Hospitality is making your guests feel at home even when you’re wishing they were.

17. I have always taken life with a grain of salt. I also used to take it with a slice of lime and a shot of tequila.

18. When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.

Happy Wednesday.  It’s not always about serious. Sometimes we have to crack a smile and just keep trudging.

: )

I also know that where I bring my body, my brain will follow–it has to, and I learned that very valuable information right here in Alcoholics Anonymous.

So back to this woman in the photo.  She’s in Bakasana, or crow pose, and if you’re wondering how she’s supporting the weight of her entire body on the palms of her hands, let me tell you, it’s not easy!  In yoga we’re often working really hard to get into or to maintain a pose.  Once in a pose like Bakasana, we might be gripping with all our might to control it.   But my teacher will always remind me that it’s important to find the balance between effort and ease. So the effort is all of our muscles cooperating and working together to achieve something; the ease is being able to relax enough inside the pose to find (and control) our breath. I promise that I’m getting to the point of what this has to do with sobriety.

Most of us get to sobriety in pretty bad shape.  I mean that’s just the nature of the beast, right?  What do we know about a newcomer?  Well, we know that they’ve just had the worst freaking year of their life.  As we get sober and embrace working a program (hopefully!) we are taking a lot of action. We’re going to meetings, being of service, working our steps, repairing the wreckage of our past, learning how to live like grown ups on the planet. It’s a whole lot of effort.

And the best outcome of that is that we stay sober, and what happens for most of us is that we wake up (or in my case, we defrost) and our lives get bigger and more meaningful as we take on relationships, jobs, careers, school, families. You get the point.    So with these big new lives comes even more effort.  Relationships take a lot of work. New career? You’re going to busy 40+ hours a week.  And in the best of circumstances, we’re keeping our program and our fellowship right in the middle of it all.

Sometimes fear can drive us to make things harder than they have to be.  But sobriety shouldn’t be all work.  We have to find the balance between effort and ease in our programs.  How often do we walk around judging ourselves? Wondering if we are doing enough for our sobriety? Doing enough for AA?  Yes, we need enough effort to keep our side of the street clean, carry the message, and to always be the voice and face of the program when someone reaches out.  Service is the foundation and the safeguard of our personal sobriety. But we also need to cultivate ease. We need enough ease to relax into God’s will for us and to enjoy the blessings that sobriety.  Ease is being able to snuggle up with our kid and watch a movie, or sit on our front porch for a little while and enjoy the first day of fall.  Ease is about being able to be right here, right now. It’s knowing that if we just take enough next right steps, everything will be what it’s supposed to be.

Ease is about trusting the perfectness of God’s plan for us.  Working hard without controlling outcomes.  Meeting ourselves each day on the mat, or in the mirror, or at a meeting and realizing that in each moment we are capable of doing, being and feeling different things.  We’re human!  Effort and ease.  Both are required for health and happiness.