Awareness. I use a lot of guided meditations as part of my daily spiritual practice. One that I found supremely helpful during the early days of my widowhood was “Yoga Nidra for Grief” with Scott Moore on the app “Insight Timer.” Moore suggests that grief is an opportunity for deep awareness, and that we don’t try to deny or minimize grief, but rather welcome, recognize, and witness it as an experience that can lead to a deeper awareness of our individual self and also of life itself.
There is a part of ourselves, Moore teaches, that can witness both our grieving and our not-grieving simultaneously and see them both co-existing within our own selves. That part is Awareness.
In Breathing Under Water, Richard Rohr links “consciousness” with AA’s Step Ten, “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” Consciousness is the awareness, the ability to step outside ourselves and look at our own behavior. We monitor our own actions impartially as we develop the perspective of being onlookers of our own lives. By gaining that distance and developing that viewpoint, we can see how we actually do affect others, and we can make decisions about taking responsibility for the consequences of our choices and actions.
When I was new to the Twelve Steps, I went to a meeting and the topic was Step Ten. I wasn’t at all familiar with the steps or the program—I was just grateful that I had found a community which welcomed me and whose members understood and talked about what I was going through. The woman who was speaking about Step Ten said it was her “most favorite step of all” because it recognized the humanness of those who choose 12-Step recovery as a way of life. “I don’t have to pretend to be perfect or to get things right,” she said about the Step. “Step Ten acknowledges that even when I’m doing the best I can do and trying to live a responsible, moral life, I will mess up. Step Ten leads me back to behaving the way I want to.” Being ready, willing, and able to recognize and admit to wrong-doing means being relieved of the burden of attempting to be perfect.
Before I came into recovery—and believe me, I was a churchgoing, choir-singing, self-satisfied sort of person—I would tell myself that what I did, how I behaved, didn’t negatively affect other people. “It doesn’t matter” was a mantra I used back then. I would say, in the adolescent voice coming out of my 37-year-old head, “Hey, I’m doing the best I can,” if my performance on any task didn’t measure up to expectations. Or “Hey, I’m only being honest,” when I said something rude or intrusive to someone who had irked me or whose life I imagined I could improve with my observations and advice.
The Program taught me—gently, kindly—not only how to stay sober (one minute at a time) but also (to paraphrase Step 5 from the 12 & 12) how to recognize “what and who I really was” and follow that “by a sincere attempt to become what I could be.”
The Program (i.e. the Twelve Steps) and the Fellowship (i.e. meetings and sponsorship) did not say to my confused, terrified, self-deprecating newly-sober self that I was bad or stupid. I was told that I was a “sick person getting well” and that as long as I stayed sober, I could learn how to live the moral, helpful, responsible life I had always wanted to live.
Recovery has taught me how to be awake and aware in my own life. Recovery has taught me to be conscious of my words, choices, and actions. Recovery has taught me how to make healthy choices so I can be a healthy person striving to live a sober life and forgiving myself when my humanness messes things up for a while. I have the steps to lead me back to my center where I can welcome, recognize, and witness the astonishing beauty of my sober life.
-Christine H.