INTRO: Eleventh Step

Before I came into AA, I prayed often and meditated never.  Praying improved my conscious contact with God, as I understood God.  The problem was that contact does not lead anywhere when one does not feel anything.  Subconsciously, I blamed God for the setbacks that I faced in life.  Some of them, like alcoholism, were related to nature.  Other disappointments may have been attributed to bad decisions and/or bad luck.  Still, I wondered, "Why doesn't the God of my understanding intervene?"

I prayed at the hospital between the scene of the accident and being taken to jail for the DUI, and I prayed in jail.  When I attended my first AA meeting, I prayed the Serenity Prayer with the group in the beginning of the meeting and the Lord's Prayer with them in the end.

The thought of meditating made me laugh.  I was the opposite of a contemplative when I came into the program.  Meditation, I thought, was for men and women who were comfortable withdrawing from the world and sitting with themselves.  It was not for the person whose body still ached from drunk-driving into an inanimate object.

AA changed my prayer life, and this change started by praying as often as I did with men and women who were as desperate as me.  Even after I accrued some time in the program, praying with a group of other alcoholics was different than praying within a faith community.  Alcoholics may be called to prayer with profanity (a feature of life in AA that still makes me laugh), and yet the only thing that is considered profane in AA is not taking sobriety seriously.

Everybody at an AA meeting has come to a place in which he or she had to admit that he or she belonged there, and for those with some time in the program, remembering his or her first meeting always breeds gratitude.  Praying not only improves my conscious contact with God, it also improves my conscious contact with others whose hearts yearn for healing and wholeness as much as mine does.

I did not experiment with meditation until my second year of sobriety.  Now that I have, I think about meditating differently.  For years, I have heard people say, "Prayer is talking to God; meditation is listening to God," and yet the meditation experiences that are the most meaningful to me are the ones without words, not mine or God's.

I sit regularly with a group of Buddhists, who have taught me the spiritual and psychological value of being still.  I sit for a half-hour at a time with this group and think about nothing but my breath, which, of course, is a power greater than myself.  I have the same sense of relief and relaxation after meditating that I do after attending an AA meeting.  Both provide me with an alternative to going through life restless, irritable and discontented.

I pray for God's will for me, even though experience has taught me to be careful when I become too clear about what God's plan for me is.  When I pray for this knowledge, I find that I may become impatient.  Once I think that I know what God's will is, I think that change should come quickly.  Sometimes I complain, because I want God to disclose more of the future than God is in the business of disclosing.  I am aggressive in pursuing what I interpret God's will for my life to be, and yet I find that I am more content when I focus on receiving the day than seizing it.

Stuff happens, even in sobriety, and yet when I am centered spiritually, even the most tragic events are bearable.  Prayer and meditation center me spiritually, like steps four through ten center me emotionally.  By practicing the steps together, I find balance in my life, and with this balance, I am able to be at peace and to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.

INTRO: First Step

The first visit to an AA meeting was a humiliating experience for me.  Even more humiliating was being cuffed and incarcerated the night before I accepted that I belong at AA meetings.  For years, I would wake up in the morning, recognize that I had a problem, vow not to drink that day, be drunk by bedtime and repeat the process the next morning.

Repetition is a quintessentially religious act.  I drank religiously---every day, often with gusto, regardless of the circumstances.  Drinking became more and more important to me, inching its way up my priority list.  I considered myself to be a religious person.  I was committed to doing well personally and professionally, but it did not occur to me that doing well and being well would require me to stop drinking altogether until I faced the consequences of a DUI.

The DUI was not the problem.  Drinking was.  Had a DUI not brought me into AA, I am sure that other consequences of my actions would have caused me to face my problem.  In the beginning, I was anxious and desperate.  I did not know if the DUI would cost me my family or my job.  I was afraid of where further drinking would lead, and I was afraid to start facing life without the comfort of alcohol.  

AA's steps and traditions were posted in the fellowship halls of churches that I attended for years before coming into the program, so I had some idea of what to expect.  The first step is about power and the alcoholic's lack of it.  There are two big, bold statements in this first step: 1) We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol; and 2) that our lives had become unmanageable.  

I am smart enough know that I should not drive after drinking, and I am compassionate enough to care that drinking and driving may have consequences for everyone that I meet on the drive home.  One of the problems with drinking is that it impairs judgment.  Once I start drinking, I am not able to stop.  This is the essence of powerlessness, and it leads to unmanageability.

I have not had a drink since I attended that first meeting.  I have not had a second DUI either.  Sometimes I feel powerless but am increasingly comfortable with the fact that I am not all-powerful.  I am better at managing life now than I was when I came into the program, because what I do repeatedly has changed.  I practice the steps of AA, which provides more structure and comfort than alcohol ever did.