My personal journey of recovery from addiction

I would like to clarify, as I begin this talk, that I do not represent any 12-step program, nor am I a drug and alcohol counselor. I am simply an alcoholic-addict who has found a way to not only stay sober, but to be restored to life as a useful member of society – The society that rejected me and that I rejected. (Alcoholics Anonymous)We have, as a result of living the spiritual principles of the 12 steps, what are called ‘The Promises’: We will know a new freedom and a new happiness. We won’t regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it, we will comprehend the word ‘serenity’ and we will know peace.

These promises were coming true in my life; yet in 2001, after seventeen years of sobriety, I felt stuck in old patterns of behavior and in character defects that began to shift my sense of gratitude and enthusiasm for recovery into restlessness and a gnawing feeling of discontent. Although I became aware of the three C’s in my attitude – criticism, cynicism and condescension – that knowledge, from the 10th step inventory, wasn’t changing my behavior. Asking God to remove them, in steps 6 and 7, didn’t seem to pry them loose. It seemed the harder I tried, the more stuck I became. It was grace that gave me the willingness and desire for spiritual growth, to persevere in ‘conscious contact’ with God. I never stopped attending meetings and I continued to carry the message to other suffering addicts, yet I always felt ‘something missing’ and no amount of ‘doing’ would bring that peace that passes all understanding that I had experienced, even though briefly.That ‘missing something’ in my life, was exactly what Carl Jung wrote about in 1961 to Bill W, one of the founders of AA. He described in the letter exactly the root of the problem in my life: the craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. He went on to say that Alcohol in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.In the spring of 2001 I attended an afternoon program of Christian meditation. It was the first time in my spiritual journey of recovery that I finally felt I had come home. At last I had landed! (I was a flight-attendant for thirty-one years). It was the language of the heart, of truth, the experience of presence that I had been searching for. When I arrived at that afternoon workshop I was seventeen years clean and sober, divorced for the fourth time, the third time in recovery. The previous six months I had experienced the death of my parents, a woman I sponsored, my closest friend and my little seventeen-year-old Yorkie.

When I first began to meditate in this way of Christian prayer, I was agnostic and, looking back, rather proud of my non-Christian spiritual journey in recovery. I had been meditating in the Eastern tradition for many years. When I was three months clean and sober I had a spiritual experience that left me knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a God that has no name but is all-loving, all-powerful, all goodness in the mysteries of darkness. It was that place of peace beyond human understanding. Pure joy, pure peace, pure love.Although the ‘experience’ lasted only a few days, the memory of the truth of love and goodness has never left me. That memory is embedded in my heart. This God-moment took me from the depths of depression to a seventeen-year search to find out the meaning and purpose of that moment. Grace led me years later to an afternoon of contemplative prayer with a group of Christians. The last place on earth I ever wanted to be! Grace brought me home even though I was kicking and resisting all the way.Up to the time Christian meditation found me through grace, I had tried every 12-step program that was out there and sought relief in a wide variety of spiritual teachings: A Course in Miracles, Joel Goldsmith, Infinite Way, Eckankar, Association of Research and Enlightenment (Edgar Cayce), The Triangle, Thich Nhat Hanh, Order of Inner Being, Self Realization Fellowship, chakra-balancing, rebirthing classes, healing breath work and sweat-lodges. They were all helpful and all part of waking up from the coma of self-preoccupation, but nothing sustained my inner longing. Soon I would be off and running again to find another seminar, retreat, guru or lecture. Speaking of lectures, there is a saying that Heaven has two doors. 

One says Heaven and one says Lecture on Heaven. I was always the one lined up for the lecture on heaven. Surely, I told myself, the ‘it’ that I heard about in the rooms of recovery, the ‘it’ that would get better, must be out there someplace.It continues to be my experience that many people come to the rooms of recovery and remain at the level of the lecture. The literature of AA reminds us over and over that to friends, colleagues, family and clergy, the alcoholic is a riddle. But to us, he or she is not. For those of us in recovery, we understand the answer to the riddle. The spiritual life is not a theory; we have to live it. Failing to live a God-conscious life leads to relapse and relapse leads to jails, institutions and death.The main problem of the alcoholic centers on his mind. In my mind, even after years of recovery and dabbling in a variety of meditation practices, there remained a constant chatter of self-analysis and rehashing of the dramas – my own or somebody else’s! The inventories turned into just another form of self-absorption. 

When I heard the term ‘monkey mind’ in Christian meditation, it really hit home for me. The ‘mind’ said that if only I did another inventory, worked harder, did more service work, then I would find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I was stuck in Martha, complaining that no one was helping me find the answer! Even though I wanted to stop spinning, and felt drawn to silence, I remained powerless through all my efforts to be transformed in the renewing of my mind. Christian meditation gave me a way to plug into that current of love that Bill W. wrote about in The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety and which John Main calls the divine energy, the stream of love.We are all in need of the power of love that will restore us to wholeness and bring us to fullness of life. The addictions to drugs and alcohol are heartbreaking, but it is the socially acceptable and less obvious ones that lure the addict into painful compulsions in ‘sobriety’ – addictions to money, power, prestige and the need for approval, amongst many.

 John Main speaks to this life of superficiality so profoundly: 

The real tragedy of our time is that we are so filled with desire, for happiness, for success, for wealth, for power – whatever it may be – that we are always imagining ourselves as we might be. 

One of the outreach programs that we offer at the center is Christian meditation as an 11th step practice. The group meets weekly and is for people who are involved in 12-step programs of recovery, but everyone is welcome. Sister Elizabeth Hillmann, my spiritual director for many years, who is not in recovery, led a Christian meditation 11th step retreat with me here in London a few years ago. Sister Elizabeth always starts out welcoming everyone by saying, We are all addicted to something! In his book, Addiction and Grace, Dr. Gerald May reminds us that to be alive is to be addicted and to be addicted is to stand in need of grace.

There are two quotes from John Main that continue to speak to me and to others who come to the 11th step group, looking for a way to leave self behind – to Let go and Let God: