Forgetting What I Know -- disaster or becoming teachable

 It is an interesting thing to ponder whether I can choose what I forget.  The reading this morning starts with a quote from Publilius Syrus that says, "We may with advantage at times forget what we know."

There is no advantage to me in forgetting what I know about the 12 Steps and what I have learned about myself in working the Steps.  There is an advantage, however, in forgetting all the old ideas and beliefs that get in the way of a happier, healthier and useful life.  If I forget program, my life is a disaster.  If I forget the old ideas and beliefs?  There's room to live differently, better.  Room for me to live my program beliefs instead.

The reading talks about how coming to OA, the writer knew what she knew:  her compulsive eating stemmed from an emotionally deprived childhood and nothing -- not God even -- can change that.  And then she writes that somehow in OA she forgot all of that.  She went ahead and acted as if everything everyone told her in OA was true.  She prayed even though it was as if her Higher Power was three letters of the alphabet.  She thought abstinence was dumb and did it anyway.  

This is perhaps the penultimate paragraph in the reading:  "I still know what I know but, thank God, I am no longer using it to keep me from getting well."  She says for today, it is just as effective to "act as if" she has forgotten what she knows.  It works anyway.

Sometimes when I am writing or sharing I recognize some "therapy speak" coming through in my voice.  Or I hear it in someone else's share.  It can sound hollow or even trite, not thoughtful, necessarily, like an equally ubiquitous OA slogan usually does.

What do I need to forget?  Myself.   I need to get over all the pain I have from the past I have.  It doesn't help.  It is an important part of who I became, who I am now, but it doesn't help me going forward today.  It is like an anchor, dragging me down.  

I need to forget everything I think I know about God, beyond my innate sense that there is a Divine life force in me and in all living things that propels me toward growth and toward survival when growth seems too hard.  

I need to put aside my doubt and act as if this is going to work.  I see it work for others; I hear them share that it works for them.  I can forget my relapses, my struggles in the past.  They do not serve me any more.  They are part of my story and inform my choice to live differently today.  Just today.  Let's live today.

Blessed be.

Being a Newcomer again

 I am struggling with my faith that God will do what I cannot do for myself.  I see and hear stories of recovery where faith and surrender to a Higher Power leads to healthier, happier lives.  And I feel stuck and unhappy.  I believe God will help you recover but I am not convinced God will help me recover.  That's f*cked up.  The years of therapy I have had suggest this is black or white thinking, future telling, any number of other cognitive dissonances based on a self concept of being unworthy, undeserving, somehow damaged more than anybody else.  And I know that is not true.  However, I still feel it.

This morning in my daily reader, For Today, I looked up all the entries in the index for 'newcomers'.  Date order be damned!  And this is what I found:

No one [in OA] made me feel that my illness rendered me less worthy of respect than other people.  Taking a cue from these loving, caring friends, I stopped being ashamed of myself.  The defences I had set up fell away, and I became open to change.

OA is a refuge from the harsh judgments society passes on compulsive overeaters.  [I need] unconditional acceptance and respect, not judgments. - May 9

This is true - the only person making me feel my compulsive eating, my size, my struggle with depression et cetera renders me less worthy of respect and help is me.  Shame is a big part of this struggle.  Feeling like I am not good enough for God's help.  Feeling like I am too long in OA to be a newcomer again, or a newcomer still.  Defensive that after six years, I still struggle with frequent relapses in my abstinence and my faith is shaky - not for you but for me.  My Higher Power offers unconditional acceptance and respect for my humanity and I don't accept that gift a lot of the time.  Pride.  Self.  This has to go!

As newcomers we look at recovering compulsive overeaters who tell us of the happiness, freedom and joy in their lives and we can hardly comprehend that they were not always this way.  Those miraculous recoveries seem unattainable to us.  ...  members with years of program and lives that are happy, joyous and free are compulsive overeaters who, like the rest of us, began at the bottom.  Where I am today is a fine place to start.  - May 16

Where else to start but here?  And "here" arrives each moment.  There is no arrival and I'm done.  That is a lie I tell myself, along with the belief I should be more recovered than I am after six years in OA.  Members with more years and more recovery still struggle - I hear that in the rooms.  The standard is not perfection spiritually.  I can't achieve that and neither can they.  They don't claim it in their stories.  But they are happier, more joyous and more free than I am.  And I want that.  I need to suspend my beliefs that I can't have that too for whatever bullshit reasons my disease puts in my head.

There is no reason to be discouraged if newcomers [if I] express doubt that the recovery [I] see will happen for [me].  [My] experience of the disease is propelling [me] toward experiencing recovery.  -June 2

Ughhh...  my disease is propelling me toward recovery -- true!!  Or I wouldn't keep coming back.  My disease is also propelling me into the abyss with lies that I can't, I don't deserve this, God will do this for other people but not for me.  This tension is something I have to give over, give up.  It is a tug-of-war I can't win and the doubt it creates only prolongs my misery in my disease.  

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions. ... I may fool myself and others by my talk, but my illness cannot be fooled.  - June 12

I feel like a fool, an incompetent.  Six years in OA and 270 something pounds.  I wear my disease.  I wear the lie of my recovery.  That is living in the past, however, and unhelpful.  Today, I can do differently in what I think (maybe?) but definitely in what I do.  The slogan of 'acting myself into right thinking' applies here.  I need to shut off the thinking and focus on doing what I know helps.

Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliances are relieved or not at all [Shakespeare].  ... I want what I see in OA.  I pray for the willingness to follow each step of the program and to believe that the food and the weight will be taken care of in the process.  - August 17

Yep.  I think the experiment of not tracking and not weighing myself for October is incomplete.  I am more aware of what I am doing (I think) and I need to continue to build on the changes in my plan of eating and my action plan I have started to identify.  I feel like I should continue on this path in November and also continue on my week-long (so far) practice of a meeting a day.  I need to hear the message from others and stop listening to the disease in my head.

Balancing - Physical (Purpose), Mental (Meaning), Spiritual (Hope) and Emotional (Belonging)

 I am in the process of relooking at my spirituality and my faith that I too can recover.  I felt stung by another fellow's honest reflection that my thinking / spiritual belief that God could but would God for me? is like a newcomer.  

I have been pondering faith and hope a lot in the last week – since last Sunday’s 100 pound panel at the Region 8 convention.  I feel all in progress and a bit disoriented.  I decided to try more meetings and I have somewhat unofficially decided to try 90 meetings in 90 days.  I am not at all confident that I will keep with this but for today, I am doing another meeting.  So I am at day six and meeting six. 

I just finished a new-to-me meeting this morning and it was a unique format, one I found very helpful.  They focus on recovery as balancing the physical, mental (thinkin), spiritual and emotional health as four quadrants where we try to live in the sparkling centre with our HP.  

The meeting script talked about how physical health gives us purpose, mental health gives meaning, spiritual health yields hope and emotional health creates belonging.  I was at a meeting on Friday night where the speaker shared how his ‘dependency needs’ were not being met so he filled them with compulsive over eating.  I’d never heard that expression before and my initial reaction was “I don’t want to be dependent on anything, that’s unsafe and unreliable!”  And then he shared the exact same belief, before he found more lasting recovery.  LOL.  Yep.  I need (and want) to build more trust that I am and can be dependent on my HP and the sense of hope that creates.  

The writing / meditation prompts were to consider all four quadrants of the circle and consider:

• Take note of your reflections and then develop them as you meditate and think about your reflections from each of the four perspectives.   For instance, in this way of looking at things, our emotional health can be indicated by our feeling of belonging or reflections from our attitude.
• Our physical aspect is related to how we may do things, or our way of being and way of doing and our wholeness as a person.
• Our mental wellness can be measured in our capacity to understand our friends and neighbours, or ideas, such as those presented in books or even in society in general. We have a certain level of intuition or have a chosen rationale for our chosen lifestyle.
• Our spiritual wellness is found in our sense of hope and on what we base our beliefs, our values and on what we chose to identify ourselves with. 
• Mental wellness creates meaning, physical wellness creates purpose, spiritual wellness creates hope, and emotional wellness creates belonging.
• These are just examples to help start the process. They are not marked in stone but merely suggestions. 

It was a bit complex as the instructions were to focus on the Voices of Recovery reading for today, make notes for each of the four quadrants in our life today coming from the reading, and then do a five minute meditation on that!!!   

I felt like this is a useful way to work and yet it was a bit fast for my first time hearing it all for me to take it up in any detail.  I found myself correlating the four quadrants to my past (feeling like I didn’t belong / emotional pain), my present (health concerns / lack of purpose), my future (preoccupation in depression/anxiety worrying things will not get better – that life has little meaning), and lastly spiritual health where I have doubt instead of hope more than is needed / true. 

Blessed.

Expectations and Arguing with God

This morning, I am reflecting on acceptance vs. control this morning.  And I am weighing the balance I have between ‘doing the footwork’ vs. expectations about the results.  How control and expectations lead me to resentments.  And I cannot afford to stay in that emotional space.  It is a threat to my emotional sobriety, to my conscious contact with God, to pretty much anything that helps me be less crazy in addiction, in my relationships with God, with myself, and with others.

My expectation is often that I can control the results if I work hard enough.  And that if I don’t get the results I want, I have failed.  That this is sometimes true makes me expect it to be true every time.  And when it isn’t, I am shocked, unhappy and angry.  The mystery in recovery is that I do not have to understand or accept God’s evaluation of my work.  It just is.

And yet, often I just don’t understand God’s will and I feel strongly about that.  However, I have to accept that I don’t have to understand everything.  If me not understanding today means I make a similar mistake in the future, I will just have to live with the consequences.  That is just a learning opportunity, another chance for growth.  When I go too far in trying to explain or justify my process out of the belief God is wrong, the universe made a mistake… well, that just doesn’t work.

I can try to understand where I went wrong, but getting into an argument with God, back talk really, is never going to be productive.  This is not a relationship of equality.  I’m not the director.  And I cannot manipulate outcomes long-term by sheer will.  It isn’t healthy.  It doesn’t work.  And it is not acceptable to God.

I can be confused and not resentful.  I can be frustrated and not lash out in anger or self-harm.  I can just be ok with “I did my best and I’m happy with that” on the one hand and “God didn’t give me the outcome I feel my work deserves and I am unhappy with that” on the other hand.  It doesn’t feel great but I can accept that this is how I feel right now.

I do this work of recovery because I know deep in my heart this is what God wants for me.  Happy, joyous and free.  I accept that sometimes obedience is just doing exactly what I’m told, without adding to it or changing it.  I accept that I may interpret a task differently than God does and God gets to evaluate the results, not me.  I could be angry that sometimes diligence is rewarded and sometimes it is not but that only feeds my anger.  I don’t need more reasons to be angry.  It gets me into trouble in life and it takes me further from God.  That is not the pattern I am trying to foster for myself.

In the rooms this week, I heard someone say “sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I learn!”  I can be grateful when I make some progress.  Focus on the big picture, not the momentary frustration of not getting what I want.  I can rise above a temper tantrum.  I am a child of God but I am not a child.  I am reminded of the passage in the Big Book (p.88):

As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action.  We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day, “Thy will be done.”  We are then in much less danger of excitement, fear, anger, worry, self-pity or foolish decisions.  We become much more efficient.  We do not tire so easily, for we are not burning up energy foolishly as we did when we were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves.

I can be grateful I am learning how to process anger, overwhelm, and anxiety.  There is a lot of good in this.  I do not need to make my progress feel sour by being angry at God’s evaluation of where I am in this journey. 

While I am allowed to talk back, to argue with God, it is not a good use of my energy.  It changes nothing.  I am learning that sometimes I will make mistakes.  Sometimes I will do everything right and not get the results I want.  And when that happens, it’s God’s will.  I may not understand and I can live with that unease.  I do not need to be right so badly that I will disrespect God by turning away, becoming self-destructive in my frustration and despair.

I’m sorry, God.  I will hold my frustration better in the future.  I will turn away from self-destruction and turn toward you.  Please help me accept the things I cannot change.

 

Stop and Start Recovery - learning from a sponsee

This morning, I am playing my spiritual music list and right now the Bellamy Brothers' song, Let Your Love Flow, is on.  It’s been a dark few days here mood-wise and that is challenging.  I weighed myself this morning and I am losing and regaining the same five pounds!  Since New Year, I’ve done it twice and I have been bouncing around the same numbers since the end of July.  My sense is I am in some sort of holding pattern there so I am praying for insight on what I need to accept / acknowledge / understand / surrender to move forward.  So that’s for my two-way writing prayer meditation this week.

It occurred to me that my erstwhile sponsee is showing me this pattern but in big capital letters and broad strokes.  She will email me that she wants to start working her program again and then she doesn’t actually start.  Or if she starts, it’s a day at the most and then she stops.  A few weeks, maybe a month pass.  And I keep the channel open but I don't chase her.  I cannot work anyone else's program for them.  And as a sponsor, all I have is my experience, strength, and hope to offer.  Seeing her struggle is a reminder of how painful my life is when I struggle.  

Last week she emailed me a quick note yet again, thanking me for staying in touch periodically and that this was an ‘interim’ email saying she has her head around her again.  She shared that she’ll work her plan and let me know how it goes later that night.  And then radio silence!  So she is struggling with moving forward and consistent effort.  

I reflect on this from my sponsee as I consider my bouncing stagnant physical recovery as a symptom of the health of my spiritual program more generally.  I acknowledge to myself and to God that I am maintaining about a 75 lb weight loss for which I am very grateful.  However, abstinence is working towards or maintaining a healthy body weight.  While I am healthier, I am not a healthy body weight yet.  

Bouncing around, losing the same five pounds, is a stop and start physical recovery.  This is hard on my body.  It is also hard on my emotional recovery - a symptom of spiritual unease.  There's some block there to moving ahead, trusting God I have the strength to do the work necessary to move toward a healthy body weight.  Trusting God that I can safely face the uncertainty that comes with feeling smaller in my body.

And this brings me to a version of the Step 8 prayer I read recently:

God, in my illness, I have harmed myself.  Grant me compassion, tolerance, and patience. Save me from negativity now as I move toward healing. 

Blessed be.

Not Getting My Way: Resentment, Anger and Fear (yesterday, today and tomorrow)

Resentment is from 'not getting my way' yesterday.

Anger is not getting my way – today.

Fear is not getting my way tomorrow.

The ONLY day I can do anything about is TODAY.

One day at a time. 

So I inventory my resentments of yesterday and my fears of tomorrow.

I take swift action in Step 10 about my angers that arise today.

On grief, suffering, and humanity: "What Punishments of God are not Gifts?"

This moved me last night and I wanted to share – it’s from an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and comedian Stephen Colbert...  Anderson Cooper’s Dad died when he was 10 (heart attack) and he lost his Mom in early June.  Stephen Colbert’s Dad and two of his brothers died in a plane crash when Stephen was 10 and his Mom died a few years ago too. 

It’s really clear in the interview that Anderson Cooper is still very much in grief and he is asking some pretty big questions that are personal, not part of his “newsman” persona.

The interview is here -- https://youtu.be/iZ_zajwFPDs -- this is the part that really moved me:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Anderson Cooper: I’m not the person I meant to be. I’m not the person I started out to be (because of the grief / loss / trauma).

Stephen Colbert: But you are the person you were meant to be.

Anderson Cooper: Maybe, maybe not. Maybe this is a warped version of ...

Stephen Colbert: So there’s another time line with a happier Anderson Cooper?

Anderson Cooper: Yeah! I mean no. There’s not, it doesn’t exist, an alternate universe but... but yes, I guess...

Stephen Colbert: But that’s what I mean about faith.

My experience and learning from the experience of my mother, what I read and what I experience in my particular faith, extremely imperfectly, admittedly, is that there isn’t another time. This is it.  And the bravest thing you can do is to accept with gratitude the world as it is and then, as Galdalf says, so too all people who are in such times.

Anderson Cooper: You went on to tell an interviewer that you have learned to love “the thing that I most wish had not happened.” You went on to say “what punishments of God are not gifts?” Do you really believe that?

Stephen Colbert: Yes. It is a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. And I guess I’m either a Catholic or a Buddhist when I say that because I’ve heard that from both traditions.

But I didn’t learn it - that I was grateful for the thing I most wished didn’t happen - but I realized it. It’s an odd, guilty kind of feeling. I don’t want it to have happened. I wish it had not happened.

But, if you’re grateful for your life, which I think is a positive thing to do - not everybody is, and I’m not always - it’s the most positive thing to do, and you have to be grateful for all of it . You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.

And then, so what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss, which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply, and to understand what it’s like to be a human being, if it’s true that all humans suffer.

So, at a young age I suffered something so that by the time I was in serious relationships in my life, with friends, or with my wife or with my children, is that I have some understanding that everyone is suffering and, however imperfectly, acknowledge that suffering, and to connect with them, to love them in a deep way... and that’s what I mean, it’s about the fullness of your humanity.

What’s the point of being here, being human, if you cannot be the most human you can be? I want to be the most human I can be. And that involves acknowledging, and ultimately being grateful for the things that I wish didn’t happen- because they gave me a gift.

and in the Christian tradition, that’s the gift of the sacrifice of Jesus:  that God suffers too.

❤