So I just read an article titled “Why the Best Thing in Life are All Backwards,” by Mark Manson, and it made me think of my alcoholic brain. It basically describes this inverted curve that represents things in our life that are counter-intuitive. In other words, the more effort we put into things, the less success we have at attaining what we want. It also made me think of the introduction of the thesis to a book by a pastor, Richard Rohr. The book is, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. The first step of AA states that we must accept our powerlessness and our disease, and the Big Book mentions in Chapter 5 that we must be honest in order to succeed at the program of AA.
All of these remind me of myself. I seek a life of sobriety in order to have peace of mind and a serene life. I want to live happily. For me this means that I can enjoy what my current state is. It means that I don’t have to absolutely control what is going on around me–mainly because I can’t. By the end of the article, Manson speaks of psychological actions that reside solely in our thinking and how those are the ones that require less conscious effort in order to succeed. His line is, “But when the action becomes purely psychological—an experience that exists solely within our own consciousness—the relationship between effort and reward becomes inverted.” In other words, the more I try to make some emotion or psychological experience true, the further away I get from it. I personally also extend this to the more I try to make a spiritual experience true, the further I get away from it.
The more control I exert over my own life, the less I enjoy it. He compares it to a dog chasing its tail. The dog chases the tail, but can’t catch it, because it is chasing itself. I chase a state of mind or of being, but can’t catch it, because I am chasing my self as well. When I stop chasing and live with my current state of being, then I can enjoy it and I can be content and happy in it. In other words, we need to surrender, “not out of weakness. But out of a respect that the world is beyond our grasp.” Richard Rohr, states,
“We suffer to get well.
We surrender to win.
We die to live.
We give it away to keep it.
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us—by some reality over which we are powerless—and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.”
I am forced to accept that I need suffer to get well when I am faced by the fact that the more I try to control how I drink, the more I will fail at it and keep hitting one bottom after another. That I need to surrender to win when I am faced by the fact that I can’t control how my fiancee reacts to my apologies or to what extent she is able to forgive me and move forward, but instead I can surrender to the pain that I have caused in her and empower her by validating her pain. In this way help her healing process to begin and progress, so that we can then heal as a couple. That I need to die to live, when I am faced with the fact that I need to kill my alcoholic self–my way of living, of thinking, of reacting–in order to live a full and productive life that I can enjoy. And finally, that I need to give it away to keep it when I am faced by the fact that the more I give of myself rather than put up emotional walls, the more I am able to keep who I am, rather than lose my identity to booze.
In other words, as the Big Book says, and Rohr repeats, we need to be honest and accept our Reality; the definition of humility that I can understand.
Because, as Manson states, “You lean into the fear and uncertainty, and just when you think you’re going to drown, just as you reach the bottom, it will launch you back to your salvation.”Surrender
#Drowning #Acceptance #Powerlessness #Spirituality #Honesty #Humility #Reality
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