Normally when I lead an inspirational recovery support meeting, I have detailed elaborate notes that summarize a week plus of daily inspirations -- inspirational readings, journaling, meditation, and inspiring experiences. This time I had no notes – I could not pull together all of the inspirational experiences and readings that had come together for this topic.
My collection of experiences and inspirational insights consciously began last Sunday, with an inspirational life training group that I lead using Twelve Step spiritual principles. We were finishing Step 8 and discussing Step 9: these two principles deal with identifying how we believe that we have harmed others, preparing to make amends when we really have harmed someone, and actually making the direct amends to others.
I was saying how each person will do this inventorying and making of these amends based on their level of emotional necessity. Someone in the group described this thought profoundly for me as, “how important is it?” This question has vibrated all week in my inspirational listening and journalling .
The other piece of this topic is “experience”, from the inspirational concept of “we share our experience, strength and hope”. The level of importance of anything or anyone in my life is the level of my conscious human experience of that person, thing, or situation. The way that I first became aware of my problems and illness was when my human experience became startlingly conscious – feelings started coming back into parts of me that been cut off and numb.
Before I began my spiritual recovery over twenty-two years ago, I was an “intellectual.” Being an intellectual does not mean one is intelligent—it just means that one thinks a lot. And because we think a lot, we seem to know things that others don’t know – which again makes us seem intelligent. And because we are under the influence of thought, as one would be a drug, we seem more calm and strangely in control of ourselves. This too is only a perception and not a reality.
Like an alcoholic, my tolerance of thinking was so great, that I could think people “under the table”. Again, this was not because of my intelligence, but because of my ability to ingest huge amounts of thought.
Shortly before beginning my spiritual recovery, my second wife left the scene. I believed that everything was now fixed – she was, of course, my problem. But without her to think obsessively over, I became majorly distressed – I began to detox from the huge obsessions I had be using. Thinking was no longer working for me, and I was in serious trouble.
(to be continued)
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