Step Nine -- Changing Memories from the Past -- Daily Inspirations: Part Two

Step Eight: We made a list of all persons we had harmed and
became willing to make amends to them all.
Step Nine: We made direct amends
to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or
others.

Please consider reading the prior article on Step Eight, before reading this article. Click here: Step Eight -- Changing Memories from the Past -- Daily Inspirations: Part One

In Step Eight, we make a list of all the persons we believe we may have harmed, evaluate the reality and level of the harm, determine what action could and needs to be taken to amend or change the situation, relationship, or memory, and become spiritually prepared with a steady and improving level of intimate conscious contact with our God In Step Nine, we take the identified action needed to forgive and release ourselves from the guilt and shame of perceived harms we have done to others.

Understanding the Nature of our Harms

In experiencing Step Nine, we need to remember the dynamics that are involved in our illness, and in our harm of others:

1. As a result of others emotional injuries and/or illnesses, others abandoned and abused us – two major forms of emotional separation.

2. In this emotional separation -- abandonment and abuse, we became injured and ill as well. Our injuries and illnesses were caused and perpetuated by our brain’s reactive constriction of emotional energies.

3. In our injury and illness, we abandoned and abused others – with our thoughts, words, and/or actions. We “harmed” others.

4. Abandonment is where we withdrew our attention, care, and presence (conscious contact) from others – separation – frequently with passive indifference and inability to share our experiences with others.

5. Abuse occurred when we actively pushed others away with the force of our anger, rage, and overall negative energy – whether in attitude, actions or words. Typically this abusive and separative “harm” involved exaggerating circumstances to the point of damaging the living human flesh that connected others to us. I remember taking situations that were level two or three in actual problem level, and making them rageful “tens”.

6. Abandonment and abuse are about our primitive brains trying to protect us from the ultimate death – separation from persons we are emotionally connected to. Abandonment harms by an internalized constriction of emotional energies, and abuse harms by an externalized discharge of constricted and forceful energy. Separation in either or both forms is an ongoing pattern of harmful perceptions, reactions, and actions that have been programmed into our instinctual brains, forming our ego, our guardian and protector self. I am not a programmer. But my God is.

Definition of “Amends”
“Amends” means to change something about the harm. Ultimately the change we need is self-forgiveness – much more so than the forgiveness of others. And our God holds nothing against us, so we only need to be able to accept their unconditional loving care.

The Serenity Prayer says, “God grant me the courage to change the things I can.” But this follows the more important request, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” We will attempt to change or “amend” the things we can, hopefully with the needed level of conscious contact – higher Presence – with our God that allows us to forgive ourselves in the process, and not be dependent on external outcomes.

Four Levels of Amends
In my experience, there are four levels of amends and change involved in this step. It is important to note that “direct” here, in my experience, means with conscious contact (with God, ourselves, and others) and with actual action in some form. The specific level or levels of amends needed will be determined by our level of pain – guilt and shame – attached to the harmful event:

1. Direct awareness, acceptance, admittance, and experience of how we have harmed others.

2. Directly practicing spiritual principles – conscious contact with God – with every perceived harm.

3. Direct and active presence (conscious contact) with others in the forms of kindness, generosity, courtesy, honesty, and empathy – the opposite of separation.

4. Direct addressing, as appropriate, of our harms with the others we have harmed, offering remorse, concern, repayment for losses, and/or restoring of personal contact and presence,

In my experience, we are not “ready” to make amends until we have admitted and reviewed our harms list and the specifics of our potential or planned amends –changes -- to a spiritual sponsor, .

Grief and Loss

When we harmed others, we wounded ourselves, and experienced painful losses of our selves in the losses of our closeness with others. “Harm” – in any form – rips us away from essential emotional connections to others, our God, and to ourselves. Steps Eight and Nine are about identifying our losses, and participating in a healing treatment of amending our memories and past experiences -- unconditionally forgiving our selves of our harms – through improving conscious contact with our God.

Spiritual principles – principles of healing higher Presence – give us the intimate means to relive and re-experience our pasts-- and have different “outcomes”. Life can become a better and better place as we live by our God’s loving redesign.

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What’s Stored In Your Attic? Finding Daily Inspirations in Revisiting Our Pasts

DECEMBER 12, 2009

This morning I was getting ready to journal after my meditation, and I realized the date: today would have been the sixteenth wedding anniversary of myself and my wife who died in January, 2005. I experienced a sadness -- a timelessness -- a remembering -- the last anniversary -- and the one before -- and the holidays.

It felt different -- it felt new and fresh -- and it felt familiar.

Later this same morning, I was at a spiritual support group that I attend on Saturday mornings. The topic was the holidays and using God’s Presence to deal with grief and loss. One person’s grandmother had died last week. One’s daughter had died over thirty years ago, and she was still experiencing parts of her sadness. Another has lost his mother a couple of years ago, and his father this past year. Still another -- her sister died this past year, her sister’s husband was remarrying, and she was experiencing a new and more conscious sadness and grief with the Holidays.

As I sat there, I could see in my mind, an attic -- used for storing Holiday ornaments and decorations for the each year -- and storing other things as well. In our metaphorical attic, we store the memories, dreams, hopes, loves -- that no longer are -- except in storage. Losses we didn’t know what to do with. Deaths of people and of relationships -- stored in compartmentalized containers away in our attic -- until someone or something brings them down out of our attic, and we have to re-experience the pain and fear. Then we can begin to experience spiritual healing -- or return them back to the attic to sit and to wait for our return.

In my experience, two life events primarily sends me or someone else into my attic for more “boxes“:
The first event is change. If we can just go up there and get the decorations of the past and come back down, the rest of past stays stored and safe in our attics. But when things change -- move slightly or greatly -- we and others take ourselves back to or further into our attics, and we begin going through some more “boxes“ of stored memories. We begin to remember.
The second event that brings more of us out is our improving conscious contact with our God -- conscious Presence. As we become more and more spiritually awake through daily inspirations, we begin to remember -- we begin to return to our attics and find more boxes of our life that we have instinctively stored in the attic.

The Holidays are a prime time to remember and rediscover our pasts. Life during the Holidays is consciously stronger and louder than any other time in the year. The Holidays force us to find forgotten and lost parts of our selves -- and regain or relose these lost selves.

Kathy and I went to a Christmas flea market at the Convention Center in the afternoon. With the experiences of the morning, I found myself looking at people -- as they were shopping or as they passed me by. What I realized was that each face -- each person -- was a reminder, a metaphor for one or more of my lost selves. So I began to watch them, and allow them to remind me of boxes of selves still in my attic, and begin to re-experience some of my selves. I didn’t finish -- and I am aware that many more boxes and experiences still lie ahead.

I shared with Kathy at lunch about my remembering and experiencing my old anniversary. Being the wonderful person she is, she saw, bought, and had personalized a very special Christmas tree ornament -- just for me.

On the ornament was written, “You may miss me, but I am spending Christmas with Jesus this year. Love, Liz”.

We don’t have to be afraid of what’s in our attic -- as long as we have our God’s Presence to comfort and spiritually empower us to live through the possible pain and fear -- allowing the past to be restored to being a loving part of our Present.






December 15

After writing this, some boxes from the past came down out of my attic.

I was talking to my daughter about an hour ago, and she told me of the tragic and sudden death a special couple in Austin, Indiana -- James and Jackie Jewell. My daughter understood that they were traveling on the interstate between Austin and Scottsburg, when they were bumped from behind, losing control of their car and careening across the median and into the path of a oncoming semi. Both were killed instantly.

As I was standing in White Kastles a little while ago waiting for my order, I could feel tears swelling up inside -- I became nervous and embarrassed that someone might see my tears and wonder what was wrong with me.

I could feel myself beginning to go through the boxes of memories with their names on them. In 1974, I came to a church in Austin as a summer youth pastor before going back to college my senior year. This couple were leaders of a small group of church people who took a special interest in me, and were very kind, caring, and supportive. As I am re-experiencing this time and events, I remember that they were the first members of the denomination in which I had grown up, who could care and love unconditionally, without religious judgments and ultimate criticism -- without abandoning.

I came back to Austin to live there for several years, and they continued to be the same kind and compassionate people I had met and known.

I am glad to have had them in my life. And now, as I am remembering and experiencing their presence I am realizing that the treasures of their simple loving care can now be stored forever in my heart. They are not going back into the attic.

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