Step 11 Teachings from Buddhist Monk

As part of my Step 11 practice, I am getting around some of the Buddhist Centres in London.

Last night it was the last of a four part teaching on developing patience; how to deal with anger and hatred.

Bits I remember:

Love is the antidote to hatred and anger, hitting pillows may help but the only real way to counteract hatred and anger is with the cultivation of love.

We can learn to cherish others. We can train our minds to think and act differently.

Those who give and are loving to others never go without.

Love and anger are mutually exclusive (hence for the those we resent the Big Book tells us to realise that they, like us, are spiritually sick and we are instructed to show then patience, pity and tolerance).

People change; a person who inflicts pain can later turn out to be our best friend, in this life or the next, perhaps. Even those who inflict unnecessary pain on us. (I started thinking this means I will get back with guy x who rejected me or he will call me and say 'hi I've changed my mind' I doubt this is what the monk was getting as, however)

The talk was not about eliminating anger altogether but helping us deal with it. We all get angry. This is what the Indian masters say from 7 BC.

Analysis and examination is very useful and constructive; when people experience anger there is always borne out of some confusion, greed or fear etc..

We lose our wisdom when we are angry

All people even those who inflict unnecessary pain are the same as we are, deep down we all want to be happy and we ALL have a right to be happy. That is where the analysis and examination comes in.

A story: a monk wanted to have a certain type of visualisation during meditation. He meditated for three years but could not attain the visualisation during that time so he gave up. As he left the monastery he saw a man holding a very big and thick metal pillar, who was rubbing it with a small cloth.

The monk asked him what he was doing. The man holding the pillar said he was rubbing the pillar down so he could make a very fine needle to sew a delicate piece of cloth. The monk than realised how impatient he had been in expecting the visualisation to occur in just three years and kept trying.

This story reminds me of that annoying but true thing-the only thing instant in AA is the coffee.

Ramdom bit from the Big Book

I have now got a potential new sponsor in the pipe line so I better start reading a bit of the Big Book everyday again. It's been a while since I have read it. I remember I hated a guy at my home group who was only just under a year sober, who said 'I've read it all, so know it anyway' when I asked him if he read a couple of pages of the book everyday, as is suggested at the groups I go to.

Anyway, I am doing the same. I have learnt that recently. When I am judging another person for a perceived flaw, it is usually because I too possess that flaw and disapprove of it in myself.

I should read the book, as all the instructions are in there, the biggest mental health experiment of the twentieth century my previous sponsor called it.

I am too tired to read two pages. I have opened the book and it's Page 19 There is a Solution. The bit I have previously highlighted in pink (that means it is an instruction to me) is:

"Most of us sense that real tolerance of other people's shortcomings and viewpoints and a respect for their opinions are attitudes which make us more useful to others. Our very lives, as ex problem drinkers, depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs"

Appropriate.

Doom and Gloom

I was drafting a blog post at work today in my outlook today ready for this evening. I was going to call it "when the chips are down, you are on your own." That's how bad I feel when I am at work. Doing the same job for two years being trying to get out of it for the same amount of time.

I had my rock bottom six months after starting (this is not a job, more of a career, so studied for a long time to get there) and didn't make any changes whilst going through the steps (good advice in retrospect). Anway, I am bored, I feel ignored blah blah blah. This post is not going to make a great deal of sense because I am SO angry so I am not thinking too straight.

Anyway the reason for my doom and gloom draft blog title post is that when I am in these moods I REALLY GENUINELY feel that they will never end. They are happening, or appear to be happening on a daily basis throughout the entire time when I am work. They seem to be getting worse not better and the waves are more intense.

I know that the way I feel is not commensurate to the things that are happening at work or my circumstances at work and have read enough Step 11 stuff to realise that this is old pain coming to the surface. The problem is that is overwhelms me to the point of paralysis. I know this sounds histrionic but I am being as objective as possilbe in describing how I feel when I am 'in it'.

My frustration is that I know there are suggestions I could do to improve my situation but the paralysis is stopping me getting on with them. It's also loss of faith in the process of recovery.

I do however have a seed of hope which is keeping me going at the moment; that the darkest hour is before the dawn; pain is the touch stone to spiritual growth etc. but it is a long time coming this time round.

Not only is the emergence of the old pain relentless the frustations of my present employment circumstances also appear to be NEVER ENDING.

Thank god for the Buddhist talk I went to last night and my regular AA group. AS one employment consultant said to me recently "every body needs a bit of sun light on the scene." My presnet thinking is a throwing toys out of pram "where's my sunlight; I want some sun light, can some one please give me a bit a sunlight." Proper doom and gloom stuff.

Anger

I am SO angry. I thought I had dealt with all this stuff in steps four and five, but a year and a half into recovery and I think it is about six months now since finishing step nine, the pain and crushing reality of how my disturbed past has affected me has come to the surface.

Is this processing as they call it in meditation, all 'my stuff' coming to the surface because my sub conscious knows that I am now well enough to process this stuff. I want to talk about it. No one really wants to listen, which is why I have to pay someone. All this stuff has been repressed for so many years. I want to get it out and I want sympathy, bucket loads of the stuff. Will the pain end? Can I endure it? Why has it come up now? Is this me just being chronically self centered?

The pain principally manifested as intense anger, really is excrutiating. Can other people really endure these levels of pain without flinching? Is this what normal non-alcoholic people feel on a daily basis? Before AA I only felt the deep throb of depression (endured/covered up/denied by use of prescribed drugs and alcohol) now my feelings are back. An AA saying I heard when I was new springs to mind about coming into recovery: the good news is we get our feelings back; the bad news is we get our feelings back. They always turn out to be true those annoyingly glib sounding AA sayings.

The source of my rage is not yet clear to me, there is plenty there to be angry about, but my biggest fear is those occluded memories, things that pop into my consciouness that are deeply disturbing and are only just revealing themselves to me now. The good news is that I know that I will deal with it. The reason: I know people who have endured similar levels of pain and deal with. Another reason why I am glad I am in AA: experience, strength and hope.

AA is quite good really

I went to a very plush hotel for a fundraising ball for children with special needs tonight. I was impressed by the determination and enthusiam of the people who organised it and there followed a long recitation of speech after speech. What struck me was my inability to feel compassion for the children displayed on expensive lcd screens across the room as they learnt in the special way that is taught in that particular school. I've yet to cultivate generosity of spirit I'm afraid, but am working on it. I am not seeking to diminish the suffering of others,the hard work of the people who work there, the people who donate and those who fundraise tirelessly (i've tried fundraising and it is NOT easy-I was a spectactular failure), but a thought that crossed my mind was what about the children that are continuously sexually abused, or those who have alcoholic parents, mentally ill parents, who are repeatedly beaten, ignored, neglected, sent into care. Lots of children who have these experiences ( I am one of them) end up in the rooms of AA. They do not appear on lcd screens at fancy london hotels, they are often forgotten about and hush hushed because society, it seems, doesn't really like to acknowledge that these things go on or the crushing effect they have.

Then it struck me that that AA is pretty cool really, a sort of sprawling mass underground movement that is not really acknowledged or respected by mainstream society, but exists and takes in the adults that these children often become (if they make it that far and get steered in the right direction) who have to drink themselves to near death in order to anathatise the pain and deny the emotional lacerations these childhood experiences leave. AA exists and flourishes and just sort of works without any leaders or wealthy patrons and takes in some of the most wounded people in our society. Cool!

Sponsorship

I had a sponsor for just under a year, but she has now stopped sponsoring. Nothing personal I am told she just simply has her own life to lead and it's gotten incredibly busy recently. So there we are. Where does this leave me? Her advice is that we don't necessarily need sponsors after step nine. There is enough wisdom in the rooms of aa for us to get by. We should also be able to stand on our own two feet, as it were, by now. I can see the wisdom in this and it would certainly do me good not to defer all my life's decisions to my sponsor and, for the first time, take charge of my own life and trust the courage of my own convictions, which I must admit is a very new thing for me. I have a history of co-dependence with friends (and lovers) which I just don't tolerate any more now that I can see that I am not worthless, as previously thought.

So that's the good news on the co-dependency front, but what about my sponsees? What about my continuing questions about recovery? I have canvassed opinions amongst other women in AA, most of whom fundamentally disagree with this sponsor-less approach. The reason being that we all need to check we are on the right path, to defer to the experience of the more experienced. All I know is that my sponsor helped me enormously when taking me through the steps and I trust her advice, but I am flailing around somewhat without a sponsor at the moment hence the quandry. Thre is mention of spiritual advisers in the big book, but I need to check this. The jury is still out on this one as far as I am concerned.

About Me

I am a year and a half sober from alcohol and have decided to join the blogging commumity. My sponsor suggested I try it, so I am, partly to find my own voice, partly to record my own progress as I recover from alcoholism as it (progress) is sometimes difficult to see. I have been taken through the twelve steps of alcoholics annonymous, as they are laid out in the book. I have two sponsees at the moment and go to two to three AA meetings a week. I work full time. I've not found recovery easy, but I'm learning all the time, I'm making mistakes all the time, I depend on people too much rather than my higher power all the time, but I AM making progress, which is all that we're asked to do.