How to get out of hell

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What is hell? Hell is one's own mind when it's under the control of the ego.

Here's an actual picture of the inside of my brain before recovery:



How can you tell it's under the control of the ego?

Desire, excitement, tension, fear, anxiety, grievance, resentment, guilt, shame, etc.

None of what follows is novel or new, and I've written about these matters many times before, but it does no harm to periodically update the list and ensure it is furnished with my latest experiences and tips. What is set out below is basically everything I have tried that has worked plus a few things that really do not help.

Have a good daily programme

Pages 84 to 88 of the Big Book cover comprehensively how to structure and manage the day, from the moment one gets up in the morning until one goes to sleep at night. I will not rehash those four pages here, save to say the content falls under the headings of Steps Ten and Eleven, which can be read about comprehensively here and here.

Progress with the first nine steps

Until the first nine steps are completed, although one can make significant progress on getting out of hell, the anatomical structure of hell is still in place. The priority in one's life is therefore to get through and complete the first nine steps, in particular exhibiting thoroughness and completeness with inventory and confession and certainly pressing through with Step Nine to complete the step in a few days or a maximum of a few weeks. Clear the decks. Make ten amends a day. Get it done. Throughout the process, spend at least an hour a day, and as many extra hours as can be carved out. Do the work first thing in the morning so you spend the day having done your step work and to make sure nothing trumps it. Not only will this get you there quicker, but the vigour of the action turns on enough light to make for a pleasant day most days, not to mention the exhilaration of progress.

Some basic principles

The mind's negative content can be legitimately dealt with in Steps Four, Ten, and Eleven, under clinically controlled conditions. Such content must not be handled otherwise. In other words, one should not take such negativity and populate every moment of the day, every interaction with it.

The job, until the Steps work on the substrate of that thinking, is to learn to take control of the mind, usually for the first time in one's life, and deliberately manage what going on in there.

I'm not responsible for the thought that presents itself to my mind. But I am indeed responsible for whether I run with it, or reject it and turn away to what I have decided to turn my attention to.

We have typically been 'victims' of our physical brains. Whatever effluent it pumps out into the consciousness we gobble up. Whatever negative and unfruitful chain of thought it suggests we follow with eagerness. This has to stop, and it has to stop now. When it's really fighting back and the war seems lost, that's the time to redouble the efforts, not to give up or change tack fundamentally.

This will involve having a raft of different solutions available and nimbly switching between them as the situation requires. Which of the following are suitable for a particular person at a particular time will depend on a plurality of factors, including personality, temperament, experience, and particular circumstances. It is well, however, to realise the full range of what is available and to become adept at selecting the right tool for the moment.

Even those who have been sober for a long time and have been very well, spiritually, will experience periods when the ego launches an assault on the consciousness to try and win back the territory for itself. The following techniques apply both when one is trying to oust the enemy from the mind and when one is trying to prevent its return. They also work as general defence mechanisms to keep a peaceful mind peaceful. Do not let up on these when things are good, or the enemy will see a chink and go for it.

The basic method is simple.

Do not think about the problem.

Get out of self by forming a relationship with God PLUS by forming a relationship with others and the world. Not one. Not the other. Both.

Prayer and meditation

The chief answer, of course, is the relationship with God. Here is a full raft of options:

  • Morning and evening routines per pages 84 to 88 of the Big Book
  • The spot-check / in the moment activities: pages 84 (middle), 85 (middle), and 87 (at the bottom) of the Big Book
  • Saying and repeating the Serenity Prayer, the Step Three Prayer, the Step Eleven Prayer, the Pledge, the Lord's Prayer
  • Saying and repeating any other set prayer
  • Memorising one or more of the Psalms (pick a version you like: English King James version, English Standard Version, St Jerome's Vulgate [don't underestimate the power of Latin], Hebrew [they were written in Hebrew: you're literally using the same words that have been used for thousands of years]); these are particularly good, because they talk about 'enemies', constantly, God's routing of the enemy, and God's protection against the enemy; who is the enemy? The devil, the ego, manifesting through its attack thoughts in the mind: this is what the Psalms are talking about metaphysically. Use the Psalms to (a) raise the consciousness (b) form a relationship with God (c) spur the imagination to create spaces to inhabit in the place of hell (d) block out the narratives: if nothing else good comes presently of the exercise, at least the effort and activity is blocking out the negative narratives and preventing them from entrenching themselves further
  • Say the above prayers out loud and maybe even sing them
  • Learn and sing hymns out loud. If you're Church of England, invest in a hymnal. If you're Jewish, learn some of the standard tunes, for instance of the Kabbalat Shabbat Psalms or other texts or learn some of the contemporary versions that can easily be found on Spotify (e.g. here)
  • Visualisation meditations are great. Anthony de Mello's Sadhana provides a gazillion ways of doing this
  • You might consider Buddhist meditation, and some people make an excellent go of this, but it does not suit everyone, and most people I have known (myself included) make much more rapid progress by using forms of prayer that involve developing a direct personal relationship with a Higher Power
  • Consider finding a local church that holds morning, lunchtime, or evening prayers or mass or similar and attending daily
  • Consider a morning meditation meeting, like this
  • Consider Lectio Divina
  • Apps like Universalis (also available on iPhone etc.) provide prayers for throughout the day, including audio recordings, which one can listen to on loop if necessary
  • Consider Insight Timer (endless opportunities and methods, from the very active to the very passive: in particular consider the tracks that involve sound patterns that positively affect brain waves and calm a person down)
  • Take a line from the Big Book and turn it into a prayer. There are hundreds if not thousands to choose from
  • Take a line from the Bible and turn it into a prayer. There are tens of thousands to choose from
  • Keep the channel of communication to God open at all times and talk to God (and listen) as constantly as possible: remember that all goodness, all direction, all strength, all care, and all protection comes from Him: if you want these, remain in constant contact, recognising that you can do nothing of value apart from God and that you need Him every moment, 24 hours a day

Fellowship and service

  • Go to as many meetings as possible
  • Face to face meetings wherever possible
  • Online meetings only if there are no face to face meetings available or if a particular online meeting offers content and people of a calibre not available face to face at that time
  • Show up early
  • Leave late
  • Go for fellowship
  • Sit at the front
  • Pay attention
  • Share
  • Maybe mention difficulties but don't go on about them: talk about solutions
  • Use the opportunity to learn, to be part of, and to be of service
  • Do practical service at the meetings, particularly service that involves interaction with others, e.g. tea and greeting
  • Introduce yourself to everyone you do not know and spend a few minutes talking to each to break the ice
  • Make a beeline for people who are new or struggling and befriend them
  • Offer your number, then call or text to find out how people are and offer to take them to meetings with you
  • Aim to end up in a position where you are spending much of your spare time sponsoring others and doing service (page 19): only once this is fulfilled is the Step Twelve condition fulfilled for entering, here, into the 'utopia' described by Bill in Bill's Story
  • Until then, the job is to take actions that take you in that direction
  • Don't take a long face to meetings: take what is good and cheerful and bright and true (even if it's just a mustard seed) and propagate that in your interactions

The day's content

  • The day's content is threefold: looking after oneself, the fulfilment of obligations, and having a nice time
  • To be mentally well, one must be physically well:
    • Stable sleeping pattern
    • Stable eating pattern
    • High-quality food
    • Avoiding foods and substances that create rollercoasters of emotion and energy levels
  • Keep on top of personal administration: aim for zero inbox; being behind will get a person down
  • Lose yourself in the fulfilment of obligations during the day: if you have none, create some by looking for work, studying systematically in accordance with a set programme, or by volunteering; the devil makes work for idle hands and minds: as the Just For Today Card suggests, we should not be loafers, mental or otherwise
  • Perform each task to the absolute best of one's ability, simply for the sake of it
  • Cultivate the philosophy of deriving satisfaction not from identity or attainment but from the due and proper discharge of one's duties, from redeeming the time given well
  • Whenever the mind wants to distract you, say a brief prayer, and draw it back to the task at hand
  • Be present in what you are doing: that's where you'll find God

Spiritual growth

  • To win this war, the twelve-step programme provides the basic skeleton, muscles, and other tissues
  • To make the spiritual body really strong, however, a spiritual path is required: that's the training programme
  • Be open to different traditions
  • But maybe pick one and run with it for a while
  • Treat this as a major, interesting project
  • To get rid of rubbish from the mind, one's mind must be taken to a higher level: the rubbish must be replaced with high-calibre, primo content
  • One fights not against the rubbish but to rise above it and to replace it
  • To do so, immerse yourself in the higher realms and in particular people who talk and write about this
  • We need new ideas and new ways of framing our perceptions, interpretations, and experiences
  • This takes years so start today
  • This involves two chief domains of activity:
    • Listening, reading, and watching at times deliberately set aside for this purpose
    • Listening when doing other things (e.g. housework, commuting, walking)
  • Good sources:
    • Spotify
    • Apple Podcasts
    • YouTube
    • Audible
    • Amazon (get Kindle and get a load of spiritual books downloaded)
    • The Books app on iPhone (you can get samples for free to try out different authors)
  • Engage in such materials until you're frothing over with fascinating and useful ideas and practices you've found and have applied
  • If you're not frothing over, you're not doing enough: you're starving
  • If you're unhappy, read and listen until something clicks and you feel better
  • You're not done until you feel better

Particular writers, speakers, approaches, etc.

These can be accessed in a score of ways.
  • Emmet Fox (read everything he wrote)
  • C. S. Lewis (read everything he wrote)
  • Marcus Aurelius
  • Anthony de Mello
  • Brother Lawrence: Practice of the Presence of God
  • A Course in Miracles (ACIM)
  • Ken Wapnick's talks and books about ACIM
  • Charlotte Joko Beck
  • Norman Vincent Peale
  • Ernest Holmes
  • G. K. Chesterton
  • Joyce Meyer (her app has daily videos: excellent)
  • Earl Purdy (his channel on YouTube: his ACIM classes are amazing)
  • There are lots of bible and Christian websites and apps too
  • If you're Jewish [or even, frankly, if you're not], try Chabad; even if politically they're not to your taste, there's a wealth of great material on there: take what's useful and ignore the rest, which is a great principle in general
Take notes, find principles and practices to apply, apply them, and share them with your friends.

Other resources

  • Read all of the AA literature
  • Read all of the Al-Anon literature
  • Read all of the literature of whatever other fellowship you're in
  • I have collected a repository of written audio materials that can be access by going to the home page of this blog and clicking 'ALL MATERIALS' at the top or by clicking here
  • In particular, listen to all of the Father Tom W materials.
  • The blog also contains a link to a sister blog with lots of excellent spiritual quotations
  • The above ALL MATERIALS link will take you to lots of AA speakers (individual talks and box sets)
  • Listen to all of them. Make notes. Find principles and practices to apply, apply them, and share them with your friends
  • There is nothing better to block out unhappy thinking than to listen to some jolly good AA talks
  • You will find loads more by Googling AA speakers or AA tapes

Other interests

The Big Book suggests we balance the programme with other interests. There's a limit to how much programme, spiritual, and religious material a person can take on board healthily and productively, so it's important to have other interests, to expand the mind, to eclipse the self, and to help rise up and out of the crippling self-absorption that comes with untreated or not-entirely-treated alcoholism. The same principle applies as with the spiritual materials: the job is to find activities and materials that are absorbing and represent a focus to draw the mind constantly back to, away from itself.

If the mind is eating itself alive, you're not giving it enough proper sustenance to eat.

Here are some ideas I have found very useful, and others also report as very useful:

  • Listen to a lot of high-quality talk radio (plays, documentaries, etc.)
  • Listen to audiobooks on bright and interesting (not gloomy or worrying) subjects
  • Use the Audible catalogue available for free once one has a basic monthly subscription to learn about the world (check out the Audible Great Courses) or get a thorough grounding in classical or English literature: listen to all the books you never got round to reading
  • If you have even a small amount of a foreign language, find an app where you can listen to news and feature radio: there's almost nothing that concentrates the mind (away from itself) as well as trying to figure out what someone is saying in a language you know a little of
  • Learn a foreign language (lots of cheap apps available)
  • Learn a musical instrument
  • Get an animal and look after it like it's your child
  • Spend a lot of time in nature
  • Garden or buy and look after a load of plants
  • Develop a robust exercise routine
  • Practice a sport, perhaps a team sport
  • Run, walk, cycle, or swim daily
  • Practice yoga (if you don't know where to start, start here)
  • Cook
  • Bake (bread and cakes are particularly satisfying, if they agree with you)
  • Take what you bake to meetings for everyone to enjoy
  • The most useful interests are those that involve the body as well as the mind, and the senses

Things maybe to cut down on or be careful of: chemical rollercoasters and rabbit holes

  • Sugar
  • Caffeine
  • Nicotine
  • High GI index foods
  • Rolling news and current affairs (if they set you off or worry you)
  • Social media (unless your feeds are highly curated to cut out the crap, ire, and misery)
  • Controversial topics
  • Materials that medicalise or pathologise living problems (let's do what we can to handle living problems with living solutions: maybe let's leave such questions of diagnoses, trauma, and brain function and chemistry to the professionals for the time being)
  • People with justified grievances
  • People who are not fully committed to the programme
  • Cynics, grumps, milksops, and grouches
  • Screentime
  • Violent films and shows
  • Practitioners and helpers who focus on the problem, on origins, causes, and aetiologies, and on attributing responsibility to others or anything outside one's control: let's focus on changing what we can change and quietly passing over what we can't

When things are tough, don't give up

Sometimes the ego's attacks are very persistent. One recognises a particular mental narrative as unhelpful. One turns away from it. But it comes back again and again. Keep holding up the hand, Not Today, Satan! [= sorry-ass thoughts about nothing], and returning to God, to prayer, to hard work, to the person you're with, to the present. You may have to do this a thousand times a day. No matter. Eventually the effort pays off. Keep going.

If in doubt, learn the King James version of Psalm 91 and repeat it over and over, concentrating on each idea and visualising God's protection. Eventually the devil gives up.

Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional.

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