“Many A.A.’s go in for annual or semi-annual housecleanings.” (Page 89, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
I do this, somewhere between semi-annually and quarterly. It’s a short, sharp shock, not a lengthy self-indulgence. I find that letting more than six months pass without a review is to let myself drift too far, and I’d rather catch things early. It does not take long, at all, and it can save me weeks or months of error.
Sometimes people spend their whole time in a process of the first nine steps. Fair enough, but it’s like spending all of your time on the train and none of the time at your destination. Hogwarts is considerably more interesting than the Hogwarts Express.
The best way to avoid Step Twelve and actually doing God’s will (which is often repetitive, routine, banal, menial, and entry-level and entails the eclipsing of self and all its manifestations) is to take an excessive interest in the preceding steps, particularly Four and Eleven, which are particular favourite refuges:
The endless expanses of self-examination, pain, injury, suffering, fragility, sensitivity, touchiness, offence, woundedness, neurosis, trauma and its sequalae, family of origin dynamics, and the zombie resurrection of the childhood or other past unpleasantness in the voodoo ceremonies of deep dives, new experiences, peeling layers of onions, getting-in-touch-with, repressed memories, and systemic theories.
The equally endless expanses of spirituality, religion, mysticism, psychedelics (whether micro- or macro-dosed), attempts to hack the universe or hack God, pulling back the curtain of reality to reveal some imagined antecedent metareality, the co-option of ‘spiritual principles’ to force change in or heal others or the world through spiritual means, the attempts to discern the future or ‘read’ remote minds or events, spiritualism and magic, the attempts to force God’s hand through two-way prayer, the attempts to get high or transcend everyday life through transcendental meditation.
Good for others? No idea. Good for alcoholics of my type? No, siree.
I’ve fallen into both gutters on either side of the bowling lane and come back to the simplicity of getting on with my daily tasks (keep the show on the road, fulfil my obligations, do some things I enjoy), keeping my spiritual life to ‘what does God want me to do today?’, and keeping the annual or semi-annual housecleaning to this:
- Where is my attitude wrong?
- Where is my behaviour wrong?
- How should I look at things instead?
- What should I do instead?
… and then getting on with it.