DECEMBER 24
There is an easier way to rid ourselves of painful thoughts and imaginings than by following the philosopher’s advice: “Empty your mind. . . .” It is to replace worry and distress with something pleasant.
When I do this, I am not running away from my troubles, but clearing my mind of confusion, so I will be better able to make decisions when the time comes to do so.
Constant dwelling on disturbing matters never solves anything; trying to follow the convolutions of a problem only makes me lose all sense of proportion about it.
Today’s Reminder
I will turn to simple things: the contemplation of a tree or a cloud; writing a long-deferred letter or making something, perhaps a bird-house, a rag doll or a cake. I will deliberately lose myself in the new preoccupation so that when I come back from it, my thoughts will be freshened and ready to deal clearly with what I have to face.
“A change of scene, a new interest, a creative undertaking—these are healing medicine for the troubled.”
(One Day at a Time in Al-Anon)
When I first came across Step Eleven through application of the Twelve Steps, the fashion in the fellowship around me, almost exclusively, was to essentially consider Step Eleven to be Buddhism: eastern-style meditation, poses, breathing, concentration on viewing one's own thoughts, mindfulness; the whole Buddhist shooting-match.
I have no opinion on Buddhism per se, at least in the context of recovery, and know very little about it, relatively speaking, although I did attempt to practice Buddhist meditation for a few years. I know people who practise Buddhism very profitably. But meditation in accordance with the principles of the above passage has proved extremely helpful and more helpful than my attempts to do what everyone around me in Al-Anon was doing for meditation.
When new, I was also advised by numerous people to get outside help (both chemical and talking), because of my somewhat dramatic childhood and the self-evidently disordered mental, emotional, and social state I was in. My Al-Anon go-to person told me in no uncertain terms that what I needed was God and a reliance on a higher power and not to worry about outside help. She was right.
What does this reading say?
"Constant dwelling on disturbing matters never solves anything; trying to follow the convolutions of a problem only makes me lose all sense of proportion about it."
That neatly sums up why I've become a fan not of outside help but of inside help, the help available inside the programme, inside the fellowship, and inside God.
The Steps have solved my problems simply and surgically, by scientific glances within, not rumination or preoccupation.
This reading echoes my experience: I needed and need less self, less focus on me, less introversion, and more mind-training:
I have learned to train my mind along positive, constructive lines, not to retreat from the world, not to see the material world as entirely illusory, but to see the material world as a very real venue, albeit in the context of a greater, transcending metaphysical reality, which is the source of my direction and strength and the repository of my security. God likes this world, it seems; He apparently made it.
Currently I wake up at 5.00 a.m., full of beans, raring to go, fascinated by life and the world, barely able to contain myself.
That's a result not of introspection but of self-forgetting.