(This blog is eleventh in a multi-part series, “Thoughts On The Steps”. This series is not a guide on how to work steps; steps can only be worked under the guidance of a sponsor. The twelve-step program is a spiritual program; it teaches us how to live a spiritual life. Working each of the steps gives us the chance to practice a spiritual principle. Whatever your particular fellowship, the Steps are the same, as are the spiritual principles behind them. These are my thoughts on the steps and on those principles.)
Step Eleven: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
12-steps is a spiritual program. The steps themselves and the process of working them are all designed to bring about a spiritual awakening. In the early history of Alcoholics Anonymous, the founders were searching for a cure for their alcoholism. They learned that the only people who had been cured of this incurable, hopeless condition were people who'd had a profound spiritual experience. The twelve steps are designed to bring about just such an experience. And if I may be so bold, it is rare to meet someone who has thoroughly worked the steps that hasn't had a spiritual awakening of some kind. Working the eleventh step is how we practice increasing our own Spiritual Awareness.
The biggest key here, in my mind, is the very first word: sought. We seek out the power greater than ourselves. Many faith and religious traditions have the concept that as we seek our higher power, it makes itself available to us. Christianity expresses it by saying 'for every step we take towards God, God takes two steps towards us', or some variant like that. We are spiritual beings, by our very nature, and access to the spiritual is available to us. If we truly seek, we will find. It is the way of things.
As we've worked the previous ten steps, there have been a number of prayers said. In Step Eleven, we pray for something simple and very specific: the knowledge of our higher power's will for us and the power to carry out that will--whatever it might be. We don't pray for happiness or that we'll stay clean & sober. We don't pray for the health of our family or the success of our friends. We don't read a wish list. This prayer is a natural following of the third step prayer. We've turned our will and our life over. Now we seek guidance on what to do with it. We pray, too, for the strength to do whatever it is our higher power directs us to do.
This step talks about meditation. If prayer is talking to our higher power, then meditation is listening to it. We pray, and we listen for the answers to our prayer. We open our hearts and our minds and our souls so that we might hear the guidance we have asked to receive. If your mind is anything like mine, then you know that quieting that inner chaos takes a lot of practice. But it can be done.
This is another step that talks, too, about having our own understanding of our higher power. One of the reasons the program works so well for so many is because it encourages us to come to our own understanding of just what exactly this ‘God’ thing is. Ironically, it is because of the atheist and agnostic members of those early AA meetings that this turn of phrase appears in the steps. It’s a crucial one.
We have a spiritual malady. By working to increase our Spiritual Awareness, we increase our contact with the spiritual. We heal our spiritual selves.
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