Daily Reprieve

Went out with folks in recovery, with woman, ate, had meeting….saw moon guide.  Returning home, mood bottoms out, felt the need to get away, felt angry at people being around me.

My female and I paused in parking area of my apartment and searched the emotion I was feeling.  Utilized the approach I learned from my counselor … to feel the emotion, to identify what and how deep it was.  The I stated that I am afraid because…I feared the moon guide disapproves of me.  Further, I felt weak for feeling this.

Being able to identify this was very helpful.  Kept me from crashing.  I am recording this here to come back to later on, because it seems to indicate an unuseful idea.

Sponsor Quest:  My female, acting as an Oracle, said that it appears that I need to go on a sponsor quest.  And that resonates.  I love my current sponsor, but he himself told me that I should probably get another one, he is going through so much.  I told him that I do continue to value his friendship.  He suggested I go to an Alanon meeting, maybe look at getting an Alanon sponsor.  But the Oracular guidance suggest that I need an AA sponsor that is a cross between my current one, who has a great compassionate heart, and the Moon Guide, who speaks clearly and probes with insight, and is an AA sponsor.  An alcoholic.  My previous two sponsors have both been CA sponsors, who were primarily cocaine addicts.  It makes sense.

I have referred to myself as a tortoise in life and personal pursuits.  I mentioned this in a meeting after smarting from my most recent relapse.  It’s taking me so much time to get this program.  I was encouraged that the tortoise wins the race over the hare by shear persistance.  This was in a CA meeting I love, Everything or Nothing group.  We call it EON.

Later I attended another meeting at JAFI’s, an AA meeting.  The topic was on finding a sponsor.  The topic leader started off saying that if you come across a turtle sitting on a fencepost, you know it had help.  This seemed to be confirmation that I do need a new sponsor.  But I will keep contact with my Heart Sponsor-friend, and the Moon Guide sponsor, and the Dark Oracle of Recovery.  So I my focus in recovery is to listen for something and someone new.

I am grateful that I still have my 3 Sep 2011 sobriety date.

I have a new sobriety date.  3 Sep 2011.

The power went out yesterday, all day and most of today.  Windstorm echoing the violence of our coasts, the hurricane season is underway.  Appropriate backdrop for the chaos of yet another relapse.

I walked around my apartment, struggling to do and be what I need to be…It was quiet on the outside, loud on the inside.  I am slow and inconsistent in my college studies.  My assassin is strong today.  I am behind.  Do I have a learning difference that retards my progress?  Or just an overwhelming need to escape this reality?

And in the military, it seems I am slow in running because of the weakness in my lungs and the inconsistency of my heart.

God please help me want to live.

I do want to live, but not like this.  I am not suicidal right now, but I would like to earn the right to go ahead and pass beyond the veil.  My dreams do not and never have fit this life.

I care about others, but what is the relevance to that if I cannot succeed in caring for myself?

I am spiritually inconsistent.  I am tossed to and fro.

I have had wonderful things and relationships often in spite of my assassin’s assaults.  I have no complaints, nor do I blame anyone else.  No, really…I don’t have a black list for anyone today.  At least not right now.

Except myself.  And I am trying to get to the place that I can observe me without judgment.

Hey, this is a bit of hoot.  I wrote the following nine rules when I came face to face with my own distractibility, inconsistency, and procrastination this morning.  They were going to be the rules of academic obsession, but morphed into these:

1.  Does it work?  Use it!  Can you make it simpler?  Do it!

2.  Use sex-spiritual rituals to protect growth.

3.  Use sex-spiritual adventures to break limitations.

4.  Experience sex-spirituality in forbidden goals.

5.  Read Everything!

6.  Arrive early, leave late, exercise more.

7.  Start early, work late, sleep less.

8.  Write a priority list, then invert it.  (I almost always have it backwards)

9.  Do it now, today, as soon as assigned.

The storm has passed, and the power is back on.  I am still alive.

It is a bad habit that I am pretty sure what the assasin is saying to me, and get confused about the voice of the Infinite One.  I guess because the assasin has a home in my head, and I have to seek out time to actually know and connect with the Universe.  It seems it has become so much easier to self destruct.

I WANT TO LIVE!  God … help me.  Please.

This is a good description of confusing love and co-dependancy:  “If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Love, Pray)

English as a language is troublesome to the pursuit of spiritual ideas.  It speaks in what I call “bundle words.”  So many powerful meanings can be wrapped up in one word, meanings that take you in very different directions.  The only way to unravel their meaning is to provide a great deal of context.  Such is the case with the word HONESTY.  And this word is used often in recovery.

When I was in intimate relationships, and heard the question, “I just want you to be honest with me,”  I knew she meant that she wanted to gather enough information from me to control the situation.  It would not be a fair meeting of souls, but a secret trial conducted as I spoke my heart.  Screw that.

When considering the establishment of my sexual sanity in the moral inventory, I had to consider what it meant to be honest per the Big Book.  It is so filled with that bundle word.

This is what I concluded.  I believe that dishonesty comes in three categories and it is important to understand the difference.  Ricochet dishonesty, protective dishonesty, and manipulative dishonesty.  Ricochet dishonesty is dealt with in a process of self-discovery.  Protective dishonesty is the need to address a threat, real or imagined.  Manipulative dishonesty is an attempt to gain consent or compliance by creating an illusionary context for the decision-making process,  External realities are usually outweighed by internal costs, for the manipulator.

Selfishness is another English bundle word.  I believe that the most mutually satisfying sexual relationship is inherently selfish, and to fail to recognize this fact is to fall prey to ricochet dishonesty.  The mate will conclude, over time, “I don’t even know you anymore.”  So in terms of sexual intimacy, there is need recognition selfishness, empathy neutralizing objectification, and impulsive selfishness which is the same as inconsideration and plays out as sexual stupidity.

So when considering my sexual relationships, I modify the Big Book questions as follows:

1.  Where have I been ricochet, protective, or manipulatively dishonest?  Where have I misused need-recognition and empathy neutralization?  Where has my impulsive inconsiderations made me sexually stupid?

2.  The question, “Whom have I hurt?” is also too broad.  Hurting someone else or being hurt by someone can be very beneficial in getting to know yourself or others.  For me, the question is better worded, Whose core have I hurt retarding the expression of their personal mythology?

I found no need to change the remaining questions;

Did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness?

Where we at fault, what should we have done instead?

Through the 4th step inventory I have identified the following unuseful ideas that the Assassin in my head uses against me:

1.  God is a manipulator (A co-dependant assertion, a family of origin adaption)

~ God is not interested in me, only in controlling me for his own purposes, to protect his distant control on the human species.

~ God wants to control me for his purposes, wants me to be his sissy whore.  He uses my heart’s desires against me.  He has no desire for my ultimate success, only my advancement to control others.

~ If I get out of line, God has a kill switch to amplify my lusts and natural desires to consume me, or, if I am able to overcome that, God can use my disconnected strength to turn me into a predator.

2.  In order to love others, you must hate yourself (confusing compassion and empathy with co-dependency)

~ You must hate yourself to love another.  The depth of effective love is measured in the level of self-hatred you can embody.

3.  I lack potency. (Public school peer interaction in conjunction with distrust of outsiders)

~ The concepts and thoughts that I value will be overshadowed by a stronger presence.  The products of my mind and heart will be dismissed as insignificant in a crowd, and assaulted in the presence of a strong presentation.

~ Uncontrolled and spiritually undeveloped people will attack or hurt me.

~ Personal assertions that are not wrapped in a mantle of pain, depression, and anguish will not be taken seriously.  Assertions expressed with happiness will be seen as frivolous and thus, discarded.

~ Honesty is a social control mechanism and has very little to do with the discovery of truth.

~ My internal reality is more important than my external reality

4.  I am bound by family icons of devotion, resulting in the two statements on failure.  Outside the family, inevitable and lethal.

~ If I desire to be free of emotional blackmail and manipulation, I must accept that failure is inevitable and I will disappoint those who become intimate, who get close to me.

~ If my failure is exposed, what is left of my honor demands my death.

“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

Are sanity and truth married to one another?  Is sanity the ability to firmly grasp the truth about oneself and then to share that truth with others?

I feel guilty about everything.  So I cannot trust my own conscience.  What is legitimate guilt, and what is indoctrinated guilt designed to bind me?  I simply do not know how to tell the difference.

At the recommendations of others in the recovery network, I now have a counselor.  I hope to know the truth about myself.  I hate living under an impending sense of doom.

I am up and down.  Some real personal issues.  Tired.  Depression reaching for me.  The assassin ever-present.  It seems I have managed to create the same wonderfully oppressive atmosphere in recovery that I muddled through in church.

A very simple prayer today; Help my sanity, Infinite One.

Help.

“Meanwhile, keep up with your dull mundane exercises.  I know progress is slow, but it’s possible to be slow and still get to where you are going… Remember the tortoise and the hare…speed is not the essence; steady accomplishment is…Just don’t quit trying” Piers Anthony, Letters to Jenny, Page 123.

I am back from my annual training with my Army Reserve unit, and I still have much to process, to consider.  My life has often fallen short of the magic I hunger for, but someone pointed out to me yesterday after a meeting at the Hut, that if you just glance across the surface of the ground, you might miss all the hidden activities and steady processes occurring below the surface. 

The terrain at Fort Hunter-Liggett is threateningly beautiful.  I wish I could have enjoyed it from a private cabin with fireplace for the cold nights and morning coffee to greet the sunrise.  I did have one moment in time where I tried to pull off alone into the wilderness and just observe in stillness;  to surrender to the moment, and to touch the energy of the endless one with no materialistic expectations.   The following is what I was able to glean from that meditation:

Lessons … Heard from the Mountain. 

I can only see the large picture from a distance.  Large is invisible up close.  It does not appear to move.  Its power is in its ability to hold a place in time. 

It contrasts the sky.  It reveals perspective of the sky.  Trees are also still, and cover its surface, pull from its depths.  The Mountain reveals the strength of the ground.  It is carved by water, that ageless agent of change.  It is lit by the Sun’s fire.

Why do birds make noise?  What is the purpose in their soundings?  Does trust of the Infinite One exist without self-awareness?  Does the Mountain trust or care?  It just is.

Trust is given by the movers, the active ones.  And the greater the self-awareness, the greater the need for establishing trust.  The need for connection with the Infinite One.

How do I build beyond the pain?

I let go.  There is nothing in the ideas that need my further analysis to make this decision.  The Assassin’s voice has used them well to relegate me to a life of fear and hyper vigilance.  I want to live fully.  I awoke twice this morning.  My body, then my spirit. 

Any reward I achieved from cherishing these ideas I surrender.  I open myself to a new life, and recognize that so much of my old life will, by necessity, die or be forever altered. 

I also know that I am powerless to change, and that the unmanageability creates a great need for change.  I now understand why the Universe has me leaving my support network, leaving my current resources, going away for three weeks.  I feel a promise of magic today.  But I must step out of the way.  In humility, I gain the power of a god. 

Enough!  It is done, finished! 

My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, with all my concepts of what is good and bad. 

I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows, which is the litmus test of its usefulness to me.

Grant me strength, transfer great power to me, as I go out from here, to do your bidding, to cooperate with your process that has been initiated in me.

Amen – SO BE IT. 

Isn’t it interesting that the magic is to begin on Mother’s day?  As my Core expression enters this divine womb? 

I will be on orders for the next three weeks.  I will return on May 27th.

Namaste from John Mansion.

I have taken the counsel of others in the recovery network and have pulled back from this intimate dance with my core.  It is threatening my co-consciousness and I am about to leave for a 3 week annual training for my Army Reserve unit.  I can ill afford to be suffering problems with the demands of unexpected transitions.  I have also received a suggestion from the guide and others to seek a professional to help me through this.  I will probably do that before continuing with this particular 4th step.  Things have calmed down within since I have pulled back.  But if I retreat entirely, then I have to face the return of active alcoholism.  I have much work today when I get back. 

This morning, I had a message left by the Rogue Elf in the Book of Faces.  She had apparently taken the central statement of my co-dependancy and worn it as her own garment, “To love another I must hate myself.”  She had her own issues to apply this to, so she wore this mantra to see how it fits.  She ended up discarding it, and sending me the missive recording her own insight.  I capture it here, because I think it has potency to it, and because it moves me inside.  I don’t want to lose these words in the midst of my personal struggles:

To love another I must love myself and reach deep inside for all the treasures that reside there.

 

To love another takes courage, takes endurance, takes persistence.

 

To love another I must accept my lack of power, my lack of control…my humanity with its beautiful strength and weakness.

 

To love another is being open to experience the full range of human emotion, including fear and pain, but also joy.

 

To love another means to have eyes wide open, versus selective vision.

 

To love another requires trust in a Higher, unseen power and a belief in a plan Grander than a human being can imagine.

 

To love another means accepting not knowing how the story ends, but showing up anyway, knowing that no matter how it all plays out… I am safe, my beloved is safe; and I have given the universe an opportunity to heal souls and to express itself.

 

To love another is to experience and observe my filthiest ugliness and my highest beauty and an opportunity to embrace both!

 

To love another is the highest calling I can respond to and if I can continue to love no matter what it brings out in myself…if I can rise up from my wounds, both externally derived and self-inflicted, then, rather than being diminished as I used to believe, my worth, my value, my joy is increased!