Daily Reprieve

“Did you do your taxes?”

My apartment is dark, and my Father sits in his central place on the couch.  It took everything for me to get up out of my sacred Den where I go to seek spiritual contact.  Today, it was a protective womb, a private cell to hide my inner collapse.  The only place where the lights are on is in my daughter’s room.  She is happy.  Visiting with a friend.  Thank God.  I sent up a pitiful plea to just get up and be.  My submissive sends a text reaching out, sending love to her extended family.  I use the stark intrusion of my cell phone’s ring to move.  I asses my environment.  I join my Father on the couch in hopes of a real conversation.  The question he asks is simple, but filled with implications of my own personal impotence, the ultimate disappoint he must feel in seeing me flounder about.  No, of course I have not done the taxes.  Of course, I am late, even though I have had all the time in the world. 

So I leave the couch to come here, to write.  Writing seems to be the only thing in my life that gives me a safe place, a solid hold on a shifting world, a world that moves like a boa to suffocate me.  If I sit still too long it will find me.  It will take me.

Cannot…stay…in…this…place.

My Father made some surface comment about the prospect of my daughter getting a job.  We are unable to connect.  He is trying to be polite.  He has been sleeping a lot today.  He is probably depressed himself.  I get up from my place beside him.  And come to you, oh blank screen.  And I feel him walk past me, return to his room, and to the solace of his bed. 

My daughter and her friend want food.  I have been a dud for them today.  And they are oblivious to my unfolding death.  A saving grace.

I had a conversation with my guide today.  It was good and seemed productive.  I have work to do.  I have learned that “Facts are my Friend.”  I have learned that co-dendency will keep me from seeing the truth.  He challenged whether I was actually invested in the useless ideas concerning Failure, since I keep drawing my children close to me.  Why would I do that if I was certain of my failure?  He has zeroed in on the fact that being a parent is the one thing I feel I have done right.  He uses that fact to keep me commented to this world.  And to this process.  I am trying.  I will try.

I have hungry girls depending on me.  Deep breath.  Get up Trinity, just get up.

Am I being foolish?  I am sober, must count for something.  Will I ever feel sane?

There is something going on.  Stripped of my usual self-expression, I am like a shy little child inside.  I feel that the eye of God is moving over me.  I went to two meetings today, and it was suggested that I also attend a business meeting, get involved.  I took the suggestion.  I ended up on an exploratory team to find profitable events for fund-raising for the CA convention this August. I was also able to talk with someone who was smarting from a recent relapse which helped me to feel useful, and I was able to meet with the one currently sponsoring me through the steps.  He said that it is inevitable that I will lose perspective, and that is why I contact others in the network who will help me bring my perspective back in tune with reality. 

In the course of these activities, I received texts from three different people indicating that I was giving them blank checks in communication, that they were being somewhat hurt by my silence.  But I am truly at a loss.  My core is just out there in the open. 

I had a momentary thought of drinking.  I couldn’t believe it.  I prayed, and intuitively heard that drinking was an option, and I pretty much knew how that would go.  Another option was just to continue to trust and draw from God in spite of my co-dependant relationship with the Higher Power.  I chose the latter, and the obsession vanished. 

I find myself looking at all my relationships, and I wonder if my co-dependency produced such a delusive power that its absence is going to require me to rebuild on a new basis?  I fear that if I retreat to the familiar ways, I will lose access to the new world that might be opening up.  I have no clue how or when I am going to be out of this limbo.  So I am trying to move carefully and not just slide back into well-worn ruts.

I am fearfully hopeful.

From Endigar 277;

~ My failure is inevitable.  Thus I will disappoint all those who are close to me, eventually.  I respond to this idea with a strong need to withdraw and hide.  I procrastinate.  I fall into incapacitating depression.  There is a possible new idea that Gomu (God of my understanding) may be replacing this one with; Success is inevitable when I grab hold of those things that are apart of my purpose, my path.  Failure is inevitable when I refuse to let go of those things that are not apart of my destiny.

~ If I fail, I deserve to die.  What remains of my honor demands it.  Is there no hope for escape?  The fear this idea engenders creates a last-minute panic on the tasks I have accumulated through procrastination.

~ You must hate yourself to love another.  The depth of effective love is measured in the level of self-hatred you can embody.  This causes me to resist the natural growth of relationships, or If I desire for the relationship to grow, I prepare myself for absolute martyrdom.  It has a corrosive effect on trust.  Freedom becomes escape from commitments in love.  In discussion with the Moon Shadow guide, we discovered that I don’t believe that empathy is weakness, but, my empathy and compassion makes me weak and vulnerable.  Another idea revealed in the Moonlight;  There may be only one answer to this dilemma and that is to become a predator.  The Moon Shadow guide also said that he believed I was mistaking co-dependency for compassion. 

These three ideas seem to be related to one another.  The last one speaks to the warped thinking that comes from a well indoctrinated co-dependency, and the top two where developed to support the demands of assuming god-like responsibilities for lives of others in my intimate environment.  There is no doubt in my mind that this gets to the root of my useless ideas.  There is no doubt in my mind that I am powerless to extinguish, modify, or minimize it.  And I am very certain that it makes my life a chaotic hell. 

And if I believe that the only way to love others is to hate me, imagine the effect that has on my relationship with God.  If loving God means that I am to become a martyr, imagine what service work will feel like.  No wonder I get depressed after speaking, or doing anything remotely selfless and spiritual.  I am supposed to hate myself.  And if I feel that I have failed and disappointed God and everyone close to me, no wonder I walk around with a feeling that I am not supposed to be here.  I should be dead.  I am not and therefore I am wrong.  So the following ideas about God probably find their root in the deep-seated co-dependency revealed above.

~ God is not interested in me, only in controlling me for his own purposes, to protect his distant control on the human species.   This idea is not useful to recovery or spiritual development.  The band-aid solution I created for it is that I am willing to be apart of God’s conspiracy because of my own philosophy of the benefits of manifested personal mythology.  I enlist in his cause to empower humans, not just control them.  I do not surrender if I become aware the elements of “loving” are the elements of ultimate suppression.  For the most part, my current understanding of the God conspiracy passes for what we human’s perceive as loving, that is personal empowerment.  But this is tentative and not useful to long-term sobriety.

~ 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.  When this idea rises, I feel that I am in such a predicament that I cannot trust my mind, my perception, my environment.  Nothing is real, because it is temporary.  This idea causes me to fear going crazy, and fuels a desire to lash out at God and his agents, his men in black, his mafia. 

~ 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. This line of thinking cause me to see the parable of the talents in a different light.  I see the demonization of masculine energy.  Atheism is used to push me into life as a predator.  Agnosticism could be a self-protective delusion. 

So, at Oak Mountain, I turned the care and direction of my co-dependent life over to Gomu.  (God of my understanding).  I have done my individual work and now I continue on with the steps, and that means I will need to establish a 4th / 5th step discussion with the guide He has designated for me.

From Endigar 277;

~ 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.  This idea moves me into withdrawal seasoned with a continuous, simmering, judgment or open and probably unwarranted aggression.  People are usually surprised by the latter.  Another idea that came out that seems related is that I would become nobody if not cloaked in some special ability. 

~ Uncontrolled and spiritually undeveloped people will attack or hurt me.  This leads me to create protective alliances by pretending weakness, vulnerability, or hurt.  I call this the belly up manipulation.  It is such an ingrained practice that I don’t realize when I am doing it. 

Is this a root idea, or is it a resulting fear of something else?  Is it related to the discussion of the idea in Endigar 281?  A couple of other ideas that seem to be close relatives to these are:

~ 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.   I realized I felt this at a Hoot Owl meeting this weekend when the topic was on laughter and not being a glum lot.  It appears that this might create the deliberate manufacture of misery, a habit of morbid self-reflection, and the need to condemn simplicity.

~ Honesty is a social control mechanism and has very little to do with the discovery of truth.  When I hear someone say, “I just want you to be honest with me,” I translate that to mean, “I just want you to give me enough personal information to ensnare you.”  When I got my first Big Book, I attempted to go through and mark out and replace every mention of the word HONESTY with the word TRUTH.  I gave up, because it was all over the place in my book. 

The true powerlessness here belongs to the actual root idea, and I am just not sure what that is.  I need to get with my guide and talk some more on this.

From post Endigar 277;

“~ My ideas concerning masculine and feminine energy are rather medieval, primitive.  That is what the Moon Shadow guide observed during our conversation and we began a discussion of Tao philosophy.”

I am not at all convinced that I am powerless over this idea, that it is useless, or that the problems I have in my own relationships are even related to this perspective.  But I am open to learning, and I am willing to consider his observations.  A friend loaned me her copy of the Tao of Pooh, which I have read, and her copy of the Te of Piglet, which I will start reading very soon.

I really like the Tao and I can see the truth of it in nature and the flow of the universe.  Yet there is another oriental writing that I find interesting, and that is “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu.  And this leads me to the idea that I have about masculine energy that might be related.  “The ability and willingness to kill can accelerate the power to steward others.”

There is another idea that I have heard females express or imply in relation to their post-rape perspective that I have a hard time accepting, and seems to be related to my understanding of male – female energy.   The female seems to focus on the personal feelings of being dismissed, discarded, devalued.  The observing male seems to focus on the line crossed that must be reasserted, lest a precedent of predatory behavior be unleashed like wolves on the sheep.  I do not have a hard time with the personal pain that those who are raped suffer.  That is, I do not have a problem with the apparent focus of their pain as I have observed.  What gets me is the tendency for the crime to go unpunished because punishing the rapist violates what appears to be the self-delusions of those raped in response to that pain.  To consider what has happened, report it to law enforcement or those willing to seek retribution in their behalf, makes them vulnerable to internal attacks on their self-esteem.

DISCLAIMER:  I am working on personal issues, and I have not personally experienced rape.  I am trying to remain transparent in the process so others may see both the struggle and solution working in my own life.  If you have experienced the trauma of rape, it is not my intention for my words here to be taken as a statement of what I believe should become policy, or even worse, a judgment of those who have suffered.

I would like to discuss this one more.  I think what the guide is picking up on is my resentments against the apparent disequilibrium caused in society by the abdication of males in the face of the assertion of masculine energy in women.  And my resentments of the demonization of males who embrace masculine energy.

Is it possible that the problems with male dominance comes from a confusion in mentorship, not knowing the appropriate way to express ourselves?  And left with frustrated testosterone, men lash out.  And then they have to be beaten back by others who command masculine energy, usually other frustrated males.

Anyway, I am reading others ideas in this arena as they are being presented.  I feel that the current approach of my social environment is quite haphazard, with damning results.

I am not sure that the difficult parts of this idea reflects a root issue.

I heard this read in meeting over the weekend, and it is some good stuff, off of page 386 of the Big Book;

…I looked up an A.A. meeting and went there – alone.

Here I found an ingredient that had been lacking in any other effort I had made to save myself.  Here was – power!  Here was power to live to the end of any given day, power to have the courage to face the next day, power to have friends, power to help people, power to be sane, power to stay sober.  That was seven years ago – and many A.A. meetings ago – and I haven’t had a drink during those seven years.  Moreover, I am deeply convinced that so long as I continue to strive, in my bumbling way, toward the principles I first encountered in the earlier chapters of this book, this remarkable power will continue to flow through me.  What is this power?  With my A.A. friends, all I can say is that it’s a Power greater than myself.  If pressed, all I can do is follow the psalmist who said it long before me:  ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’

The person who shared this at the meeting talked about the 11th step’s direction to pray for the power to carry out God’s will for us, and then turned to the part in the book where it says that God desires for us to be happy, joyous and free.  It was really helpful to hear this.

Some relief today, a different understanding.   Perspective.  I am grateful for yesterday’s surroundings.  I am grateful for today’s slow journey.  I am grateful for the possibility of love in hot pursuit of my tomorrow.  That’s enough.

Is it possible that the Infinite One conspires to create a companion for Itself, and that we humans are very much apart of that romantic scheme? We are the Yin and It is the Yang in that powerful intercourse?  Is it possible that we must learn to embrace both the order of God, like an angel, as well as the Chaos of God like no other? 

Is it possible that Christ was a heretic whose primary focus was to teach us to seek resurrection while still in this body?

Is it possible to self-actualize personal mythology in these bodies?

Maybe it is more important to have really good questions to move us forward rather than the answers that serve to box us in.  I like these questions.  The foundation for some new adventures?  Maybe.  If you are reading this, I just want to say that I it is my passive desire to know that you are making it, and that you are unfolding as a fellow human being.  My desire is only passive because I cannot see you or directly connect with you.  But I genuinely desire good things for you.  And thank-you for your time.

Yet another trip into the “fearless” moral inventory.  This time, I am following the guidance of one who uses the multiple columns to identify the root obsessions that have proven to be unuseful, to threaten sobriety, and to feed those activities and events that have placed me in the position to acquire deep resentments.  These are my damning ideas:

~ My failure is inevitable.  Thus I will disappoint all those who are close to me, eventually.  I respond to this idea with a strong need to withdraw and hide.  I procrastinate.  I fall into incapacitating depression.  There is a possible new idea that Gomu (God of my understanding) may be replacing this one with; Success is inevitable when I grab hold of those things that are apart of my purpose, my path.  Failure is inevitable when I refuse to let go of those things that are not apart of my destiny.

~ If I fail, I deserve to die.  What remains of my honor demands it.  Is there no hope for escape?  The fear this idea engenders creates a last-minute panic on the tasks I have accumulated through procrastination.

~ You must hate yourself to love another.  The depth of effective love is measured in the level of self-hatred you can embody.  This causes me to resist the natural growth of relationships, or If I desire for the relationship to grow, I prepare myself for absolute martyrdom.  It has a corrosive effect on trust.  Freedom becomes escape from commitments in love.  In discussion with the Moon Shadow guide, we discovered that I don’t believe that empathy is weakness, but, my empathy and compassion makes me weak and vulnerable.  Another idea revealed in the Moonlight;  There may be only one answer to this dilemma and that is to become a predator.  The Moon Shadow guide also said that he believed I was mistaking co-dependency for compassion. 

~ 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.  This idea moves me into withdrawal seasoned with a continuous, simmering, judgment or open and probably unwarranted aggression.  People are usually surprised by the latter.  Another idea that came out that seems related is that I would become nobody if not cloaked in some special ability. 

~ Uncontrolled and spiritually undeveloped people will attack or hurt me.  This leads me to create protective alliances by pretending weakness, vulnerability, or hurt.  I call this the belly up manipulation.  It is such an ingrained practice that I don’t realize when I am doing it. 

~ God is not interested in me, only in controlling me for his own purposes, to protect his distant control on the human species.   This idea is not useful to recovery or spiritual development.  The band-aid solution I created for it is that I am willing to be apart of God’s conspiracy because of my own philosophy of the benefits of manifested personal mythology.  I enlist in his cause to empower humans, not just control them.  I do not surrender if I become aware the elements of “loving” are the elements of ultimate suppression.  For the most part, my current understanding of the God conspiracy passes for what we human’s perceive as loving, that is personal empowerment.  But this is tentative and not useful to long-term sobriety.

~ 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.  When this idea rises, I feel that I am in such a predicament that I cannot trust my mind, my perception, my environment.  Nothing is real, because it is temporary.  This idea causes me to fear going crazy, and fuels a desire to lash out at God and his agents, his men in black, his mafia. 

~ 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. This line of thinking cause me to see the parable of the talents in a different light.  I see the demonization of masculine energy.  Atheism is used to push me into life as a predator.  Agnosticism could be a self-protective delusion. 

~ My ideas concerning masculine and feminine energy are rather medieval, primitive.  That is what the Moon Shadow guide observed during our conversation and we began a discussion of Tao philosophy. 

Now that these ideas have been identified, the task is to take them through the steps.  In the first step process, I must look at my life history and decide if these ideas are truly unuseful to me, and that they make my life unmanageable.  I also must evaluate if I am powerless over them, that I have continuously attempted to modify or eradicate them and have them manifest and dominate my life regardless of my efforts.  The steps are designed to deal with obsessive ideas.  Steps 2 and 3 dictate that I decide if I believe or am willing to believe that a power greater than myself will restore me to sanity, to a state of freedom and serenity.  The 4th and 5th steps, as I understand it, is to analyze the ideas to see if there are any deeper ideas propping up these.  Steps 6 and 7 embody the magical element of the process.  This is where we surrender to the prospect of the psychic change.  8 and 9 are the amends process.  10 is the protective vigilance.  11 seeks to strengthen my connection with the Higher Power, and 12 is the practical activity designed to enlarge my spiritual life.  I hope this works.