Twelve Step practitioners believe that their very lives hang in the balance unless they can develop and maintain a very specific modality of living. It is the model of a spiritual lifestyle that includes daily prayer and meditation. In the magnificent story, text and prayer book, “Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism” the coauthors propose these two activities as a way to improve a conscious contact with God. It is the Step Eleven proposal. While not vague at all about the prayer leg of this proposal, the coauthors were outright negligent in presenting readers with any meditation method to use toward the very end they propose. Many practitioners are forced to seek outside sources for a meditation technique.
Nearly all of what they discover “out there” are meditation methods that come bundled with religious and spiritual philosophies that are contrary to basic spiritual principles to which they feel they owe their recovery. This contrariety is cause for great irreconcilable rifts in faith which soon develop.
Many of us discover that some of the most basic tenets of the organizations and movements promoting such meditations shake hard at the foundation of the Twelve Step Principles and this conflict causes great consternation eventually leading to dissatisfaction with our recovery process, the fellowship that delivers its message, as we slip into unmanageability, depression, anxiety, restlessness and finally relapse; back into drinking.
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