Gaia: 12step

Re: Spiritual Awakenings

http://blacksamba.gaia.com — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:46:48 GMT

Hi,

My book, the 12-Step Buddhist, is available for pre-order on Amazon. It's coming out in a few months. I go into a lot of detail on different spiritual approaches, compared mainly to Buddhism. There are exercises on each step, experience and advice on how to apply the underlying principles from any tradition to recovery.

There are also a number of articles and podcasts on the website, as well as many resources, recommended books, etc.

http://the12stepbuddhist.com

Namaste

-d

Re: Spiritual Awakenings

http://rightminded.gaia.com — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:31:45 GMT

I've been sober for almost 4 years and have not read this volume yet, I'm glad it was posted althrough this thread has been inactive for some time!

Re: Hello and I think I'm in the funnel

http://jennifersavin.gaia.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:00:12 GMT

Chris-
Thi

Re: Hello and I think I'm in the funnel

http://jennifersavin.gaia.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:00:03 GMT

Chris-
Thi

Episode 002 is UP: Five Minute Meditation on a rock

http://blacksamba.gaia.com — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:00:52 GMT

Episode 002 - the 12-Step Buddhist Podcast: 5 Min. Meditation of the Rock, Who is An Addict?

Website: http://the12stepbuddhist.com

Also in iTunes!

Format: 160kbps MP3

Time: 32:11

Highlights:

* Five Minute Meditation: of the rock

* Thanks to jazz pianist Clay Giberson for the show intro

* Darren's background 10-0-10

* Definition of addiction, abstinence in different programs

* Website features: How Many Buddhas?

* Ask the 12-Step Buddhist - audience question: How to do 12-Step recovery as an agnostic in a mostly Christian town

* Daily Meditation SMS program - Sign up for 12-Step Buddhist inspirational text messages

* Recitation from the Sutra of Golden Light, per Lama Zopa Rinpoche

New blog by the 12-Step Buddhist

http://blacksamba.gaia.com — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:39:27 GMT

Getting Naked with the Guru. Excerpt below. Get the full article here:

http://the12stepbuddhist.com

"As a 12-Stepper in the early 80’s, I was even convinced that there was a guy in a mansion somewhere who collected all the dollar bills we put into the baskets at meetings. It was probably ten years before I felt comfortable adding money when the baskets were passed. So if you said “Guru,” I said “Bullshit!” So back in 2005 when my sponsor said, “Dude, you need to find a guru,” I said, “Uh, what the “F” are you talking about, man?”

Re: The Funnel

http://brucegodden.gaia.com — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:13:45 GMT

Hi Friends,

I just recently joined Gaia, and just joined the 12step pod tonight. I have 18-1/2 years clean and sober. I just narrowly escaped "the funnel" with my life, and not much more than that. I've got a 5 yr. medallion and a 15 yr. medallion. Let me tell you, the intervening 4-1/2 years without drinking, drugging or recovery were way more painful than the last years of my active addictions. Now I get the real significance of what is meant when they read the words, "Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after (emphasis added!) make clear three pertinent ideas: (a) That we were alcoholics, and could not manage our own lives....(emphasis and re-emphasis added!).

Thank God, I'm now out of the management business....

With Gratitude that You are All here,

Bruce

Re: The Funnel

http://brucegodden.gaia.com — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:10:30 GMT

Ask the 12 Step Buddhist

http://blacksamba.gaia.com — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:37:11 GMT

got a question about Buddhism and addiction/recovery?
ask the 12 Step Buddhist!
http://ask.12stepbuddhist.com

Ask the 12 Step Buddhist

http://blacksamba.gaia.com — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:34:33 GMT

got a question about Buddhism and addiction/recovery?
ask the 12 Step Buddhist!
http://ask.12stepbuddhist.com

Sober Circle Online Community

http://blacksamba.gaia.com — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:39:18 GMT

http://www.sobercircle.com/index.asp?node=profile&memberid=21405

Hey Sober people. Come over to Sober Circle and join me with 19,000 other recovering people. It's a nice online community and I think is more active than these Zaadz pods.

-d

My friend Foster...

http://wvClifton.gaia.com — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:17:55 GMT

I think it's time I commented about my recent reinvolvment in the life of a certain boyhood friend, Foster. I was recently summoned to his bedside in a local hospital as he was stricken with kidney failure and a malignant mass in his chest, which has spread into his bones as well. Things did not look good for him; family and friends gathered around.

The kidney issue has been contained and he has been released to receive treatment for the cancer on an outpatient basis. He will soon move out of the area.

I have very mixed feelings about it. This is a person I was friends with all the way through grade school, junior high and high school and into a couple semesters of college, at which point I broke off most of my relationships because they were almost exclusively based on our shared passion for recreational drug use. Those with whom I was most regularly associated apparently never broke their stride--it apparently meant nothing to them that I found it necessary to be hospitalized and sent to residential treatment for over 60 days and could no longer be around them on any sort of ongoing basis. It was no reflection on them and their behavior, it didn't imply anything, it didn't mean they had to do anything...which is to say I thought it should have. And I guess this is still the sticking point for me today: why should I have been the only one out of the whole lot of them that did? This is not something that's had a lot of free rent in my head over the intervening 26 years I've been clean and sober--i've just been to busy doing what I had to do-- but I guess it's coming up now that I've been in regular contact with Foster again recently.

Fast forward about 18 years to our 20-year high school reunion, now about seven years ago: it's not like I haven't had any contact with Fos at all--we've chatted here and there over the years, but he shows up at one of the class get-togethers and I am utterly shocked at his appearance and behavior. He comes in stoned shitless, mumbling the same jibberish we used to back when we were getting high in seventh grade (which is about the year I started using).

I tell you it was like seeing a ghost. And it was exactly same M.O., too: all this laughing at jokes that no one else but his stoner buddies understood, and them ducking back out again to smoke more weed in his friend's Trans Am. What's more, he has failed to establish a family or career, wandering from one entry-level job to another, was kicked out of the Navy's nuclear engineering school for failing a piss test and periodically has to rely on the the help of family to support himself. He persists in getting high, year after year, day in and day out, making horrible choices in friends and associates.

And yet he makes no connection between his misfortunes and his drug use.

I guess the long and the short of it is, he can, so he does.

I can't, so I don't.

But it's hard to watch this drama unfold with the cancer and everything and not wonder whether it could have all been avoided.

And it's even harder to listen to him now, prattling on as he always has, lapsing back into the same naivete, apparently still unready to take the life he has been given seriously. He'll be back on the bong in no time (prove me wrong, Foster).

I don't lean on him on this matter or even bring it up in any direct way. If recovery-talk leaks out in passing conversation it's because that's who I am (or more accurately, who I have been), not because I'm on any sort of 12-mission to save him. But he said something to me in a phone conversation subsequent to our first visit about "agreeing with" the "N.A. philosophy." Dear God!! He has NO idea what it would take to turn things around at this point. This isn't a parlor game. Saving your life doesn't hinge on assenting to certain intellectual propositions.

I used to think, early, early on in recovery, "Don't worry about your old using friends, their disease will catch up to them someday, the disease will take of them if they don't surrender to it"--and I'd imagine that, "Yeah, won't that be gratifying to know that I've taken the right path," and look forward to some grand day of reckoning with smug self-righteousness. Now, as in fact the effect of years of the using lifestyle begin to take their toll on some of my peers, I'm not finding that is the case, at all. It's long, drawn out, and tedious. And what's more I have to stand by in silence and not scream at the top of my lungs that all this was preventable if you'd have just fucking listened...and pretend that I'm like everyone else, clueless, thinking "Awww, gee, what a terrible tragedy, I don't understand how this could have happened," when in fact I saw it 26 years coming...

Re: Goodbye

http://wvClifton.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:45:07 GMT

I'm still waiting on that monster relapse I was told would surely follow if I quit going to meetings...it must have gotten lost in the mail or something...

But not only have I commited the unforgivable sin of not going to meetings, I'm told I also had <gasp!> resentments when I left! How that is different from having resentments and staying was never explained to me...

What some people can't seem to get their head around is that people are not machines; they don't always conform to the script that we write for them in our heads.

Re: Goodbye

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:54:36 GMT

I quit going to meetings when I entered a monastery. I could have, but decided not to because I didn't want to appear special. I still worked the steps however, by myself, because the steps are tools for spirituality, and sanity. Basically, inventory, prayer and meditation are a long term recipie for spiritual growth. I 100% believe that spiritual growth is the point.

After leaving the monastery, I did not go to meetings for another year because I was too busy, and I didn't need them. But after a year, I got a good day job and had time for meetings. I enjoyed seeing my old friends and I enjoyed listening to new comers stories. Then, three years ago, I moved to the country. Now I go to one meeting a week and drive 45 miles to get there.

I go because I see the fellowship as a spiritual entity. Bill explains this in Language of the Heart. I have a need to belong to a spiritual entity, and church doesn't do that for me. I leave the meeting and don't think about AA again except to figure out my schedule for the following week.

I don't help new comers because the page I live on is too far from where they are at (always has been). Spirituality is my whole life. Any spirituality includes ego deflation; and a deflated ego will stay sober.

Many people quit going to meetings, but they also have no spiritual focus for their life. They stop taking inventory and the ego grows back. Of course they drink again.

I do believe in being responsible for the hand of AA; and this is another reason for my weekly committment.

Re: The Funnel

http://wvClifton.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:13:23 GMT

hey, yo, samba, i'll put you down as yet another person who does not understand. oh well, you've got a lot of company! thanks for sharing.

i liked what you said about newcomers, though...it can be draining to persist in the face of such utter hopelessness...i suppose some grizzled old timers would attribute a lot of that to the 12-step fellowships' oh-so-cozy relationship (acknowledged or not) with treatment centers and also the court systems "sentencing" people to meeting attendance. i imagine back in the old days membership was a little more exclusive, in that they probably checked you out for your sincerity and desire before trying to 12 step you. In fact, it is my understanding that the Third Tradition originally was worded "The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking."

The Funnel

http://blacksamba.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 18:51:01 GMT

Hey y'all. I've been watching the thread on Goodbye 12 Steps with great interest. I'm coming up on my second 10 year anniversary on December 4th. I relapsed with 10 years of sobriety, in 1994. It wasn't as simple as not going to meetings anymore. I felt dead in the program, and crazy in my head. And then I disconnected. And then I relapsed.

It was a jouney into hell, the likes of which I had not even dreamed. Since returning, I work very hard on trying to help others avoid that hell. I mostly focus on people with long term sobriety, but occasionally I waste my time on newcomers, who rarely listen and more rarely stay sober. But the ones with time who outgrow the steps are the ones I try to speak to.

I just met three guys who used to have 10 years. One has a few weeks. Another has two years, and another has four. In my experience, almost none of the ones who relapse with time will be able to stay sober. I only think I do so because I work my ass off on a multi-faceted recovery program which includes regular psychotherapy - five years with the same doctor, medication when necessary, regular, consistent meeting attendance - I come early, stay late and CONNECT with addicts, focusing on what I can add TO rather than what I can take FROM the meeting, and I practice intensive involvement with the Buddhadharma with a number of high Tibetan lamas, a Zen teacher and other groups of practitioners. I also participate in community volunteer projects as part of my recovery. Most recently, I started 12 Step Sangha: Meditation for Recovering People.

None of these individual activities are enough for me, in and of themselves. Treatment needs to be flexible and able to change to meet the needs of the addict. That said, an indispensable component of recovery is the 12 Steps in general, and Step 12 in particular. Because contact with other alcoholics is absolutely essential. No one who is not an alcohoilc/addict can possibly ever get what it means to be one. Ever. Period. They don't get it and they won't get it. But in the 12 Step community, EVERYONE gets at least that. We all know the disease.

So refusing to continue in 12 Steps is the kiss of death. Thinking that you've graduated, are too advanced to help people, are too bored with the same old stories, all of this is total bullshit. It's the disease talking. The disease is what's saying goodbye. I know two people who just relapsed. One with 23 years, one with a few years. They both have the same disease. It doesn't go anywhere because things look good on the outside, material posessions return, self-knowledge is gained or for any other fucking reason. I'm like a man with no legs, I will never grow new ones.

So if you want to stop going to meetings because you're just too advanced, too busy, too smart, too successful or because you've fallen victim to the delusion that somehow, someday you will control and enjoy your disease - well you're walking INTO, not up to but INTO the gates of insanity and death. Unfortunately, none of us can pull you back. The nature of the disease is that we are beyond human aid.

I hope you find a power greater than your ego that will solve your problem. Otherwise, make sure your family knows what your favorite song is, so they can play it at your funeral.

-d

Re: Goodbye

http://wvClifton.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 18:30:28 GMT

I notice I'm now taking more notice of all the other things I do and accomplish now that I'm not going to meetings. Apparently, meeting attendance was a way of staying unconscious of several other things I undetake during a week . For instance, one night this week I gott all my laundry caught up. I watched Ken Burns' THE WAR on PBS and it was quite good. Another thing: I've been more thoughtful about things I do generally, like my guitar playing...I can segue into it...I'm taking more notice of my surroundings, I'm not as rushed...home is not just a place to hurry up and leave out of...

I think I went to meetings the way I used, to keep me from something, perhaps to keep me from being me, because that was not a good thing, it was not enough, not enough for me just to exist...ever notice, looking back over your using, how exquisitely more miserable it got for you as the years went by when you weren't fucked up? God damn I hated it! That part of the disease came very early for me...I even remember taking stabs at not using, to no avail...having tasted the relief available to me by getting loaded there was a gaping hole in me that NOTHING else could ever fill, and that I could not ignore...I could not not-know that it was there and what I could do about it...and I could handle it! And handle it, I did, until I could handle it no more...until it was handling me, then it was throttling me, then it threatened to kill me...it has that momentum...it has a better program than I do, and I respect that...

Yes, I think that's it...subconsciously, that's what has been going on.

That's the source of unending misery, the insatiable, incessant, compulsive need for entertainment, gratification, stimulation, distraction: being is not enough. Being me is not enough. It must be adorned, dressed up, added to...qualified, explained, rationalized...something, something, something...

Re: Goodbye can be a good thing

http://synerjyz.gaia.com — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 12:41:21 GMT

Hello Clifton. I was attracted and engaged by the honesty and bravery that shines from this thread. I have traveled a long and twisting road in and out of the halls of 12 step recovery. I credit the program with saving my spiritual and physical butt when it needed saving the most (many years ago). It was the perfect path for me to follow, leading me through the legacy of pain handed down through my family’s consciousness and right out the other side. While living inside the principles and community of the 12 step program I raised two children –neither of them practice drug or alcohol addiction. My gratitude for breaking the cycle for them is abundant to say the least.

Several years ago, I made this same decision to say goodbye and for many of the exact reasons you mentioned here. According to the wisdom of the old timers and book thumpers, this decision was a free pass for addiction to rule my life with destruction once again and they bid me farewell with those knowing-it-all, shit eating grins that said “she’ll be back if she doesn’t die first”. My spirituality had grown so strong and open over the years that I genuinely smiled back with a blessing instead of judgment or fear. They were being exactly who they had decided to be and were genuinely concerned for my well being based on what they believed – what they believed about addiction, about themselves, the program and about me. But I no longer believed in the same small & limiting me I had created and shared with them over the years

I had indeed transformed from the unconscious grateful dead of my addictive destruction into a fully conscious co-creator of my own destiny. As far I was concerned, I had grown up and into myself. My gratitude for healing inside this nurturing community is abundant to say the least.

When I decided to follow my own beliefs, my own still small voice inside, which no longer resonated with these limiting and fear-based thoughts and beliefs, it was an act of bravery, faith and surrender much like the one that had started my recovery. I knew what I believed and what they believed but none of us knew what would actually happen.
Fortunately for me, addiction did not return to the seat of power and my life continues to move toward the light. That was about 8 years ago. I miss belonging to the fellowship very much from time to time – there is such a tight sense of belonging! - not often found elsewhere. But I do not miss the digging through layers of misery and pain in conversation after conversation as if the miracle of our free life is somehow buried there.

My life is far from pain free. In fact, the pain of grief and fear has often been at the seat of power in my life over the past 8 years. I still use the steps, and other techniques, to de-thorn unhealthy powers from my consciousness and for that I am abundantly grateful!

May you continue to follow the path that is paved with your blessings and miracles and may that path lead to the Great You! Nametse’
Syn

Re: Goodbye

http://mqs.gaia.com — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 23:29:30 GMT

Clifton, You are coming through pretty clearly here Clifton. I am out of time for the day and will think some more about this conversation as it is sponsoring thoughts/insights that have been labile for some time and I am deeply grateful for that. I would like to talk to you and plan to do so some time this coming week. For now, I would suggest that we keep going here from time to time so that others can follow this discussion and perhaps chime in with their own considerations. I, too, have lived with the sense of emergent "defeat" (not the right word, but close) that comes from listening to the "bullshit." Still, I have to remember that for years, and still to some extent, that I am one of the bullshitters. I am working on an attitude that will allow me to listen without being triggered in the old way, listen, and when I feel the call to reaction, just wait and observe my own-self doubt and the fear that accompanies it as they arise. I suspect that exactly what I am prone to criticize in others lies yet undiscovered in my own shadows. More soon, lovin' this. yer pal, Michael

Re: Goodbye

http://wvClifton.gaia.com — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:36:27 GMT

michael, thank you for such earnest and sincere sharing.

one thing that seems to be important to my story relative to where i am now is the fact that i got clean SO young, followed ALL the suggestions, and have never really veered from the path. so? so, i don't have any other life or way of life to compare it to, or to contrast it with. my using was entirely during my adolescence. i never really grew into adulthood to have anything to lose. when people would share about "getting back," or getting things "back," i had never really lost anything like that so i couldn't relate.

now, i have lost things while clean, but that doesn't really fit the recovery narrative, does it? people can't relate. and since for 90% of everyone in our membership recovery is a short-term thng--that is, they never stack up enough years, or decades, to really experience the seasons of life--i have grown increasingly irrelevant to them, and they to me. i see this thing developing in members, where the bloom comes off the rose for them, the romance is gone, and they feel they have surely done or are doing something "wrong" relative to "working the program," they get discouraged and return to using. and little wonder, since they've been indoctrinated into believing that they ARE addicts, they ARE alcoholics, and that's what addicts and alcoholics DO. they act as if there is no other alternative....when all along what they were experiencing was merely LIFE, shit that happens to EVERYONE if you live long enough--tragedies, loss, bewilderment, the loss of innocence, etc.

people like to talk about having pink clouds when they first come around in the context of the first several months--i say, how about the first several years. because you see, you can put on the mantle of having lots of time and use that to shore up your identity and your delusions as well, e.g., "i am this," "i am that," therefore, "i am special"...these are dangerous things to need.

it's time, time for me to surrender the delusions of youth, become a member of the human race, just like everybody else, bereft of my specialness, my unique status, my narcissism that's turned from being a castle into a prison. i'm telling you, i get really, really sick around those people in the fellowship, they pull me down, down into a place i no longer need to be--as the old saying goes, they will get me sick before i will get them well...