I see much of what the Big Book describes as ‘causes and conditions’ (BB p.64) of my alcoholism as the inner wounds that keep me from wholeness and healing. In ‘As Bill Sees It #291, we are presented with this possibility of moving from being pain killers to become pain healers. For me, much like a wound that is infected; I have work to do in this cooperative process by cleaning the wound. Yet that cleaning doesn’t explain the healing; it simply opens me up to this miraculous innate desire for healing and wholeness that seems alive within me … an unsuspected inner resource (BB p.567) of healing, wholeness, and perhaps love. We can think of Step 1 as becoming conscious and aware of being lost and powerless without this spiritual center. That we are truly mind, body and spirit … and to deny or distance ourselves from this reality is to deny or distance ourselves from what is both whole and holy within us. And Steps 2 and 3 as our roadmap that culminates in a decision to take actions through Steps 4 thru 9 to experience the ‘new freedom and new happiness’ that comes from this wholeness on the inside … and Steps 10 thru 12 as our efforts to experience the ‘limitless expansion’ offered us from the wholeness of this way of life.
I find these short reflections from a book entitled ‘The Inner Voice Of Love: From Anguish to Freedom’ by Henri Nouwen a prescriptive encouragement to the ‘wholeness’ which is described this way as an important objective of the Twelve Steps …
“A.A.’s Twelve Steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole.(Foreward p.15 Twelve & Twelve) – Bruce M.
With your divinely endowed center, you know God’s will, God’s way, God’s love. But your humanity is cut off from that. Your many human needs for affection, attention, and consolation are living apart from your divine sacred space. Your call is to let these two parts of yourself come together again.
Right now you experience an inner duality; your emotions, passions, and feelings seem separate from your heart. The needs of your body seem separate from your deeper self. Your thoughts and dreams seem separate from your spiritual longing. You are called to unity…When you have found that unity, you will be truly free.
You have to begin to trust that your experience of emptiness is not the final experience, that beyond it is a place where you are being held in love. As long as you do not trust that place beyond your emptiness, you cannot safely re-enter the place of pain. So you have to go into the place of your pain with the knowledge in your heart that you have already found the new place. You have already tasted some of its fruits. The more roots you have in the new place, the more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there. You cannot mourn something that has not died. Still, the old pains, attachments, and desires that once meant so much to you need to be buried. You have to weep over your lost pain so that they can gradually leave you and you can become free to live fully in the new place without melancholy or home sickness.