LIFE IS LIKE THAT

Today’s teaching revolves around the 4th step of the 12-step process of spiritual awakening first delineated in the book Alcoholics Anonymous over 70 years ago. The 4th step of the 12-step process concerns the personal inventory. In this step, we get down to the causes and conditions of the things that have been driving us or in today’s recovery medicine vernacular: triggers. “We are driven by a hundred forms of fear…” pg 62 Alcoholics Anonymous. The purpose behind this step is to finally and forever show that behind every circumstance and condition, every hard feeling and resentment are two constants. First that we bear some responsibility in everything that has transpired in our life, when choice was involved, and second that every bad choice or decision was based in some way on fear, the fear that we would either not receive something we believed we deserved or needed or that we would lose something we had. Relationships: I will never find the right one/what if they leave; Money: I will never have enough/what if I lose what I have; Health: I will never feel good/what if I get sick, etc, etc. Once we identify what has been holding us back and apply spiritual principles to those conditions/symptoms we begin to experience true freedom. “…we learn that by beating the symptoms spiritually (not, of course, covering up symptoms, but beating them) the fear or false suggestion that caused the symptom disappears too, and the patient is free.” Simple but not easy. A price has to be paid, and that price is the surrendering of self.