The Wisdom To Know The Difference Part 2

The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry that I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was gra.s.sy and wanted wear Though as for that the pa.s.sing there Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads onto way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost, 1920).

And you, my friend: in this very moment, what paths lie before you? And which will you take on this day?

The Two Paths Meditation: Pausing at the Junction of Two Paths in the Woods.

Let us stop for just a moment here and imagine that your life is like that walk in the woods described by Frost. Could it be that we are truly always at that junction-at every single moment of our lives? Could it be that we could stop at any moment and see different paths we might take? If we could pause as a choice as we moved through our day, what an a.s.set that would be!

So now,

Right now,

Right at this very moment,

Let us stop

And practice stopping,

And seeing,

In hope that this practice will serve us in the days to come.

Let us stop together for a moment and let ourselves see the paths that lie before us. Set a timer for five minutes. Allow yourself to settle into a comfortable seated posture. Allow your eyes to go gently closed or your focus to soften. Take Six Breaths on Purpose and just let go of everything. Make a friend of your own breath. Notice its gentle rise and fall through five or six cycles. Notice the temperature of the breath and the sensations in the body as the chest and belly rise and fall. Practice taking good deep breaths, filling your lungs slowly and completely and emptying them slowly and completely, and, with each, letting your breath become your friend. Let your breath become a place you can come to stillness. Imagine that your breath could offer you the gift of stillness.

After settling into your breath, imagine that you stand at a point where two paths separate before you. Let yourself see the paths, and let yourself be uncertain about where the paths lead. Let yourself wonder. Imagine that you could lean forward slightly so that you were at the point of tipping toward one path or the other. If you find yourself being certain about which path, see if you can let go of that certainty for just a few minutes and allow yourself to stay inside the question, to stay inside the uncertainty.

Making Friends with Uncertainty.

Why make friends with uncertainty? What if uncertainty and possibility live in the same house? What if the price of possibility is making friends with uncertainty? It is hard to take, but it seems to be the case. If you look around at the things you care most about in life, you will find uncertainty. How will this marriage go? How will having children go? How will this career choice go? All contain a lot of uncertainty. Making friends with uncertainty means that you get to go places that are unknown to you. If you are entirely satisfied with where life has taken you, this matters little. But if you have a longing for more, come along.

Missing Things.

We could ask the question in only one way-"How has life been going?"-but there is a problem with asking in that way. We remember some things, but not others. Think about your own childhood. If you are like most of us, you remember bits and pieces, snapshots, a select number of particularly good times, and perhaps particularly bad. But remembering the fifth year of your life will not be like replaying the fifth song on your favorite CD.

Sometimes memory selects in a negative way-all we can see is what is wrong. Sometimes it selects in a positive way-big problems lurk all around us unnoticed. Later we may say to ourselves: How did I miss that?! Here is how: you are human. It is simply part of the human condition to miss things. Missing things is not a bad thing, except when it is.

Stopping to Smell the Roses.

There are a thousand stories, songs, and poems that remind us to stop and smell the roses. If missing things were not so common, there would not be so many songs and poems.

Sometimes we miss things because we move by them too quickly or move by them looking from a particular vantage point. Think of a place you have driven many times. If I asked you what was along the way, you would not be able to tell me every stone, stick, and pebble along the way. There is no need to. You need to know where the gas stations and the grocery store are, and you might also know some things that matter little. However, you could stop anywhere along that road, sit down, look, listen, and smell, and you would see, hear, and smell things you have never known-even though you had pa.s.sed that spot a hundred times.

Try it in your own house. What we are about to ask you to do is weird, but humor us.

Seeing What's There.

Part 1: Get up and walk from wherever you are reading to a bedroom or some other room. When you come back, go to the bottom of page 35 in this book and follow the instructions.

Part 2: Start walking from your living room to your bedroom again. Count to five and then, wherever you happen to be, stop. Lie down on the floor on your side. (We warned you that we were going to ask you to do weird things.) Let your head come to rest on the floor. Allow yourself to relax and just open up all your senses. Let your eyes go closed and just listen for the smallest sounds. Notice temperature. Notice smells. Let your eyes come gently open and look around. Again, take in the details. Just allow yourself to get quiet, relax, and take it in.

See: Start by looking around from that perspective. Spend a couple of minutes. Be patient. Notice, especially, color, light, and detail. I just tried this and I noticed the bathroom door is slightly lower on the hinge side. There are several small cracks in the baseboard. There are small aluminum hinges on the bottom of the furnace air return. I could see a huge variety of colors in the hardwood floor-reds, browns, yellows, in very soft subtle shades.

Hear: I listened and the main sound was the furnace running. It started out sounding like one sound but as I listened for a minute, within that sound there was a sort of cycling from higher to lower sounds. There were little ticking sounds in there. If I listened carefully, I could barely hear the sound of the refrigerator running in the other room.

Feel: I could feel the cool of the floor on my cheek. I could feel the grain in the hardwood floor. I could reach out and feel the texture of the paint on the wall. As I got quiet and settled in, I started to notice the feel of different parts of my body that touched and did not touch the floor.

Smell: There was a cool wood smell.

If you do this you may see, hear, feel, and smell things that you never noticed before. The reason is the pace. You would have noticed different things if I had asked you to walk briskly down the hall.

Try this same exercise other places in your life. You do not have to lie on the floor to do the exercise. You can do this noticing anywhere. Stop and stand on a street corner and try the same thing. Stop in the cafeteria at work. Try it riding on the bus to work. Lie down in the gra.s.s at the park. Practice coming to stillness and noticing. Grow your stillness muscle.

Let's keep going with the inventory idea we started earlier in the chapter. Now you won't be reflecting on areas of your life. Instead, you'll be recalling and writing down a history of your alcohol and drug use. As you do this piece of work, we invite you to pause every so often and do the Two Paths Meditation. Let your eyes go closed. Settle into an appreciation of your own breath. See the paths. Let yourself come to stillness in the midst of wondering where the paths might take you. Then open your eyes again and go gently back to the inventory. Let the inventory itself be a sort of meditation.

Right now, we are not problem solving. We are surveying. Problem solving will be for later. You may come up with a lot of self-talk about how to solve the problems you see or how impossible they are. For now, we'll ask that you let go of problem solving. For now, we'll ask you to let go of conversations about what's possible and impossible. We'll rejoin those conversations later-we promise. If you find your head filled with words like always, never, must, can't, should, shouldn't, possible, or impossible, it's time for a break and a few minutes with the Two Paths Meditation or Six Breaths on Purpose.

Practicing Our Way to the Gift of Stillness-Part 3.

In a notebook, for any of the substances mentioned below that apply, write down:

The age you started using.

How long you used.

The frequency of use (in times per week, month, or whatnot) How you used the substance (smoked, drank, ate, injected, and so forth)

Include a section for each category and an entry for each of the following substances that you've used:

Alcohol.

Marijuana.

Hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms, peyote, and so forth) Depressants (Xanax, valium, barbiturates, and so forth) Stimulants (speed, cocaine, ecstasy, ephedrine, and so forth) Inhalants (glue, gasoline, aerosol propellants, and so forth) Opiates (heroin, Vicodin, codeine, Oxycontin, Percodan, and so forth)

Begin with the first time you remember using any mood-altering substance, no matter how little of the substance you used. It is important that you be painstakingly thorough in this task. You can use a format like the one in the sample below or just write a description of your age and usage pattern.

This may well seem like a long and difficult task. For many of us it is. It really is doable though. Just pick a substance and work your way through from first use to present. Take your time. If you find yourself unable to remember for one substance or time period, switch to another and work on that for a while. Sometimes working on another area will help you remember more about the one you are having trouble with. If, in the end, you find that you simply cannot remember for certain substances or time periods, make your best estimate. Remember, pause frequently and use Six Breaths on Purpose or the Two Paths Meditation. The inventory is about learning to pause, so pause.

Practicing Our Way to the Gift of Stillness-Part 4.

Okay, ready for part 4? This section should be done after you've done the first three parts. Write down any problems or changes in your life that were a.s.sociated with using alcohol or drugs in each of the listed areas. In some ways this is a slightly harder look than the look we made at these areas in part 1. In part 1, we were just looking for general ways you might have been less than fully present. For a lot of us, drugs and alcohol were an important way to check out. If that is true, there are likely to have been consequences. Those consequences are what you're going to reflect on in part 4.

Appreciating in Sadness Certain Consequences and Turning Points.

Sometimes consequences do not seem that bad at the time, but they signal later s.h.i.+fts that were more important. For example, I had a best friend in school from about the fourth grade up into high school. My first recollection of Sonny was on the playground. I was small for my age and nerdy-with big black gla.s.ses. Sonny was a big athletic kid with a huge heart. He was sort of a protector for me all through elementary and middle school. He was my best friend.

When I was about fifteen years old and had begun smoking pot, Sonny confronted me one night about my having offered his girlfriend some pot. He warned me to stay away from him and from her. I think I could see the sadness of that in his eyes at the time, just the other side of the warning. That night, I shrugged it off. They were square and I was....er, well, I guess I thought I was pretty cool. I recall telling the story to my pals in a way that made him seem unhip and me very cool and collected. In retrospect, there was a s.h.i.+ft under way. I was s.h.i.+fting away from the people I had grown up with and in the direction of a crowd that was drinking and getting high. The deed was not done on the night Sonny warned me off, but that event remains in memory, and it saddens me.

I think there was considerable pain for Sonny, saying goodbye to his best pal. And me, I treated it as if it were something to be laughed off. It was a single friend lost, but it marked a much larger s.h.i.+ft in my life. And to you, my old friend Sonny, my friend in whose presence I was always safe: I feel sad and sorry that I treated our friends.h.i.+p in such a careless way.

If there were no consequences, write none. However, we would encourage you to list consequences even though they may have been small. For example, you may not have been fired from a job, but you may have gone to work with a hangover and been less effective as a result. This need not have been ineffectiveness that others noticed. What is important is your own sense of this. Number each section and keep the twelve areas separate from each other as much as possible. What we're looking for here is any cost of using. It is absolutely okay to be repet.i.tive. In fact, repet.i.tion is quite common and worth noticing. Pay special attention to places where, as result of drinking or using (or drug seeking), you did things that violate your personal values (concealing, rationalizing, being secretive, being violent, etc.). The inventory does not need to be exhaustive. Who could remember everything? And, why? Instead just give a few very specific examples in each section. Here are the areas again.

Family (other than your spouse or partner and your children) Marriage and intimate relations.h.i.+ps Parenting Friends / social life Work Education and learning Recreation and fun Spirituality Community life Physical care, exercise, sleep, nutrition The environment and nature Art, music, literature, and beauty *

From Not Now to...What Comes Next Relating the Gift of Stillness in ACT to AA

You will find lots of places where practicing stillness will serve you in AA. Some of the obvious places are where the program suggests prayer and meditation. Prayer and meditation are in the eleventh step, which calls for prayer and meditation and a regular practice of taking time from your day to become aware of your life direction. Many in AA use a book like As Bill Sees It or Daily Reflections. You could also choose something from a spiritual or philosophical tradition that resonates with you, like the Bible or the Dao De Jing. Just as stopping to stretch can be a good way to begin exercise, taking a few minutes in stillness after reading a short recovery-relevant or spiritual pa.s.sage can be a great way to begin the day. You do not have to wait for the eleventh step to begin this practice. Today would be a good day to start. Sometimes the business of the day carries us off without our getting centered and reflecting on our intentions for the day. We invite you to take time now for reflection and stillness and setting of an intention for this day.

Equally critical is learning to practice stillness in the midst of a storm. The inventories in this chapter link up very closely with several of the 12 steps. The first step involves an admission of the true costs of drinking and using. The fourth-step inventory looks more systematically at these costs. In the AA Big Book (as the book Alcoholics Anonymous [2008] is popularly known), it is called a fearless and searching moral inventory, which sounds pretty menacing. But really, it is just a stock-taking. The inventories are not intended as yet another opportunity for beating yourself up. If taking a beating was all that was needed to "cure" alcoholism and addiction and the bad behavior that often accompany them, there would not be any addicts or alcoholics. Heaven knows you have likely taken a lot of beatings on your way to this book-probably many delivered from you to you. This is why in these inventories, you can focus on stillness and the inclined heart. We believe that to be the intention of the first, fourth, and ninth steps, which involve careful self-examination. Here is how they put it in AA's 12 & 12 (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions [1981]): "There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit. But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakeable foundation for life." (12 & 12, 98). This is exactly what we are trying to accomplish in the inventories in this and other chapters of this book.

Really, the idea of pausing and coming to stillness within significant questions can be found throughout the steps. You might ask yourself in the midst of the second step: Might I come to believe that a power greater than myself could restore some semblance of good order to my life? In fact, if the word "G.o.d" grates on you, you could follow the practice of those members of AA who call G.o.d "Good Orderly Direction." Some have used the group as a higher power and a source of direction. Some have said G.o.d is good. What if coming to believe simply meant allowing the "good" in your own life to organize what you do with your hours and days? If you are spiritually inclined, you will find many prayers throughout the Big Book. We encourage you to practice stillness, even for just a few moments, in the midst of the various prayers. If you are not so spiritually inclined, consider adding one little "o" to the prayers. Consider the impact of adding a single "o" to the AA third step: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Good as we understood It." The third step is about a regular practice of aligning yourself with some sense of good direction. We will say more about this later, in our chapter on values. Practice at stillness, when stillness is easy and when stillness is hard, will be an a.s.set.

Another place you can practice stillness will be in 12-step meetings. Like everywhere else in the world, if you go to meetings you will hear some real jerks. You are likely to get steamed listening to them. You might want to argue, but there is no crosstalk in 12-step meetings. Each person who speaks generally gets to do so uninterrupted. Since you can't respond out loud, you may be tempted to engage in the argument in your head. And, while you are busy off in your head grinding over the things that person said, you can become so distracted that you lose the rest of the meeting.

We encourage you to practice stillness in these circ.u.mstances. Try Six Breaths on Purpose and bring your intention back to the meeting. There is likely to be at least one jerk in every meeting. Think of it this way: unless you are a saint, one day that one jerk may be you. You may come into a meeting profoundly stirred up, feeling about as unspiritual as is possible. You may say things that you regret, or worse, say things that you do not know enough to regret until years later. And, the way places like AA work, you will not likely get kicked out. You will finish your rant and people will smile and say, "Keep coming back." Practicing stillness in the midst of strong inclinations to react, debate, and evaluate will serve you many places in life. And, while providing the other guy with a tolerant and patient environment, you may be paying rent for the day when it is you that needs the tolerance and patience. This is not to say you should seek this out. We encourage you to find meetings where there are a good number of people who speak in ways that are directly helpful. And, no matter how beloved the meeting, you will hear things that will give you a chance to practice stillness.

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