Conscious Contact

Anonymous

When I worked step eleven in SLAA, my sponsor didn’t have any specific exercises for me to complete, as he had for previous steps. Instead, he said, “Just increase your conscious contact.” 

So, for me, I worked on increasing the regularity of my prayers. I struggle with meditation generally, as my mind can’t seem to focus on anything, including my breath, without getting very distracted very quickly. Today, my relationship with both conscious contact and with my Higher Power is continuing to evolve.

With prayer, I used to say certain prayers when I’d notice myself feeling anxiety, fear, and a lack of serenity. I tried to say the Serenity Prayer, the third and seventh step prayers, and others where I noticed that they were immediately useful.

And to be honest, I still do that. When I’m in a car or bus and I notice the potential for a collision, it’s become more automatic for me to pray the Serenity Prayer in the moment. That feels like progress, like I’m connecting more with my HP.

But a sponsor in a different fellowship is helping me rethink my connection to and conscious contact with a Higher Power, including for SLAA. They’re asking me to call them every day with an account of how I’ve connected with my Higher Power that day and what the results were, if there were any. This means that every day, I am being asked to talk to my Higher Power directly about what I have going on that day and notice if anything occurs.

This is something I have started very recently, but it is helping me realize how I can better achieve and maintain conscious contact with my Higher Power, which I also think of as whatever helps me achieve a Higher Purpose. In my sex and love addiction, when I feel like doing some “gray area” behavior that could lead to acting out, sometimes I talk to my Higher Power and ask Them to help me abstain for that moment and move on to some other, healthy activity.

And trying that approach recently, it has been helpful. Like a fish in water, I tend to forget how much I get stuck in my own head until I am reminded to check in with my HP, often in meetings or in step work, daily check-ins, and occasional outreach calls. I often hear something I’m struggling with from the mouth of someone else, and that’s another way I can experience conscious contact—it’s like my HP is reminding me of my own issues in this disease and about how important it is to listen and get out of my self-centeredness.

But meditation is still a struggle. I’m noticing when I get caught up in my head with resentments, it helps to focus on deeply inhaling and exhaling. That can be a form of meditation, and it may be a way for me to finally, after eight years in SLAA, “understand” how to meditate. Of course, I’m not supposed to rationally “understand” meditation—I’m sure if I just do it, I will see changes in my life and my ability to match calamity with serenity.

One approach is to write as a form of meditation, stream-of-consciousness. I’ve tried doing that first thing in the morning, and it has helped me when I have worked on it. Right now, though, I am resistant, but maybe I can use vacation during the holidays to get back in the routine of such meditation. It helped clarify and lessen resentments and other things I was struggling with.

Another area where I’m seeking out conscious contact in terms of step work is through step ten, continuing to admit when I am wrong and make amends as needed. This year has been an ongoing lesson in step ten and how resentments can crop up after working step nine—amends don’t “cure” anything, but they can certainly help lessen resentments.

For me, continually working step ten has not involved daily inventories, as it does for many, but it has involved realizing more intuitively, including by connecting with my emotions and with my HP, when I am wrong, when I need to make amends, and when I need to ask for help.

By achieving conscious contact, however imperfectly, my Program improves and hopefully I am more useful to others in the process, as well as useful to my HP.

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Which came first…the consciousness or the contact? 

This age old existential dilemma really sums up my experience in recovery. If you had asked me this question the first few times I tried to work the program and even early in my current one, I would have said it was the consciousness. I was obsessed with consciousness. I couldn’t get past this idea that I had to “make it work.” That if I wasn’t feeling the contact, it was my fault. I wasn’t “doing it right.” I only found the right action, the right way, the right definition of God to pray to…but the trouble was nothing felt right. Or more accurately, everything felt wrong. And of course it did. Because everything I tried either came wholesale from someone else, and was never my truth in the first place, came directly from me, a person I didn’t know, trust or respect, or came from others who saw truths I couldn’t bear to face yet.

Looking back, I realize that in these times, I was mistaking conscious with all its less gentle, more punishing synonyms…intentional, deliberate, effortful, controlling…and the harder I tried, the less it “worked.” It’s a trap I can still fall into sometimes, particularly when I’m afraid. But what’s changed is that I hit bottom and had a totally new experience with my Higher Power. Being in that place of hurt and desperation and fatigue and yearning, I just couldn’t “try” anymore, and amazingly, I found I didn’t have to! When I stopped working so hard to find a Higher Power to listen to, I discovered I could hear it’s voice all around me. I could face the truths others saw and feel their compassion when I did, I could borrow wisdom from them when it made sense to me, and I have a voice in my head that’s always encouraging me toward kindness, forgiveness, honesty and courage. 

I still take deliberate actions, but now they come from a place that’s guided by that contact. So if you asked me that question today, I’d say it’s the contact before the consciousness. I have no idea why my Higher Power chose that particular moment in my life to have me hit bottom and it feels like I had so little control over being able to be aware of My Higher Power until all of a sudden I could. But I do know the shift is real and I feel really grateful for the peace that’s come of it so far and hopeful for what lies ahead. 

Jayne K.

My SLAA Recovery

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In my life I took to accommodating myself for the imagined pleasure of other people, both good people and bad people. This was a vexing character defect for me. And it contributed greatly to my long delay in getting a sponsor in my early years in the program, as I will show.

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To elaborate on this character defect (I call it my “follower’s flaw”), I attempted at every turn to assuage mean-tempered teasing and bullying. I was driven by a self-destructive fixation to please precisely the person with the most exceptional brute strength, or the most thunderous voice, or the most quickly-lit temper.

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A word about my time in the program. I first went to an SLAA meeting over 20 years ago. Still, as I alluded to earlier, I choose not to count my first years in the program as time in recovery for the simple fact that in all that time I never once asked for a sponsor. What recovery I may have claimed in those years I now consider null and void inasmuch as I never shared my bottom lines with anyone. I heard at meetings, but rejected just the same, what was said to newcomers: “essential to our recovery. . . is finding a sponsor as soon as possible to help us begin working the steps.” My addled thinking had convinced me that the more time that passed, the less I needed to follow the advice to seek out a sponsor.

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The reality of the situation was that, as a matter of fact, I was “later to join” the program than the newest newcomer!

Yet this inauspicious start did finally turn the corner. I made a serious Second and Third Step and began Step Four under the guidance of a sponsor. Now through my working of the rest of the steps I am living a happy, joyous, and free life. I am under the tutelage of God. Now God frequently teaches me lessons through my sponsor.

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My Step Three turning over also rewarded me. By God’s loving will I have three years and three months sober from my bottom-line addiction to internet pornography. Every day, too, I have the opportunity to maintain a fit spiritual condition. This affords me a victory over my anorexia.

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Yet for any of this miracle to even begin to take place, I first had to work Step Seven and humbly ask God to remove the aforementioned “follower’s flaw.” I had to rid myself—with God’s help—of my destructive habit to follow after and please others. Indeed, my sponsor helped me get quicker to the 7th Step when he refused (with every fiber of his being!) to ascend the throne I built for him.

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With the completion of Step Seven, I am free to say no to my sponsor when it seems right. I discovered that I don’t need to satisfy, less do I need to know, every whim of my sponsor. I practice how to say no to my sponsor and I can say no to most anyone when the situation calls for it.

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In this flash of insight in Step Seven to love myself and live honestly with my sponsor, I discovered that God alone is my Power, My Love and My Way of Life. God alone is my Leader. I follow him.

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-David Sc.