melind4

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This final Step is comprised of three parts: experiencing a spiritual awakening, carrying the message of deliverance and practicing these principles throughout our lives.
Step Twelve can be understood as embodying the Three Treasures (or Jewels, or Refuges) of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.

The word Buddha literally means “the awakened one.”  And each of us is first of all attending to his or her own awakening. The Dharma is the teaching (the message); and the Sangha is the community of those who practice together or, in a wider interpretation, the community of all living beings—those with whom and for whom we practice the principles of awakening.

In a spiritual awakening we come (back) into contact with our potential for intimate connection with our own lives, with others, with the world. The inherent message in the language of this Step is that this awakening is something which is based on cause and effect. It is not the result of the caprice of a deity who bestows grace upon some and withholds it from others. It is available to anyone willing and able to undertake the necessary work. It can be learned and taught. In this, both Buddhism and the Steps are in agreement.  It is more accurate to say that the Steps themselves are the spiritual awakening.

Read More: Link to Full Article

Dharma of Recovery: Step Eleven

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step Eleven entails a quantum jump from Step Three.  This movement of the heart and mind is a transition from a lower to a higher level of commitment, all the while maintaining its essential identity. It is an elaboration of the initial decision made to turn  our will and life over to a higher power.

In both Steps we are faced with a deliberate choice: to make “a decision” and to carry on a “conscious contact.” Steps Three and Eleven both also contain the idea of surrender: in each we endeavor to subordinate our will. These two poles of will and surrender of will are emblematic of the entirety of the Twelve Step program. Both, though seemingly moving in contradictory directions, are essential and must exist at the same time. These are also found in Buddhist meditation. Whatever the particular style, it always contains two elements—in Sanskrit, samatha and vipassana—calming/concentration and insight.

Read More: Link to Full Article

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Once the disciple Ananda spoke to the Buddha, saying, “It seems to me that half of the holy life is association with good and noble friends.”

The Buddha replied, “Not so, Ananda. The whole of the holy life is association with good and noble friends, with noble practices and with noble ways of living.”

As mentioned in the essay on Step Three, in Buddhism there is no statement of belief, but rather going for refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The refuges are not listed in  descending order of importance; they are all on an equal plane. This makes the community of practitioners as important to individual awakening as the teaching or the teacher. In the same way, we do not recover from our addictions alone, but as sober members of a sober community.

Read More: Link to Full Article

Dharma of Recovery: Steps Six and Seven

Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Steps Six and Seven signal the turning point in our recovery. In the first five Steps we have been concerned mainly with getting and staying sober and establishing a solid foundation in recovery. In Six and Seven we begin preparing ourselves for a life of service. As the Seventh Step prayer says:

“. . . remove from me every single defect of character that stands in the way of my usefulness. . .”

In this prayer we are not asking that the characteristics that are bothersome, irritating or inconvenient to ourselves be removed, but only those which make us less effective in our service to others. We may find such traits as messiness, too great a fondness for sweets or neurotic anxiety about being on time to be personally unpleasant. But they do not necessarily bar us from helping others. In fact, some of the things we like least about ourselves may actually be the very characteristics that make us more effective in working with others. For example: though it may be distressing to always worry about being punctual, it does allow others to have trust that we will be where we say, when we say.

Read More: Link to Full Article

Dharma of Recovery: Step Five

In ancient India, the four quarters of the moon were marked as special days devoted to spiritual practices. During the lifetime of the Buddha, they are the times when the ordained community would preach Dharma to lay people. Eventually these days (sometimes reduced to the full and new moon days) became times for the Sangha of monks to come together to recite the pratimoksha, the rules of training. If a monk had transgressed the guidelines, he would make confession of his fault, receive whatever corrective was considered necessary and the Sangha would be pronounced pure. A version of this ceremony continues in countries which practice the Theravada school of Buddhism (Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, etc.)—the so-called Southern School.

The version of this ceremony that we practice at Zen Center is a collective one. Each person does not confess his or her individual faults, but each of us joins in a general confession of failing to live up to our ideals. The verse chanted goes like this:

All my ancient, twisted karma,
From beginingless greed, hate and delusion,
Born through body, speech and mind,
I now fully avow.

We then go on to renew our vows: taking the three Refuges (in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) and the precepts.

Thus, even in a non-theistic tradition such as Buddhism, the efficacy and necessity of confession is acknowledged.Read More: Link to Full Article

In Step One, we made an initial incursion into reality when we admitted the nature of our relationship to alcohol. We began examining our denial and magical thinking. In Step Four we further map the real geography of our lives beyond that single area (although, as we find, almost all parts of our lives have been affected by alcohol).

As we have been unwilling to confront the nature of our drinking, so most of us have been in denial about cause-and-effect. Although we would argue otherwise, our behavior has been marked by an inability or unwillingness to recognize that we too must suffer or enjoy the consequences of our actions.

Buddhism calls this cause-and-effect karma. The word itself in Sanskrit means “deed.” In Buddhist understanding, it refers to volitional activity, acts that are preceded by will and that have consequences for the actor. These consequences can either be immediate and obvious [If I throw the glass against the wall, it will break.] or accumulative and subtle. The second sort is sometimes described as environmental karma—-actions that create an atmosphere in our lives. For example, if I habitually tell lies, I come to live in a world in which nothing can be accepted as certain, no one can be trusted, I am constantly juggling my different versions of reality and no one else can believe what I say.  If I am violent in word and deed, I attract violence to myself. On the other hand, if I behave in ways which are honorable, reliable and ethical, I attract other such people to myself. Obviously, this is not 100% true 100% of the time, but as a general rule of thumb, it can keep us out of a lot of trouble. (In one of the early scriptures, the Buddha is quoted as saying that only a Buddha can fully understand the workings of karma.)

So, in Buddhist terms, the Fourth Step is about acknowledging karma as the basic engine of our lives. And this in turn means acknowledging our own participation in the creation of our lives, for good or ill. When we take Step Four, we see that our actions have weight in the world, gravity and mass. What we do literally matters. We have often denied this, preferring to cast ourselves as victims, to absolve ourselves of responsibility for what we experience. Or we think that what we do doesn’t matter because we don’t matter. In a sort of reverse ego-mania, we negate our effect upon our own lives, on others and on the world. We are not accountable because we don’t count.

Read More: Link to Full Article

Dharma of Recovery: Step Three