We’re asked to review and accept the past, to identify our mistakes, and to try and clarify the patterns and habits that fueled our behavior. We’re encouraged to directly or symbolically clean house and make amends, and we’re advised to adopt a far more honest and transparent approach to daily life. The difficulty the program struggles with isn’t in its basic prescription. There’s a phrase in the Big Book that says something to the effect that God is either everything or nothing.
It was apparent that many people attending had been AA members for years and credited AA with their own recovery; the point being, we do not have to choose between Buddhist groups and AA. I’m disappointed, however, to see few magazine articles and opinion pieces by Buddhists who have found long-term recovery in AA. It’s in forums such as magazines where one can carry on (anonymously of course) meaningful dialogues about Buddhism and AA. I yearn to learn more about practicing the Buddhist Way and the Twelve-Step Way together.
How Meditation Helped Me to Stop Drinking
Alcoholic Anonymous’ spiritual discourse on recovery gives prominence to the development of a set of spiritual practices that trains participants in their capacities of self-care and self-regulation (i.e. writing, praying). Drawing on Foucault (2005), spiritual exercises were in antiquity a form of pedagogy, designed to teach people of a philosophical life that had both a moral and existential value. Spiritual practices were ways in which to enact self-transformation – an exercise of self upon the self by which one attempts to develop and transform, in order to attain a certain mode of being. The participants’ narratives presented authenticity and care of the self as a salient aspect of their recovery.
Religious Harmony Sought after Sri Lankan Comedian Arrested for “Defaming Buddhism”
Has been helping alcoholics recover for more than 80 years. A.A.’s program of recovery is built on the simple foundation of one alcoholic sharing with another. For a person suffering from an addiction, the steps can serve as helpful tools in his treatment and rehabilitation.
You’ve called the Buddha a “spiritual revolutionary.” How does that fit with Refuge Recovery? There are so many levels to this anti-greed, anti-hatred, anti-delusion teaching that says, in this world that’s filled with confusion, let’s be unconfused. In a world filled with hatred and greed, let’s be generous and loving and forgiving. What Refuge Recovery and the Buddha’s teachings offer is an internal tool to go against greed, to practice renunciation, to not satisfy the cravings that arise.
- As with the Twelve Step program, the first thing in Refuge Recovery is community.
- Nearly all hospital-based and free-standing programs throughout the US follow a 12-Step model of recovery.
- This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) at odds with anything anyone encounters in recovery nor in AA.
- Seventy-three per cent of adults in Ohio consider themselves Christians; in New York it’s 60 per cent; and there are Buddhists living throughout the US.
- Drawing on Foucault (2005), spiritual exercises were in antiquity a form of pedagogy, designed to teach people of a philosophical life that had both a moral and existential value.
Sobriety in AA: Since getting sober, I have hope
However, it might be avoidable using “the Way of Abstinence.” covert narcissist and drugs Due to the simple etymology of the organization’s name, Danshukai is often wrongly considered as a group that merely assists with drinking cessation. Therefore, it is important for Danshukai members to clarify their ideology. “The Way of Abstinence,” as Danshukai’s ideology, is discussed using Hendry’s analysis of dō (2003) and Rohlen’s analysis of seishin (1973). Japanese alcoholics’ endurance is stressed as potentially part of the spiritual training in the Way of Abstinence.
Alcoholics Anonymous, Buddhism + Powerlessness – Ep. 161
So does memorizing the Big Book, performing service work, talking to our sponsors every day, talking to sponsees every day, and trying to discern what our ego’s notion of God would have us do in alcohol and violence statistics perplexing situations. Even in sobriety, we continue to obsess and wallow in the collective belief we’re broken people with few redeeming capabilities. We litter our talk with discussions of core character defects, addictive tendencies, and fundamental flaws. We actively run from life’s commitments and opportunities. And we habitually insist without more the doom we evade through ongoing recovery lurks just beyond our conscious reach.
And we who have addiction find ourselves in this realm not because our throats are in fact too small nor our natural appetites too large, but because we’re utterly and wean off prozac beyond all doubt convinced we’re doomed without some external substance. Our lives are the experience of profound insufficiency. The belief we simply cannot survive without some sort of relief colors reality in such a hue that without more we are literally blind to everything else.