Anybody Can Take Steps

By Charles A. Peabody

The Twelve Steps are not just that poster hanging on the wall during a meeting or support group. This program gives us a rigorous set of actions based on universal spiritual principles that we find at the core of any religious tradition throughout time. Please use and share this groundbreaking Twelve Step guide for a profound and cathartic spiritual experience of your own. Ask yourself if it is time to regain power and to effect real and lasting change in your life. Ask yourself if it is time to let go, find peace and become free. Trust me, there is nothing better in this world than simply being okay... so go for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781329822634

Book preview

Anybody Can Take Steps

ANYBODY CAN TAKE STEPS

A Universal Twelve Step Guide

Charles A. Peabody

Charles A. Peabody Books

Copyright 2015. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-329-07723-2

QUOTE

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. – Neale Donald Walsh

INTRODUCTION

Anybody can take Steps, not just alcoholics and addicts. We are told to carry this message to others who suffer from addiction, but what about everybody else? Why hoard a process that can induce miracles? Shouldn’t everybody have access to these powerful and life-changing tools? Shouldn’t those we love feel the relief and serenity that we have procured for ourselves?

Letting go is a miracle. Once our basic needs are met, this is the secret to inner peace and happiness. If we can mentally/emotionally let go of all that is around us and inside of us, we can accept everything. We will have touched the great voice within and thus, the power of God. We can then touch the fabric of our universe and it is in this harmony that we continue to expand, know ourselves and give back. We’ll get more into letting go in Chapters 3 and 11, but to experience this inner evolution is something you do not want to miss.

While there are many ways to achieve our ultimate goal of peace, the Steps harness timeless wisdom and universal spiritual principles that we see at the core of any serious religious tradition based on love, faith and humility. The Steps then take this wisdom and apply these principles into practical actions such as writing inventory, making amends, praying, meditating and working with others. As such, they can be used by anyone to elicit both internal and external change.

The Twelve Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous was inspired by the Oxford Group, a Christian-based spiritual group that promoted the tenets of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, known as The Four Absolutes. The program also involved four simple steps of admitting our wrongs, surrendering to God, making restitution and carrying out God’s will. Bill Wilson expanded these Steps when he conceived of the Twelve Step program for alcoholism, but you don’t need to be an alcoholic or a drug addict to take them or use them to effect real, lasting change and personal growth. Anyone can take Steps for any number of reasons, and we can all have a spiritual experience. I believe our world would become a more enlightened and mature place if we all took it upon ourselves to embark on some variation of this timeless program.

In this book, I will analyze each of the Twelve Steps based on my own knowledge and experience, breaking them down to uncover how they can relate to anybody who may be suffering or powerless over, well, anything. Furthermore, I will describe how to take these Steps if I were a non-alcoholic or non-addict. My hope is that you will see how these spiritual tools can be used to achieve universal catharsis. More importantly, I want you to learn how to use the Steps to recover from what ails you, be it anger, rage, depression, anxiety, boredom, codependency, mental illness, personality disorders, narcissism, eating disorders, gambling, spiritual angst, lack of purpose, physical pain, or just the plain old blues. And the truth is that we don’t need to be suffering at all to enjoy the fruits of the Twelve Steps. Actively growing and evolving through right action and accountability is always a good thing. In fact, working on ourselves is a basic human responsibility. Don’t the people in our lives deserve that we continue getting better? Doesn’t the whole world deserve the same? And don’t we owe it to ourselves to do what we can to sleep well at night?

Every morning I ask God to help make me a better man. I continue to take Steps in order to fulfill this prayer. Compared to the absolute nightmare I once was, the Steps have helped me become a more honest person. They have helped me to remove unhealthy and excessive selfishness. They have helped me to remove anger, fear and resentment. They have helped me to get outside of myself and think about others once in a while. They have given me the willingness to serve and to continue growing along spiritual lines. They have given me purpose and meaning. Best of all, the Twelve Steps have given me a way to always be okay, rain or shine. It doesn’t matter so much anymore when life throws me great challenges. Because of the work I’ve done in the Steps and the resulting relationship I now have with God, I finally have some peace. I am free.

Trust me, there is nothing better in this world than simply being okay.

DEDICATION

To my beautiful family

STEP 1

Admitted we were powerless over          ?         - that our lives had become unmanageable.

Many people today falsely believe the notion of powerlessness to imply permanent defeat, but defeat is by no means where the Twelve Steps intend us to stay. In fact, the very purpose of understanding what we are powerless over is to regain power. This concept is more about awareness, acceptance of our present reality, and experiencing some humility, all of which appropriately characterize a first crucial leap forward in our personal growth and evolution.

For alcoholics and addicts, a 1st Step allows us to understand intellectually and to feel deep within that we have lost power over drugs and alcohol, both physically and mentally. If there is one thing in this world we simply cannot control, it is mood-altering substances of any kind. We cannot stop once we start, and we cannot stay stopped once we stop. I remember being in treatment on the second or third night still thinking that if I really wanted to, I could stop using alcohol and drugs. I truly believed I could conjure the willpower to recover all on my own because I was so talented and smart and strong. Then someone reminded me that I was in rehab, and generally speaking, you don’t wind up at a locked detox/psych ward and then get hauled off to an inpatient treatment center if you drink or use normally.

My new friend also mentioned that if I still thought I had power, I had successfully wasted my first few days at this amazing place, days someone else was paying for. It hit me like a ton of bricks, and in that moment I realized that for all of the things I could do, the one thing I couldn’t was to stay sober. Drugs and alcohol had me.

Here’s the thing, though. You don’t have to have an alcohol or drug problem to lose power over something. People can become powerless over fear, anger, anxiety or depression… over food, sex or some toxic relationship… over beliefs, notions, attitudes, judgments or opinions… over self-image, vanity, intelligence or stupidity… or perhaps over someone else’s addiction. The truth is that we can lose power over just about anything, whether it is some internal part of ourselves, or something external. I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blank.

It should come as no surprise that at times certain aspects of life could easily have us whipped. We all have negative internal skews that can rear their ugly heads. Sometimes we give our power away to these maladaptive behaviors or energies, whether consciously or unconsciously, and then one day they suddenly control us, we don’t control them. One day they are making decisions for us as opposed to us making decisions for ourselves. When some darker and more destructive part within suddenly rules us, we have lost power.

But with the loss of power also comes the responsibility to regain it. When we lose control of something, we no longer have the right to ignore it, as it will inevitably effect others and create a harmful ripple effect that we may be slow to understand, or perhaps altogether blind to. Furthermore, we often cannot get power back on our own. Sometimes it is only by something Greater than ourselves that we can regain power, and this is precisely what the rest of the Steps are for.

Finally, many people see the 1st Step written on a page or a poster and think, ‘Cool, no problem. I can understand that intellectually. Done with that one!’ but it is not sufficient to simply study the 1st Step. We must actually feel and experience this sense of defeat deep in our guts, and the humility that accompanies such an understanding should effectively knock us off of our pedestal and fundamentally change the way we feel. If we have a palpable 1st Step experience, it should cause us to stop and take pause. We may feel quiet inside and may not want to talk or interact for a while. It may even bring us to our knees in tears, but don’t worry because that is actually quite healthy and emotionally productive. We are cleansing ourselves by shedding layers of emotional skin, which cracks open a door that may have been shut for a while. It is this sense of humility that propels us to move forward in earnest, and oddly enough, it can serve to lift some of the weight and burden of being powerless. It may even signify that we have now begun this spiritual journey and are finally on our way to regaining strength and willpower, and best of all, serenity.

Regardless of what happens to us individually, it is a cathartic experience to feel powerless. For the first time in our lives, we realize that we don’t have control over something we once did or thought we still did. The illusion of power and autonomy, driven by ego and intellectual stubbornness, dissolves right before us, and though this is usually perceived as a tremendous loss, it is not. The truth is that this newfound realization will help us to grow in spades. So try not to get caught up in the negative connotations increasingly given to this crucial 1st Step of admitting powerlessness. Try not to get caught up in words such as defeat. There are many ways to define or conceptualize certain terms, and we must look deeper to see the wisdom of this Step.

Let’s examine in more depth what not only being powerless over drugs and alcohol means, but over several other common demons as well. I should briefly note here that when dealing with drug and alcohol addiction specifically, we need to distinguish between physical powerlessness (permanent) and mental powerlessness (temporary), but for the purpose of this book and universalizing the Step process, we will tend to focus on mental power or willpower, which can be both lost and regained. For alcoholics and addicts, however, being powerless means two things.

First, it means that we have suffered a bodily change. When we drink or use repeatedly, we eventually cross over some invisible line, and once that happens, our bodies will forever react abnormally to drugs and alcohol. That is, we experience the phenomenon of craving, as noted in the Big Book, whereby once a drink or drug enters our system, we crave more and more and more until we’re either unconscious, arrested, or no longer breathing. Craving is a physical event, not a mental event as conventional thinking would have it. When people