Category: Step 11

Surfing Emotional Waves

3/15/2014

By Jim Babin

My first clue to the power of meditation was its ability to calm my mind. Once a month I spent an hour with a client planning his newspaper advertising. He spent most of the time swinging from one thought to another, rarely sticking to one idea. It seemed that he was always looking for the perfect answer. By the end of our time together my brain was frazzled and the rest of my day was shot. I shared this with a colleague of mine and he recommended a paperback about meditation. It was written by Dr. Herb Benson, MD and titled “The Relaxation Response.” It recommended a method for quieting the mind. I bought a copy and started practicing it after each meeting with my client. I would sit in my car after our meeting and spend 15 minutes doing it. It was a simple method that chose a neutral word, such as “One." I said it repeatedly, quietly to myself; interrupting my thought process.

I was so impressed with the calmness of my mind that I began using it as a regular practice. I worked for a daily newspaper, fighting 16 deadlines a week and while I liked the job it was anything but calming. One day a secretary I worked with asked me what was going on in my life. I asked her what she meant and she said that I didn't get angry any more. I told her that I didn't understand what she was getting at. I thought about that for a few days and realized that she was partially correct. I was still getting angry but wasn't acting my feelings out. My meditation practice was developing a time delay in my thought process so that I wasn't reacting to them spontaneously but was slowing down the process, giving me time to decide what do about them, if anything. Here again I had discovered a new tool in my life's journey.

After a while though I sensed a spiritual disconnect. About that time I discovered another paperback on meditation titled Centering Prayer, written by Fr. Basil Pennington OCSO. He offered a different method. I liked the spiritual connection and changed over to his method. It fitted my spiritual and religious beliefs and so I began a 25 year spiritual journey.

As I traveled this journey over the years, I was able to do things and take on projects that I never would have done if my fears and anxiety levels weren't being surfed through giving me emotional and spiritual support. My beliefs, prayers, and faith in my God and my church became more real and important to my life. I saw God as the ultimate reality present in so many ways, in the world and in my life.

At the same time that I began my meditation journey I also discovered the AA-12 Step program for Children of Alcoholics. Its 11th Step suggests that we seek God through prayer and meditation. For me it was a perfect fit. It came about at a time when my life was falling apart, but that's another story.

While my life has been full of ups and downs over these years, Centering Prayer and the 12 step program has helped me surf the emotional waves that rolled through my life and helped me maintain serenity and sanity.

Jim Babin is a facilitating member of several Twin Cities Centering Prayer groups, and was a longtime treasurer and board member of Minnesota Contemplative Outreach.

Quest for the Keys

6/1/2013

By Jon Spayde

In my fifteenth year of sobriety, I realized that I wanted to thank God in a formal way for rescuing me from alcoholism. Joining a church seemed like the best idea—I wanted to pray regularly with others—and I had been attracted to Catholicism for a few years without taking the plunge. So one bright autumn day I marched up to my neighborhood church, St. Luke's (now St. Thomas More) and enrolled in the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) class. At Easter of 2000—a resonant year—I was received into the Church.

I have a background as an academic agnostic with a jumpy mind, and it seemed obvious to me that my biggest challenge in practicing the Christian faith would be figuring it out. I loved the beauty of the liturgy, of course, and the dedication of the priests and the religious, but I knew that my real task was getting a clear handle on things like the two natures of Christ, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth. There must be a set of intellectual keys, I thought, for unlocking and understanding these strange things.

When I got the opportunity to write a book in 2006, it was in service of this quest. How to Believe (Random House, 2008) is based on a series of interviews with Christian thinkers, clergy, and laypeople in which I ask them to explain their understanding of the faith, and especially of mind-bending doctrines like the above. To my surprise, many of my informants told me that figuring these paradoxes out wasn't the point. The point was to use them as perfect tools to open my mind to the presence of God, who can never be fully "thought-out," only surrendered to, adored, and thanked.

Not long after, I joined the Centering Prayer group at St. Thomas More—as kind and loving and truly spiritual a cluster of human beings as I have ever come across. I had known about Centering Prayer for a few years—I'd taken instruction in it from Basil Pennington during one of his visits to the Twin Cities—but I hadn't practiced it much, distracted as I was by my search for those doubt-destroying, certainty-producing, purely intellectual keys.

But sitting with my friends in the sanctuary on Tuesday nights, in silence, resisting, retaining, and reacting to none of my many thoughts, I slowly found myself going in two beautiful directions at once: on the one hand, letting go of my demand to understand the faith on my terms; and on the other, coming to find that words like Trinity, Real Presence, and Communion were taking on a new and deeper resonance and a clarity too, a clarity beyond definition. As I went deeper into silence in the presence of Love, those words became road signs toward a deeper silence and a richer Love.

And I also began noticing the changes that are the real point of being on a spiritual path: I was being a little more consciously loving with my wife, a little less prone to annoyance with the world, a little more welcoming of whatever shows up in my life. Today I'm convinced that this task of welcoming and accepting is the best possible employment for my mind, while, with the help of Centering Prayer, I let God change me in whatever paradoxical ways He chooses.

Jon Spayde is a facilitating member of the St. Thomas More Centering Prayer group, and is a regular presenter at the 12 Step Spirituality Workshop, which meets at the Colonial Church of Edina from October through May.

A Testimonial

8/15/2012

By Ted Tappan

Nearly four years ago now while incarcerated in Stillwater prison, in Minnesota, I was given instruction on, and began the daily meditation practice called Centering Prayer. I attribute miraculous changes in me and in my life to that daily practice and to a practice of 12 step principles.

I have been lifted from a scrap heap, and life has been restored to a goodness. I am out of prison, my chemical addictions have been successfully treated, most broken relationships have been restored, and my professional life is healing.

I have a relationship with God I never had. I have better relationships with my family than ever (not perfect). I have a humble confidence, a deep sense of gratitude, and a joy in my life that I never thought was possible. With Centering Pray I can Hear better than ever...but I can also See, Touch, Smell, and Taste all that I could never really experience before.

With Centering Prayer (meditation) anything is possible.... And the effects can be felt almost immediately. Like riding a bike or playing golf you get better with practice. I could go on talking about all the life changes I’ve had, or the changes I’ve seen in others…. But I will stop here with a suggestion to anyone who wants a better life: Try Centering Prayer.

Ted Tappan actively participates in the Centering Prayer Group at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis and for two years has attended the Workshop for Centering Prayer and the Twelve Steps held at Colonial Church in Edina.

Aftercare Spotlight

3/1/2012

Centering Prayer can bring silence to your soul.

By Kathleen Lindstrom

Dick Young's search for peace started 50 years ago when his wife, Carolyn, gave him an ultimatum: "Either get into therapy, or we get a divorce." Five years and 250 therapy sessions later, he began facing the demons that haunted him since childhood when he was abused by an alcoholic father and narcissistic mother. It left him with a stutter and an inability to master reading, writing and arithmetic.

"Without the Twelve Steps and Centering Prayer, I'd be a raging maniac right now filled with anger and resentment — someone who couldn't feel one feeling."

Young went on to graduate from college, marry, get sober, raise two children, work his way up the corporate ladder and, in 1999, retire as the chief financial officer for a Fortune 500 company. Even more important, he works the Steps daily and claims to experience those intangible blessings of freedom and peace promised in the Big Book. He insists it's all due to the support of loving people who crossed his path along the way, and he's spent most of his life trying to return the favor.

Young's workshops, "Exploring 12 Step Spirituality" are one way he hopes to give back. The three-hour sessions are held once a month and include testimonials, group discussions, readings from the Big Book and 20 minutes of Centering Prayer meditation.

"Centering Prayer," he explains, "is one way to work the 11th Step, with the goal of improving our conscious contact with a Higher Power through prayer and meditation. They're both very compatible. Like the Twelve Step program, Centering Prayer is all about surrendering to something bigger than ourselves and deepening our relationship with the Divine."

For Young, discovering Centering Prayer was a turning point and something he unabashedly calls a "God-touch." "We had just lost our son in a tragic accident and his death was devastating. He was only 25. Carolyn and I were in bad shape. We read some books on grief and one of them talked about the healing power of meditation, so my wife started to do Centering Prayer. I have ADHD and sitting still for 20 minutes twice a day was unimaginable. But I saw the changes in her and decided to try it. Three years later I got up from my 20-minute session and realized the pain was gone. I still miss my son, but after three years of meditating, the octopus of pain that was strangling me had let go."

Today, the Youngs are certified Centering Prayer teachers and have led a Centering Prayer group for eight years.

Young explains that Centering Prayer is a form of meditation practiced by the desert mothers and fathers in the third century, and eventually entrusted to monastic communities for safekeeping. In the mid-1970s, Thomas Keating and two other Trappist priests repackaged this ancient prayer for the modern world, called it Centering Prayer and introduced it to the lay population.

Centering Prayer enables us to move deeper into our hearts and just be, Young says. "We sit in silence twice a day for 20 minutes. We say nothing; we ask for nothing; we just surrender to the moment and allow God to be with us. Keating has said that 'silence is God's first language. Everything else is a poor translation.' So we sit in that silence, listen with the ear of our hearts and gradually wake up to the presence of God."

How has this practice changed him?

"The best way to answer that is to ask someone you've known for a long time. So I asked my wife of 54 years if I've changed, and she said ‘Yes! It's unbelievable. No one from your past would know you today.'

"I've been working the 4th Step for 50 years," he adds. "For the first 30, I did it without Centering Prayer. For the last 20 years, I did it with Centering Prayer—and the rate of healing was exponentially faster. Centering Prayer reduced my anger and resentments faster and more completely than I could have done it otherwise.

"I've seen other people change also. It's in their faces—there's a quietness there, a peace and joy. They slow down. They are more accepting. They know a loving God is present in their lives. And isn't that all any of us really need to know?"

For more information about “Exploring 12-Step Spirituality,” visit 12stepspirituality.org.

© Published with permission from Renew Magazine, January/February 2012 issue

AA - Eleventh Step Prayer and Meditation

7/1/2009

By Jim Babin

The Alcoholics Anonymous Eleventh Step can be easily undervalued or overlooked as one travels their Twelve Step journey. Bill W., one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, said in his Grapevine Writings that it took him 24 years to realize its importance. He realized that his twelve step friends were moving ahead of him in their spirituality. This was a wakeup call for him.

The Eleventh step reads, "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."

While many of us are used to verbalizing the prayer part; requesting help for ourselves or others, or saying words of gratitude, or acknowledging our creator, we can easily fail to overlook the meditation part or under use it because of our limited understanding of its meaning.

I believe that as this step was originally written, the word meditation was meant to ponder or ruminate, AA’s or other spiritual readings. This is an active and valid use of meditation and a good one. It’s a reflective way of meditating.

Many AA’ers have been discovering and are using another form of meditation called Centering Prayer as a valuable way of seeking "Gods Will and the power to carry it out". This is known as a receptive means of meditation.

The method Centering Prayer is one of quiet and detachment. A wise sage said that “we have two ears and one mouth, because we need to listen twice as much as we need to speak”. Centering Prayer is a practice that disciplines us to listen to the "Ear of our Heart", that deep spiritual center that we all have. We put aside our thoughts and agenda and simply practice listening and waiting for God to present Himself, inviting Him to do so. How will God speak to us?

None of us really knows, but those who practice the Centering Prayer method know that He finds many ways. We just need to keep our spiritual antennae raised to be receptive. Centering Prayer creates that space. When we practice it, we surrender ourselves to our Higher Power [our Ultimate Reality] and let Him work within ourselves, empowering us to carry out His will.

Bill W. had really developed the 12th step of "carrying the message to others" but had forgotten that our spiritual awakening is an ongoing process that needs to be renewed and re-energized and is needed lest we burn out. Taking time out to Let Go and Let God by the use of Centering Prayer can refresh and renew our lives. Twenty minutes twice a day can transform us. We simply need to regularly practice it.

Surfing Emotional Waves

Quest for the Keys

A Testimonial

Aftercare Spotlight

AA - Eleventh Step Prayer and Meditation

Presence & Action Blog

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