An Antidote To Relentless Grandiosity

If you were predestined to only ever to be a worker amongst workers, could you find contentment with life?

What would it feel like to find out today that none of your deepest grandiose dreams and desires would never come true?  No matter how hard you strived to game the systems in your favour, your biggest achievements and existence in life would be viewed as menial?

Would life still be worth living?

If you are an Alcoholic, that nasty self-righteous side of you might awaken while pondering these ego-deflating questions. You may think to yourself, “there has never been a day in my life where I haven’t loathed the idea of working a typical 9-5 job”. You might have even suffered through years of poverty just to uphold this belief. Never will you fall into this thought to be trap. This gravely defiant part of you refuses to conform.

While considering yourself far from reckless when it comes to decision making, you simply can’t fathom why people would squandered away their most prized resource in life. Time sits and waits for no man/woman. The thought of having to work for someone else’s vision and dreams suffocates every ounce of life from your being. From time to time, wisdom might poke its ugly head up through your consciousness questioning this closely held belief as you age, but your views won’t budge. Your unjustified obstinance seems to have only etched itself further into stone with time.

As you enter the rooms of Recovery, you are quickly brought up to speed on just how many beliefs you have been carrying around that simply aren’t rooted in reality. And the further you lean into the spiritual realm, the more you begin to be haunted with the idea that some of your most well nurtured beliefs really don’t serve anyone. You have been greeted with an awaken of sorts that maybe didn’t arrive as smoothly as anticipated, and it hurts.

But it is from our twisted relations with family, friends and society at large, that many of us have suffered the most. We have been especially stupid and stubborn about them…We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend amongst friends, to be a worker amongst workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it. (p.52-53 Twelve Steps And Twelve Traditions)

Our root cause for separating ourselves from the norm was usually initiated to protect ourselves from a traumatic event, but somehow it nestled itself deeply within our psyche. This psychological coping switch was activated, and while it did serve its originally designed purpose, we forgot to turn it off.

This protective forcefield would remain in full effect until life brings us to our knees, and then some of us start to unwrap the gift of desperation. We might not have  been aware that a switch had been pulled in the first place. But our sponsor gently grasps our hand and points to the path, following our illuminated defective thoughts and beliefs that brightly lights the twelve steps we climb together.

Before we are half way through, meaning finishing and withholding nothing in step five, we find it nearly impossible to deny our irrationality to life, and a sense for lightness comes over us. We had made a plea to our maker, and start to work towards re-igniting that flame within that went out so long ago.

James, the brother of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, would have said – “faith without works is dead”. We have a great role in the relationship to play. While faith alone in the author and creator of the flame that is in and all around you is foundational, we still have to sort through the wreckage of our past. The biggest wrecking ball of them all, and usually last to properly reform is our thoughts. The thoughts we hold towards life, our own worth and function, and especially thoughts held towards God(creator, yahweh, buddha, creator, divine, etc).

The mind of the alcoholic stumbles greatly over this concept of God. For most of our lives we have solely depended on our own limited power, and basically presumed ourselves to be the little god of our own minimal understanding. It’s no wonder we thought we knew and saw fit what the world and it’s people were to do all the time. We may have completely missed the mark when it comes to understanding  life and playing god, we slowly come to find that while we aren’t God alone, our makeup does allow for God to flow through us. With proper care and alignment, we begin to start to feel that presence and peace that seemed to always pass us by.