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At a meeting this week, we read from the Big Book appendix called “Spiritual Experience.” If you haven’t read it, I’d encourage you. It’s about a page and a half long. It pops up as an asterisk in multiple places through the Big Book, so the founders of 12-step recovery must have thought that it was a critical supplemental piece of reading for us alcoholics. I put a link to it in the written version of this newsletter (HERE).
When I first got sober and started reading about the importance of spiritual experiences, I had a very specific idea of what that must mean. I thought it was something that must happen once, and it would involve bright lights, and the clouds parting and unicorns flying down from the sky, and me riding on the unicorns. In my head, that was what a spiritual experience was, and when it happened, my life would change forever.
That hasn’t quite played out yet for me. I’ve yet to ride a unicorn, and I’ve found spiritual experiences to be small, steady signs of transformation, sometimes noticeable in the moment and sometimes not—I’ve had multiple times when I’ll be driving home from work or from a family get-together and say to myself, “Huh, I’ve never behaved that well or gotten along with people like I just did, and I didn’t even need alcohol or drugs to do it.” That’s a spiritual experience, in my humble opinion.
Or I’ve gotten a promotion at work and had a celebration, but it’s usually an ego-based celebration—look at me! On top of the world! Give me all of the praise, please!
It’s a week or two later that I think to myself how I had 10 years of my life where I was virtually unemployable, let alone being considered for more responsibility and more compensation. That’s a spiritual experience, too!
So when we read it the other night, I took note of every word carefully, and sure enough, there’s no mention of the clouds parting or unicorn rides. It’s mostly about the changes that happen within us, not to us. It uses the phrase “of the educational variety,” not the money variety or sex variety or being named CEO variety.
Our literature also does not say that the spiritual experiences are giant. Far from it. There’s no mention of lightning bolts striking us and one chapter of our lives ends and another begins right in front of our eyes.
Last but certainly not least, I also noticed for the first time that it doesn’t say anything about spiritual experiences being only good or bad events. It indicates that we all should seek out spiritual experiences, that they are important growth generators. But it doesn’t say that the change always come from positive events. Sure, job promotions and child births and weddings are probably awesome moments to detect transformations in ourselves.
But I’ve learned more in my sober time from things I never would have chosen for myself than the stuff I want and get. There’s a lot of growth that happens from pain, and I have certainly found that.
I still remember about four months into sobriety, my life had turned around. I was going to at least four meetings a week and making tons of phone calls and working closely with my first sponsor. It was a miracle.
Then I hit a rough patch at work. I tend to be one of those people who works really hard—too hard sometimes, admittedly—and that means I don’t delegate or act like a good teammate for others on projects. In basketball, you’d call me a ball hog, trying to take every shot.
Well, I had a big work project involving a bunch of people, and I was the lead grunt on it, but we had a supervisor who I was unimpressed with—let’s call him Biff. I felt like Biff was swooping in and out of the project, nitpicking here and there, but mostly just coasting along as we busted our asses.
And I started having mini passive aggressive behavior around him, talked some s**t within our group, and generally just took on a nice-sized resentment against this guy. When we finally had it near the finish line and some of his bosses’ bosses started weighing in with criticism, my head exploded when my boss on the project said, “Yeah, they’re right. Why are we doing it this way?”
My immediate reaction was, “You know? Go f— yourself. If you thought we should be doing it that way, why didn’t you say anything the first 52 times we discussed it? Now you’re throwing us under the bus in front of your bosses to escape blame. You son of a…”
I didn’t say any of that, but I did make a few snippy comments, and I definitely had my anger on my face. I remember we were sitting in my boss’ boss’ boss’ office, and at the end of the meeting, he said, “All right, looking mostly good here. We’ll meet again two weeks from now,” and everybody started to file out. He made eye contact with me and indicated to stick around.
“What was that?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Well, I saw…” he paused for awhile before finishing. “I saw the old you in that meeting. Very thin-skinned about gentle pushback. You seem very aggravated with Biff. It’s just not the same person that’s been working here for the past four months.”
He knew my situation. He’d encouraged me to go to rehab. I respected him and cared about him, because he bent over backwards to get me launched into recovery. I send that guy a note every year on my sober anniversary to say thank you, and I always will.
But he wasn’t going to meetings or doing stepwork with me. He just saw the end result every day in the office, and he was blown away for four months. Well, three months and 29 days, I guess. What he was actually saying without knowing it was that he had seen a sober person in recovery for awhile… then a dry person at that meeting. That worried him.
That was a spiritual experience for me. It wasn’t pleasant at all. I wish it hadn’t happened. But it was a critical moment that I vividly remember because it introduced the concept of carrying these principles into all our affairs. My recovery shouldn’t be something that happens four times a week, for an hour each, in the basement of churches. It should be happening when I am driving, when I am at the playground with my kids and yes, when I am working with the Biffs of the world.
So I am looking forward to my next spiritual experience. It might not be huge. It might not have the unicorns. It might even be a piece of bad news. And it might involve Biff again. Who knows? I just have faith that it’ll be a good growth stimulator.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS
I don’t want my ego to be the first thing people see when I walk into a room.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2000, Shawn)
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