Today in AA the leader put out as a topic spiritual experience, as it is a tenet of the 12-step world that somewhere in there everyone who is successful in the program will have a spiritual experience that will be integral to staying sober or off of whatever else ails them. So we all think about it a lot. What was mine? Did I have it? At our lowest moments we all wonder "was her spiritual experience more profound than mine?"
For me the first one was early in sobriety, back around '92 at Columbia in NYC, when I was suffused with profound gratitude and realized that it didn't really make sense for me to be grateful for nothing, that there had to be something on the other side of that gratitude, something I was grateful too. Beyond AA, I'm still not exactly sure what it is. In many ways the last 30 years have been a process of trying to maintain that gratitude.
Since I have recently been going to only one meeting a week, quite often when I am in a meeting my mind is drifting all over the place and I have a hard time listening to what everyone is saying. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, but really I needn't. It has much in common with being in church as a kid and having my mind be all over the place during the sermon or the reading of the scripture or lessons or whoever was droning on about what up there at the front of the church. It's a once a week thing where more or less like-minded people come together and agree to be still and quiet while somebody else talks. There's no quiz at the end. In a sense it also has a lot in common with the so-called "monkey brain" that afflicts most of us during meditation, which we manage through the admonition to "come back to paying attention to your breath." It is a place for recentering.
It's all good.
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