Tag Archives: empowerment

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I love the way the steps are set up.  There is an order to them that makes it easy, for me at least, to move from victim to empowerment.

I know that it is common to hear, in 12 step meetings, that we must continually acknowledge our powerlessness.  In all my research of the steps, and in my personal experience of 29 years of incorporating them into my life,  I have failed to find any evidence that advocates powerlessness as a way of life.  Instead, I find much evidence that says powerlessness is like a doorway into recovery.  Powerlessness is for beginners.

In a way, much of life is like this:  when we first encounter a new concept, a new way of living, a new way of being, we must be open to possibilities, even though the unknown is sometimes much scarier than the known, as unsatisfactory as the known may be.  But if we admit to not liking the way things are, and to acknowledging that there must be a better way, then we somehow open ourselves up.  Powerlessness is that doorway.  Yes, we are in a powerless place in the beginning....but only in the beginning.

Once we get to step 10, we get our power back.  (Actually in my personal experience it comes much sooner in the process, but I know it isn't that way for everyone)  Here are the 10th step promises in the textbook of Alcoholics Anonymous:

"And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone—even alcohol. For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality—safe and ­protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is our ­experience. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition."

Jean Houston writes, in the Foreward to the Science of Mind textbook, that in thinking of God as something within us, it moves us from a state of powerlessness to one of power.  "This grants us tremendous power and with it the innate responsibility to make or break our world through the extraordinary working power of our minds. Thus the practical emphasis in The Science of Mind of schooling in the power of trained thought."

So....we move  from a state of powerlessness in the beginning, to one of power by the tenth step.  The steps teach us to live in 10 and 11, inventories, meditation and prayer.  New Thought teaches us to consistently do our spiritual practices, with introspection (inventory) and the resulting personal awareness, and meditation and affirmative prayer making for a lifestyle that does indeed move from powerlessness to being safe and protected, from victim to empowerment.

This is a lifestyle that works, and I am so grateful for it.

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Does your life suck?  Or maybe not all of it sucks, maybe only one aspect sucks.  It doesn't matter:  suckage is suckage, whether it is your entire life or just one part of it.  If you have some suckage going on in your life, the only thing you need to do to begin to change that is acknowledge that you want to change it.

That's it.

The traditional wording of the First Step speaks to powerlessness.  I prefer to look at it this way:  my life sucks and I want to change it.  Then I begin to envision what I want to change it to.  There is no shame here, no blame, and certainly not a lack of power.  It's about focus, and training our minds, and this is the beginning of that process.

This is the beginning of the empowering process that allows us to totally take personal responsibility for our lives.

If this scares you, welcome to my world.  It scared me too.  No longer could I blame the circumstances of my life on God, or someone else, or them, or even alcohol.  Scary, but also a doorway into a life I never dreamed possible.

Someone once told me in a class that if my dreams and visions did not scare me, they weren't big enough.

Life sucked, and at that time my dreams and visions were very small:  start life over again with a new way of living that did not include alcohol and drugs.  It wasn't a matter of hanging my head in shame for being an alcoholic.  It was a matter of refocusing my attention to what I wanted to occur in my life.  I wanted to live differently.

If you want to live differently, then you have made a beginning.  Acknowledge that.  Then begin the process of dreaming big.  Do not deter  your focus from the prize.  Take your focus off a life that sucks and place it on that which you wish to be and do.

I'd love to hear about your journey!