Month: August 2014

“Having Had A Spiritual Awakening…”

Much of the reason why I named my blog “The Twelfth Step” is actually due to the first five words of the step itself and they read as follows:

“Having had a spiritual awakening…”

I never really knew what a spiritual awakening was until I began experiencing it firsthand in my recovery from addictions. But to be perfectly frank, I find it quite difficult to place a concise definition out there that can fully describe what it genuinely means. But thankfully, I received a pamphlet from a workshop recently that specifically lists 12 symptoms (or signs if you may) of someone who’s either had or presently having one of these spiritual awakenings. I’ve altered them only slightly for grammatical purposes, but their essence essentially remains the same. They are:

  1. Having an increasing tendency to let things happen rather than making them happen.
  2. Having frequent occurrences of smiling.
  3. Having positive feelings of being connected with others and nature.
  4. Having numerous overwhelming episodes of humility.
  5. Having the tendency to act only after careful evaluation.
  6. Having an unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
  7. Having unshakable faith and confidence in life no matter what’s going on.
  8. Having more of a positive interest in the thoughts of others.
  9. Having a loss of interest in criticizing the actions of others.
  10. Having a loss of interest in judging others.
  11. Having a loss of interest in judging oneself.
  12. Having the ability to love without expecting anything in return.

The ironic thing after reading each of these signs several times is that I believe I’m still in the midst of having one of these spiritual awakenings. Many of these signs are things I have been experiencing more and more of lately, but not always on a consistent basis. Maybe the real truth is that a spiritual awakening is something that can happen to me for the rest of my life, but that’s contingent on continuing to do all the spiritual work I’ve been doing on a regular basis.

I began this spiritual work on myself over a decade ago and year after year, I have discovered more and more ways to turn my will over to the care of my Higher Power. And the more I have turned my will over to the care of my Higher Power, the more I seem to find myself experiencing many of these signs of a spiritual awakening.

Thus my conclusion is this. While I may not be able to succinctly define what a spiritual awakening is, I do believe the life I’m living today is starting to really demonstrate it. But I feel there may  be one sign of a spiritual awakening still missing from this list, so I decided to end this entry with what I think that is because it sums up quite nicely where my Higher Power seems to be leading me nowadays.

13. Having the ever-increasing desire to share all of my experience, strength, and hope in life in ways just like this…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

 

Walking A Religious Path To Find Spirituality

I was born into a religious family and because of that, my first exposure to a Higher Power came solely through a religious perspective. I’ve been slowly trudging on a path though, over the course of my entire life since then, that continues to lead me away from being religious to that of being spiritual.

My religious path began in my Methodist family, as we were all devout members of the United Methodist Church in Poughkeepsie, NY during all my childhood years. One of the things I learned there very early on was how important it was to attend each Sunday’s worship service and to make sure I studied the Bible. It was often stressed that the Bible was the strict word of God and that everything in it was supposed to be obeyed. But frankly the Bible bored me, as did each church service back then. I usually did what I was told though, so I still attended those services each week and frequently read the Bible as well. By the time I left home and went off to college, I had 18 years of this religious upbringing and my idea of God was all about obeying rules and living in fear of breaking them.

It was in college that I began to face the fact that I might be gay, and unfortunately because of this strong religious upbringing, the notion of being a homosexual wasn’t sitting well within me. I kept remembering those few passages in the Bible that contradicted the sexual attractions I was feeling towards people of the same sex and it upset me greatly. So alcohol and drugs soon became my way of escaping all of my religious and sexuality worries. But that all changed when I fell in love with one of my closest friends during my senior year. It was then that I faced my first real religious crisis.

If “lying with a man, as a man lies with a woman” were immoral, why would God have created me only to fall in love with someone of the same sex? Was I really being immoral by loving a man with all my heart and soul? These were questions I didn’t have any answers for and my desire to find them was much in part why I became clean and sober. I knew I would never discover them so long as I kept myself inebriated or high, as that only left me in a constant state of being numb from whom I really was inside.

I spent the first few years of my newfound sobriety from alcohol and drugs going back to my childhood roots. I found a church I loved and began attending it, as well as regularly studying the Bible again. I began to utilize prayer as a way to asking God about my sexuality, but no answers came so I started living a double life because of it. On the one hand I tried to be a devout Christian by doing exactly as I was taught in my religious upbringing, but on the other hand I was supposedly going against what I was taught by being in same-sex relationships. This internal calamity led me to finally sit down with the leaders of this church to ask for some guidance. What I received from them didn’t help my dilemma though, as they only pointed to the Bible and said my actions were immoral.

I left that church only to spend the next seven years or so angry and confused. I couldn’t understand why God had made me the way I was if it was supposedly wrong, so I allowed this confusion to lead me into a living a life of promiscuity. It was almost as if this became my act of rebellion to the religious God I was brought up with. Thankfully, my discovery of meditation would change all this. It was through one of my earliest deep meditations one night that I finally received the answer from God that I so desperately had searched years for. During it, I was told it didn’t matter whether I was in a relationship with a man or a woman, so long as whoever it was with I’d love with all my body, mind, and soul. My entire life began to change after that because this spiritual experience went directly against the Bible and the “word of God” I was told all of it contained. If I had to label a single point in time where my path of spirituality truly began, it was after this meditation ended that night.

I immediately began to study the books and teachings of a bunch of other religions and attended several services of many of them as well soon after, only to find more rules and principles that just alienated people instead of embracing them. I ultimately realized that my religious upbringing and living a religious life wasn’t going to work for me anymore. But through daily prayer, meditation, and working the 12 Steps of recovery, I began to discover a more loving and accepting God who was able to show me more of the actual truths behind the words and beliefs I had read about or was taught in my religious upbringing. This led me to accept the fact that there was no religious book on this entire planet that could ever encompass every single word or truth of God. Instead, I began to believe that religion and all of its books only had a piece of truth in them, and it would take internal guidance and direction from my Higher Power to fully figure out what they were.

Nowadays I receive my communications from God not through the Bible, church services, or any other religious context. On the contrary, I receive them through the movement of my heart and soul and do my best to apply each of them to how I live my life everyday. I no longer allow anyone or anything to tell me what God’s words are, as to me this is what being religious was all about. Instead, I wait patiently upon God now for the answers to come from within, as I believe this is what spirituality truly is. So I guess it just took me having to walk that religious path to finally find the one I believe I was always meant to walk on…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Getting The Love And Respect I Truly Deserve In Life

I had to cut ties with someone the other day because the majority of my efforts in the past few months to rekindle a friendship between him and I have gone ignored. In doing so, I was reminded of a pattern I allowed myself to live in for years and it’s one that dealt with me once believing that a person will give me the love and respect I truly deserve if I just wait a little while longer for them to change.

Here’s a simple fact of life that took me several decades to figure out. Waiting around for someone else to change does nothing more than make a person extremely resentful because those changes often never come. The real truth is that the only person I can ever change in life is myself. Unfortunately, that never stopped me from trying again and again and again until I finally figured this lesson out. Why it took me so long stems all the way back to my childhood where I desperately wanted my dysfunctional mother and father to be more loving parents. I generally thought back then that if I tried a little harder to please them that I would achieve that, but I never did.

When I became an adult, I went on to form one connection after another with individuals who were no different from my parents. Consistently I received much less love and respect from each of them than what I truly deserved in life. But I always stayed in those connections way beyond what their shelf life was probably meant to be always trying harder and harder to make them work. I frequently pointed out all the areas they needed to work on, yet I wasn’t changing in the process either. The only thing this led to was making me become a very resentful person in life. Until I released all the anger I harbored inside over my parents and forgave them, I remained this way, living out my life in various relationships with others who I desperately tried to get to treat me better than they did.

With some, I even waited years for them to change, doing everything I could to be what I thought they wanted and I grew more and more miserable in the process. None of them ever really changed though and sadly, neither did I, other than becoming more and more codependent. Thankfully, I eventually did find the healing for the pain I had held onto for so long with my parents. And once I did, that’s when I began to change. It’s then that I began to find the energy within to cut ties with everyone in my life who was just as unhealthy as my parents once were. The more I did this, the healthier I became. And the healthier I became, the more clearly I saw that the only reason why I ever allowed myself to get into these toxic connections was to remind me of the work I needed to do within to heal. Today, I don’t need or want anyone in my life that I have to chase after or try harder with like this person whom I attempted to rekindle a friendship with recently. And truthfully, the way things used to be years ago between him and I was no different than how things once were between my parents and I. So I guess I needed to have a gentle reminder of this invaluable lesson and thankfully the pain it caused me was quite minimal.

The bottom line is that I deserve love and respect today in all my connections and so do all of us for that matter. None of us need to wait around for that to happen because it often never comes. But if we work on healing and changing ourselves, we will soon find we don’t draw those types of relationships into our lives anymore and instead, will find ourselves becoming surrounded with people who can offer us the unconditional love we truly deserve in life.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson