Addiction to Self

This week, a really long and perhaps a bit niche blog post. I hope it is of some interest and maybe even help. Make a cuppa and sit down for a bit - or read it in portions.

I am just home from the Triratna Order Convention which I loved. There is a lot I could say about it but I actually want to share some thoughts on something which came up for me while at the convention. Each morning I attended a pan fellowship 12 step meeting - something I helped instigate years ago at Order gatherings. So, I wanted to share some things I think we, as Buddhists, could learn from the 12 step movement.

You might not know this, but there's quite a lot of twelve-steppers in our Order and our movement. So, we decided to have these pan fellowship meetings. Any Order member, in any 12 step programme, can come along. We get folk from Alcoholics Anonymous, from Sex and Love addicts, overeaters and a host of other fellowships. More recently, internet addiction features. We also get people coming because they are curious, maybe wondering if they have an addiction or not - or because they have a family member or loved one who is in a programme - or perhaps isn’t in a programme but is definitely an addict but not in recovery. It is very helpful to find that there are others in the same boat.  On this convention someone coming along because of having a family member who is an addict was incredibly moved to find someone else with an almost identical situation.

I thought it might be interesting to share some reflections of what I find we have in common and even perhaps some learnings. Firstly, one of the biggest things in a twelve-step meeting is that people are very willing to be seen. You're there for a clear reason, straight from the word go. So there's no point in a sense, not to be open with each other. Also, people are there because they've got something in common - this is true in sangha gatherings as well but I observe that it can take time for people to open up. Maybe it is not so obvious what we all have in common - although I would say that finding ourselves in a sangha / community is almost certainly because we are seeking the same thing, even if we think in different terms - freedom, peace, support in a troubled world.

Another thing I find interesting is that one can go to a meeting anywhere in the world, and find the same format and the same structure. You immediately feel at home. It's a bit like sangha - if you go to any Triratna class or meeting, people know why you're there and they will accept you immediately. Hopefully, there is a trust that helps you feel at home anywhere in the Triratna world

Within twelve-step programmes, there's different strands, and one strand is a strand called HOW. So that could be Sex and Love Addicts, HOW. And what HOW stands for is Honesty, Openness, and Willingness, and that's the commitment that people make that are following that programme. So straight away, you've got a commitment to complete transparency with the openness and honesty. But you've also got this willingness, a willingness to keep coming back. In fact, at the end of 12 step meetings you say "keep coming back.” There is a commitment to staying together, even when the going gets tough. To supporting each other. The whole phrase is “Keep coming back, it works if you work it and work it, you’re worth it!” I think that applies to Dharma practice too. It works if you work it and you are definitely worth it.

I thought I would say a wee bit about the steps and how I think they are applicable to anyone, not just someone in a 12 step programme. I would argue that we are all addicted in some way. At the most powerful and deepest level, we are addicted to our sense of self, our ego. We are addicted to samsara. I thought I'd divide them into three lots: steps one to three, four to ten, and eleven and twelve. In traditional AA, if you work the steps, as they say, you work them in that order. You do the first three as a block, and then you do four to ten as a block, and then eleven and twelve. And when I say "work the steps," what I mean is there's particular ways you work with sponsoring—you go through each step one by one, and depending on which fellowship it is, they have different sets of questions and stuff that you look at.

But in our terms, I think you could say that one to three is a bit like going for refuge in the sense that we're somehow admitting that we need to give ourselves over to a Higher Power. What I see that as meaning is that there's a sense of recognising that there's something bigger needed to help us walk the path. That might be the community itself. The main thing is getting out of our ego, our self referential mode of being. We could just say that we've come to believe that the power of the good, let's say, can actually restore us to sanity.

Here are the steps as adapted to a pan fellowship meeting

1) We admitted we were powerless over addiction, our lives had become unmanageable

2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a Loving Higher Power

4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves

5) Admitted to our Higher Power, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs

6) Were entirely ready to have our Higher Power remove all these defects of character.

7) Humbly asked our Higher Power to remove our shortcomings

8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except where to do so would injure them or others.

10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it

11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our Loving Higher Power, praying only for knowledge of our Higher Power’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

12) Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps we tried to carry this message to other addicts and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives.

I'm not going to go into steps one to three much at all. Four to ten is the bit that's interesting to me because it's confession, making amends. And then eleven and twelve are a little bit like resolution. And service 

Step four - we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. So it's quite demanding, and it is definitely a section of moral inventory. It's no joke, you know. It's real deep stuff. The following is from AA literature:

So the fourth step calls for us to examine our lives up to the present day, rating down all important actions and events of a moral or ethical nature, their feelings about them, and the character traits in us from which these actions stem. Writing this inventory is an important process, which tests their commitment to the twelve-step programme. How do we face this challenge fearlessly as the step asks us to do? Those of us who have completed step four have found that taking this searching and fearless moral inventory is one of the most loving things we've ever done for ourselves. As we took an honest look at our past, at who we'd been and what we'd done, we began to understand ourselves better. That understanding was the beginning of an emotional healing. Many of us had lived our life up to this point with a secret feeling of shame. We carried deep in our hearts the feeling that we were worthless and insignificant. Often this shame stemmed from unresolved guilt over mistakes we'd never fully dealt with. We'd never faced our wrongs so honestly and never acknowledged them, so we were left with feelings of shame. Writing a step-four inventory enabled us to begin cleaning up the messes of the past so that we could start life afresh.

When I did my step four, I'd been practising confession in a Buddhist context - I’d been practising as a Buddhist for twenty-five years or more, but actually I found the rigour of doing that confession was like nothing I'd ever come across before. There were loads of  questions to answer, about childhood stuff. Different fellowships do different questions, but all of them are asking you to look back, and they give you particular questions about specific things—resentment, anger, remembering things that you've done. Is there anything left over from it? Actually, I didn't have an awful lot. The sponsor that I did it with said that was unusual, but no doubt it was because I had been practising within a Buddhist path and I had been trying to work very hard at not leaving things behind and cleaning them up. But even so, I felt it took me into corners that I had maybe not visited before.

That did make me think that in some ways having a formula can be quite helpful. There's something about the specific nature of the questions that are quite ruthless. They can just keep pushing you in a way, and pushing you. I’m not suggesting that we do exactly that, but I think there's something about having fairly clear parameters about the behaviour that we're looking at. Maybe people do that anyway, we probably do. And I know that as Buddhists, we definitely are very strong on confession in the sense of having a really strongly developed, ethical sense.

Step five you share your confession with a friend. This is important, not to keep it to yourself. And then six, seven, eight, nine, ten are kind of together - having done your moral inventory, you don’t just go back and look at things in the past, but you actually look at what they call in 12 steps ‘defects of character’. We might say samskaras, habitual patterns of behaviour. You're trying to get underneath the action to what the driving forces are, because otherwise you're gonna do it again. If you don't work it, while you drink, you're gonna just keep drinking. Same with any behaviour.

Then with the next two, steps six and seven, the whole thing is an admission that you can't do it on your own. So in this case, it's talking about your Higher Power, but it could be the Sangha. It's the recognition that it's quite hard to change deeply rooted samskaras on your own, and most of us actually need to surrender to something bigger than ourselves to work for that.

And then eight and nine. Eight says we made a list of all persons we'd harmed and became willing to make amends to them. That's quite a big step for people often in twelve-step programmes, and it often means going back to people that they’ve harmed in the past or whatever, and that can be quite a big thing. When people share that in a meeting, it can be really, really moving. Just hearing about people trying to sort things out - sometimes quite big things, because they've done something under the influence of alcohol or drugs that has been very harmful, usually to people they love. And step nine says you make direct amends, except where to do so would injure them or others - that is important. 

Now, just to finish the confession aspect, step ten is a really important one, because we continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. So there's a real commitment to seeing how those samskaras are still playing themselves out, and to immediately try and make amends.

Steps 11 and 12 seem to me to be the heart of the Bodhisattva Ideal. We do service by helping others in the same position. As a sangha, we do service when we offer the dharma, when we keep the centre doors open and the lights on - whether by economic contributions or by helping out in any way we can.

I do hope at least some of you made it this far. I’m not sure why I wanted to share this when there were so many really inspiring aspects to the Convention. It is something I have often thought about - I do think we can learn a lot about fellowship from reflecting on the steps. I would love to offer a retreat sometime using the 12 steps to look at our behaviour in terms of our habits as obstacles to awakening. 12 steps to breaking out of Samsara. My name is Parami and I am an addict to the self!

Meanwhile, as always

May all beings be well, may all beings find true happiness and its causes and may all beings be free from suffering.

Where the Bodhichitta has not yet arisen

May it arise

Where it has arisen

May it flourish

Where it flourishes

May it never die