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Starting an Eleventh Step Practice

Click Play to Watch Gregg’s Video on How to Start an Eleventh Step Practice:

Finding the Time

The first step is to set an intention to pray and meditate, and then find or create a quiet space in your home where you may sit undisturbed in the morning. There are many reasons why morning is a good time for your prayer and meditation practice. The practical aspect of it is that your day hasn’t gotten going yet, so there isn’t so much to stop of slow in order to quiet the mind.

So, set your alarm clock five minutes earlier so you have the time to meditate before you need to get started on your day’s activities. Then bring a timer with a chime with you, and set it for five minutes. It is important to honor the time – you are making an agreement with your body and mind that you are only sitting for this allotted time.

First Do Nothing, Then Meditate

Then sit for the five minutes doing nothing. Don’t meditate, don’t pray. Just sit and feel all the resistance of the mind and body to just sitting. After a few days, as that resistance calms, then you are ready to begin meditating. If you begin before the resistance calms, you will think you are failing at meditating. Actually, you’re just failing at sitting still for five minutes.

Waiting for the Desire for More

Keep the practice to five minutes until you feel a longing or desire for more time. This often surfaces as a recollection during the craziness of a typical day of the calmness and sweetness you experienced in the morning practice. Now you can increase to ten minutes. Continue adding like that until you have a 20 minute meditation practice. That’s enough time to experience the deeper brain wave activity associated with meditative states of consciousness.

Step Three of the Twelve Steps

“Step Three opens the door” to all the other Steps, making possible our success in the practice of the Twelve Step program.

Step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him”

Here’s an introduction to the 3rd Step from “The 12 Steps in 2 Minutes” video series:

Click to continue…

Step Four of the Twelve Steps

Completing the Step Four inventory, you realize “you have swallowed and digested some big chunks of truth about yourself,” perhaps for the first time in your life.

Step 4: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

Here’s a quick intro to the 4th Step from “The 12 Steps in 2 Minutes” video series:

Click to continue…

Step Five of the Twelve Steps

Finding connection with others through our Step Five admissions, we come to “a resting place where we may prepare ourselves for the following Steps toward a full and meaningful sobriety.”

Step 5: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

Here’s a quick intro to the 5th Step from “The 12 Steps in 2 Minutes” video series:

Click to continue…

Step Six of the Twelve Steps

Step Six “separates the men from the boys,” as we let go of our “clinging” to our old addictive patterns of behavior.

Step 6: “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”

Here’s a quick intro to the 6th Step from “The 12 Steps in 2 Minutes” video series:

Click to continue…

“My best thinking got me here.”

A fellow is sharing in a meeting about some attempt to figure out a solution to a life problem. Then the realization dawns that as an addict he’s never been good at figuring out real solutions to life problems! It’s been the “mental twist” alcoholics and addicts have that keeps making the drink or drug or addictive behavior seem like the perfect solution to any life problem. And then the fellow concludes with, “After all, it was my best thinking that got me here.”

A Good Third Step Story

It’s the humility in that realization about the poor quality of his thinking that brings his sharing then to the need to turn the problem over to his Higher Power for the solution – that he’s simply never going to think his way out of the problem.

I understand what the fellow is sharing – it’s a good Third Step story of letting go and turning things over to the Higher Power. But we could go deeper.

Eleventh Step Thinking

When the fellow tells us that “my best thinking got me here,” he’s also telling us that he doesn’t have much of an Eleventh Step practice. Why? Because Eleventh Step prayer and meditation practice over time will change the way you think and the quality of your thinking. This fellow hasn’t experienced his “best thinking” yet! There’s more to come.

A.A.’s official text, Alcoholics Anonymous, affectionately referred to as the “Big Book,” is quite clear about this change. In discussing the Eleventh Step, the Big Book states that “our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane….” The change is then explained as a shift to a more intuitive process: “What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind.”

Meditative Brain Chemistry

This change is confirmed by research involving meditation today. We know a consistent meditation practice will develop more “right brain” or intuitive thinking. And we know that meditation moves us into the lower brain wave frequencies that are associated with more intuitive thinking – the “ah, ha!” moments. We experience less analysis and more synthesis; less prose and more poetry.

However, this change doesn’t happen immediately or quickly. It comes with the consistent practice of the Eleventh Step. The Big Book promises that “our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration.” And so the very quality of our thinking changes with the working of the Eleventh Step. We begin to find inspired thoughts – perhaps from our Higher Power – leading us to better paths in our lives. As the Big Book concludes: “We come to rely upon it.”

Same Brain, Different Thought

What a change from the “best thinking that got me here!” More intuitive, more inspired. True guidance coming to us through the same brain that used to convince us that acting out our addiction was the best solution to any problem.

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