Supersize Me

As an alcoholic in recovery, it all starts with meetings for me. Meetings in recovery are different from meetings in other arenas, the business world, say. I’ll admit, I’ve been to some absolutely unbearable work-related meetings over the years, but in terms of recovery, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a meeting that didn’t help me in one way or another.

Meetings for recovering alcoholics are where we share experience, strength and hope with our fellow alcoholics—some of whom may not exactly be “in recovery” as yet, but hopefully they’ll make it eventually. For me, it’s where I constantly hear things I need to hear.

For example, I was at a meeting the other day and we were discussing the idea of practicing the principles of AA in all our affairs, the hope being that we might be as understanding, helpful, and compassionate with family, friends, and strangers when we leave the meeting as we are while the meeting is actually going on. It can be difficult sometimes and I know I’m not alone in having had the experience of sitting in a recovery meeting feeling incredibly peaceful, contented and full of love for my fellows and then, within minutes of leaving and hitting the street, I’m ready to rip somebody’s head off.

As we talked about this topic, one of the members shared some advice his sponsor had given him recently. The sponsor, with kindly intentions after listening to the fellow rattle on about all the horrible problems currently haunting his life responded with the forthright suggestion, “You need to enlarge your spiritual life.”

To illustrate, the sponsor related this story. “You know those eco-tote bags? Well, if you’re at the grocery store and you need a lot of groceries, you better bring two bags.” He continued with a further explanation. “If you only have one bag, you’re not going to be able to carry everything you need. You’ll either have to get less than you need to start with or squeeze as much as you can into that one bag. Basically,” he said, “you need to enlarge your spiritual life.”

The story reminded me of a discussion I had had just the previous evening with another friend of mine in recovery. We were having dinner together and getting caught up on the details of each other’s lives. He had recently returned from Switzerland, where he had just attended the memorial service for his mother who had just died.

My friend is Swiss, but has been living in the U.S. since he first got sober nearly 25 years ago. He has returned periodically to Switzerland over the years and has maintained close ties with his family over there. As we were talking he indicated that his mother had gotten quite crotchety in the months before she died, lashing out at the people around her and making things difficult for family members who loved and supported her. Her world had narrowed and her character defects had expanded, it seemed.

As we talked about the situation I relayed to my friend something I had heard from a spiritual teacher I am familiar with. The teacher described the impact of a teaspoon of salt on a glass of water, with the salt representing the negativity that comes into our lives, all of our lives, on a regular basis. Dropped into the glass, that teaspoon of salt essentially renders the entire glass unpotable. Yet, if one were to take that same teaspoon of salt and put it into a pitcher of water, the impact would be negligible.

In essence, my friend’s mother had reduced her spiritual life to the size of a glass of water, and the salt had virtually poisoned everything in it.

That same message came back to me at the meeting the next day. “You need to enlarge your spiritual life.”

As published in the AA book, As Bill Sees It, Bill Wilson, AA’s cofounder wrote in a 1966 letter, “The chief purpose of AA is sobriety. We all realize that without sobriety we have nothing.

“However, it is possible to expand this simple aim into a great deal of nonsense, so far as the individual member is concerned. Sometimes we hear him say, in effect, ‘Sobriety is my sole responsibility. After all, I’m a pretty fine chap, except for my drinking. Give me sobriety, and I’ve got it made!’

“As long as our friend clings to this comfortable alibi, he will make so little progress with his real life problems and responsibilities that he stands in a fair way to get drunk again. This is why AA’s Twelfth Step urges that we ‘practice these principles in all our affairs.’ We are not living just to be sober; we are living to learn, to serve, and to love.”

So, when it comes to the spiritual life, I say “Supersize me”!