I want to
talk to you a bit more about how I see my higher power and why it works for me.
I'm always a bit reluctant to talk about this topic because I know that one's
relationship to one's higher power is a very personal thing. What's meaningful
to inner person is not to another. I learned this fairly early on in program.
The great tsunami in the Indian Ocean occurred
about two months after I joined program. I heard the third step prayer and I
thought about the tsunami and I was inspired to construct a meditation in which
I visualized my higher power as the tsunami, thinking that the tsunami would
destroy and wash away the bondage of self and all my character defects.
I did this
visualization on a very deep level. I really imagined myself being destroyed by
the great wave. I also imagined
selfishness, dishonesty, self-seekingness (not sure of that's a word), and fear
as little grass shacks that I had constructed, four of them, arrayed behind me.
I brought to mind the images I had seen of the tsunami, washing through
buildings and trees and destroying me and the little grass shacks.
I imagined
it really as two parallel events, one in my head and one outside my head, so
that I would really truly be totally gone. I imagined the wave washing through
the trees, just as I had seen in a video, but also washing into the back of my
head, into the depths of my subconscious, cleaning everything out, especially the desire for excess food.
I planned
this visualization like this. Then, unplanned, my imagination provided a second
visualization. Since I was imagining myself as dead, my soul was free to soar
way up into the stratosphere, up to where the satellites take such beautiful
photos of the earth. Then I did a backwards somersault up there.
The tsunami
victims had said that the tsunami was actually two waves, that many children
had been taken, because they went out to play on the parts of the beach that
were newly exposed when the first wave receded, and succumbed to the second
wave; so my imagination, unbidden supplied this image of me coming back down
from the stratosphere onto a surfboard, that I rode the second wave with.
Now of
course the second wave was to crash on the shore just as the first one had, but
this is where my new intuition applied what program had taught me about living
in the moment. I had been listening to this concept in meetings, the idea that
we stay in the present. I learned a saying: "Yesterday is history,
tomorrow's a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present."
Being on
that second wave was a fatal endeavor. It was going to crash into the trees
ahead of me. I would surely die from they impact, yet it was also the best ride
in the world, while it lasted. The water was sparkling under a warm tropical
sun. The breaker around me was beautiful and exciting, roaring, wet, crashing.
It was an amazing tropical vacation moment.
This was a
new concept for me. I had been very afraid of death or injury. Even today I
don't think I could really ride a big wave like that, but still the idea of
enjoying such a thing was, for the first time, suddenly appealing to me. I
sought out videos on the Internet of people who had actually ridden hundred
foot waves.
The idea
that I was riding that wave persisted in my head for several months. It was a
very exiting time for me. I felt relieved of all my worries and truly free for
the first time in a very long time, since I quit a job that I really didn't
like. I went to sleep imagining I was sleeping on my surf board. Sometimes I
imagined that the floor was wet from the wave, when I went to a new place where
I might be confronting some fear.
It was an
ecstatic mystical experience that lasted for about six months until I finally
got a consistent sponsor. Most people tell you their sponsor helped them find a
higher power, but that was not my case. She really didn't know anything about
my beliefs or spiritual life. She heard that I did yoga, so she suggested that
I try to visualize energy going through my chakras and that I pray on my knees.
Even though
I was pretty sure that that was not what my higher power wanted me doing, I did
it. I allowed my sponsor to interfere with my higher power, because I was
making get into a higher power. I wasn't setting good boundaries.
Fortunately,
I didn't lose my abstinence, but my relationship with my higher power did
deteriorate.
But this
just goes to show how tricky it is to talk to another person about spiritual
things in program. You don't know what is going to help them and what is going
to mess them up. Food plans are like
that too . We don't really know what triggers and doesn't trigger another
person. We really only know for ourselves.
Others,
too, have told me that there is a honeymoon period in program for the first six
months, anyway, so maybe that intense ecstatic state would have faded even
without my having changed my practices. I always remember it, though.
I once took
a class in prayer. The speaker told us that in a person's lifetime there will
be periods of consolation and periods of desolation. Anyone can have faith in
periods of consolation, times when God seems beautifully close and full of
inspiration. True faith comes during periods of desolation, when God seems
impossibly distant and uncaring. Even though I was sad that my ecstatic mystical
experience faded, because I listened to my sponsor rather than, my higher
power, I kept my faith in the reality of my higher power transforming me in
wonderful ways.
So I know I
need to be careful, about talking to people about higher power. Sometimes I've
told people about my tsunami visualization. So far no one has found it
appealing at all.
In any
case, the question I once asked myself about this visualization was whether my
higher power was, for the purpose of program,
the surf board or the wave. I went back and forth on that. Ultimately,
though, I conclude that it is both: the safe spot where I stood, but also the
chaotic and destructive forces around me.
I started
out with this destroyer HP idea, because I went to a weekend retreat at a yoga
ashram. That was where I decided to use a spiritual approach to my eating
issues, even before I joined program about six weeks later.
At that
retreat, they talked about the benefits of meditation for mental and spiritual
health. One speaker told us that, in India, housewives use a mantra while they
are doing chores, as a spiritual practice that would not detract from those
chores. The mantra they used was "Om, namo Shivaya," calling on
Shiva, one of the members of the Hindu trinity.
Now I've
never been much of one for Hindu Gods, but I decided to use this manta and it
worked for me.
There were
several reasons, why this particular God appealed to me. One was that he us the
transformer, and I wanted to be transformed into a thin person. Another was
that I had prayed fervently for years for God to save my marriage, and my
marriage had not been saved, do my confidence in God was weak. Another was my
need to confront my own fears of loss.
The
Christian tradition, in which I was raised, speaks of God as creator. The
Hindus have this Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva trinity. Brahma is the creator. Vishnu
is the preserver. Shiva is the destroyer and transformer. Hindus have told me
that they are really monotheists, like people in Western religions, but they
have different personae for this one God, because it makes it easier for them
to focus in the aspects of God that interest them.
When I
first heard of Shiva, I assumed he was a bad guy, like Satan in Christianity. I
thought that, because I couldn't imagine death and destruction coming from a
nice God.
I was
surprised to learn that Hindus seldom worship Brahma. Instead they focus their
worship on Vishnu and Shiva. They regard Shiva as a loving god because he's
sort of a cosmic declutterer, taking away the stuff that one no longer
needs. By definition, I guess, stuff
that one no longer needs is the stuff that Shiva has taken away, whether one
likes it or not.
Shiva the
destroyer inspired my tsunami visualization.
I don't
think one has to be a Hindu to appreciate the idea of God having destructive
powers as well as the more positive stuff. God does create, sustain, and
destroy, after all.
For me, the
take home here is that if one does only see God as creator, then one is going
to be frustrated when things are lost, taken away. "A loving God would not
do these things," we're likely to say to ourselves. However, if we see God
as being Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer, then it's going to seem more
natural if things are lost, if there is suffering in the world.
I might not
agree with what goes on here, but I am not in charge. I might not like or understand why some
people have to suffer and die, especially if they're people who I like and want
to have around, but I am not in charge. God is in charge. God decides who lives
and who dies, not me.
Program has
taught me to imagine positive consequences from tragedy. For instance, as a
result of the horrors of World War II, Europe is now committed to peace. Something similar happened in China about
2000 years ago. A horrible emperor who committed mass murder united the
country, paving the way to peace and prosperity.
I take this
example, because my father came to this country as a refugee from the
Holocaust. I tend to feel unsafe, because of what happened there, and that God
isn't really trustworthy, and of course he isn't, if by trust one means doing
what *I* think is right. What I think is right is not necessarily going to
happen, but I'm not in charge here, and cosmic decluttering is going to keep
happening, even if, from my limited perspective, it seems unkind, unjust,
cruel, or tyrannical.
Another
thing I learned from that group of yogis was that if one truly believes that
one is part of a greater whole, then nothing is truly lost. It might be
redistributed, in some time or place distant from me, but that does not mean it
is lost to God. God can still go there and experience it, or rather is near
everything. It is only lost from my limited, selfish perspective. My anger or
grief at loss only means that I want different things from what I am given, in
other words that I am not surrendered.
*******
Addendum: 10/17/23
I still get fascinated with big waves
