On A Mind-Fuck, and Epiphany - Part II

Part I: ...We must get to our elemental state, broken to pieces, before we can Surrender.

Now, the thing about Surrender is it's never perfect. I don't care what you say, I don't believe it is. It is a taper process, and I'll explain what I mean shortly, here. We are only human, and we have Self-Will. There's a vestige of Self-Will left in any Surrender. That is exactly why we have to be pulverized to bits to reach our BOTTOMS, to Surrender, because we are so resistant.

For myself, I have begun to recognize a benchmark for Surrender. And that is that I begin to feel grief. If we truly have separated ourselves from whatever it is we have surrendered, it means we have given it over, given it up, to our Higher Power. Which translates to us mere mortals into:

We Lost.

And, when we Lose, we grieve the loss.

So what I think a lot of people don't get is that they think once they surrender it should be a lot easier. They don't get that this means the beginning of a grieving process, first. That we must traverse the grief of the loss, before we come to the other side, the promised land of Serenity.

Surrender is one of those quantum leap things. High activation energy. High threshold. But when we cross that threshold, it isn't magically delicious. It's a beginning of a process. It's the beginning of a journey of grief.

They speak of the pink cloud in recovery - that period of great, euphoric relief when the light at the end of the tunnel suddenly comes on, and an addict sees there indeed is a path to the Promised Land. It lasts a while, until reality sets in, in recovery. That reality is the beginning of the work of transformation, which includes the processing of all the grief, for everything the addict has to Surrender, to follow the Path. Yes, it starts with giving up the substance, or behavior of the compulsion.

But that is only the crack in the floodgate.

It is the beginning of a total life remodel. A restructuring of our ways of thinking, believing, behaving, acting, reacting. And to change any of them means to Surrender That Which Was Not Working. And each Surrender is a loss, and each loss must be processed through grief.

This is the real work of recovery.

I am getting to the Epiphany, but the set-up is taking a while, and I'm pulling things out of my thinking that I hadn't realized were there, so I'll stop here for today, and continue in Part III.

-The Traveler