Al-Anon's Step 11

Al-Anon's Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Sometimes I think of this as my favorite step, and many times it looms large in my mind as one I am consciously working on. However, going through my notebooks I realized that I have not been to very many meetings on Step 11. I procrastinated in writing on this step as I have gone through a lot lately and writing about how I work this step is almost too personal to share at this time. But, I will write about how I got into it.

(Photo by Selma Yalazi.)

I was not excited about the “prayer” part of this step in the beginning because I had some issues with the religion of my origin. I thought of prayer as an obligatory thing, and so when I did it I rarely felt a connection with God. The idea of meditation was, and still is, more accessible to me. To get used to talking to my Higher Power on an intimate basis I had to learn to be quiet so I could tune in to the messages I was supposed to receive. I learned that I should not pray for others or for a specific cause, but to ask for guidance in my situation. Then, I had to accept how my Higher Power resolved my problems, which may not be the way I intended. I have to be confident that my Higher Power will take care of my loved ones and myself and that things will work out, even if I don't know how.

Learning to meditate had been a big part of my Al Anon experience. For most of my life I could not imagine sitting still and clearing my mind for even three seconds.  I found yoga invaluable for calming my mind for mediation as I could work out the compulsion to always be doing or thinking about something and instead focus on the class. (I have heard is the original purpose of the yoga poses – to quiet your mind and to focus on meditation.) Part of the reason I began taking yoga classes is that I knew that there was meditation included in the class, and I had no idea of how to do meditation on my own. I knew I needed someone else to guide me. It is only in recent months that I began doing meditation on my own. 

I tried a number of different ways to learn meditation outside of Al Anon and yoga. Once, a Buddhist monk led a meditation workshop at the local library, and that helped a lot. At that time I was not yet practicing yoga and the monk helped us to learn how to just sit in a regular chair and meditate. He said for us to simply sit upright, place our feet flat on the floor, and rest our hands in our lap. (I mention this because an Al-Anon friend injured himself trying to meditate. He thought you had to meditate while sitting cross legged on the floor, but he did not realize that at his age he was no longer physically able to do so.)

I did not get much out of reading books on the subject, even though I am a big reader and love to learn "how to" from books. It seemed to me that books were full of quick novelty exercises while what I needed was just to listen to someone else guide me. I found a couple of web sites with recorded meditations on them, and YouTube had plenty. (Alas, my favorite night time sleep meditation from that time has been removed.) I also like the evening meditation from the DVD AM and PM Meditation featuring Rodney Yee and Maritza. I would put it on my bedroom TV, skip the yoga part (because I have my own practice, but it is not necessary to use the yoga part to do the meditation) and use it to get to sleep at night.

I had a big breakthrough when I followed the Yoga JournalMediation Revolution series.  (I wrote about my experiences as I was going through them, so see this tag on meditation for all of the entries. As with the DVD, I had my own yoga practice and skipped that, using only the recording at the bottom of the page.) It took me a couple of months to get through the whole series, and it was hard, but I grew tremendously from it. I use techniques from the Great Heart meditation when I need to feel connected to my HP. In fact, the whole series made me more independent in my meditation and I can now sit quietly and meditate on my own, using my own intuition instead of a recording.

These days, at night before I go to bed I do some kind of relaxation yoga practice and then sit quietly in bed and meditate. This helps wind me down so I can sleep, no matter what is going on in my life at the moment. I feel that I have been working Step 11 hard over the past few months, but now I am reaping great rewards from it.