Step Eleven, Picking and Choosing...

A coin is flipped high in the air.  “Call it!” I say heads.  “Tails you lose.”

How often it seems, when we were “out there,” we lost as a result of the choices we made. Not so with Step Eleven.  We’re not asked to make a choice.

In my first ten years of sobriety, I made the choice to only pray.  Meditation seemed so foreign and certainly not something familiar to me, or my family, while I was growing up.  I was reading Step Eleven as prayer or meditation. Fortunately, prayer was enough to keep me sober then.

I didn’t feel complete though.  Something was missing and what do you do when something is missing?  You go searching.  I began reading about Buddhism and meditation.  Intellectually stimulating I suppose, but it didn’t satisfy. 

Then some fellowship friends beckoned, suggesting that I check out this sangha where they meditated.  The rest is history – I have twenty years in this Zen tradition.Yes, it’s prayer and meditation, like two sides of the same coin.  The choice is Step 11, not prayer or meditation.  Like in-breath and out-breath is called breathing.  Step 11 is truly without difficulty when I embrace it in its entirety.

·      One person this evening said, “I pray only for guidance.  When I’m in prayer I feel like I’m being guided.  Since God is leading me, I don’t have to choose.”

·      The ultimate path for me in this koan is the conscious contact I have with God and my fellows.

·      The picking and choosing, that’s my will, my judgments.  “Prayer and meditation keep me from being swept away by it all.”

·      “God’s gift to me in this process is peace.  Power un-opposed is peace.  Avoiding picking and choosing is peace.”

·      This “without difficulty thing” …when I can detach from my thoughts, prayer and meditation help me to deal with outrageous matters without becoming outraged.”

·      Step 11 is an investigation with God as I understand him. I keep investigating this matter, let go of my responsibilities, and see what is happening – to say “yes” to everything, to stand up and be ready.

As this evening together was drawing to a close, one person said, “So great to grow old with the Steps.”


Bill K.