Ballad of a Reluctant Yogi-part 1
The darkness flashed as I pulled the car up to a stop underneath the rusty trestle. I could see a yellow moon poking its head up over the tree line to the north. I rolled down the window of the 66 Pontiac, and it got stuck as usual. Reaching up with my left hand to hold the glass in place, I cranked the window down with my right. I had a few minutes to spare before hitting my AA meeting on the west side of town. My old car smelled like my grandfather’s car used to smell. All that was missing was the beat to shit dashboard Mary that used to hang on for dear life in his old jalopy. The air was thick. It was summer, and the night was filled with the heat and hum of cicadas in the Hackberry trees. It was the year of the thirteen year cicada, and every so often, one of the monstrous creatures would fly into the side of the car with a thud. The last four years had been a wild ride. I’d been sober for that amount of time, and I was somewhat grateful.
Sitting there, I had the overwhelming realization that I had never really wanted this life of recovery and sobriety. It had just happened. I had to admit that I missed the old days. The booze had quit working, 1 and what was left was all the stuff I used to drink away. It ran deep. I had been able to stay clean going to meetings. I had been wading through the work in AA and found it to be profound. I generally wasn’t hating everyone and everything so much anymore. That was good. I seemed to be growing in ways that I could not really comprehend. I did what they told me to do, and I was able to stop drinking. This enabled me to move forward. But sitting here on my way to yet another meeting, something still felt strangely amiss. I could feel it. Mind you, I never really asked for or wanted any of this... It just happened. It had been a rough few years. Though I had been off the booze for that amount of time, some things had not gotten better. In some respects, they had gotten worse. Not on the outside but on the inside. I had spent the first year just hanging on, trying to push away the fear that seemed to bubble out of every pore.
The second year had been better, as I had started doing the steps, but the rancor and disdain of the AA world had still permeated my being. I couldn’t stand the fact that I had to be there. But there had been nowhere else to go. It had been the last stop on the penance train for all my sins, I had thought. I constantly had the feeling that I was dying, that I was a corpse strolling toward the end of my life with a black leather jacket hanging off my bones. I was un-gratefully dead. I’d go to see my doctor and tell him how I felt. “I’m dying, you see,” I'd say. “I feel terrible. You gotta check me out.” The staff would go about running the usual barrage of tests, poking and prodding, and then come back in awe of how great my blood work looked or how tremendous my lung capacity was. I would look at them and say, “That's all fine and good, but you don’t understand. I’m dying.” They would tell me to check back in six months if I didn’t feel any better. I would amble out the 2 door and drive down the road, bemused and full of a fear so deep that it infected everything I did.
The third year had been somewhat better. I was working the steps and getting to know folks in recovery. I had an amazing sponsor who dropped a dime on me and tried to help. He would recognize my predicament of general hate, misery, and dishonesty with myself and make me do more work. The only reason I did the work was that I didn't have any other option. At one point, he told me that I had to go tell my AA home group how much I actually hated them all. These things brought great relief and uproarious laughter for me and the group, as we were all able to identify ourselves and the interior shit show most of us were experiencing more precisely. That identification was useful at first, though after a while, it ran its course. The fact was, after four years, I was still wracked with a sense of fear, self-protection, and self-loathing that was ingrained in my cellular being. This was after doing the steps and coming around a bit. I had started to notice that my sponsor suffered from the same thing as well. He still seemed to be just hanging on for dear life at times, and he was upwards of ten years sober. “Don’t leave before the miracle happens,” he’d say. But it was obvious that the miracle of freedom hadn’t happened yet for him either. I prayed like a beggar, by default, reluctantly, and separate from a wholeness that had eluded me my whole life. To be honest, up to that point of 40 years old, I’d never felt comfortable in my own skin. I had been constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was like some kind of middle-aged Wile E. Coyote, waiting in a barren desert for an anvil to fall from the sky and crush him with a POOF. I thought that I was flawed, a bad person, and terminally viewed myself as less than, though all the while, trying to cover it up with a mask of my will and ego (an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, as they say). This was not my fault. Another year went by. I was sober. I’d felt somewhat better. I could hold a job and be good to my family. I did the AA “moral” self -inquiry work, but there was still something missing. I still wore a black leather jacket in the summer. I still had delusions of grandeur. I still lived a life of quiet desperation.
So, it was here that I found myself this night, twiddling the knobs on the AM radio. Little Jimmy Dickens came on with a quiet tune that flowed out into the sticky night to meld with the cicada hum. “Life turned her that way.” (I didn’t get the connection at the time, but in hindsight, I see there are no mistakes in this life.)
If she seems cold and bitter Then I beg of you Just stop and consider
All she's gone through
Don't be quick to condemn her For things she might say
Just remember
Life turned her that way
No don't blame her
Life turned her that way
As the tune twanged in the twilight, I pulled a rumpled soft pack of Marlboro lights out of my back pocket and straightened a smoke. As the tobacco crackled in the firelight, a little voice whispered into my being.
The voice said, “My man, if you don’t go deeper spiritually, you are not going to make it.”
I took a long pull, and I heard it again.
“My man, if you don’t go deeper spiritually, you are not going to make it.”
They say, in the program, if we fail to continually expand our spiritual life, we are doomed to failure in recovery. They said that the spiritual life was not a theory, that we had to live it. Being a recovering Catholic, as well as an alcoholic and self-deprecating egomaniac, this was a tall order. My experience up to that point, in relationship to God, was one of abuse, guilt, shame, toil, and joyless consternation. There wasn’t a lot of freedom there. Just seeing the word God on the wall in the rooms of AA made me want to vomit. I would shake with resistance. I loathed the whole concept of abuse and shame I had been given as a child. In fact, I’d become a living reaction to it. I hated those fuckers. I could still feel the cracks on the back of the head I had gotten from my father if I didn’t kneel right in church. Sexless nuns had been teaching us about sex, shame, and morality and whacking my knuckles with rulers. Sad, old, moral men had bemoaned “the word of God” throughout my youth, like it was something separate from us—something we had to live up to. I saw more joy in people walking out of a restaurant or bar than I had walking out of a church. My parents had shoved an orthodoxical interpretation of God down my throat on a daily basis. It had created an oppositionaly defiant disorder effect of resistance in me that had been fierce. Who wouldn't recoil at being treated this way? I would actually hurt myself to prove them wrong. It fucked me up. Something in their moral little world of perfection just hadn’t added up, and I had known it from deep within. I had known it when I was 6. When I would question it, I would just get shamed. I had felt my family love had been contingent on my being someone I wasn’t. It had felt like some kind of sick trade off. It changed my relationship with telling my own truth, that was for sure. This really is the root of emotional trauma and spiritual abuse. I had felt that I had been rejected by my parents, so therefore, unacceptable to God. It is one way that the separation of self occurs.
BUY THE BOOK
click here
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08DSVHQRF/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3
