I stay in touch with a broader sense of who I really am, and a deeper sense of what I really want.
Original wording (AA):
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact
with our Higher Power as we understood our Higher Power, praying only
for knowledge of our Higher Power's will for us and the power to carry
that out.
What is implicit in this step -- as in the whole Proactive Twelve Steps approach -- is that you can find a lot of the answers within yourself. All you have to do is calm the fears that prevent you from connecting with what is good within yourself -- whether you call it God, a Higher Power, or anything else.
A contemplative attitude
By now, you have a good sense of the process of the Proactive Twelve Steps: Lasting changes don’t happen from being forced through sheer power of will. Instead, you take the time to pay attention.
An analogy to this process is how to deal effectively with a tangled cord. If you focus on making something happen fast, you pull and pull. The more you pull, the tighter the knots, the harder to untangle the cord. If, instead, you focus on loosening the cord, it eventually becomes much easier to disentangle.
Going through this process, you have been practicing a contemplative, meditative attitude. As you live your everyday life, as you face the challenges of life, big and small, you stay tuned inside, in touch with a broader sense of who you really are, and a deeper sense of what you really want.
Of course, you can also look for a formal meditation practice, as the original wording of the step calls for. There’s nothing wrong with that. Meditation is a good way to be in conscious contact with your True Nature, your Life Force, your own inherent goodness. You can experiment with various forms of meditation -- some techniques may work better for you than others. But the point is not to add yet another activity (this one, called meditation) to the long list of things you have to do in your day (e.g. brush teeth, then meditate, then…). The point is to integrate the kind of proactive contemplation I have been describing into your normal, everyday life.
A sense of spaciousness
Similarly, as we have seen in Step Seven, organized religions do not have a monopoly on prayer, in the sense that prayer is not a magical way of “placing an order” for what you want. Prayer is what happens when you realize how much you want something, and how little control you have over what happens.
In fact, some people’s religious practices and rituals can sometimes be a way to delude themselves about having control when they actually don’t. Take, for instance, the ritual of doing a “rain dance”: If you see the rain dance as a way of expressing how fervently you want the rain, and how little control you have over whether it actually rains, you are very much in tune with the limitations of the human condition. On the other hand, if you feel that, by doing the rain dance, you are actually activating a mechanism that will make rain happen, you’re out of touch with reality.
So, throughout this process, we have been cultivating an ability to find a sense of peace, a sense of spaciousness, in the midst of tensions and problems. It's the opposite of feeling agitation, of rushing around. The opposite of feeling "I can't bear this". You develop your intuitive sense of your authentic self. In other words: You are more comfortable in your skin.
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