"Finding Spirituality"

A final element of phase two recovery that must be acknowledged is spirituality. Many recovering addicts who begin to get a glimpse of some progress in their lives, soon begin to read and learn a lot of information about spirituality and can be heard talking about everything they have learned until they are blue in the face! This is a very natural part of phase two recovery which is oftentimes referred to as "finding spirituality". The "finding spirituality" may or may not have anything to do with religion or your religious beliefs.

Spirituality isn’t such a bad thing to have as we enter phase two of our recovery because it allows us to celebrate our progress in a somewhat harmless manner. The only person who has to suffer is the person who lives with us! Our ongoing lectures and speeches about the "spiritual truths" we have discovered can become pretty tedious for our loved ones. Hopefully, we don’t drive the ones we love away as we profess all our great new realizations! If we can eventually become more humble and quiet in our spiritual progress, we will keep the ones we love close at hand and make them our partners in our spiritual journey. A silent humility is the greatest example we can give to the people who are closest to us and we might be best to save our speeches for meetings or spiritual groups which are better suited for that end.

People are naturally excited that they have made some progress and they are eager to move ahead at an extremely fast pace. Although big leaps in consciousness are sometimes seen to happen, most recovering addicts and alcoholics have found constancy and persistence to be a more common experience in recovery.

Continual "speedy progress" has not been possible for other addicts and learning to settle into some daily habits is part of the program for any serious student of spiritual work. It is common for us to forget that progress takes time. We have to go through the ups and the downs to really make a truly spiritual life.