Mayra Hornbacher - Waiting - A Nonbelievers Higher Power

I would like to thank the many people who have helped me find my way toward clarity as Ive written this bookthose who have questioned, challenged, agreed, disagreed, given me insight and opinion, spoken up, listened well, and given support in so many ways. For a lifetime of conversation, argument, and laughter on the matter of spirituality, thanks especially to my father. For walking her own path and showing me I could walk mine, thanks to my mother. For his wise words one winter evening when The God Issue was making me particularly crazed, thanks to Steve L.this book would not exist without you. For years of teaching me what spirituality could mean, in all its manifestations, thanks to the Polaris Group, and special thanks to my sponsor. Many thanks to my editor, Sid Farrar, for guiding me so carefully as I wrote. Thanks to family and friends for once again putting up with me during the process. And thanks, above all, to the women I sponsorfor showing me that spirituality lies in action, in connection, and in love.

Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning journalist and the Pulitzer Prizenominated author of four books. Her best-selling memoirs Madness: A Bipolar Life and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia have become classics in their fields, her recovery handbook Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the 12 Steps is an honest and enlightening look at the Twelve Steps for people who have co-occurring addiction and mental health disorders, and her critically acclaimed novel The Center of Winter is taught in universities all over the world. Hornbachers work has been published in sixteen languages. She lectures regularly on writing, addiction, recovery, and mental health.

Hazelden, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1949, helps people reclaim their lives from the disease of addiction. Built on decades of knowledge and experience, Hazelden offers a comprehensive approach to addiction that addresses the full range of patient, family, and professional needs, including treatment and continuing care for youth and adults, research, higher learning, public education and advocacy, and publishing.

A life of recovery is lived one day at a time. Hazelden publications, both educational and inspirational, support and strengthen lifelong recovery. In 1954, Hazelden published Twenty-Four Hours a Day, the first daily meditation book for recovering alcoholics, and Hazelden continues to publish works to inspire and guide individuals in treatment and recovery, and their loved ones. Professionals who work to prevent and treat addiction also turn to Hazelden for evidence-based curricula, informational materials, and videos for use in schools, treatment programs, and correctional programs.

Through published works, Hazelden extends the reach of hope, encouragement, help, and support to individuals, families, and communities affected by addiction and related issues.

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January

Reaching the end of a given road in our livesor the end of the road of our lives in addictionwe find ourselves at a point of despair, recognizing our powerlessness, not knowing where to go next or if we can even begin again. Sometimes its a matter of waiting through this painful moment, allowing the heart to experience what comes, to feel its way through darkness, and to emerge with whatever it finds. We have come to Step One.

Lake Superior sprawls endlessly to the east of Highway 61, a steely silver-gray, surging against the rocks that line the shore. Sharp outcroppings of rock rise high above the road. At certain crevices, icy waterfalls tumble downward, frozen solid, as if time had stopped and held the ropes of water tangled in midair.

This is the heart of winter in the deep north. For reasons I cant quite explain, Im driving yet farther north, toward the Canadian border, toward tundra, a place where maybe the landscape will match the emptiness I feel spreading through my chest.

There are times when the heart burrows deeper, goes tunneling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know. They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a barrenness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a barrenness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

I have known these times. I believe everyone has. And for the better part of my life, I have tried to dull the sharp awareness of them with addictive substances and behaviors. I have tried to blot them out, blunt their edges, make them disappear. At those times in my life when I have reached a moment of doubt or despair, I have turned in desperation to my addictions, clinging to the absolute faith that my addictions would fill the emptiness. I have trusted the voice of addiction to guide me; I have made it the absolute in my life, the one thing I trusted and knew to be true. I have tried, again and again, to turn my addictions into a spiritual source.

Addiction failed me, as it fails us all. Its clear voice turned out to be nothing more than the voice of my own fear. The source of guidance and comfort it seemed to be were false at best, deadly at worst. And eventually I realized that my life in active addiction had to end. The devastation it had created in my life, in the lives of those around me, in what I wanted to be myself, was too great.

But at that momentthe moment of realization that life as Id been living it would have to endI felt devastation unlike any Id ever known. The barrenness was indescribable. The emptiness that opened up in me seemed to stretch on forever; I could see no end to it, could find no source of comfort in it, could not imagine any way out.

That state of devastation, of despaira state we fear and run from, most of us, all our livesis a spiritual state. It does not feel like it at the time. It feels powerfully, absolutely alone. We have reached an ending; we know that the path weve been on goes no further or leads only deeper into a private hell. It is what they call the dark night of the soul.

But it is a spiritual state: because in that darkness, we become aware of a spiritual hunger that we know must be fed. And that awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings is in fact a gift. It is a turning point. We reach an ending, yes, but it is at that ending where we hear our spirits, which wed thought were long buried or dead, choke back to life.

Although I spent years drowning the sound of my spirit in alcohol, hoping it would serve as some kind of spiritual nourishment, there came a time when I had to stop. And though it was the most terrifying thing I had ever done, I turned inward. I turned to face what seemed to be a spiritual wasteland, walked into it without compass or map, in the hope that I could find my way to something I might need.

At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a cavern and over my face. I know this place, I know its seasonsI have hiked these mountains in the summer and walked these winding pathways in the explosion of color that is a northern fall. And now, as the temperature drops well below zero and the deadly cold lake rages below, I feel the stirrings of faith that here, in this place, in my heart, spring will come again.