The Presents in Presence — Embracing Step Ten
By Kimberly C.
Step Ten states, “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” A few weeks after I delivered my last lingering amends for Step Nine, I sat down with my sponsor and told her I felt like a little baby, fresh and new, ready to learn how to be a human again, and not only a human but a spiritual being.
Prior to Step Ten, we alcoholics are on a road of triage and clearance. We learn about how our resentments are really just excuses for not living up to our fullest potential. We learn to look at our behaviors through a common lens of humanity, and to forgive ourselves and others for the coping mechanisms that led us lifelong to the self-medicating elixir of booze. We no longer want to numb out or escape, we start to feel a compulsion for living.
I felt that compulsion. I was ready to walk and talk and engage with the world and its inhabitants from a place that had been cleaned of its toxic sludge, otherwise known as “the wreckage of the past.” I was looking for that “fourth dimension” – a profound shift in perspective brought about by my newfound connection to a Higher Power. A state where I was told I would experience life differently, free from the destructive patterns of addiction, and find a deeper sense of purpose and meaning. I could be liberated from the confines of my former, self-centered existence.
Knowing that Step Ten is centered in a devout conscious effort to be present and aware in our every thought, speech, and action, my sponsor assigned me some work. Every day I was to write a gratitude list upon waking to frame my day with an intention of positivity. Then I would pray and meditate. Prayer for me is when I talk to my Higher Power, asking to be rid of self-will, and allowed to become a receptive hollow bone for which can be filled with a divine plan, focused on natural harmony and love. Meditation for me is when my Higher Power talks back to me, giving me clarity, mindfulness, and messages only found in a sincere silence with myself and my inherent soul.
Then in the evening before bed, my sponsor told me to write a Nightly Review of my day – the things that stuck out, noticing the activities that made me feel joy, and any activities that made me feel disturbed. And if there were moments that made me feel disturbed, I was to process them, either through a phone call with her, or through my own journal writing. After processing anything that left a sour taste in my mouth, we would come to solutions –sometimes these solutions constituted of making an amends, and sometimes they culminated in me discovering my character defects that had been peeking out from the shadows.
When I started this practice, I dug around in my old pile of journals I’d been keeping for the last decade and was dumbfounded to find an eerie pattern. Every day started with my best thoughts for the day ahead, optimism abounded, as I would see the statement, “I will not drink today.” By ten a.m. the pages would go empty, because that was the point I would succumb to the vodka and the rest was blotto. A broken record for years is recorded in these notebooks.
Seeing this made me realize the tenth step is about persistent presence, consistent accountability, and living by example. It’s about Good Orderly Direction. By paying attention to what we do, and immediately reversing any errors made along the way, existence becomes like a blank canvas to fill unfettered by past influence and unarmored for the future. We meet ourselves in the glorious now and we no longer build that old storehouse of ick in the gut.
At the end of the night, I pray and mediate again—these two activities frame my day, creating a sacred container between me and my Higher Power where I know I am safe. It has made me take off the invisible backpack I used to wear full of strategy, manipulation, control, anger, and bitterness. I am only responsible for myself here and the tenth step holds me true to that.
Step Ten has made me no longer feel like I am teetering on a tightrope wire between continual catastrophes and have learned to meet life with grace in every given moment. It doesn’t mean I dance through a field of flowers like a Pollyana in rose-colored glasses; there are still car problems and grumpy family members and people whose personalities piss me off. But I carry in my pocket this daily tool kit as an ever-ready guide for those moments when I do break down. And these days, thanks to Step Ten, that has become the exception rather than the norm.