Body, Mind and Spirit

For years, I had known the physical nature of alcoholism, but the shakes and the pounding headaches and the gastric distress I suffered on a regular basis were relieved when I picked up a drink. And, judging from the way people looked at me on the street or when I opened my mouth to speak, I knew I was out of my mind, though the panic and the rage and the extreme isolation seemed to lift when I had a few. And, finally, I was well aware of the spiritual vacuum I was living in, but its manifestations of alienation and hopelessness seemed to dissipate the drunker I got.

So, yes, I knew about the threefold disease. I just didn’t realize it was alcohol that was causing, not curing, my difficulties.

What was critical for me was the realization that recovery, too, was threefold, and that if I didn’t drink I could actually get better in body, mind and spirit.

It didn’t take long to start feeling better physically. Not flooding my body with alcohol and drugs seemed to have a positive effect on my system, and getting copious hours of sleep and some regular meals brought a kind of homeostasis I hadn’t know for years.

Similarly, my demeanor seemed to improve with continued sobriety. I was less apt to fly off the handle, more willing to cooperate and, in appropriate kindergarten parlance, “to play nicely.” However, the mental part of recovery was not as smooth as the cellular regeneration that was physically underway simply through the removal of the toxins. Like a warped floorboard, my emotions kept tripping me up, sending me into chaotic episodes of frustration, anger and despair. While I could sense progress, it still seemed an insurmountable task to actually gain some measure of emotional control. And there was something romantic about my emotional immaturity that I found hard to give up, a kind of freedom that came from acting on whatever passed through my mind at any given time. Judged against this standard, sobriety seemed to be a little boring and I remember walking along the streets at night in New York early in recovery just itching for somebody to bump into me or to say something so I could react and unleash all the feelings that were brewing inside of me.

As it says in Step One of AA’s “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,” “It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us.” This is where the spiritual part of recovery began for me, and I found myself stepping into churches at different hours of the day, just to sit and to pray for some kind of release from the storm clouds of emotion that seemed to follow me.

It didn’t have anything to do with religion for me; I simply was searching for a place – anyplace – where I could be quiet for a moment and reach out to the power I had known all my life was out there somewhere, available and accepting of the myriad flaws I had exhibited throughout my life with such regularity. My sense of a higher power was raw and unrefined, yet it was palpable and personal and I recognized slowly that God was everywhere for me – not just in the empty churches I frequented in early sobriety, but on the streets, too, in the chaos and in the calm.

My recovery in these three areas has continued over the years, with progress and setbacks at regular intervals. And no one area has taken precedence; there is no hierarchical ranking, no top dog, so to speak, in recovery. I need to pay equal attention to all three aspects. Like the equilateral triangle enclosed in a circle that has become a symbol of Alcoholics Anonymous, my wholeness is contingent upon continued maintenance of the three sides of the triangle: body, mind and spirit.