The Spiritual Secret of AA’s Success
A Summary of Breathing Underwater by Richard Rohr
Introduction
After reading and reviewing nearly a dozen of Richard Rohr’s books, I wanted to find out exactly why he very often references the success of the 12-Step transformation model of Alcoholics Anonymous.
As a newcomer to counseling recovering addicts and prison inmates, I decided to seek spiritual wisdom from my favorite contemplative author on this vital subject. As expected, I found Breathing Underwater to be a treasure chest full of ancient and modern wisdom.
Rohr believes AA’s 12-Step program will go down in history as “America’s greatest contribution to practical spirituality in the 20th century!” That’s an amazing endorsement from a man who has been at the center of the global interspiritual renewal for a half century.
Clearly our nation has a big problem: “23.5 million Americans are addicted to alcohol and drugs,” according to DrugFree.org. That’s approximately one in every 10 Americans over the age of 12…But only 11 percent of those with an addiction receive treatment.
That means one in 10 people we will meet today on the street, in a grocery store, or even sitting next to you in church are struggling with addictions… and only about one in a 100 are receiving treatment!
Worse yet, the Surgeon General reports, “Few medical conditions are surrounded by as much shame and misunderstanding as substance use disorders. Historically, our society has treated addiction and misuse of alcohol and drugs as symptoms of moral weakness and these problems have been addressed primarily through the criminal justice system.”
Alcoholics Anonymous’ Big Book touts about a 50% success rate, stating that another 25% remain sober after some relapses. So obviously AA’s 12-steps offer a proven pathway out of their addictions and into sobriety.
What most Americans and Christians do not realize is that Alcoholics Anonymous can be traced back to a Bible study called the Oxford Group. The 12 steps are based on the Oxford principles, which were used to help all Christians in their walk with God, whether they were “addicts” or not!
Breathing Underwater is important reading, which helped me see for the first time that, like it or not, we are all addicted to something and we all could use some help realizing it and learning how to let go of it.
New song/music video: We’re All Addicts!
Rohr titled his book after a poem by Carol Bialock, Breathing Underwater, “We cannot stop the brown grounding waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, properly detach from it, build a coral castle and learn to breathe underwater.”
Rohr minces no words in his introductory salvo: “We are all spiritually powerless, alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways.” Boom!
The New Testament calls this awakening of our powerlessness “salvation,” others call it “enlightenment,” and the 12-step program calls it “recovery.” So the starting point for salvation, enlightenment or recovery is the same; to acknowledge our powerlessness to do it on our own.
“It seems that we humans would rather die than change, or admit that we were mistaken. Grace is always a humiliation for the ego it seems.”
Rohr’s offers four assumptions about addiction…
1. We are all addicts by nature.
2. ‘Stinking thinking’ is the universal addiction. We’re all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything.
3. All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep co-dependency on them.
4. Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from these addictions and from cultural lies.
“When religion does not move people to the mystical, or non-dual level of consciousness, it is more part of the problem than any solution whatsoever,” writes Rohr. Richard brilliantly identifies the root causes of unhealthy addictions and why healthy solutions must begin from a solid spiritual foundation.
Rohr then explains the reasons each of AA’s steps work so well and examines the biblical and spiritual basis for each. He reveals why these profound twelve statements resonate so strongly with millions of addicted souls participating in the 12-Step program, founded by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob in the 1930s. The following is my short summary of each chapter.
Chapter 1: Powerlessness
“It is when I am weak, that I am strong,” writes the apostle Paul. It appears people who fail to do something right, are those who often breakthrough to enlightenment and compassion. Until we come to the limits of our own self there’s no reason to switch to reliance on a Higher Power.
“God makes sure that several things will come our way that we cannot manage on our own,” writes Rohr. “It is the imperial ego that has to go and only powerlessness can do the job correctly.”
Albert Einstein put it this way, “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created the problem in the first place.”
The ego defines itself by what it attaches to and its aversions. “The soul does not attach, nor does it hate; it desires, and loves, and lets go…all mature spirituality is about letting go and unlearning.”
No one likes to die to who they think they are because “their false self is all they have,” said Trappist monk Thomas Merton. “The spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition,” said the German mystic philosopher Meister Eckhart.
Chapter 2: Desperate Desiring
The surrender of faith does not happen in one moment, but is an extended journey, a trust walk, a gradual letting go, unlearning and handing over. “To surrender ourselves we must have three spaces opened up within us at the same time,” says Rohr; “Our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the work of spirituality.”
To keep the main space open we need some form of contemplative or meditation practice. AA founder Bill Wilson was wise to name “prayer and meditation” in Step 11 as necessary to the process. Transforming spirituality is a matter of emptying the mind and filling the heart at the same time.
To keep the heart space open, we need first some healing in regard to the hurts that we’ve carried from the past. “The heart space is often opened by right brain activities, such as; music, art, dance, nature fasting, poetry, games and the art of relationship. Every heart needs to be broken open, at least once in order to have a heart for others.”
To keep our bodies less defended is also the work of healing past hurts and many memories that seem to store them self in the body. “Surely this is part of the function of healthy sexual encounters, exercise and the importance of hugging.”
Rohr concludes, “So the work of spirituality is the ongoing liberation of head, heart and body toward full luminous seeing and living.” Most “head” churches do not touch the heart, most “heart” churches do not bother with the head, and almost all churches ignore the body as if it was of no account.
“May the God of peace make you whole and holy, may you be kept safe in body, heart, and mind and thus ready for the presence,” -First Thessalonians, 5:23–24.
3. Sweet Surrender
It takes a long time just to accept what it means to really accept our self, others, the past, our own mistakes and imperfections. “Surrender is not giving up, nearly as much is it is a giving ‘to’ the moment, the event, the person and the situation. As Carl Jung taught “What we resist, persists.”
It is our stubborn and self-defeating willfulness that must be converted and handed over. “Our will does not surrender easily and usually only when it is demanded of us by our partners, parents, children, health or circumstances.”
The most common and universal substitute for renouncing our will is sacrifice. “Personal sacrifice creates the Olympics and American idol and many heroic projects and many wonderful people, it’s just not the life-changing gospel. It’s a common substitute.”
“There is a love that sincerely seeks the spiritual good of others, and there is a love that is seeking superiority, admiration and control for self, especially by doing good heroic things.”
Most resentful people are very sacrificial. The manipulative mother is sacrificial, all codependent are sacrificial. “Co-dependents, end up being just as unhealthy as the addict, while thinking of them selves strong, generous and loving.”
“With gospel brilliance and insight AA says that the starting point and continuing point is not any kind of worthiness at all, but in fact, unworthiness! The starting point: “I am an alcoholic“.
“We will never turn our will or our life over to any God, except a loving and merciful one,” says Rohr. “Why should we? Love has little to do with duty, obligation, requirement, or heroic anything. It is easy to surrender when we know that nothing but love and mercy are on the other side.”
4. A Good Lamp
Some people are driven to addiction to quiet their inner critic. “Moral scrutiny is not to discover how good or bad we are, but to begin some honest shadowboxing, which is at the heart of all spiritual awakening.”
People arrive at deeper consciousness by intentional struggles with contradictions conflicts, inconsistencies in their moral failure. “It is not moral superiority, but luminosity of awareness and compassion for the world which becomes are real moral victory. Seeing and naming our actual faults is not so much a gift for us, as it is to those around us.”
Our “shadow” self is not our evil self, it is just that part of us we do not want to see, our unacceptable self, or what AA calls denial. “We need conflicts, relationship difficulties, moral failures, and defeats or we will have no way to ever spot or track or shadow-self. They are are necessary mirrors.”
Step four is about seeing the log in our own eye so that we can stop blaming, accusing, denying and displacing the problem. “If we see rightly, actions and behaviors will eventually take care of themselves. God brings us through failure from unconsciousness to ever deeper consciousness and conscience.”
5. Accountability is Sustainability
Almost all religions and all cultures believe one way or another that evil is to be punished and retribution to be demanded. “Retributive justice has controlled the story line of 99% of history.”
“A second kind of justice is known as ‘restorative’ justice has always been a small minority position, even though it is the clear and revolutionary pattern of Jesus before, during and after the crucifixion.”
In Step five of the 12 steps, a very similar technology for healing and restoration is set forth — a clear structure of accountability, for knowing, speaking and hearing the full truth. “When we human beings admit to one another the exact nature of our wrongs, we have a human and humanizing encounter that deeply enriches both sides, and even changes lives forever.”
“God seduces us all into the economy of grace by loving us, in spite of our self, in the very places where we cannot, or dare not love her self. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.”
The usual and expected ego pattern: sin leads to punishment → leads to repentance → leads to transformation. But the restorative pattern is entirely different: Sin leads to unconditional love → leads to transformation → then leads to repentance.
Can you see the big difference? Instead of responding to sin/failure with a knee-jerk reaction of punishment, God teaches us via Christ that our first response should be unconditional love. Then transformation will naturally follow.
Jesus offers this powerful gift of confession and accountability to all believers, not just priests and pastors. “Step five tries to remedy this deficiency by returning confession to all three levels; God, self, and at least one other human being. It returned the mystery of forgiveness to where Jesus first offered it, to peer confession and peer counseling.”
“This method of restorative justice is now being used in some negotiations conflicts and prisons around the world, and could well change our very notion of justice bringing it much closer to a divine justice.”
“Only mutual apology, healing and forgiveness offer a sustainable future for humanity. No wonder almost 2/3 of Jesus teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness.”
Forgiveness is to let go of all hope for a different or better past. “The unbound ones are best prepared to unbind the rest of the world.”
6. The Chicken or the Egg, Which Comes First?
“We have to work to see our many resistances, excuses and blockages. But then we have to fully acknowledge that God alone can do the removing. Which comes first; grace or responsibility? The answer is both come first!”
Christians often believe in paradoxes without even realizing it. “For example, Jesus is totally human and totally divine at the same time. God is both one and three at the same time. Mary is both virgin and mother at the same time.”
Step six managers to operate paradoxically. “We must first fully own and admit that we have defects of character, but then step back and do nothing about it until we are entirely ready to let God do the job.”
When we allow faith to become a good work, the ego is back in charge. “Many Christians have remained materialistic, war-like, selfish, racist, sexist and greedy for power and money, while relying on amazing grace to snatch them into heaven at the end, yet they surely did not bring much heaven into this earth.”
“We need to hold the creative tension of these paradoxes of life until we can see that the seeming contraries might not be contrary at all. We must both surrender and take responsibility.”
7. Why Do We Need to Ask?
“We ask not to change God, but to change ourselves. We pray to form a living relationship, not to get things done.” This is the simple, yet profound power of prayer and meditation. Not seeking more, but learning how to be content and hear God’s voice in our silence.
“It seems the death of any relationship is to have a sense of entitlement. The mind of a rich person is invariably one of entitlement. To undo this arrogant and soul-destructive attitude, Jesus told us all to stay in a position of a beggar, a petitioner, a radical dependent, which is always spiritually true, if we were honest.”
“Prayers of intercession, or petition are one way of situating our life within total honesty and structural truth. What has been lost is honest relationship with the earth, with one another and a basic humility to how we do life. This is the real and final truth, not what ideas we believe.”
Step seven says that we must humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. “We have to let God reveal our real faults. Usually by failing and falling many times we then allow God to remove those faults.”
“Sadly, most people in early stage alcoholic recovery replace one addiction with another, now it is nicotine, caffeine, stinking thinking and the angry stick. God’s lasting way of removing our shortcomings is to fill up the hole with something much better more luminous and more satisfying.”
Lastly a bit of good news. “It has been my frequent experience that many people in recovery have a unique and very acute spiritual sense, more than most people. It just got frustrated early and aimed in the wrong direction, so it is important that we ask, seek and knock to keep our self in right relationship with life itself — a daily, chosen attitude of gratitude.”
8. Payback Time
“Despite the higher economy of grace and mercy taught by Jesus, he did not entirely throw out the lower economy of merit or satisfaction. God fully forgives us, but our past mistakes remain and we must still go back and repair the bonds that are broken. Otherwise, others will not be able to forgive us and remain stuck and both we and they remain a wounded whole.”
“Redemptive listening” involves stating the facts, as we remember them, and to be open to sharing with the other as needed or felt.
Step eight tells us to make a concrete, specific list of those we have harmed. “AA is the only group I know of that is willing and honest enough to tell people upfront you are selfish and until you get beyond your massive narcissism you are never going to be able to grow up.”
“The geometry of the cross should tell us that we need both dimensions; vertical forgiveness and horizontal forgiveness. Step eight is a marvelous tool for very practical incarnation of that truth, which keeps Christianity grounded, honest and focused on saving others instead of just ourselves.”
Step eight also recognizes how long it might take to truly be willing to make amends to them all because it is a process and must finally include all. “Making such a list will change our foundational consciousness from feeding resentments, to a mind that is both grateful and humble all the time.”
9. Skillful Means
What western religions call wisdom, eastern religions often call skillful means. “Jesus, was a master at teaching skillful means, especially his Sermon on the Mount and in many of his parables in one liners.”
“Jesus proudly and often called himself a ‘son of man,’ the archetypal human every man. Jesus said ‘follow me,’ and never once said, ‘worship me.’” Sadly, our putting Jesus on a unique pedestal kept Jesus out of the range of actual imitation.
“The very goal [of Jesus incarnation] was for us to imitate Him in his combined humanity and divinity. The sad result is that we have many ‘spiritual’ beings, when the much more needed task is to learn how to be true ‘human’ beings.”
Step nine is telling us how do use skillful means to both protect our own humanity and to liberate the humanity of others. “We often need time, discernment and good advice from others before we know when how, who and where to apologize or make amends. If not done skillfully, an apology can actually make the problem or hurt worse — and the 12 steps reflects such experience.”
“Just because something is factual or true, does not mean that everyone can handle it, or even needs to handle it, or has the right to the information. We need to pray and discern about what the other needs to hear and also has the right to hear.
“Skillful means it’s not just to make amends, but to make amends in a way that do not injure others. Truth is not just factual truth, but a combination of text and context, style and intent.”
10. Is This Overkill?
“Our religious history has been guilt-based and shame-based, but Jesus metaphor was a positive vision which he called the ‘reign’ or ‘kingdom’ of God.’ For Bill W and AA it was called “a vital spiritual experience,” neither of these were a negative threat, but a positive allure, promise and invitation.”
This examination of consciousness in Step 10 transitions well into Step 11 on prayer and meditation.
“Consciousness is as hard to describe as a soul is hard to describe, maybe because they are the same thing. Consciousness is awareness of my feelings, so I cannot be purely and simply my feelings them self.”
Meister Eckhart said that detachment was important to increasing our consciousness. Franciscans called it poverty. But today we do not live in a culture that appreciates either detachment or poverty.
“For properly detached persons (read, non-addicted) deeper consciousness comes rather naturally as they discover their own soul, which is their deepest self. You have access to a larger knowing beyond yourselves. If obeyed, consciousness will become a very wise teacher of soul wisdom. The law written on our hearts, as it says in Romans. Or as some call it, the inner witness, or the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus was the inclusive Son of God, revealing what is always true everywhere and all the time. Paul resolves our standing by saying that we are adopted children in Galatians 4:5 and co-heirs with Christ in Romans 8:17.
“So on one level, soul consciousness and the Holy Spirit can be thought of as the same thing. That’s what Jesus means when he speaks of giving us the Spirit, or sharing his consciousness with us. Consciousness, or soul and the Holy Spirit, on both the individual and the shared levels, has sadly become unconscious. No wonder some call the Holy Ghost the missing person of the Blessed Trinity.”
“British philosopher and poet Owen Barfield called soul ‘original participation.’ Many ancient people seem to have lived in daily connection with the soulful level of everything; trees, air, the elements animals, the earth itself, the sun, moon and stars. These were all brothers and sisters, as Saint Francis would later name them.”
Most of us no longer enjoy this consciousness in our world. It has become a disenchanted and lonely universe for most of us, yet religion’s main job is to reconnect us to the whole, to ourselves and to one another.
So, a daily examination of consciousness sounds like a very good thing. “Indeed, when we stopped, trusting our inner and united witness, we had no support in believing the central gospel message itself — that we share the same identity as Jesus (I John 3:1–2, II Peter 1:4).”
Step 10 does not emphasize a moral inventory, which becomes too self-absorbed and self critical, but speaks instead of a personal inventory. In other words, just watch yourself objectively, calmly and compassionately.
“God forever sees and loves Christ in us. It’s only we who doubt our divine identity as children of God. Once we begin to see our inherent dignity clearly, the game of evil and addiction begins to collapse. Evil always relies on camouflage to have its way. People who know who they are find it easiest to know who they aren’t.”
“Whenever we do something stupid, cruel, evil or destructive to our self or others we are at that moment, unconscious to our true identity. Loving people are always highly conscious people. To rely on any drug or substance is to become un-conscious. We cannot actually be loving people when we are unaware or not fully present.”
“To be fully conscious would be to love everything on some level and in some way even our mistakes. The fact that Jesus commands us to love our enemies then we know that God must and will do the same thing. What hope and joy that gives us all. It takes away all fear of admitting our wrongs.”
11. An Alternative Mind.
“The word prayer, which Bill W rightly juxtaposed with the word meditation, is a code word for an entirely different way of processing life. When we pray, we’re supposed to be taking off one ‘thinking cap’ and putting on another ‘thinking cap’ that will move us from egocentric perspective to a soul-centric perspective.”
“I call the first perspective the ‘calculating mind’ and the second perspective the ‘contemplative mind.’ For most people most of the time, the calculating mind is totally in control. It has become our only operating software. And if we do not learn how to pray and change our mind by a spiritual revolution, we will try to process the big five human issues of love, death, suffering, God, and infinity with utterly inadequate software.”
Because we have not been teaching people how to switch this thinking cap, Rohr says we’re producing a lot of neurotic and angry behavior as people cannot deal with the big, central issues.
The first mind sees everything through the lens of its own private needs, hurts, angers and memories. “Most of us do not see things as they are, but we see things as we are.”
“Prayer is always an alternative processing system, but for many if not most, it’s become a pious practice or exercise that we carried out with the same old mind as from our usual self-centered position.”
“It is work to learn how to pray, largely by emptying the mind and filling the heart. In short, prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us, or as Step 11 says, “praying only for the knowledge of God’s will.”
Prayer is an exercise in divine participation, says Rohr. “It is vital that we change our thinking cap because it largely has to do with how our mind processes things and then the heart and body will normally come along. For this reason, Jesus said when you pray, go into your inner room and shut the door. He’s talking about the inner self that we now call the unconscious, our personal inner room.”
“Jesus himself goes into silence, into nature and usually alone when he prays. It is the prayer of quiet and self-surrender that would best allow us to follow Step 11, which Bill W must have recognized by also including the word meditation.”
“Only contemplative prayer or meditation invades, touches and heals the unconscious. God hides and reveals in that secret place. In Matthew 6:6 Jesus calls it the kingdom of God within you. In Matthew chapters 6 and 7 Jesus warns against the unconscious, social payoffs in all public displays of prayer, fasting alms, giving clothing, money class systems, social judgments and possessions.”
Social prayers can hold a group together, but it does not necessarily heal the heart or the soul of the group. Jesus tried to move history toward interiority whenever possible.
The 12-step program was ahead of its time in recognizing that we need forms of prayer and meditation that would lead us to conscious contact with God beyond mere repetition of correct formulas.
“For years, I was part of competing church services at a local Albuquerque jail where each group divided over externals, worship style and vocabulary. But when we did contemplative or centering prayer together, most of those divisions meant nothing, even who was leading the service was unimportant. There was no room for fighting over clergy, gender or ordination, only confidence and authenticity mattered.”
“Watch your thoughts, they become words, watch your words they become actions, watch your actions they become habits, watch your habits they become character, watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
12. What Comes Around Must Go Around
Psychologist Bill Plotkin says that we live in a “patho-adolescent culture,” stuck in immaturity. One of the few groups that has identified this and solved this is Alcoholics Anonymous. AA’s Big Book page 62 says, “So troubles, we think, are basically of our own making, arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, although he or she usually doesn’t think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must rid ourselves of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us.”
We move out of self-centeredness when we share our truth with others. “We do not truly comprehend any spiritual thing until we ourselves give it away. Spiritual gifts, increase only by using them, where as material gifts normally decrease in value by usage.”
Tradition 11 of AA says “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion.” In other words as our light within shines we become more attractive to those around us.
The book of James points to a more “lifestyle” oriented Christianity rather than focus upon doctrinal theories, more about our practice (orthopraxy) instead of exact Scriptural interpretation (orthodoxy).
“If good works do not accompany faith, it is quite dead,” says James 2:17. It is the spiritual equivalent of the first law of thermodynamics; energy cannot really be created or destroyed, it is merely converted to different uses. What comes around must go around, or it does not come around again.
“The sacred name of God (Yahweh) is revealing the deepest pattern of all reality which is; the cycle of taking in and giving back out, which is the shape of all creation. AA recognized that most people need tough love or they do not grow beyond their inherent selfishness. Passive membership creates not just passive dependency, but also passive-aggressive behavior.”
Step 12 calls for a spiritual awakening. “Yes, God could have created us already awakened, but then we would’ve been mirror robots or clones. God loves and respects freedom to the final, fullest and riskiest degree. It was for freedom that Christ set us free, writes Paul in Galatians 5:1.”
“Good religion keeps God free for people and keeps people free for God. When these two great freedoms meet we have a spiritual awakening. But keeping God free from bad teaching, fear and doubt, and getting our self free from selfishness, victimhood and childhood wounds is a lifelong task.”
AA wisely clarifies that our awakenings are not “in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals,” but they are of the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time.
“Again, and again we must choose to fall into a love that is greater with friends and children, which is all training for the falling into the Love that is the greatest. All loves are a school of love and their own kind of “vital spiritual experience.” Rohr’s wonders if that’s why we both want, but also avoid, a vital spiritual experience.
Step 12 says something very risky, but very true — that we will have the spiritual awakening “as the result of these steps.” He knew that we would know only afterward that it was all grace anyway.
“Addiction is a spiritual disease, a disease of the soul and illness, resulting from longing, frustrated desire and deep dissatisfaction, which is ironically the necessary beginning of any spiritual path.”
“The reason AA has been more successful than most churches in actually helping and changing people is that it treats addiction, spiritually as an illness rather than as moral failure, or an issue of mere willpower. AA says, in it’s own inspired way, that addicts are souls searching for love in all the wrong places, but still searching for love.”
Conclusion
“The 12-step program teaches that addiction emerges out of the lack of inner experience of intimacy with oneself, with God, with life, and with the moment.” Clearly this condition exists with a great number of people who are neither alcoholics nor drug addicts.
“Manufactured intensity (via alcohol and drugs) and true intimacy are complete opposites in the search for intimacy. The addict takes a false turn, hopefully a detour, and relates to an object or substance, an event, repetitive anything, shopping, thinking, blaming, abusing, eating, in a way that will not and cannot work for them.”
“Over time the addict is forced to up the ante. When the fix does not work, we need more and more of anything that does not work. If something is really working for us, then less and less will satisfy us.”
Rohr concludes, “Let’s not waste any more time or worship on gods that cannot save us. We were made to breathe the air that always surrounds us. AA offers us 12 important breathing lessons, teaching us that we can even breathe underwater, because the breath of God is everywhere.”
The Christian community can learn a lot about how to develop closer relationships from AA’s 12-step program. Imagine if leaders focused on promoting interactive, participatory small groups, bearing one another’s burdens, sharing both needs and resources, confessing and become accountable — moving toward a model of spiritual simplicity and greater connection with each other and the earth, as it is in heaven?
My new YouTube song inspired by this book, We’re All Addicts By Nature.
P.S. “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection,” says the closing line of The Year of the Dog, an excellent 2022 film. It is the story of an alcoholic who finds a stray Husky and, with the help of a close-knit Montana community, the two strays find a connection and discover what it takes to pull through to the finish line.
