Sought Through Prayer AND Meditation

As I have mentioned a few hundred times, I am achieving sobriety through the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.  While I haven’t actually begun step work with my sponsor, I attend a lot of meetings where we study and talk about the various ways people have completed the steps.   This weekend we studied Step 11 in a meeting, and while I am nowhere near ready to even think about that step (they are in order for a reason), I learned something that may help me in my daily life, right now.

For those not familiar with the steps, Step 11 reads:

Sought through prayer and mediations to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

To date, I haven’t given a lot of thought to this step, but recently I have had a lot of interesting things happen that I believe are signs from God, but I don’t necessarily understand what those signs are supposed to mean to me (see my post on Synchronicity, as one example).  I have continued to pray that I obtain understanding, but it has not yet been granted.

And then someone shared their interpretation of Step 11, which is that both prayer and meditation are necessary, because prayer is speaking to God, and meditation is listening to what He has to say.  That blew me away… I am fantastic at talking to God, but how good am I at sitting and trying to listen?  I heard that explanation, and I realized that to God, I am probably a lot like my 9-year-old son is to me… he is great at telling me all that is going on in his life, and complaining about what is missing, and demanding all that he needs, but when it comes time to hearing what I have to say back to him?  He is usually too busy moving on to his next activity to pay much attention to my pearls of wisdom.

My extremely limited knowledge of meditation involves people with shaved heads, sitting in a lotus position, and chanting “ohm”… not really my bag.  But I am guessing I need to expand my horizon a bit on the real meaning of meditation and figure out a way to make it work in my life, because I don’t want to just talk at God, I really do want to hear what He has to say back to me.

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