The Way of Withdrawal

I was reading a post online interested in using the 12 step process with the way. I hadn't quite understood before that the 12 step process put so much emphasis on a power greater than ourselves:

• Admit powerlessness: Admit we are powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.
• Find hope: Believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
• Surrender: Decide to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him to be.
• Take inventory: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
• Share inventory: Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human beings the exact nature of our wrongs.
• Become ready: We’re entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
• Ask God: Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings.
• List amends: Make a list of all those we have harmed and make amends to them all.
• Make amends: Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
• Continue inventory: Take a personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
• Pray and meditate: Through prayer and meditation, we improve our conscious and connect with God. We do this to understand Him, praying only for His knowledge to give us the power to carry that out.
• Help others: Having a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles.

As someone who is studying the phenomena of withdrawal, I find this approach rather fascinating.

When it comes to withdrawal, it can be from any sort of conditioning. Any sort of habit momentum. Sex and Drugs/Alcohol are obvious. But grief is like this as well. And when the pandemic came, it became clear that major changes in our lifestyles that we were not ready for, also triggered withdrawal problems.

All of it comes down to our attachments to something - attachments that we are not willing to part with.

And so the withdrawal process involves the steps of:

• Denial
• Bargaining
• Anger
• Depression
• Acceptance

Because acceptance is the hard part. And when people don't see an attachment as causing a problem, they will do anything to resist coming to terms with it. And coming to terms often requires going through some kind of breakdown, some kind of depression that allows acceptance to sink in.

So when I look at the 12 step program, I see that acceptance is the first step. And understand that many will be in a program like this because they have figured out the need to acknowledge that there is something wrong. For various reasons. And at some level, accept this.

But it seems like there is still something missing with this. This is acceptance that at some level there is a problem. But not acceptance that has been able to transcend the habit momentum. Not acceptance that is truly able to metabolize the problem.

If we want to bring this into a perspective that follows the way, it might be important that we study nature.

And in studying nature, we come to see that it all revolves around cyclical processes.

And this is where the so called "five elements" come from. Water Wood Fire Earth Metal Water.

They're named like that because of the types of "elements" their phenomena can be easily seen in.

But they're really just describing the phases of change within a cycle.

• Water 💧 Potential Energy, all stored up. The potency that is needed for life to come forth.
• Wood 🌱 Expanding Energy, that which grows. The fuel in the tank, actively moving forward.
• Fire 🔥 Culminating Energy, that which creates. The climax.
• Soil 🍄‍🟫 Created Energy, that which forms the center. Often, the center that was created long ago, that we continue to revolve around.
• Metal ✨ Consolidating Energy, that which condenses and reforges what was created, back into a hot liquid plasma: Water.

This last phase - Metal - is where we have the most difficulty.

Often because the Soil we've created has so much STUFF to process. Processing is what Metal does, but its goal is to get to the point where it all melts down. Then all the stuff that was distinct and divided before as separate stuff, melts back into one undivided whole. One undifferentiated whole.

But getting to acceptance is hard. We usually get lost in our processing. Because there is so much soil to process.

And here's the thing with cycles. We can use up all of our water, feeding the creative fire of an addiction. To the point where we exhaust all the available energy our body has to deal with it. Or that a relationship or family has. Or we exhaust society's tolerance. And so we end up wiped out, defeated, reaching some level of depression that helps us with acceptance.

Acceptance that there is a problem, anyway. That we have a problem. (With the balances in our cycle.)

So we go through emptying out, and letting go, and bit by bit, Metal transforms back into Water.

But then it becomes a problem. Once there is water again, new growth can happen. At first it is small, but it builds up more and more. Like money in the bank. When it is small, it isn't really putting that much of a pressure on us. But as it replenishes to fullness within us, often as sexual vitality, we start to find that it is getting increasingly difficult to not start spending that energy on our old habits. It becomes unbearable and we don't know what to do.

So we need to find ways to utilize that energy - healthy ways. The better we are able to metabolize the energy that builds back up, and turn it back into water on our own, the more we become able to have full control over our own energetic cycling.

And that's the thing here. About regaining agency and autonomy (look those words up!) over our own minds and our own selves.

When it comes to daoism, it is about following the way. That's what the dao is, the way. It leads back to water. For the sage, back the original source of the universe - a hot plasma of formless energy, or ultimately, beyond even this.

When the way arrives at this original water, this is Zhuangzi's the way that is no longer a way.

From Ziporyn's Zhuangzi - The Essential Writings Chapter 2 (dao = way = course):

The Great Course is unproclaimed. Great demonstration uses no words. Great Humanity is not humane. Great rectitude is not fastidious. Great courages is not invasive. For when the Course becomes explicit, it ceases to be the Course. When words demonstrate by debate, they fail to communicate. When Humanity is constantly sustained, it cannot reach its maturity. When rectitude is pure, it cannot extend itself to others. When courage is invasive, it cannot succeed. These five are originally round, but they are forced toward squareness.

Hence, when the understanding consciousness comes to rest in what it does not know, it has reached its utmost. The demonstration that uses no words, the Course that is not a course - who "understands" these things? If there is something able to "understand" them [in this sense], it can be called the Heavenly Reservoir -- poured into without ever getting full, ladled out of without ever running out, ever not-knowing its own source.

This is called Heavenly Splendor.

This way is always there. It is present all around us in the form by which it equalizes the spontaneity of nature, so that things can come together and merge back into simpler things. Like the way that metal condenses and melts back into water. It follows synchronicity. But desire tends to grasp hold of spontaneity with an impulsive need to grow. It doesn't want to do the letting go and returning that the way leads toward. It doesn't want to listen to how to equalize and harmonize with its environment, because something is out of balance here.

In this way, the LaoZi tells us:

至虛恆也，獸中䈞也。

In regards to getting all the way to formless constancy,
it is due to devotion in gathering up the wild within.

萬物方作居，以寡復也。

The 10,000 things just at the moment of standing up, sit down and rest,
due to making use of decreasing the way to back to return.

The 10,000 things can also be translated as "myriad phenomena" and this refers to "all the stuff that has been created and is in need of processing."

So we hear here that in order to regulate this "stuff", we need to be devoted to gathering up its wildness. AND, that it is easier to do this when we don't let it become too wild in the first place.

If calm-and-controlled is one state, and wild-and-uncontrollable is another state, we see that there is a distance between them.

If we want to bring what is wild back into control, then it is easier to do when it has not traveled very far out of control.

And it is well known that an alcoholic cannot have just one drink. Because the habit momentum quickly goes out of control.

But when there is a lot of practice put into consistently bringing things back into a state of resolution, things become much more manageable.

I see that the 12 step program looks to a higher power to help with this. In some ways, yes, we can look to the dao - to the way - for this.

But the way is there to be followed. So it won't help us if we don't follow it. But if we look and listen for its messages, we begin to find that they are there. We have to find them beneath the noise of the desires, the loud calls of people following their own desires, and all the stuff on the surface that we may find distracting. We have to listen more deeply, and then we find that Oh, momentum is peaking here and I can carry it further, or I can listen to the call to return.

This is very important.

Because one of the biggest cycles is the cycle of the day and night.

And we regularly, as humans, tend to ignore the phase where the light fades and we slow down with nature and prepare to rest. Prepare to consolidate and store up, at night.

Reclaim your night.

Learn to go inward. Do your processing.

Dim the lights.

Practice bringing the energy back into a state of consolidated emptiness.

Practice letting the mind go. Journal, work out, unpack the stuff and sift through it if necessary, with the intent to melt it all up into acceptance.

At first it may seem hard, because at first there is a long distance to return it.

But listen to how the way is naturally working with us. Bit by bit, it become easier to process and come to terms with the stuff from our day, so we can empty out and settle down to a very peaceful and replenishing sleep.

Meditating at the end of the process can be much more attainable. Because we've done the work to process and settle our minds. And can relax more fully.

This practice get easier and easier. And we can even start simplifying our lives so that there is less to process. While still living fully and working with the energy that is replenishing.

But it is up to us to do the work. And listen to the way.

🙏