Healing and Personal Power: Step 4 to Immortality, Part Two

Welcome to Part Two of Step 4 to Immortality. Discover how to let go of insecurities and harms, finding inner peace and personal power.

Healing and Personal Power

This week you’ll discover how to do a 4th Step Inventory that will lead to healing and personal power.

We’ll show you how to let go of fears and insecurities, as well as anger, that hold you back from the life you want.

[Related: Step 4 to Immortality, Part One]

Step 4 to Immortality: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Last week we looked at part one of Sept 4 to Immortality. We began to look at ourselves and become self aware in a powerful way.

We found we don’t have to try so hard to get what we want, that we can take our hands off the wheel, a bit, and find a better direction.

This week, with Step 4, you’ll find specific instructions for activating you immortal core by awareness and conscience.

Step 4 is an action Step where we take a moral inventory of ourselves.

Why a Moral Inventory?

Our deep selves, the real you and I, are honest and pure, unafraid and fully present.

When we hide in dishonesty, deliberate or unconscious, we miss ourselsves.

When we’re not authentic and being who we really are, at our core, we short-change our potential.

The Power of Your Core

The be immortal, we need to find our core, our eternal physical self at the center of our being.

If we’re dishonest with others and not honest with ourselves, we live of the surface of life, reacting to the world around us, not controlling our journey and personal destiny.

By letting honesty slide, we miss the opportunity to really be who we are and have the gift of this life.

Dishonesty Makes Us Weak

If we avoid who we are, by self denial and personal evasion, we weaken and die.

If we’re not honest, we can’t feel or sense ourselves; we can’t find our immortal core.

We’re weak and at risk when we’re not living with honesty, as our real and true selves.

Conscience, Used Well, Awakens Us

In knowing ourselves, we find the source of life and express our immortal core.

The Fourth Step is a beginning — and opening up — of our human power of honesty.

As we’re honest, in daily practice, we find our greatest human power; we know ourselves. We know others. We understand the world and get the help we need.

The Danger of Denial

When we’re not honest, not true to ourselves, we and the world lose the benefit of our soul, the best of who we are.

When we’re not honest, by habit or choice, the world and other people don’t know how what we need and how to help us.

A Powerful Method for You

The 4th Step shows us a method for becoming aware of who we are — how we feel, what we fear and how we react to life.

The 4th Step is a path to freedom, where we can heal from past wounds and be aware of how the world is controlling us.

In Step 4, we begin to experience our personal power and the immortality of our core.

How We Give away Our Power

The world controls us by our conscious, and unconscious, reaction to life.

We’re controlled by our reactions to external events, both good and bad.

The 4th Step allows us a beginning of real power and personal control.

As we identify our problems of reactivity, as we stop opposing life — Step Four can begin our spiritual recovery, the return to our immortal soul.

Awareness Is The Key to Immortality

Awareness is the key to immortality: becoming aware of how we think, feel and act.

Awareness helps us answer the following questions:

• • • Are we growing and helping the world?
    • Are we hurting ourselves and harming others?

This may be seem hard to believe, but it’s difficult to always know if we’re helping or harming.

We act largely by habits of belief and behavior, formed in childhood.

We’re strongly influenced by how we’ve been treated and what we’ve seen while growing up.

Both Good and Bad

Some of our young development is good and helpful, but there’s also harm we learn by watching other’s do harmful things and by being mistreated ourselves.

Eventually, we get numb and blind to the point where we can’t see the harm we’ve acquired…

…where we can’t see how we cause injury and pain to ourselves and others.

Heal and Be Aware

As we react to the harm of the world, to injuries and insults we’ve suffered, as we try to protect ourselves, it’s easy to shut off our gut intelligence. We can end up where we don’t feel, know or understand ourselves.

Step 4 gives us a methodology to overcome personal pain and shutting down, to heal, become aware and grow.

Making a List and Checking It Twice?

We begin Step 4 by making a list of resentments.

Step 4 is a methodology to become aware and powerful, so why do we begin with resentments?

Why begin with resentments?

For personal power, we are want to be aware of things that hold us back and take our attention.

Resentment, anger and fear hijack our inner peace and keep us from immortality.

Resentments Hijack Inner Peace

Resentments are the easiest place to start … as we unravel injuries holding us back.

Resentments and anger are the “low hanging fruit” of self awareness and personal growth, the easiest things to find and treat.

You may think: “Oh, I’m a descent guy, kind and understanding. I don’t have resentments.”

Or you may be full of resentments and very aware: knowing the time, date and place or every wrong done to you.

You may be a combination of these two.

In either case, we want to build our awareness of how we harm our lives with injuries that have not been healed.

In the 12 Steps to Immortality, the only things we want to repeat are love, forgiveness and the knowledge of our physical immortality.

Untreated injuries and resentment hold us back in repeating cycles.

The Purpose of Step 4

In Step 4, we want to find the unconscious and forgotten resentments that are quietly churning.

We also want to identify the resentments of which we are aware.

In Step 4, we take a look at what’s been happening inside ourselves.

In this step, we begin to surrender uncomfortable feelings, so we may dig-for-gold and find our core of love.

Resentments, anger and fear are a great place to start in gaining self awareness and personal power.

Make Your List of Resentments

We begin the 4th Step with pen and paper.

Guess what we do? We make a list of resentments.

You may be angry as hell, or think you’re a wonderful person.

You may be a combination of these two.

Either way, it’s time to begin our list, an inventory on our journey to freedom and eternal ability.

Three Columns to Personal Power

The 4th Step begins the process of setting us free from resentments, anger and fear … so we can find a greater peace and immortality.

Your resentment list should have three columns:

• • 1. People who anger you
    2. The cause of resentment
    3. How you’re being affected

Let’s look at the example list below, (Adapted from the main text of 12 Step literature)

In column one, you list the person, place or institution (government, law, etc).

In column two, you list the date or “facts” of the situation that caused your resentment.

Column takes some reflection: you list how each resentment affects your esteem, security, sex relations, etc.

Keep this list simple. I can’t stress this enough. It’s best to do this inventory exactly as presented here.

By keeping this inventory simple, we avoid more excursions into anger and pain that are not needed.

The 4th Step Paradox

By looking at how each resentment keeps us from getting our needs met, we can move on and get our needs met.

A resentment is the result of perceived harm, real or imagined.

Our brains evolved to keep us safe. Resentments, at best, are designed by evolution to be a watchman, guard or lookout … keeping us safe from future encounters with the person who harmed us.

At worst, resentments are an unneeded reaction that repeats endlessly, keeping us from going beyond our present state.

Conscious and Unconscious Resentments

While doing the 4th Step, it’s important to note that most of our resentments are unconscious, things we’re not aware of on a day-to-day basis.

If you’re having trouble starting your 4th Step Inventory, if you cannot imagine resentments you may have, begin with the people closest to you at your job or in your families.

Consider you family of origin and how you grew up.

Look at the Fear

Behind most resentments is fear … the fear we won’t get our basic needs met, the needs for security (food, clothing, shelter, job, etc.), social status, intimacy, friendship, love, esteem, etc.

In your 4th Step List, look at the fear behind each resentment.

Fear can be a driving force that steers us in the wrong direction, so diminishing fear is needed for immortal development.

We can’t use willpower alone to successfully end fear, yet we can dissolve our fears by listing them on paper and sharing these fears with a person of trust (Step 5 to Immortality).

Most fears surround our human needs and the worry that these needs won’t be met.

The Basis of Most Wrongdoing

Fear is the basis of most wrongdoing. If we’re going to do what’s right for ourselves, we’ll need to take a look at human needs and fear.

For more about human needs and how they affect us, see “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”

The links below will help you.

[Related: “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”]

[Related: Video on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs]

Our Big Reward

The big reward of the 4th Step is where we turn the tables, where we put away our resentment and instead look at our part.

Most of our problems are of our own making, caused by how we react.

Turning the tables can be difficult at first: instead of dwelling in resentment, we look at how we might have acted better, having created a less harmful outcome.

What could we have done differently to make our situation of resentment have a better result?

Perhaps there’s nothing we could have done better, especially as children in our family of origin, but as adults we’re responsible for how we react.

As adults we’re responsible for how we react to the present, and how we react to the past.

What Was Our Part?

As resentful and angry as we may be, what was our part in each situation on our 4th Step list?

If we had not reacted with anger, fear or insult … would there have been a problem, as big of a problem?

Did our reactions make the situation worse?

Take a look at your patterns of reacting throughout your life: have reactions of resentment and anger helped you? Were they absolutely necessary?

Our power comes when we look at how we can change our behavior and improve our lives.

What other people do or do not do, is usually not a helpful concern of ours.

We’re Not Bad People

We’re not bad people for having resentments, anger and fear; these are normal reactions to threat and danger, designed to keep us safe.

However, we have the power, as adults, to limit the effect of bad and harmful events.

We have the ability to create a better life of forgiveness, love and understanding.

By doing the 12 Steps to Immortality, we can discard resentments that don’t serve us.

We can give our immortal soul the space it needs to breathe, the place it needs to be in our lives.

In a few weeks, get ready for a really big pay-off by doing the 5th Step to Immortality.

In our blog post three weeks from now, you’ll learn about Step 5 to Immortality.

Step 5: Admitted to our Greater Power, ourselves and another person, the exact nature of our wrongs.

In Step 5, you’ll discover how to join the world in a wonderful way — getting the love, meaning and strength you’ve always wanted.

Learn to awaken your conscience and unleash a powerful healing love.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog, a return showing of “Death is a Con.”

Three weeks from now you’ll learn the power of Step 5 for Immortality.

Blessings, hope and goodwill.