The 12 Steps are a great gift to humanity. More than just a program for recovery, the wisdom in these steps can provide anyone with a powerful pathway for spiritual growth.

Most people, unfortunately, will never get acquainted with the benefits of the 12 Steps because their need isn’t strong enough. Those that do find their way to the Steps generally do so because they must turn their lives around. Oftentimes, they’ll join a 12-Step program when recovering from an addiction is a life-or-death matter, or at least it feels that way. As is so true for many of us, only when our suffering reaches our threshold (and each person’s threshold is different) are we finally motivated to recover.

The 12 Steps aren’t just helpful for people recovering from addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, or overeating. There are 12 Step recovery groups for all kinds of suffering: financial debt, co-dependency, workaholism, clutter, procrastination, obsessive compulsiveness, even emotional issues like depression, anger, or guilt.

Benefits of “Working” the Steps

I believe we can all greatly benefit from working the 12 Steps. Why? Well, aren’t we all addicted to our egos and its experiences, emotions, thoughts, appearances, and behaviors? Don’t we all need to be in recovery just from being human? It’s not easy being human; the burdens are great, but we need not bare them alone.

The 12 Steps provide a powerful daily spiritual practice, a way to:

• Surrender the past and let go of wanting to control the future
• Let go of our resentments
• Come to terms with our defects instead of repressing them and projecting them onto others
• Better understand ourselves and others
• Cultivate compassion, humility, acceptance, and honesty—the qualities necessary for authentic spiritual work
• Release our judgments toward others and ourselves
• Accept what is

The 12-Step programs offer an enlightening way of being that brings greater equanimity and inner joy.

Applying the 12 Steps to Your Own Life

Some people are averse to working the Steps because the program suggests that you go to meetings. But who says you have to go to meetings first? You can begin by learning about the Steps. You can start working through the Steps on your own or with a friend. You can then find a sponsor—a guide through the 12-Step process—in a counselor, clergyman, therapist, or close friend.

Bear in mind that you can work the Steps as best you can before ever setting foot in an actual meeting. (Those recovering from addiction generally approach the program from the opposite direction—attending meetings first before working the Steps.)

Integrating the 12 Steps into our lives brings many benefits and doesn’t conflict with other religious or spiritual practices. We learn what it means to surrender—to let go—to be lived by a Higher Power (the Self) instead of trying to force and control life. It’s a liberating experience, and it’s available to us all.

Now that we see that compassion is the secret to effective communication, honest questions can arise: But what happens when we don’t care? What happens when we’re in a position where we have to interact with someone that drives us crazy? What if our compassion tank is running on empty?

Certain relationships are difficult because of interpersonal conflicts, but some people are just plain difficult.

Have Compassion for Difficult People

Nevertheless, the more we foster a sense of compassion and “caringness” within ourselves, the better equipped we’ll be in our dealings with others. Our egos secretly believe that if we withhold our compassion, we’ll be teaching difficult people a lesson. They don’t deserve our care or compassion, our egos tell us. In truth, of course, withholding compassion only hurts ourselves.

Spiritual practices, like A Course in Miracles, frame difficult people as our greatest teachers. Difficult people help highlight defects within ourselves, illuminating our shadow. According to psychiatrist Carl Jung, the shadow represents the repressed defects and instincts hidden in our unconscious mind. When someone’s actions or behavior elicit a strong emotional response within us, we get clues about our own darker side.

Learn from Your Reactions to Difficult People

Inconsiderate people can be challenging to be around. But if someone else’s inconsiderate nature produces a strong emotional charge within us—triggering negative emotions like anger—we can perform self-analysis (with humility and inner honesty): Is there a part of us that’s inconsiderate? Perhaps an aspect of ourselves that we haven’t been conscious of? If a part of ourselves wasn’t inconsiderate or ungracious, it’s unlikely that someone’s behavior would illicit a strong emotional response within us.

When our negative emotions get triggered by someone else’s actions or behaviors, we have an opportunity to forgive those qualities within ourselves. For example, when we’re upset because someone in inconsiderate or ungracious, we can forgive the part of ourselves that is inconsiderate and ungracious (even if we can’t consciously identify with it).

Difficult people offer us a tremendous opportunity for spiritual growth. Through our interactions with them, we can hone our communication skills—for if we can learn to be caring and understanding with difficult people, surely we can be caring and understanding with all people—including ourselves. Compassion for others will then become a way of being within ourselves.

Now that we’re aware of the Five Levels of Communication, we can look at some of the principles involved in effective communication. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we all “pick up” on hidden cues from others (although some are more intuitive at reading these cues than others). These cues give us a sense of what a person’s over-riding intention is for us. We generally know if someone is coming from a place of servitude or self-interest, of helpfulness or profiteering.

So what’s the secret to becoming an effective communicator? Compassion. A compassionate communicator is an effective communicator.

Become a Compassionate Communicator

Compassionate communicators care. They care about what you’re saying; they care about who you are; they care about what they are saying to you.

I know, it’s not sexy. And we could say it’s hardly a secret, except that few people seem to truly understand this compassion principle.

Readers of Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People are introduced to over thirty principles on how to be a better communicator, but almost every principle points to having compassion for the other person:

• Try honestly to see things from the other person’s viewpoint.
• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
• Use encouragement. Make the fault easy to correct.
• Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
• Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
• Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
• Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
• Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• Smile.

Do you see the pattern here? All of Carnegie’s suggestions point to one main idea: concern about the other person. Because our egos so easily get enraptured in their own concerns, we need constant reminders of the value of holding compassion for others.

If you care about another person, often times, the Five Levels of Communication take care of themselves as that person intuits your intention and  willingness to serve.

The more I learn about effective communication, the more I wonder how we’re able to communicate with each other at all.

Communication between two people occurs on numerous levels simultaneously, each with its own nuances and complexities. These levels include verbal, physical, auditory, emotional, and energetic communication:

Verbal Level of Communication

Although this is perhaps the most gross and fundamental level of human communication, people can spend a lifetime trying to master it.  This level includes our selection of words based an understanding of meaning held by the recipient: there are multiple definitions for most words and few of us hold the exact same meaning for each word. Different words evoke different images, memories, and meaning for different people. The logic and reasoning of a statement or argument (Aristotle’s logos) influences the effectiveness of the message being received.

To communicate more effectively, select the “right” words and usage. Be clear and concise. When possible, formulate your thoughts to avoid rambling. This is an art in itself.

Physical Level of Communication

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) brought to our attention the importance of visual cues: eye contact, gestures, movements, stances, breathing, posture, facial expressions, and so on. When used with integrity, techniques like “matching and mirroring” a person’s stance and movements (and words too) can increase his or her receptivity of your message.

To communicate more effectively, it’s helpful to physically align with others, connecting with them in form and movement.

Auditory Level of Communication

The sound of our voice, including the tone, range, and speed effects how our messages are received and interpreted by others. For example, fast talkers will find it beneficial to slow their speech when speaking to a thoughtful, introverted person or risk being unheard. Also, how we enunciate, inflect, and place emphasis on certain words affects how others interpret the meaning of what we say.

To communicate more effectively, become aware of various auditory cues, speaking to others in a manner more akin to their own ways (another form of “matching and mirroring”).

Emotional Level of Communication

Few people fully appreciate how our emotional states affect what we communicate and how the message is interpreted by the recipient. In rhetoric, Aristotle’s pathos represents an appeal to the audience’s emotions. Are you more receptive to someone who is positive and up-beat or someone who is somber and critical? Passionate and enthusiastic or flat and boring? The speaker’s emotions put the recipient in a particular state of mind and influence how the listener interprets what is said.

To communicate more effectively, become aware of your emotional state, learning to pause and release negative emotions before attempting to communicate with others. Words spoken in pride, anger, or fear are rarely well received.

Energetic Level of Communication

Also called the psychic level, this level of communication encompasses a vast range of unseen factors including a person’s level of consciousness, the frequency or harmonics of the message, and other subtle energies. Some people seem to have an “X-factor”—a unique presence—that naturally imparts their messages to others with greater meaning.

To communicate more effectively, hold the highest intention for the other person’s wellbeing. This requires a unique level of mindfulness that is generally cultivated through practice. When we are centered within ourselves, we’re more likely to access this psychic dimension that holds great treasures of insights into others, helping us communicate with greater ease.

Bringing all the Levels of Communication Together

The verbal level is the content; it’s what we say. The physical, auditory, emotional, and energetic levels represent how we convey a message. These levels are interdependent, as each level affects the other. For example, our emotional state affects our body language and our overall field influences our emotional state.

Simply becoming aware of these various levels can be beneficial. When we see the complexities inherent in human communication, we can become more patient in our speech and more compassionate towards others and ourselves.

(Next week, we’ll unveil the secret to effective communication that supersedes these five levels.)

We have access to virtually unlimited information. But does that make us wiser? Not necessarily. Let’s explore the vital distinctions between information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Information includes facts and bits of data. Information is everywhere. Need to know how many grams are in a pound? Want the starting and ending dates for the American Civil War? Curious who founded quantum mechanics? Google it. All the information we want is at our finger tips.

Information, when properly applied, ripens into knowledge. Knowledge requires the organization of information into useful patterns, categories, and concepts. When we make connections between separate pieces of information, we develop knowledge. Learning—the acquisition of knowledge—is an active process that requires study, contemplation, and practice. (This is true for both book learning and self discovery.)

If we stop with just the acquisition of knowledge, we limit our growth. We become knowledgeable, maybe even scholarly, but not wise. Wisdom comes when we apply and integrate our knowledge into our lives. When we learn to live the knowledge, we become wise. Great teachers like Socrates and Confucius were great because they were the perfect expressions of their teachings. They did not say one thing and do another. They were their teaching.

In the field of psychology, self-knowledge is often referred to as “insight.” There’s a joke in psychoanalysis about a man who approaches a stranger in a bar and punches him in the face. While the two men are being separated, the victim shouts at his assailant to see a psychiatrist. A year later, the event replays: the same man punches the other man. The victim once again howls at his attacker, “I told you to see a psychiatrist.” The attacker replies, “I did. Now I know why I punched you.”

Insight and knowledge can be fascinating and revealing. To the mind, insight and knowledge are ends within themselves, yet they don’t lead to transformation unless they are integrated into who we are—our very being. If we learn from insight, which leads to greater understanding and a change in our perspectives and behaviors, we become wiser. If we don’t change as a consequence of insight, we may be more knowledgeable, but not wiser.

True knowledge itself may be rare, but wisdom is rarer still. It is wisdom, not knowledge, which opens the path to inner freedom.

With wisdom, you become the knowledge—you are it. Living the knowledge, then, becomes the highest ideal.

Our greatest teachers devoted their lives to teaching the path of virtue. Virtues are qualities of the Good. I capitalize “Good” because the teachers of old—like Socrates, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, and even Jesus Christ—intuited the existence of absolute virtues, a set of universal values that are the cornerstone of Absolute Goodness.

Our current relativistic culture believes, as the Sophists did, that what’s right for me is right for me and may not be right for you—that “Man is the measure of all things,” as Protagoras taught.

For those who hold such beliefs, the notion of absolute virtues can elicit uneasy feelings. Nevertheless, I believe the more we study the Great Books—both East and West—the more accurate our moral compasses become, opening up the possibility for the existence of Absolute Goodness.

There are four fundamental virtues found in ancient Greek and Roman thought, classical India, classical China, and even in contemporary literature: Justice, Courage, Moderation, and Wisdom.

These four golden virtues don’t stand alone. Understanding the interconnected nature of these virtues offer a profound guide to living a Good life.

The Virtue of Justice

Justice is personified by the Golden Rule: “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” For Confucius, living the Golden Rule was the way to truth and harmony in the world. Treat others as you would want to be treated; never do harm to others—have respect for others and their property. Passivity (remaining silent because of our own needs) in the face of injustice is itself an injustice. Always keep your word, but be practical (for there are times when keeping one’s word is wrong because it may harm others). Honor is at the heart of justice, resting on integrity and courage. Arguably, a litigious culture like ours doesn’t fully appreciate the meaning of justice for legality often circumvents the foundation of justice. According to Cicero, justice is the single most important quality a person can possess.

The Virtue of Courage

With courage, a fundamental human value, we demonstrate the willingness to stand up and say what is just and true. With courage, we do what needs to be done, steadfast in the truth as we understand it, not allowing fear to hinder our course. When we have an understanding of what is just, it takes courage to uphold what is right. Interestingly, on various developmental scales like Hawkins’s Map of Consciousness, courage represents the dividing line between integrity and delusion. Wisdom is also essential to courage, for without wisdom an individual can’t know what he or she should defend. Bravery in the service of “evil,” or of what lacks integrity, is savage and unjust.

The Virtue of Wisdom

Wisdom is knowing what needs to be done. The ultimate goal of the seeker of truth is wisdom; wisdom is found in knowing the truth. With wisdom, we understand these absolute values and how to apply them to our lives. The ripening of wisdom often begins with knowledge—the accumulation of facts and information. With experience, however, this knowledge must be applied to living the Good life. In fact, wisdom consists of knowing how to apply the Good to life; if not, the knowledge is worthless. (Wisdom, then, does not necessarily come with age.) Wisdom illuminates what justice is, when courage is required, and how to avoid excess and extremes, leading us to the fourth virtue …

The Virtue of Moderation

We’ve previously discussed this fourth virtue in the Buddha’s concept of the Middle Way. The virtue of moderation provides a guide to living: nothing in excess; nothing carried to extremes; nothing pushed so far that it becomes harmful or wrong. Moderation, we might say, is the secret ingredient of the four virtues, joining together justice, courage, and wisdom, ensuring that they work in harmony. With moderation, we come to know when justice turns into legality. With moderation, we can see when brutality replaces courage. With moderation, we can discern when we’re accumulating knowledge for knowledge’s sake versus when knowledge is ripening into wisdom.

Justice, Courage, Wisdom, and Moderation: four all-powerful virtues that require a lifetime of study and daily practice. Many great minds believed these four virtues to be a guide to a life of freedom. These virtues of old are just as applicable today as they were at the time of Socrates, almost two and a half millennia ago.

Cultivating these four virtues puts us on the path to the Good life.

Positions are deeply entrenched ideas and beliefs about who we are, how the world is, and what is “right” and “wrong.” Positions are sacred cows; we hold our positions up on a special altar, believing they are beyond scrutiny or questioning.

Positions have a way of permeating our very being, becoming part of our identity. Because we hold them dear, our egos project great meaning onto them, fortifying their stronghold in our minds, making it evermore difficult to examine our sacred cows and expose them.

Some positions are inborn; others appear to be socially constructed. Some positions can be destructive, like believing that my way is always right. Other positions seem more benign.

Destructive positions always elicit an emotional charge. The clearest examples of destructive positions are found in religion and politics. Many people intelligently avoid such discussions, knowing that others have strong positions and will relentlessly defend them. This isn’t to say that destructive positions are inherent to religion and politics; I don’t believe that is always the case. There are models like His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who demonstrates how one can devotedly practice one’s faith with compassion, openness, and acceptance of other faiths.

Psychiatrist David R. Hawkins explains that our positions create a fundamental block to our spiritual growth. Positions, too, are a source of constant suffering. Positions distort our perception of reality. As part of our identity, positions require our defense, which takes energy, leading to emotional distress in the forms of frustration, anger, resentment, fear, and prideful arrogance.

Transcending Positions

The first step in transcending our positions is to identify them. This requires self-analysis and introspection along with the qualities of inner honesty, courage, patience, and humility.

We can start by surveying our beliefs about politics and religion. When we observe a negative emotion in response to another point of view, we’re probably clinging to a position or a series of positions.

Once we have identified a position, we can examine it. We can call it out, put it on the stand, and honestly evaluate if the position is supportive or limiting. (Again, inner honesty is needed here.) Remember that the truth needs no defense and doesn’t elicit negative emotions.

Ideas that trigger the ego’s defense mechanisms point to areas for us to examine. In letting go or undoing our positions, greater peace, love, and joy are realized.

Last week we observed how negative emotions distort reality and alter our perceptions of what is, leading to misunderstandings, conflict, and suffering. Now, let’s see how negative emotions affect our decision-making abilities.

Effective decision making requires discernment: the ability to evaluate and assess a situation accurately, externally or within us. Discernment arises in the absence of negative emotions. The more negative emotions we have, the less discernment we have.

We’ve all made ill-conceived decisions. Influenced by negative emotions, we’ve made important decisions from places of fear, anger, guilt, and pride. And even when the “outer” results of these decisions appeared benign, with inner honesty, the deleterious effect they caused us (internally) is apparent.

Tony Robbins said that “any decision made from fear is the wrong decision.” You can replace “fear” with any other negative emotion and the statement still holds true. Negative emotions signal that we’re seeing the world through a distorted lens. Making a decision based on negative emotions creates more problems in the future because we’re weighing options based on illusions, not facts.

Stock investing provides a useful illustration, for what is stock selection but a series of decisions. Warren Buffett, the most successful stock investor in the world today, notes that temperament, not intelligence, is the most important quality of a successful investor. It takes a steady temperament to curb one’s urges and avoid making decisions out of fear, pride, or excitement.

When Negative Emotions Strike …

When overtaken by a negative emotion, often the best course of action is to do nothing, to simply pause. A brief pause before making a decision can mean the difference between financial success or ruin, between growth in a relationship or decay.

When caught in a wave of resentment, don’t fight it. Ride out the wave, allowing it to pass over you. Then, you can catch your breath and gain your bearings. Centering yourself, you’ll be able to “process out” the resentment instead of aimlessly splashing about in the rough waters of contempt.

When your mind is occupied by anger or fear you’re not in a position to utilize your reasoning faculties (executive function) nor listen to your intuition. Making a decision from a place of anger, fear, or pride is like a wounded soldier, stripped of his armor and weapons, trying to storm the enemy lines single-handedly instead of tending to his wounds, waiting for reinforcements, and developing a military strategy. Failure is certain; his efforts will be in vain.

Get into the habit of pausing for an “emotional check” before making a decision. Visualize yourself having made the decision and notice how you feel. Are you at peace, are you neutral, or are you afraid? Peacefulness and neutrality are likely signs of a green light. Fearfulness provides you with a warning indicator, a subtle message to pause and re-assess. Sometimes, however, fear is just another form of resistance. Learn to sit with the fear, to experience it fully, allowing it to subside. Then, proceed ahead.

Mastering your emotions is a critical factor of effective decision making.

There are two different realities: what happens (an actual event in the physical world) and how we hold the event (our inner experience or perception of the world colored by our feelings, beliefs, and prevailing state of being).

For Descartes, there was res extensa, the world as it is, and res cognitas, the world as we perceive it or as it appears to be.

With introspection, honest observation, and careful self-analysis, we recognize how seldom our inner experience coincides with outer reality.

Inner observation shows us that our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs shape and color our experiences of the “outside” world to such a degree that two people can experience the same event in divergent ways. Consider how two intelligent, sound people can have conflicting views about politics or religion.

Our task, then, is obvious: bridge the gap between our inner experiences and outer reality, bringing us closer to the truth. The more our internal interpretation coincides with actual events, the more fluid and harmonious life becomes.

With less reality impairment, there’s less conflict with others. Conflict arises because we misinterpret events (and people’s behavior), projecting our own meaning onto events.

Bridging the Inner and Outer World

The mind has numerous ways of distorting reality, but negative emotions are a primary reason people misinterpret events.

Simply put, negative emotions signal a distortion: when you’re feeling angry, fearful, prideful, lustful, shameful, or resentful, it’s almost certain that you’re seeing a distorted reality.

This truth is often difficult to accept at first, as our minds hold strongly to our grievances and our belief in “justified resentments.” We nurse our emotional wounds, secretly believing that we are hurting those who wronged us by withholding forgiveness.

But, as students of A Course in Miracles discover, there are no legitimate grievances or justified resentments. (Of course, our minds hate hearing this and want to believe there are exceptions to this spiritual dictum.)

As soon as we identify the presence of negative emotions, we can begin clarifying the inner distortion through various spiritual practices such as practicing compassion, praying for forgiveness, opening our hearts, letting go of the emotion, or asking a Higher Power for a miracle. In the context of A Course in Miracles, we might ask to see things differently so that our perception will be altered and a miracle can occur.

Watch your inner state carefully. Become your own therapist. Be mindful of your feelings when you’re conversing with others, working on a project, or making decisions.

Mindful awareness alone can make you more conscious of your reality distortions. This awareness, combined with willingness and humility, will lead to an entirely new perception of reality, one that will bring greater levels of compassion and peace.

Last week we took a hard look at negative emotions, the role they play in our lives, and various ways of transcending them.

We mentioned how the mind tends to repress negative emotions, pushing them down into the unconscious where they can wreak havoc in subtle and overt ways.

Sometimes, however, we don’t repress negative emotions, we express them. Anger gets triggered; we scream loudly and slam doors; some people are even brought to violence. The more we express negative emotions in this manner, the more relationships (both personal and professional) we destroy.

Other times, when negative emotions become too intense, we seek escape. Escape takes many forms: drinking, taking drugs, watching excessive television, over-eating, playing video games, and so on. The goal of escape is to divert our mind in a particular activity in order to avoid feeling the negative emotion that’s calling our attention.

The Internet has become another popular outlet for escaping negative emotions. We can easily use our computers, smart phones, and tablets (like iPads) to divert our attention from our feelings. The Internet is an ideal tool for distraction, perhaps the most seductive and sneaky outlet for escape mankind has created.

Internet Escapism

One form of escapism on the Internet is obvious: recreational activities like watching videos on YouTube, social networking, online gaming, aimless websurfing, and in some instances, even shopping (“retail therapy”).

A popular cultural belief or meme is “It’s important to always stay connected.” Anchored to this belief, many of us spend endless hours on Facebook and Twitter. The pervasiveness of this belief is undeniable: Facebook boasts over 500 million active users; Twitter has over 200 million users and over 95 million Tweets each day.

The other form of Internet escapism is more elusive, disguised as work. Since many of us use the Internet for professional reasons—email, video conferencing, and online collaboration tools to communicate with clients, vendors, customers, and team members, for example—we associate being online with “working.” We easily convince ourselves that we’re working any time we’re engaged with technology.

And since our Western culture dictates that working is always good—that staying perpetually busy is critical to success—many of us never consider how many hours a day we spend staring at our computer screens.  We never evaluate if our enormous time investment with technology is life-enhancing or not.

Also, with our Infolust, we have a tendency to stay hyper-current with updates in world affairs, weather, sport scores, stock prices, and so on, occupying our minds with a barrage of ever-changing information. Bombarded by “status updates,” we’ve become addicted to all things digital. Busyness now is business.

It’s revealing to calculate honestly the number of hours we spend actually “working” while interacting with technology versus the total number of hours we spend online in a given week.

Behind our Digital Addiction

What’s driving our obsession with the digital world?

Could it be that repressed emotions and our need for escape are primary reasons for our addiction to technology and the Internet?

Could repressed emotions be at the root of our drive for constant busyness? Have our unconscious emotions made us slaves to technology instead of its master?

The only way to evaluate these questions is through devoted inner work, exploring the nature of our emotions, and consistently and consciously applying effective techniques to fully “process out” our negative emotions (we mentioned four such techniques last week).

Only then can we evaluate our use of technology with honest observation. Only then can we uncover our true motives for trying to stay busy all the time, convincing ourselves that this is just how life is and that we have to stay connected at all times. Only then can we uncover our own pathway to inner freedom and peace.