Step 4: Personal Inventory

In this season of renewal, it’s only fitting that we now take personal inventory on our path of death and resurrection (dying to small “s” self before rebirth into our big “S” self). Steps 1-3 in recovery took us through admitting our powerlessness to control (and our insanity of thinking we could control) reality, and invited us into a sweet surrender to a higher power of our choosing. Now the action steps! In Steps 4-9, we start the intimidating work of “personal housekeeping”, getting down to the “causes and conditions,” the “flaws in our make-up which caused our failure.” (AA, p.63)

Of course, for me when I did Step 4, it ironically first surfaced one of my main flaws, my perfectionism. Inevitably, not wanting to “do it wrong” I almost didn’t do it at all. Perhaps if I’d read Rohr’s Breathing Underwater (pgs. 30-32) first, I’d have realized that “Moral scrutiny is not to discover how good or bad I am and regain some moral high ground, but it is to begin some honest ‘shadow boxing’ which is at the heart of all spiritual awakening … for the sake of truth and humility and generosity of spirit, not vengeance on the self or some kind of total victory over the self.”

The goal, I eventually realized in slowly and painstakingly writing down my fears, resentments, dishonesty, selfishness and self-seeking (amongst many other “defects”), was to foster humility, not humiliation (the latter being the cunning catalyst throwing me back into the shame-cycle that my addictive behaviors had initially arisen to alleviate). As Rami Shapiro relays (Recovery – The Sacred Art, p.61): “Humility is simply a basic awareness of my relationship to the world and my connectedness to all its circumstances,” and “the total continuing surrender to God’s power in my life.”

Another struggle I had was that word “moral” before “inventory,” implying the dualistic “right or wrong”-ness of our actions, even our very selves. This thankfully transformed when I adopted the kinder “skillful or unskillful” mindset offered in the Buddha’s teachings, allowing me to more readily accept all my unskilled behaviors that, with God’s grace, I could learn to more skillfully embody. Richard (BU, p.34) frames skillfulness as a new way of seeing: “Step 4 is about seeing your own log first (Matthew 7:4-5), so you can stop blaming, accusing, and denying, and thus displacing the problem.” Rather than point out the splinter in my brother’s eye, I can now see and even accept the log in mine.

Maybe the fruits of my own fearfully “fearless” inventory, as laid out by the “Big Blue Book’s” author, are best summed up in Kurtz & Ketchum’s The Spirituality of Imperfection (p.190): “Humility, as A.A. co-founder Bill Wilson understood so well, begins with rejection of the demand to be ‘all-or-nothing’, Human be-ing – existing and carrying out our lives in the middle – is to be neither all nor nothing. Humility involves learning how to live with (and even rejoice in) that reality, the reality of our mixed-up-ed-ness, our being both saint and sinner, both beast and angel.”

Next month we’ll explore the joy/terror of next relaying this inventory – all of our shadow-self, skillful/unskillful, beast/angel nature – to another “human be-ing”!