Good evening everyone!
I hope you’re all well and your sober journey is going well!
I’ve just hit the reset button again and I’m beginning a new sober journey.
One aspect of AA I have always struggled with and I think has made remaining sober a challenge, is the concept of a higher power, I struggle to be religious or spiritual so I find it hard to relate it to a literal god. I remember in AA people used all sorts of things as a higher power, so if anyone is comfortable to share their experience or have any suggestions on how to explore a potential higher power id really appreciate it!
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I grew up as a fire breathing athiest. 12 step programs have helped me soften and become a little more open minded, though I still don’t believe in a Big G, but that hasn’t stopped me from connecting with an HP.
I started with using the Group Of Drunks as my higher power. I the consciousness of the group was something that was keeping me sober. I couldn’t do it on my own, but the group is so much stronger than the sum of it’s parts, and there is real power when it comes together, even just as two people.
When I came into the rooms, I had the Gift Of Desperation. I didn’t WANT to stay sober, but I knew I HAD to, for my own sanity and mental health and wellbeing. I took the suggestions of the group, as they were able to provide Good Orderly Direction on how to stay sober. I listened to the suggestions and took the ones that I felt comfortable with. Gradually, I became comfortable with more and more, but in order to get there, I had to keep going to meetings. So I did more than 90 in 90 and I took the suggestions, as best as I could.
The Great Out Doors provides me with a lot of inspiration. Nature shows me that there is something bigger than myself and that I cannot control the world around me. I find peace and serenity when I am outside in nature and I choose to interpret that peace as being something connected to an HP.
Finally, I started observing the world around me. Jung had a concept of synchronicity - meaningful coincidences. When I started looking out for these and stopped dismissing them as random, I started to understand that my HP has looked out for me and kept me safe when my actions and behaviors should have had me dead in a ditch.
My best advice is don’t force it. Just do your best. My conception to my HP has changed over time and I suspect it will continue to change.
I listened to a lot of AA speaker tapes on youtube by Bob D. He really helps me.
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In the na book there is a women still trying to figure out what her hp is, as she’s driving along she asks to be shown a sign, one minute later a farmer’s truck driving in front of her spews it,s load of potatoes all over the road in front of her. No one gets hurt and she decides to help the farmer to reload the potatoes on to his truck. He offers her a massive sack full of the spuds as a thank you, she declines but asks for just one. From that moment forward her higher power was a potatoe------- true story! 
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For this Goat, I honestly believe it happens when it happens how it happens. @aircircle gave a great example of how this happened to her.
Goat has always struggled with the religious and philosophical issues surrounding the whole God thing. Got a whole lotta religion as a kid and then a philosophy degree that caused a lot internal conflict, until Goat did for Goat what God wasn’t doing (or so Goat thought and certainly wasn’t fast enough). That ultimately got Goat a lovely bottom and a near death experience as a result.
Even after coming into the program, there wasn’t this sudden embrace the whole HP thing. It took sitting on that seat day after day after day, coming here, listening to a bunch of drunks talk about God and HP to them. Then one day, it just clicked. Goat realized that something was out there. Whatever that was kept him from dying at his bottom. It started with that and remaining open. Over time, Goat began to understand how something had been involved in other situations and occasionally was there in real time.
To this day, this Goat cannot describe God/HP to him. God/HP just is and takes the form that is needed at the time Goat needs it. Sometimes it is other people or goats or my AA Group… Sometimes there is a seeming direct connections with God. Sometimes its Jerry. When it gets really bad and dark, all Goat knows is that it isn’t Goat.
To this Goat, God/HP cannot be put in a box and defined. To define God is for Goat to exert his will and expectations over God – the exact place Goat doesn’t need to be. Goat’s job is to remain open to what is out there and allow God to do what God does, when and how he does it.
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I’ve struggled with this in the beginning too
Simple answer- your HP is whatever physical or non physical entity that keeps you sober
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My fav quote is by Oliver James, “Music is my higher power.”
For me, music has kept me sane, been my best friend, my therapist and my first love. When I can’t communicate my thoughts or feelings properly, I put them into lyrics.
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I went to a yoga/meditation teacher who talked about using the idea of the universe. Or the goddess, if you want to imagine a quasi-personal power but without the patriarchy. I am an atheist but I know prayer can be helpful, not to any person but just directing awareness to the fact that there is so much more in the world than me. Nature, music, exercise, connecting with people, those all help me feel more aware of how much is beyond me. I think a lot of the value of focus on something else, whatever we call it, is to get out of the narcissist bubble. I don’t really like either higher or power (because I’d rather focus on how to encourage a world with less hierarchy not more). But I feel helped by thinking of things beyond me. The universe. Love. Hope. It can be whatever you need today.
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Absolutely agree with @Mephistopheles on this one. Don’t get too hung up on trying to work this out.
All you need at the moment is the understanding that you can’t do it on your own. So you have to put it out there!
I also agree with him on the inner dialogue bit. My ego kept me drinking, that little voice that I fed everytime I put off giving up by another day, or drunk driving, .etc etc.
My higher power is the other voice, the one I listen to that tells me I should live a better life, be a better person. When I was drinking, I let my ego drown my HP out, literally.
When they talk of God in the rooms just think something bigger than you!
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My experience is similar to @aircircle’s. I came in as a once spiritual agnostic, even very briefly an atheist long ago. When I washed up I had lost any sense of a power greater than myself.
So at first I went with the Group Of Drunks, putting my faith in those who got sober where I couldn’t. Sometimes it was Tom Hanks, cuz that dude has something figured out. (“what would Tom do?” 
) With time I would commune in the great outdoors again.
Slowly it returned as I worked the steps though. Still relatively agnostic, but spiritual again. Connected. All I can think to call my higher power is Life, the Universe and Everything: “Lue.”
All of the world moves/inspires me, and I do my best to listen.
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I love this so much! Lue!
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There is a force that binds us all; it connects us. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you can’t smell nor taste it, but it’s there. Some call it God, some call it the Spirit, some call it Physics. Whatever it is, that is my higher power as it is what controls all matter.
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I call it source energy, pretty amazing stuff truly!
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I used in this order for my H.P. (happy increasingly spiritual agnostic here)
- Time
- 4 wise women (mom, stepmom, therapist, sponsor- any 2 give me the same advice I had to give it a go)
- Community of AA / 12 steps
- Broader more spiritual sense of Community, locally (where I’m at now)
- Humanity (working towards being of greatest service to greatest number as an H.P. ideal)
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I had to recognize that my first higher power was the booze. What it told me to do, I did with no hesitation, no exception. Then I was granted a real true physical higher power. Department of Corrections is real good a telling me what to do and how to do it and when to do it. With that discipline, I was able to absorb the love from AA, my much cherished home group in particular. My understanding today is how I fit into the universe and into the design of it.
Spiritual practice has always been important to me. First it was consuming distilled spirits. Today it’s reading and writing and meditation and prayer and exercise and yoga and striving to not be a reactive, frightened jerk. Particularly my meditation, and most particularly the longer mediation periods I enjoy on the weekends, is important. I have what in the 80’s they might have called astral projection experiences, what I call today true wholeness. I get connected to the universe and for a short time, transformed. It’s trippy, and I dig it!
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I see mine as eternity and the universe that we are all a part of. We are made of stardust. I try not to give my HP a name, since names and words are entirely human reference points. I feel a lot of peace when I spend quiet time in meditation, with my HP, and reconnect 
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I just wanted to get sober I didnt bother with higher power when i first came all i had a desire to get sober it came later when i was a few months sober
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So… for me, I remember a thing I read in an old Time magazine. They did this study where they weighed a body right before they died… natural causes I presume. And they weighed the body right after death. They did all the calculations to account for breath, organs, change of composition, etc. But they found that there was this 21 grams of … They didn’t know what… that was unaccounted for after death. Some people say there’s a scientific basis for this missing weight, but kinda in my gut I know that we’re not just bags of meat and water… we each have a tiny little something in us that makes us spark a little. To me, that’s the Zap that brings our Frankensteins to life. It’s the energy that we ARE that fills up our meat bodies, till the meat body finally wears or rusts out. That energy, our energy, is the same energy that runs through everything… we don’t have any idea how powerful it is and our eyes are so closed so much of the time… we see coincidences every day and don’t realize that they’re how the universe is doing it’s thing, staying anonymous. Ever wonder how things walk towards to you some days? Stuff you don’t want, but turns our you needed exactly THAT to help you out further down the road. Something you’d never imagine being able to predict? To me, that’s the energy that we put out there, calling to other energies to bring us what our actual selves need, not our craving, wanting meat bodies… For me, my HP is that energy, and I can trust now that universe has my back. When I don’t know what to do, go left, go right, try harder, I stop, listen to my gut… and lean back. I figure out what exactly I think I’m trying to do, what I think I want, and I ask out loud, for the universe to take me on the right path. Sure you could argue that I’d never know if it’s the right path cuz I didn’t try another one… but it’s way less stressful to ruminate on the path I didn’t take, and just know that the one I’m on- This is the right one because this is where our Creator has me now. I don’t question it anymore, I give it up to my HP and I’m 4 days shy of 7 months. Loads of crazy stressful stuff happening in my life right now, but it’s all happening exactly as it’s supposed to be. Learning, and asking for help as I go… never would have caught me doing this a year ago!
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Yeeees. Last paragraph especially.
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I love this one!! Thank you for sharing!
I utilize Group of Drunks to achieve a Good Orderly Direction to sobriety and incorporate the Great Outdoors.
On a personal level, I lean on empirical study & focusing intention.
For me, this looks like:
- Reading Peer Reviewed Journals
- Sharing & acquiring knowledge
- Developing healthy intentions
- Celebrating the cycle of life
- Enjoyment of the natural world
I have struggled all my life with faith so I gave up the fight and let logic in.
“…improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But,’ says Man, ‘The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”
- Douglas Adams, author
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