Many people come to Radiant Recovery® saying they are already doing most of the steps and just need to add a potato. I often suggest they get a copy of the talk I did at ranch in 2007 about what else is embedded in the steps. That discussion goes through each step and outlines the biochemical changes encoded in each step. But there is another key issue one I haven't really talked about. Structure antidotes blind lurching.
When we are in active addiction, it is as if we lose our center and we stop being grounded. We lurch from one thing to another. Maybe from diet to diet, job to job, person to person, place to place or interest to interest. We have 6 knitting and crafts projects going on. We present ourselves as creative and curious, liking to try new things. We collect little things like offices supplies or pens in case we need them. We lurch and resist being pinned down.
We might say that structure ties us down, thwarts our creativity. Structure seems dull and old fashioned. It seems routine and boring and who would want to do that. Nowhere in our brain have we thought of our behavior as lurching. We never really thought that a little of this and a little of that might be saying something about our sugar addiction.
Why is it that we dream big and stay small? Why is it that those sparks of insight and knowing sputter and fade rather than bursting into our passionate flame?
My hunch is that we have avoided the gift of structure. We haven't considered that structure, doing things in an intentional order might actually shape us. And it might change the lurching to intention. If you do this, you will get this result.
Now think about that. For so many years, we have worked to forget the consequence of our actions. We forget that if we eat sugar, or skip meals we get cranky and unpleasant. We forget that we lose direction and we lurch. We forget a lot.
So when we have structure, we stop lurching and we do not lose direction. Even early on in the program, when we are still forgetting because of our biochemistry, the structure itself guides us. The steps, those funny steps, lead us into intention. They guide us with if you do this, you will change. If you do these steps, you will have a life you cannot imagine. Everything will shift. And it will shift in ways beyond anything you have considered.
Now, many of you may feel that this is simply talk. It is not. We now have enough people who are doing the steps for a long enough time that it is really, really clear that there is a developmental pattern that emerges very predictably over time. The promises we make happen.
The steps are bigger than the food. Don't think of changing them. Do them, do them and get the miracle.
