Healing
Anything & Everything
Through 12 Steps
Susan Vaughn

Step 1: I admit that I am powerless to heal my depression and that my life has become unmanageable because of it.

When my partner and I spilt up my youngest child was three. Though I had been raised without religion, I said the first prayer of my entire life. "If you are there God, you must send me a guide for I don't know how to find you." I was in the most hopeless phase of my life. Without a man to support me or father my children I lost all of my dreams and visions for a positive future of safety and security where love would flourish and everything would be all right.

That was the beginning of a change in consciousness for me that continued to unfold for the next ten years. Within two weeks, God sent me a wonderful book called A Course In Miracles (ACIM), which changed my life. It was a perfect book for me, not only because of what it said, but because of the affirmations that formed the entire middle section of the book. These affirmations created for me a discipline of mind. The instructions were to repeat them several times an hour. Since there were 365 of them, I was to maintain this discipline for one year. Examples of them are: "I am as God created me." "Light and peace and joy abide in me." "I am not a victim of the world I made." "I am not a body. I am spirit."

I said the affirmations religiously and when I got to affirmation 365, I turned back to number one and did the whole thing again six more times. It took me ten years to do it. This alone had a massive impact on my inner dialogue and I believe that it created the foundation for all the healing that was to come. And what did I change my mind to? I stopped seeing myself as a limited physical person living a limited material life and became a spiritual being. In other words, ACIM empowered me to become conscious of how I was creating my painful life experience through my negative thinking.

Step 2: I believe that a power greater than I can restore me to my sanity.

My ten year experience of inner healing was an incredible time for me, full of many miracles. I had the sense that I was never alone, that angels and guides walked with me and that I was being watched over and taken care of in ways that are hard for me to describe. Within a very short period of time, I fell madly and completely in love with God/Goddess as I understood Him/Her to be and began the first true love affair of my entire life. I can not even begin to describe the ecstasy that I felt, for nothing on this earth compares with the love one feels for the Beloved of their soul, the God/Goddess of their heart.

Step 3: I now turn my will and my life over to the care of God/Goddess as I understand Him/Her.

Once I connected to God and Goddess, everything changed for me. Before, I had been alone, but now my life was filled with wonder and the constant companionship of an inner voice that was loving and kind. I didn't yet know much about the soul. All I knew was that I was madly in love with the voice I was hearing and the guidance that was coming to me from within. Personifying my guide in form (whom I later called my Beloved) became the bedrock of my healing. I modeled my guide after the Christ Self.

Step 4: I take a fearless moral inventory of myself.

It was my teacher Lazaris who introduced me to shadow work. He taught me how to find the faces of my shadow and let them come and be with me. I did this meditation numerous times. The most significant one was when my mother showed up and I had to admit our similarity. I stood closer and closer to her until we were touching. At that moment I felt my mother's spirit enter me like an electrical shock, which allowed me to feel her excruciating pain.

Step 5: I admit to God, to myself, and to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs.

As a result of all the shadow work I'd done, I realized that I wasn't always the victim I thought I was, and that, in my shame and unhappiness, there were times I was the perpetrator. I especially looked at payoffs I received for dysfunctional behavior and admitted what I was getting out of depression.

Step 6: I am ready to have God remove all these defects.

My constant prayer to God was: "Help me to become more loving. Help me to become more true to my Self. Help me to see my life differently. Teach me how to forgive."

Step 7: I humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings.

I believe this is a lifetime of work and the essence of the spiritual journey. Through life experience one has many opportunities to get in touch with shortcomings if one is willing to admit that one is at least 50% responsible for everything that transpires in relationships. As one becomes aware of what shortcomings he or he has, healing can empower self-change. I don't believe shortcomings are removed by magic, but by conscious decision making.

Step 8: Make a list of all persons I have harmed and make amends with them all.

The most significant meditation I had at this time was to visualize everyone I had ever hurt. I brought them forth one at a time to tell them I was sorry for what I'd done. There was generally an exchange of words between us that eventually led to me being forgiven. Then I went on to the next person. This was an emotionally intense meditation which allowed me to release a lot of guilt and shame.

Step 9: I make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

After I did the above meditation, I contacted everyone I could find, verbally said I was sorry and made amends where I could. Most people I contacted didn't even remember the events that had so plagued me, but verbally telling people I was sorry did a lot for my own personal healing.

Step 10: I continue to take personal inventory and wen I am wrong I promptly admit it.

Being unafraid to do shadow work and take responsibility for my misperceptions has become the hall mark of my life. Unfortunately, my misperceptions can sometimes take me far afield before I can see what I'm doing to create my life experience. When I do, however, I promptly admit my part in it and do what I can to change.

Step 11: I seek through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God as I understand Him/her, praying only for knowledge of divine will for me and the power to carry that out.

During the ten years of my healing I spent an average of two hours a day doing intense shamanic trance work. I went to fifty workshops with Lazaris that were each three to five days long. I also continued my affirmations and spent at least an hour a day reading ACIM. I actively sought my healing in every way I knew how to seek it, following the guidance I was given to the most minute detail.

Step 12: I try to carry this message of inner love to everyone who will listen, and practice these principles in all my affairs.

After doing ten years of intense inner work, standing with one foot in the physical world and one in the imaginal, I called upon my seventeen years experience as a classroom teacher and developed curriculum to teach all that I had learned. I've been teaching this information continuously for over ten years now. Though I don't have a lot of students at a time, I know I've impacted hundreds of lives through my teaching, public speaking, article writing, and my published book.

When my daughter went to college in Vermont last year, a fellow student saw my book on her shelf and exclaimed that it was her mother's favorite book! Someone else came up to me after a lecture and told me that it became her Bible for a year after breaking up with her partner. Another student told me she had a friend who had changed her entire life after hearing just one of my free lectures given at an herb fair. These are just some of the stories I've heard over the years that affirm that my work has been received.

I believe that the twelve steps is the core of the spiritual journey and can be used to heal almost anything, including mental illness and conflicted relationships. giving your life to God, developing a positive and nurturing inner voice, and doing shadow are powerful techniques that anyone can use to improve their life and create greater happiness and joy, even if their only addiction is negative thinking.

Susan Vaughn regularly holds classes in The Art Of Conscious Evolution and has written courses for UMS.

Visit the Christine Breese website to read articles on consciousness and awakening, visit University of Metaphysical Sciences Video Satsangs to see talks on spiritual subjects. Read articles on Wisdom of the Heart Church. Visit Starlight Journal for blogs, newsletter, and forums on spiritual subjects. Visit Christine Breese's Metaphysical Sciences youtube channel to view free video satsangs.