Join us in a 12-step recovery program for those who are tired of being half-alive and want to heal from the deadening effects of being socialized in this culture, which we have come to believe is unhealthy and predicated on a number of addictive processes. (For more on this line of thinking, read "Background" below.) So far, we’re imagining that the program would focus on recovery from addictions to some combination (different for everyone) of

* competition and measuring ourselves against others
* praise and approval
* comfort
* security
* smallness and timidity in the face of injustice and entitlement
* self-hatred and self-doubt
* staying busy
* control of people, places, and things
* keeping relationships shallow and safe
* having  too much or too little money
* worrying about the future
* assorted substances and material stuff, or the compulsive renunciation thereof

Members of all other 12-step programs are welcome, as well as those who have never attended a 12-step meeting before.

Together we will seek the guidance of a Higher Power of our own individual understanding (you do not have to believe in "God" as your Higher Power) and support each other in trying out new ways of living.

 We're hoping to start meeting in June, probably on Thursday evenings from 6-7:15pm. If you'd like to receive an email with details, let us know by emailing us now.

Background

"For to survive in this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings."
--Audre Lorde, in "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"

Audre Lorde’s words quoted above were spoken to an audience of mostly women, black and white, but they apply, actually, to all innately compassionate, tender-hearted, sensitive human beings—in other words, to all of us. None of us were meant to survive as human beings.

What? What does it mean to say that we were never meant to survive as human beings? I can’t say for sure what Lorde intended, but for me, these words suggest that the price of becoming good citizens of this superpower called the United States is some piece of our humanity. In order to ensure our cooperation in wealth-and-power-generating processes that subjugate and injure both people and planet, American institutions systematically teach us to toughen up, to deny our feelings, to disconnect from our bodies, to “mind our own business,” and to limit our compassion to those deemed worthy of it, often those who look and live as we do. We have been taught that, as much as we might hate it, we have to “look out for #1,” as Rabbi Michael Lerner has put it, and that we have to compete with each other for resources and status, strive for perfection, stay in control, and seek comfort and happiness in accumulating stuff.

Please understand that we're not saying all of us have succumbed entirely to this training. In fact, we believe that we have all resisted as best we can (thank God), but that the pressure to comply is intense, that the process starts so early in our lives that these ways of being we were taught are now second nature such that they are even now limiting our capacity for full aliveness.

Seminary of the Street is committed to fostering our recovery from this socialization process and cultivating the development of resilience that will enable us to resist acting according to our conditioning and to instead choose vulnerability, generosity, and ways of being that contribute to the flourishing of all life.

We also believe that our own recovery will not be complete until we participate in the healing of the addictive society that made us sick. (For more about the addictive process from which U.S. culture suffers, see Anne Wilson Schaef's WHEN SOCIETY BECOMES AN ADDICT.) For that reason, our twelfth step is a little broader than the one proposed by Alcoholics Anonymous and related programs. Ours reads "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we practice these principles in all our affairs, trying to carry this message to those who still suffer and to contribute our efforts to projects that embody an alternative to the addictive processes of the dominant culture."