“It is not necessary to acquire a major God Consciousness to be able to cease using. All we need is to maintain an open mind and a hopeful heart.”

– Life with Hope, second edition, page 7

Having entered MA as an atheist, I have a long history of resisting the Step Two challenge of coming to believe in a Higher Power. Even after hundreds of meetings and two years of being clean, skepticism remains one of my core values. I approach Step Two not by abandoning skepticism, but by suspending it from time to time, to see if doing so improves my life. It often does. Although I don’t believe that anyone listens to my prayers, I find great power in the act of prayer itself. I sometimes think of it as playing a trick on my ego—tricking it into getting out of the way for a while, so I can deal with whatever problem to which it might be contributing.

Though I started out thinking of my Higher Power as simply the other people in MA, I now see it more broadly as the state of consciousness fueled by my connections to those people. This allows me to carry my Higher Power out of the meetings and into the rest of my life. I feel its presence when I do a good job at work, call my parents to catch up with them, or help a stranger on the street who asks for directions. It’s the state of consciousness in which I do the right thing, and channel serenity into my life.

Final thought: Through this approach to Step Two, I stay true to my values without letting rigidity hinder my recovery. Marijuana broke me; in light of that, I’m okay with bending a little on the spiritual stuff.