We addicts have made a lifetime study of feeling good. In our addiction, we were concerned about changing the way we felt -- always for the better: no addict ever engaged in her addiction because she thought it would make her feel worse.

In recovery as well, too many of us focus on how we feel. How many meetings have we sat through where the topic came out of someone talking about how bad they felt? As a group, we find it difficult to handle feelings, particularly bad ones. In the back of our minds lurks the continuing suspicion that we are supposed to feel good. If we don't feel good, then something is wrong somewhere -- with us, with our program, with the people we live or work with. The point of Program, surely, is to feel good, and presumably to feel better and better the more we work our program and the longer we stay clean, sober, or whatever.

It can take many years to see what an infantile attitude this is. All we have done at heart is to trade our addiction for a belief in a merit-driven God who will make us feel great if only we do what God tells us to do. There is no room in this childish, naive view for realities like pain without any obvious cause, or misfortune even though we may have done nothing "wrong."

In meditation we can learn to deal with pain for what it is -- just another feeling. It's not the pain that's the source of the problem -- it's our desire to get rid of it. The act of meditation can help us to see the difference between the two, and to understand and accept that the journey of spiritual progress will always be one of pain as well as pleasure.