One of the hardest things to get my head around is that we don't practice meditation in order to feel better. In fact, we don't meditate for any particular reason other than that it seems to "work."

Often I have a covert agenda when I meditate. I tell myself, "If you get this right, if you meditate correctly, you will reach the point where you feel good most of the time and feel bad very rarely." In other words, I'm judging my feelings, my emotions. Despite my commitment to the Third Step, I'm the one who's supposed to determine how I feel, not God or anything or anybody else. Although I've decided to hand my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand God, I still want some tangible purpose for meditation, some concrete emotional results for doing it properly.

Gradually, I've come to see that my life is simply not like that. I'm the same as everyone else -- I get to feel a variety of feelings, and the only person who is judging these as "good" or "bad" is me. Sometimes I feel good, sometimes I feel bad. In meditation, I can experience these feelings for what they are -- joyful, painful, but ultimately "empty." But I can't use meditation to choose what I'm going to feel, or to make me feel a particular way. When I try, it shows me that in some ways I've come just a little way from my old addictive thinking, which of course was about nothing other than changing the way I felt.