Alcoholics Anonymous | March 29 2013 | Steps In Action | Step 3 "Your Higher Power" "it is the journey and not the destination…" "Am I still judging the world, and using the twelve steps to judge what other people do?" "Am I still trying to be perfect, or am I accepting that I can make progress today?" "Is there anything I am avoiding today?" "Do I really understand that life is truly all about the quality of my emotional and spiritual journey?" "By this time in my life should I have all the things I thought I wanted?" "Do people think I am a success or failure?" Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy? We can be both, if we accept we are making progress and not perfect today…
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"We can restart our day at any time!" I guess the reason why I was asking all these questions just now is because of all the things that can undo me as fast as a drink. I suppose I could call it unhelpful thinking, a sort of thinking that we start to have when we feel that we might not measure up to the expectations of those people we know. And the worst expectation of all is the one that we carry around in our own heads about ourselves. Expectations are resentments under construction. And worse than expectations in my opinion, right now, are the things we feel we are entitled to, just because we think we are entitled...
A vision for you: "the usefulness of any vessel is in its emptiness." When I stopped drinking, I was still full of fear, pride and ego. Fear fed paranoia. Pride and ego fed expectations and entitlements. Driven mad by drink and powerless over it, I did not know what to do even though I had all of the toolkit available to me to start a new life given my past experience and the skills and experiences that would lead back to success. No amount of skill and no amount of experience will overcome burnout in particular careers, which require tenacity and superhuman resilience. No one is superhuman, and nobody can live at extremes. It took me quite a while to realise that burning out, left a huge gap. And the potential to restart life from scratch… And yet the attraction to the old life, the old material life and abundant money could have undone me had I not encountered fellowship and friendship. One day at a time…
Being empty: a vessel with nothing in it? Half of a vessel empty in my case, all my thinking and past experiences were about getting somewhere. And by the time I got somewhere I would be okay. So when I stopped trying to think what the right answer might be, I was left with a whole void of time where once I had a diary of events for a good year ahead. It felt wrong to have time on my hands, I was racked with guilt and shame about failure to be the man I thought I ought to be. And with our fellowship, or somehow finding out as I needed empty spaces to make sense of why anyone is alive: "the emotional and spiritual experience…" Take away the man-made expectations and entitlements, the man made requirements and measures of success, suddenly life is quite simple…
Ah yes, but no, but yes, but no! The whole world careering along on expectations and entitlements based on judgements and measurement. And how do we actually value the life we have? On the one hand we have the material world, which drives most of what goes on. And we have songs written, books written, films made, TV series, all about? How to love, how to be loved back and find useful endeavours in life. Sometimes our thinking will lead us into all the wrong decisions, because we just don't understand what makes us tick on a daily basis… Our emotional and spiritual living…
The basics of emotional and spiritual living? Knowing our feelings in the moment of now, good feelings, bad feelings. Ugly feelings. If we know the mood we are in, we know how it impacts on our thinking and our actions. If we feel desperate, thinking is desperate and actions are desperate. If we feel loving, our thinking is loving and the actions that follow are loving. And yet in my life, I suppressed most of my feelings until I got sober, because I feared that if I told the truth, my girl would leave me, my job would be in jeopardy, my family wouldn't understand me. I would conform, so I would fit in. But I could never keep up the pretence and so drowned my sorrows as well as drowning my possibilities. I needed the emptiness in sobriety to really understand what feelings were, real feelings, even if they were awkward feelings in the moment of now. Fellowship helps me deal with my shortcomings: courage to change, faith in doing the next right thing and building confidence to be a human, being human...
In recovery we admit and accept the truth of who we are. And having admitted the truth of who we are, we can work with what we've got left. Usually we have remnants of the old life, still very active: fear, pride and ego. And we are asking ourselves to take a leap forward with courage to change, faith in doing the next right thing and trying to develop confidence that it is okay to start from scratch every single day. And more, that it is okay to restart the day at any time, with courage, faith and confidence. To deal with our defects of character which can be extreme in early recovery, fear, pride and ego can shut us down very quickly. And our shortcomings which can be extreme too, lacking courage, faith and confidence, it does take time to find our way. If we let go fear, pride and ego, as often as we can, the emptiness we have can be filled with courage, faith and confidence to change and be a new human trying to be a human being today…
How am I feeling this morning? I've been awake most of the night, pondering and not trying to answer any questions about what I should be doing today. The emptiness can gnaw at the soul. If we start to think about what we should do, we will make endless lists which have no point. Emotional and spiritual: when I ask myself how am I feeling right now? I feel like anything might happen, and its okay to be me, learning a little bit more about being a human, being human today. And what are my measures of success? Emotionally and spiritually? Feelings fitting with now, I am experiencing good feelings right now. Not always the case! Because I am human, being human. Good news, my mother has the all clear after treatment for breast cancer at the age of eighty-two. My best friend left messages, and they were funny and made me laugh. And other messages, happy messages… I have been sleeping quite a lot, and realise how tired I have been. There is peacefulness in the early hours of today and the possibility of serenity in the moment of now. I have room to experience and live emotionally in the moment of now. And without a troubled heart about what I should expect of myself? I expect nothing, so something is possible for the rest of the day…
Alcoholics Anonymous | March 29 2012 | Steps In Action | Step 3 "Your Higher Power" Today's AA daily reflection: "we are trusted servants…" To be of service for me is not being servile, it is to be helpful and aware. And being helpful, in any capacity anywhere at any time is a way of life and living to good conscience, and caring about people I encounter in any given day…
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Trusting ourselves is very difficult when we start from a place self-harm and self-prejudice. Even today, living to good conscience I am often pulled up in the moment and the memory of something I have done in the past which may have broken a rule. Indeed often I was employed to rewrite rules and break the old rules to improve a situation or an organisation. Those recollections make me shudder at how easy it is to be blown off course in a difficult world…
I cannot change the past, at the same time it is a great source of experience. Life today, to be open and honest, and willing to change. To be trustworthy and behave fairly in my relationships. I feel I did start off life with these principles from an early age. And then the real world bent me out of shape. We can compromise and negotiate, at the same time the principles of open honest and willing, unity service and recovery, keep me on the straight and narrow road of destiny one day at a time…
And today I realise it is simply progress. And I must reiterate progress is the key, because even today I can see when I take time out to look at my behaviour and my attitudes, prejudice can surface when people are either dishonest with themselves or dishonest with others. My silence and turning a blind eye to my personal conduct is as bad for me as ignoring the conduct of others… Sometimes it is right to mind my own business and not criticise others, fortunately because I'm aware I can take responsibility for my attitudes and my behaviour day to day…
Trust! A breach of trust can be devastating. Thank God, nature and nurture and the universe that I am an open book these days. My medical records are about to be updated and accessible to all medical sources just in case something were to happen to me and I could not communicate...
Trust in relationships, develops through time. At the same time, trusts will be broken because we are human and sometimes without thinking we hurt other people and then worse we hurt ourselves as a consequence. If we feel the pain caused we can grow and learn from it and that is real progress. Amends and forgiveness starts with understanding our own fallibility and the consequences. Forgiveness comes in our learning, humility and accepting a need to change day by day. Forgive everything everybody does, and forgive ourselves as well, and we do face consequences. Trust and forgiveness are earned in the moment, amends can take a lifetime and can be made every single day…
To love, be loved back and useful! How we love each other and how we form loving relationships… There is no rule book, we don't choose who we love, the nature of how we love is demonstrated by our actions and behaviour. Unconditionally loving others will lead to consequences we might prefer were different. And this is perfectly okay with me. Keeping it simple is the most difficult path for complicated people one day at a time…
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DonInLondon 2005-2011
Unity Service & Recovery, we give support, sharing experience, strength and hope. We look to what we can do to help in fellowship, greet, make tea, organise meetings. We may sponsor newcomers and explain how fellowship works. We suggest we never control, we encourage freedom in sobriety, to thine own self be true..
We are good enough today.. progress not perfect. Unconditional love; we help, we support and we love without condition. A gentle reminder to self is understanding unconditional means loving others when they cannot love themselves or anyone else, including us! Keep loving, expect nothing, accept everything is simply as it may be...
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AA Daily Reflection: TRUSTED SERVANTS March 29 They are servants. Theirs is the sometimes thankless privilege of doing the group’s chores. TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 134
In Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis describes an encounter between his principle character and an old man busily at work planting a tree. “What is it that you are doing?” Zorba asks. The old man replies: “You can see very well what I am doing, my son, I’m planting a tree.” “But why plant a tree,” Zorba asks, “if you won’t be able to see it bear fruit?” And the old man answers: “I, my son, live as though I were never going to die.” The response brings a faint smile to Zorba’s lips and, as he walks away, he exclaims with a note of irony: “How strange - I live as though I were going to die tomorrow!” As a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have found that the Third Legacy is a fertile soil in which to plant the tree of my sobriety. The fruits I harvest are wonderful: peace, security, understanding and twenty-four hours of eternal fulfilment; and with the soundness of mind to listen to the voice of my conscience when, in silence, it gently speaks to me, saying: You must let go in service. There are others who must plant the harvest.
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As Bill Sees It ~ Getting off a "Dry Bender" "Sometimes, we become depressed. I ought to know; I have been a champion dry-bender case myself. While the surface causes were a part of the picture -- trigger-events that precipitated depression -- the underlying causes, I am satisfied, ran much deeper. "Intellectually, I could accept my situation. Emotionally, I could not. "To these problems, there are certainly no pat answers. But part of the answer surely lies in the constant effort to practice all of A.A.'s Twelve Steps." LETTER, 1954
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Alcoholics Anonymous, 12 Steps AA, Addiction And Recovery, DonInLondon, Don Oddy,
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Just For Today, and every day cherish always...
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AA Official Online Site: Daily Reflections
http://www.aa.org/lang/en/aareflections.cfm
AA Official Online Site: Big Book And Twelve And Twelve
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