Alcoholics Anonymous Blog/Video Nov 30 DonInLondon Step 11 "Truth Love Wisdom"
"Love, forgiveness, harmony, truth, faith, hope, light, and joy to every human being."
November 30, 2013 Step Eleven Month: "sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out." Dear God, the truth of now, love in the moment of now and wisdom in the moment of now can be quite rare when we are confused and uncertain. Sometimes it does take time for the truth love and wisdom to surface when we are feeling the extremes of life. We all need perspective.
I can remember when I was just into manhood being quite a self-conscious and unaware person when it came to matters of the heart. A body raging with hormones and desires and uncertainty is not a very useful vessel in which to find serenity. And in my ignorance of life, I look back and can see the humour of feelings which often remained unrequited simply because I did not understand romance, love and that the desires of women my age were very similar to mine. It didn't last long, and then the confusion of desire, mistaken for love lead to all sorts of consequences of the most human kind.
Indeed looking over the last forty years of being an adult, there has been a great deal of progress in me as an individual. At the same time, younger generations seem to be more tuned into what life might be all about. I do say tuned in and might be, because being tuned in was not the problem, it was how to behave and how to be oneself that was so confusing and still remains confusing today. All the usual battles reside within every individual, the struggle between vice and virtue, the struggle of natural instincts to emerge, the struggle that society has with people growing up and maturing and taking no notice of the older generation. Or worse following the older generation into excessive and extreme behaviour society tolerates and yet in many instances keeps a guilty secret. Public virtue and private vice still prevail everywhere. I'm not a moralist, at the same time if we were able to share the truth, understand what most behaviour has left behind it in some form or other, the wisdom would be more accessible and more developed one day at a time.
Step changes! In Fellowship we know all about step change, we learn about twelve steps and how twelve steps can change our old behaviour into new behaviour, our old attitudes into new attitudes and old actions into new actions. From the 1990s, step change became part of the language used in advanced organisations undergoing huge and difficult changes. And now politicians talk about step change being a necessary element in managing a country and its economy. If they really knew how step change works, they would stop using the phrase and start utilising smart talk of a different kind. Just because somebody says "step change is necessary to change a nation" they really don't understand that change is happening on the individual level and those talking about step change have not changed at all. That's the trouble with people who think they know best, they are self-righteous cuntibolloxbastard's usually. So if in Fellowship somebody says to you, "you have not done the steps properly, or have you considered a particular step to help you, or you need to do the steps again," I feel it is okay to tell them to fuck off a mind their own business. And the same applies to any particular individual who tries to control you or manipulate you into a particular outlook focusing only on joy and why you don't have it.
Dear God and Fellowship thank you very much for helping me find all my feelings on a daily basis. And when I mention all my feelings, all my feelings are relevant because half of them seem to be missing or suppressed over a great deal of my lifetime. I need all my feelings today, which help me determine whether my current situation feels good bad or ugly. Ugly moments can produce ugly feelings, at the same time I learn what they mean and why I have them. And knowing and understanding my feelings helps me cope and understand what actions might be appropriate for me at any given time of day. Just because I have an ugly feeling does not mean that I will be ugly in my behaviour. It means something ugly is going on and maybe I can do something about it if it’s my responsibility. Every feeling educates and can be thought through to actions. The emotional and spiritual, understanding feelings and living in the moment of now and coping with reality is by far the best way forward. Sometimes it might be a big change or usually it is a step change incrementally of the educational variety that most people have most days. Just because we are sober and in recovery it does not mean we are better than anybody else on the planet, most often it simply means we are playing catch up with our contemporaries.
What seems like a bright fantastic emotional and spiritual experience in recovery for the individual in recovery, can lead to arrogance ego and pride rather than humility, courage to change, faith and confidence. What can seem like a revelation in recovery is simply a return to what other people experience every day and they see the experience as normal living. Of course, enlightenment truly is experienced in recovery. It does not mean that your enlightenment has propelled you into being more knowledgeable about anything other than your own experience. And mistaking a return to normality as a superior spiritual event is truly a mistake. We are only playing catch up with the normal humans on the planet most likely today. A bit like the song: "I've got a brand-new pair of roller skates and you've got a brand-new key…" This is something which is applicable in all aspects of life from romance to finance to understanding normal life whatever age we have attained as we are living in the day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml1696pN-yE
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