Thursday 7 November 2013

Alcoholics Anonymous Nov 7 DonInLondon Step 11 "Truth Love Wisdom"

Alcoholics Anonymous Blog/Video Nov 7 DonInLondon Step 11 "Truth Love Wisdom"

"Love, forgiveness, harmony, truth, faith, hope, light, and joy to every human being."

Step 11 "Truth Love Wisdom"

 

November 7, 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, each and every human including me has natural instincts needed for survival. God given and of nature. And then the world happened! Over the years with a good conscience and learning from fellow humans, I feel better able and restored to sanity today."

 

This world is a difficult place in which to live, so many elements of life driving us along. And sometimes it feels like I can be overwhelmed by all the things happening and all the activity that is happening around me, and I will just wish it would all stop for a moment so I can collect my feelings and thoughts. Prayer and meditation: prayer and asking for help, meditation to empty the mind of clutter and focus on what I can do and cannot do today. Humility to learn from who? Anyone and everything, no matter what the age of a person, wisdom comes from listening and understanding, changing our minds and direction and being open to anything with good conscience today.

 

Fake it to make it! I still feel that fake equals denial of the truth. Better to learn the truth of our emotional and spiritual journey. Rather than fake something, in other words pretend something, to be successful in understanding our current state of being, truth is the key. The truth of now can feel good bad or ugly. The truth of now could be we feel something which we find objectionable, or feel others will find objectionable. If we don't acknowledge the truth, and prefer to pretend all live in denial, do we simply put off the day when truth comes out? And I'm not forgetting that everyone has the capacity for denial when life is overwhelming and completely unmanageable. Denial is a natural process towards accepting the truth which takes time. This is not faking it to make it and maybe the phrase "fake it to make it" is a misleading and misunderstood term?

 

Adopting new ideas and outlooks is all part of recovery. In the old days of my living, adopting ideas and outlooks started with: "a mental try out for the ideas and outlooks." Which means we are finding new ways to live and to be ourselves. This mental try out, adopting a new path is not faking anything to make anything. If we have humility and can learn, adopting new ideas and outlooks in recovery makes it possible first: to have a desire to stop drinking. Second: willingness to stop drinking and be part of a group of people who prefer to live sober. Third: to endure the pain and frustration of early days in recovery. Four: a practical lesson experiencing the truth of now without the filter of something blocking our senses one day at a time.

 

From pretending and faking to be okay: an active alcoholic addict who rejects the reality of being unwell, in denial and covering up the problem with self-will and self-destructive behaviour. To accepting denial is part of the problem, that there is something wrong which cannot be fixed by self-will alone. To become open, honest and willing to try a new way of life and let go the old way of life which has ceased to work. This feels like the very opposite of "fake it to make it?"

 

The truth of our emotional and spiritual condition: "knowing our feelings in the moment of now and coping with reality." Understanding what we can do and what we cannot do and putting some thought into our actions. Observing and listening and understanding what is going on in the present moment is acknowledging the truth of our feelings, whether they fit reality, whether our feelings are appropriate, and taking account of the feelings of other people. The world is not all about me or you, it is not about one outlook it is about the common outlook of those people we are with today. We all have feelings and we all may feel the need to hide some feelings we wish we did not have. We do need to understand our feelings and not hide them from ourselves, and if we do not understand our feelings better to ask for help where you feel safe to express them. Some feelings, we just don't know what to do with them, it does not mean that they are unreal; the fact is we have those feelings and what can we do about them?

 

Prayer and meditation: to God or to reveal our good intent, our good conscience and our goodness. And at the same time there is the negative, those feelings which we prefer we did not have, which are not to good conscience and do not have good intent and can be very dark. The darker feelings we ignore and do not deal with will haunt anyone anywhere until they are understood in a truthful way and dealt with appropriately through time. Redemption is a difficult road as an individual and for society. Truth love and wisdom lead us to understanding and a path of forgiveness by what we do one day at a time. We are judged by our actions and not our intentions. And we judge ourselves if we are self-aware.

 

Under the conditions of any given day, the circumstances could be good bad and ugly, the people might be good bad and ugly and our responses to everything could be good bad and ugly. And some days are not only difficult; they are extremely difficult when we try to do everything on our own. I was listening to a program on the radio about the personality type often found running large enterprises. People who have little or no connection to common ground where most people are, they lose touch and are often driven by success for themselves rather than the success of the whole enterprise. When you look at the profile of the person you may elect, choose to work for, your preferences might be quite different to those you find. And we can always choose which way we want to be ourselves and not follow others on the road to hell. And this is very amusing to me, I love the Fellowship of AA because there are no leaders and we all have the freedom to make our choices one day at a time. Note to self and the newcomer: "no AA can compel another to do anything; nobody can be punished or expelled." AA tradition one.

 

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