Friday 8 November 2013

Alcoholics Anonymous Nov 8 DonInLondon Step 11 "Truth Love Wisdom"

Alcoholics Anonymous Blog/Video Nov 8 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 8, 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, acceptance can be a bit of a bugger when we realise what we can and cannot do on a daily basis."

 

One day at a time! This is something I have learned over and over again; making plans, agreeing to do something and then finding I cannot do things which make life difficult and to meet the expectations of other people. It does not make it easy to be there always when we would wish to be and it does not mean that we were always happy about our limitations. Three chronic ailments: alcoholic in recovery, type I diabetes a few years later and a diagnosis of clinical depression. Further complicated by many other difficulties caused by these three chronic conditions. Having learned about living one day at a time, experiencing the reality is all about acceptance of life in the moment. And sometimes I feel unhappy I just don't have the energy or the ability to do all the things which were normal before these ailments arrived. Sometimes I wonder about serenity, it can be very elusive when life is difficult. I do accept everything and having asked for help it comes, but never quite when I expect. A patient patient, tolerance and love, and also feelings of anger can manifest in any moment of now.

 

How to cope with all this living? It is difficult. I love to be with people, human beings and what we do today is in my opinion, "the art of living." The art of living is about every experience we have which brings us into the moment of now. Our emotional and spiritual now and coping with it requires experience, new experiences and the devil in the detail is always how we think about our situation. Our mood drives the way we think and the way we think drives the way we act, interact and learn behaviour in the moment of now. Our thinking brains often override every emotion we have and suppress them so we can get things done which we think will make us happy. We think a lot about the feelings we have? Not so much, very often we suppress our feelings to meet certain objectives and the objectives we think will make us feel better in the long run. Heartbreak: drank to oblivion and the result at the end? Simply bleakness and desolation and no resolution. Heartbreak: working through the feelings and the pain without the block of anything and we truly learn how human we are.

 

And sometimes when we look back at life, when we are older, we wonder what we have forgotten. Then something happens in our current situation which reminds us of all the happy times and maybe the sad times, but situations were good bad and ugly and yet still all these times even though we did not recognise it, love prevailed. And this is how we come to cherish people, cherish that they are like us and have feelings. How we treat other people does not mean they can treat us the same. Sometimes we may have desire and love in our hearts, and there is nothing coming back in our direction. Our thinking brains turn things over and over again to try and find cherishing feelings often from those who have no inkling about what is going on. And then other times love flows both ways and cherishing is what we feel. Being cherished can be as painful an experience as the opposite when we don't know what it is. The great delusion, we think we are in control and we are not.

 

What a wonderful mixture of life: learning what we can do and what we cannot do on a daily basis. Sometimes I lose track of the days and what has happened. Tuesday: several hours spent in the best of company and the visit to another friend who is facing very difficult times. And Wednesday: sharing time with another friend discussing much ado about the future and the brightness it offers and lots of hard work ahead. Tuesday and Wednesday filled with funny and tragic conversations. Much hope and much sadness about beginnings and endings. And then emotionally and physically my system complains, and I have to rest all the way through to Friday, and today I am tired, I find anger by focusing on things, when my real anger is frustration with my own situation and the situation of another I cannot help. I cannot help another when I'm the wrong person to be with them at this time. And a friend from America I would have liked to have seen yesterday weighs on my mind this morning.

 

My routine: all about acceptance step one, step two, step three and all day long the serenity prayer as a reminder of can and cannot do. Every day speaking to family, everyday keeping in touch with friends in Fellowship is all part of life. I rarely feel the moments of, "if only I could…" These days acceptance is: about finite time, quality of life and not quantity of things. The art of life is difficult.

 

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