DAILY PONDERABLES
Together WE Trudge The Road OF Happy Destiny
Daily Reflections
THOSE WHO STILL SUFFER
Let us resist the proud assumption that since God has enabled us to do well in one area we are destined to be a saving grace for everybody.
A.A. COMES OF AGE, p. 232
A.A. groups exist to help alcoholics achieve sobriety. Large or small, firmly established or brand-new, speaker, discussion or study, each group has for but one reason for being: to carry the message to the still-suffering alcoholic. The group exists so that the alcoholic can find a new way of life, a life abundant in happiness, joy, and freedom. To recover, most alcoholics need the support of a group of other alcoholics who share their experience, strength and hope. Thus my sobriety, and our program's survival, depend on my determination to put first things first.
From the book Daily Reflections
© Copyright 1990 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
A.A. Thought for the Day
To continue the paraphrase of the psalm: "The judgments of the twelve steps are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than whiskey, yea, than much fine whiskey, sweeter also than wine. Moreover, they warn alcoholics and in keeping of them there is great reward. Who can understand our alcoholism? Cleanse us from secret faults, Keep us from presumptuous resentments. Let them not have dominion over us. Then shall we be upright and free of the great transgression." Am I resolved that liquor will never again have dominion over me?
Meditation for the Day
God can be your shield. Then no problems of the world can harm you. Between you and all scorn and indignity from others is your trust in God, like a shining shield. Nothing can then have the power to spoil your inward peace. With this shield, you can attain this inward peace quickly, in your surroundings as well as in your heart. With this inward peace, you do not need to resent the person who troubles you. Instead, you can overcome the resentment in your own mind, which may have been aroused by that person.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may strive for inward peace. I pray that I may not be seriously upset, no matter what happens around me.
From the book Twenty-Four Hours a Day
© Copyright 1975 by Hazelden Foundation
NA - Just for Today
Secrets and intimacy
Page 218
"We feared that if we ever revealed ourselves as we were, we would surely be rejected."
Basic Text, p. 32
Having relationships without barriers, ones in which we can be entirely open with our feelings, is something many of us desire. At the same time, the possibility of such intimacy causes us more fear than almost any other situation in life.
If we examine what frightens us, we'll usually find that we are attempting to hide an aspect of our personalities that we are ashamed of, an aspect we sometimes haven't even admitted to ourselves. We don't want others to know of our insecurities, our pain, or our neediness, so we simply refuse to expose them. We may imagine that if no one knows about our imperfections, those imperfections will cease to exist.
This is the point where our relationships stop. Anyone who enters our lives will not get past the point at which our secrets begin. To maintain intimacy in a relationship, it is essential that we acknowledge our defects and accept them. When we do, the fortress of denial, erected to keep these things hidden, will come crashing down, enabling us to build up our relationships with others.
Just for Today: I have opportunities to share my inner self. I will take advantage of those opportunities and draw closer to those I love.
From the book Just for Today
© Copyright 1991-2013 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Thought for Today
"Say nothing more often" Herb G. - Buffalo Men's Zoom "How It Works Step Table"
"Happiness consists not in having, but of
being, not of possessing, but of enjoying.
It is the warm glow of a heart at peace
with itself."
--Norman Vincent Peale
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; True nobility is being superior to your former self.
~~Ernest Hemingway
Forgiveness is the final form of love.
~ Reinhold Niebuhr
Buddha/Zen Thoughts
If you want to get rid of your enemy, the true way is to realize that your enemy is delusion.
-Kegon Sutra
Native American
"A good heart and a good mind - those are what you need to be a chief."
--Louis Farmer, ONONDAGA
The combination of heart and mind is very powerful. The Medicine Wheel teaches that two worlds exist - the seen and the unseen. The seen world is the physical and the unseen is the spiritual world. Both of the worlds are necessary to discover true reality. The seen world is easiest seen by the male side. The unseen is easiest seen by the female side. The heart is the unseen and the mind is the seen. Blessed is the leader or person who has developed the heart and the mind. Truly, the person is of tremendous value to the Creator and the people.
My Great Spirit, help me this day to develop both my female side and my male side. Let me know all the feelings of each, let me develop and grow my intuition and my mind. Let my development only serve You.
Keep It Simple
The best leaders are those who know how to follow. --- Anonymous
Am I a leader or a follower? The fact is, I am responsible for where I end up. If I choose to be a follower, I'd better follow leaders who know where they are going. And I had better know where they're going.
If I choose to be leader, I'd better know that I'm responsible for getting myself on the right path. I also must be honest with my followers, so they can make good choices. I'm not responsible for my followers choices, but I must give them the truth. Being a leader doesn't always mean that I know where I'll end up. But it can mean that I know I'm on the right path, following the lead from my Higher Power---one step at a time.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, give me the faith and courage to choose good leaders to follow. When it is Your will, help me be a good leader.
Action for the Day: Today, I'll list my leaders. They might be a Higher Power, a sponsor, or a friend. I'll think of why I choose to follow these leaders.
Big Book
Chapter 10 To Employers (pg 144 & top 145)
We suggest you draw the book to the attention of the doctor who is to attend your patient during treatment. If the book is read the moment the patient is able, while acutely depressed, realization of his condition may come to him.
We hope the doctor will tell the patient the truth about his condition, whatever that happens to be. When the man is presented with this volume it is best that no one tell him he must abide by its suggestions. The man must decide for himself.
You are betting, or course, that your changed attitude plus the contents of this book will turn the trick. In some case it will, and in others it may not. But we think that if you persevere, the percentage of successes will gratify you. As our work spreads and our numbers increase, we hope your employees may be put in personal contact with some of us. Meanwhile, we are sure a great deal can be accomplished by the use of the book alone.
On your employee’s return, talk with him. Ask him if he thinks he has the answer. If he feels free to discuss his problems with you, if he knows you understand and will not be upset by anything he wishes to say, he will probably be off to a fast start.
Which Came First, the Drink or the Disease?
Grapevine May 1983
SOMETIMES, in speaking to an AA group, I depart from the standard opening, and start with:
"My name is E-- , and I have alcoholism. Putting it this way helps me remember something I must never forget: I have a progressive, incurable, and unless arrested, fatal illness, and I will have it to the day I die. Alcoholism is a sickness which happens to some people through no fault of their own. It happened to me."
And always, I wonder how many of the AA members sitting there, nodding agreement, actually believe it with real conviction.
I was new to AA the first time I heard a speaker say, "I became an alcoholic as the result of drinking too much too long." Even in the chaotic condition of my mind in those early weeks, that struck me as illogical. Was he saying that everyone who drank a considerable amount over an extended period was bound to develop alcoholism? We need only look around us to disprove that.
I could look at my own kin, typical of thousands of American families. Of the twenty-seven assorted parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins who made up our clan, I don't know of any who didn't partake of and enjoy alcoholic beverages. On the theory that drinking causes alcoholism, we should have produced twenty-seven alcoholics, but we didn't. We produced three: me and two of my cousins.
I was to hear variations of the drinking-causes-alcoholism theme repeatedly as time went on. The most recent was at an AA conference, almost twenty-four years after my first one. "I drank myself right into alcoholism!" the speaker declared.
In my opinion, that man was getting cause and effect mixed up. He didn't get alcoholism because he drank too much. He drank too much because he had alcoholism.
To attribute our alcoholism to drinking, rather than our drinking to alcoholism, as I see it, is to hold on to one of our old ideas we need to let go of absolutely. It is, in effect, to deny that our compulsive drinking is the result of an illness for which we are in no way to blame.
How patiently and resolutely we try to set straight the mixed-up thinking of the newcomers who say, "I drank because my husband (or wife) nagged me all the time," or "I drank because I had so much stress at work," or "I drank because I was worried sick over my debts."
"No," we tell them. "Those are the excuses you make to justify your excessive drinking, but they were not the reason for it. The reason you drank alcoholically is that you have alcoholism. The world is full of people who have problems just as serious as yours, but their drinking doesn't go out of control. They aren't any better or stronger than we are, but they are different from us. They don't have alcoholism, and we do."
Shouldn't we go on to convince our new members that their drinking didn't cause their alcoholism, any more than their problems did? For if they say, "I developed alcoholism because I drank," they are also saying, "If I had not drunk, I wouldn't have become an alcoholic. So it comes back to being all my fault, after all." Most of us reach AA bowed down under a heavy load of guilt. We don't need any more.
Clinging to the notion that alcoholism is caused by excessive drinking or, worse, that alcoholism is excessive drinking, presents two grave dangers.
First, the general public is slow to give up the belief that alcoholism is an immoral condition, that heavy drinking is a "bad" thing to do, and those who do it must be "bad" people. Still-drinking alcoholics who haven't reached us yet are a part of that general public, and very likely just as misinformed. They find themselves in an impossible situation.
They hear from all sides that they "ought" to stop drinking, and that their failure to do so is the result of their own weakness, depravity, and lack of willpower. And they believe it. Yet they know they literally cannot control their drinking by their own efforts (only God and the alcoholics know how hard they've tried!), and they know that in no other area of their lives are they either weak or depraved. The only way they can see out of the dilemma is to deny that they are alcoholics--and all too many of them do to the day they die, of alcoholism.
We can reach more of these suffering alcoholics if we persuade them to believe the truth--that they have developed an illness the exact cause of which is still unknown--and if we can also convince their spouses, doctors, bartenders, ministers, and all the others in a position to point them in our direction. We can do this more effectively if we believe it ourselves.
The second danger of confusing the symptom, compulsive drinking, with the illness, alcoholism, is that it can hamper new arrivals in their efforts to get a grip on the AA program of recovery. Many times, in AA talks, we hear this:
"I came to AA and stopped drinking. I was on top of the world. I knew I would never drink again. As long as I was sober, there didn't seem to be any reason for taking the Steps, or going to a lot of meetings. So I started to skip meetings. In three months, I was drinking again. And it took two sick, miserable, drunken years before I got back. You were right--it is a progressive illness."
Whenever I hear something like that, I wonder whether it might have been avoided if the speaker's early mentors in AA had talked less about alcohol and more about alcoholism--if they had dinned it into the newcomer that stopping drinking does not constitute recovery but is only the absolutely essential beginning of a recovery process that changes each of us into the kind of person we can live with contentedly, sober. Given the belief that drinking causes alcoholism, it is easy to con ourselves into thinking that stopping drinking is all we need.
It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of getting the drinking stopped. That must come before any real recovery can take place. A still-drinking alcoholic, I firmly believe, can make no progress in taking the Twelve Steps of AA, or in spiritual growth.
But becoming dry is the starting point, not the stopping point. Just as drinking didn't cause our alcoholism, stopping drinking doesn't deal with it. I came into AA as a confused, self-centered, egotistical, defensive person who drank excessively. I then became a confused, self-centered, egotistical, defensive person who didn't drink. I was still sick, but from alcoholism, not from alcohol.
The real difference was that now I could start to recover. I could set out on the difficult, exciting, often discouraging, but always rewarding experience in living that we call the AA program.
E. E.
Tulsa, Oklahoma
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