DAILY PONDERABLES
Together WE Trudge The Road OF Happy Destiny
Daily Reflections
MYSTERIOUS WAYS
. . . out of every season of grief or suffering, when the hand of God seemed heavy or even unjust, new lessons for living were learned, new resources of courage were uncovered, and that finally, inescapably, the conviction came that God does "move in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.
TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 105
After losing my career, family and health, I remained unconvinced that my way of life needed a second look. My drinking and other drug use were killing me, but I had never met a recovering person or an A.A. member. I thought I was destined to die alone and that I deserved it. At the peak of my despair, my infant son became critically ill with a rare disease. Doctors' efforts to help him proved useless. I redoubled my efforts to block my feelings, but now the alcohol had stopped working. I was left staring into God's eyes, begging for help. My introduction to A.A. came within days, through an odd series of coincidences, and I have remained sober ever since. My son lived and his disease is in remission. The entire episode convinced me of my powerlessness and the unmanageability of my life. Today my son and I thank God for His intervention.
From the book Daily Reflections
© Copyright 1990 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
A.A. Thought for the Day
A.A. also helps us to hang onto sobriety. By having regular meetings so that we can associate with other alcoholics who have come through that same door in the wall, by encouraging us to tell the story of our own sad experiences with alcohol, and by showing us how to help other alcoholics, A.A. keeps us sober. Our attitude toward life changes from one of pride and selfishness to one of humility and gratitude. Am I going to step back through that door in the wall to my old helpless, hopeless, drunken life?
Meditation for the Day
Withdraw into the calm of communion with God. Rest in that calm and peace. When the soul finds its home of rest in God, then it is that real life begins. Only when you are calm and serene can you do good work. Emotional upsets make you useless. The eternal life is calmness and when you enter into that, then you live as an eternal being. Calmness is based on complete trust in God. Nothing in this world can separate you from the love of God.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may wear the world like a loose garment. I pray that I may keep serene at the center of my being.
From the book Twenty-Four Hours a Day
© Copyright 1975 by Hazelden Foundation
NA - Just for Today
True courage
Page 79
"Those who make it through these times show a courage not their own."
Basic Text, p. 86
Before coming to NA, many of us thought we were brave simply because we had never experienced fear. We had drugged all our feelings, fear among them, until we had convinced ourselves that we were tough, courageous people who wouldn't crack under any circumstances.
But finding our courage in drugs has nothing to do with the way we live our lives today. Clean and in recovery, we are bound to feel frightened at times. When we first realize we are feeling frightened, we may think we are cowards. Were afraid to pick up the phone because the person on the other end might not understand. We're afraid to ask someone to sponsor us because they might say no. We're afraid to look for a job. We're afraid to be honest with our friends. But all of these fears are natural, even healthy. What's not healthy is allowing fear to paralyze us.
When we permit our fear to stop our growth, we will be defeated. True courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the willingness to walk through it.
Just for Today: I will be courageous today. When I'm afraid, I'll do what I need to do to grow in recovery.
From the book Just for Today
© Copyright 1991-2013 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Thought for Today
"I missed out in kindergarten when they taught you how to play in the sandbox"
Lindsey @ SIG
What price have you PAID to earn your seat in the Rooms?
"Pitiful And Incomprehensible Demoralization" pg 30 Big Book
Buddha/Zen Thoughts
Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.
The Buddha meditated for six years, Bodhidharma for nine. The practice of meditation is not a method for the attainment of realization—it is enlightenment itself.
-Zen Master Dogen, "The Practice of Meditation"
Native American
"By listening to the inner self and following one's instincts and intuitions, a person may be guided to safety."
--Dr. A.C. Ross (Ehanamani), LAKOTA
Be still and know. The Medicine Wheel teaches the four directions of inner power-not personal power, but the power of God. These four directions are emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual. As our emotions get too far our of control, we simultaneously create an equivalent mental picture, our physical body fills with stress and tension, and we become spiritually confused. When we experience these uptight feelings, the best thing to do is mentally pause, slow down our thinking, breathe slowly, or pray and ask the spirits to help. Only when we approach the stillness of the mind do we get access to our spiritual guidance system. To be guided, let your mind be still.
Creator, today, let me reside in Your stillness.
Keep It Simple
Skill to do comes of doing. --- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Often, we just want to sit and do nothing. And why not. We go to meetings, work the Twelve Steps, read, make new friends. All this takes energy and means taking risk. Haven't we earned the right to just sit and take it a break from it all? No! In the past, we avoided life. Now we're becoming people of action. We take risk. We're becoming people who get involved in life. We practice caring about people and caring about ourselves. At times, we may complain, but we do what is needed to stay sober. We gain skills by doing. why? We do it to save our lives. How? By trusting. We now trust that our Higher Power and friends will be there for us. They will help us push past our fears. As we practice daily how to stay sober, our skills grow.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, Yours is a spirit of action. Allow me to become skilled at being active.
Action for the Day: Today, I'll work at being active and alive. Maybe I'll start a new friendship or try a new meeting.
Big Book
Chapter 1 BILL'S STORY (pg 4)
Abruptly in October 1929 hell broke loose on the New York stock exchange. After one of those days of inferno, I wobbled from a hotel bar to a brokerage office. It was eight o'clock-five hours after the market closed. The ticker still clattered. I was staring at an inch of the tape which bore the inscription XYZ-32. It had been 52 that morning. I was finished and so were many friends. The papers reported men jumping to death from the towers of High Finance. That disgusted me. I would not jump. I went back to the bar. My friends had dropped several million since ten o'clock-so what? Tomorrow was another day. As I drank, the old fierce determination to win came back.
Next morning I telephoned a friend in Montreal. He had plenty of money left and thought I had better go to Canada. By the following spring we were living in our accustomed style. I felt like Napoleon returning from Elba. No St. Helena for me! But drinking caught up with me again and my generous friend had to let me go. This time we stayed broke.
We went to live with my wife's parents. I found a job; then lost it as the result of a brawl with a taxi driver. Mercifully, no one could guess that I was to have no real employment for five years, or hardly draw a sober breath. My wife began to work in a department store, coming home exhausted to find me drunk.
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Tools For Life
Grapevine January 2006
There's one for every problem that comes along
I grew up without tools that showed me how to live. When I was a teenager, I started getting drunk. This gave me immense relief from a lot of bad feelings and made me feel I needed only one tool: alcohol. Alcohol solved all my problems.
My friends, many of them, went on to college or into various businesses, married, and had families. Grew up. Learned how to deal with the real world. I stayed focused on drinking, which I did as often as possible, and my world got smaller and smaller. After a while, all I thought about was the next drink and where it was coming from. My relationships with other people deteriorated and disappeared. People and their reactions to my drinking were inconvenient and unpleasant anyway.
I stopped showing up for work on a daily basis and came close to losing my apartment. Drinking in a bar became too expensive and entailed talking to people, so I drank out of pint bottles of scotch while sitting in public bathroom stalls, sitting on a toilet reading the graffiti scratched onto the back of the stall door.
I felt there were two ways to solve my problems. One, kill myself. Two, somehow, magically, be rescued by kind people who would take me in and take care of me.
As it happened, I was rescued and directed to Alcoholics Anonymous. I immediately experienced the "love that has no price tag" that Bill W. talks about in the Twelfth Step essay in the "Twelve and Twelve." It wasn't what I expected or even wanted.
These AA people kept harping on the theme of not drinking. Nobody offered me money or a place to live. They talked about "tools of sobriety" and incessantly prescribed actions I could take, like getting a home group, asking someone to be my sponsor, or asking somebody else how they were feeling that day. I didn't feel like doing anything, and no one seemed to realize that. I took very few suggestions and nothing changed. I continued to drink periodically and think about suicide.
About a year later, I attempted suicide by overdosing on some pills I'd been hoarding. I went into a coma, had convulsions, and finally came to on my mattress seventy-two hours later. I felt awful, but there was nothing unusual about waking up feeling awful. I was relieved I hadn't died and couldn't blame anyone for what I had done to myself.
I realized something else: I didn't know how to live without alcohol. I realized that I should go back and ask those AA people how they did it.
That began my real AA journey. One by one, AAs offered me tools I learned to use, tools that solved every problem that came along.
The first tool I acquired was "act as if." It didn't matter how I felt as long as I did something. I had it backwards all along, thinking that I had to feel like doing something before I actually did it. I started, tentatively at first, to "act my way into right thinking."
"Stay in the now," someone suggested, "in the moment, on the twenty-four hour plan. One day at a time." Whenever I am gripped by fear of an unknown future and all my projections are negative, I do what my sponsor directed me to do. I wriggle my toes and come back into the safety of the moment.
Writing down all the things I'm grateful for has been a helpful suggestion. Drinking is no longer a problem, but my thinking sure is. Writing a gratitude list puts the brakes on negative thoughts, turns me back toward the light, and helps me to see the beauty in everyday life.
Try to help somebody else, my fellow AAs suggested. So-and-so is homesick, why don't you send him a card? Turn to the person next to you at a meeting and ask how they are. Call a member of your home group and see how their job interview went. I discovered that when I stopped thinking about myself all the time, I felt better.
However, being told to find a power greater than my own thinking and greater than alcohol, a power that could solve all my problems, was the best suggestion I've received. This is the purpose of the Twelve Steps, and I was fortunate to find a sponsor who took me through the process outlined in the Big Book.
I asked how to begin and was told, "Get down on your knees in the morning when you get out of bed and say, 'Please.' Before you get into bed at night, get down on your knees again and say, 'Thank you.' Turn toward that power and ask for help whenever you feel disturbed, or afraid, the way a plant turns toward the light." I did these things and found that life could be faced, day-by-day, without a drink and with the sure knowledge that my Higher Power is here to help me through everything.
I've been fired in sobriety and offered a job I really wanted. I've fallen in love, had a good marriage, and buried my dear husband. Once I became ill, received an abundance of help, and now am completely well. Precious friends have moved away; new friends have come along. Every day I discover ways to be useful and things to be grateful for. I'm a long way from the person who thought the only solution was to destroy my life. My toolkit is full today and my cup runneth over.
-- Anonymous
New York, New York
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