Daily Reflections
February 20
THE GIFT OF LAUGHTER
At this juncture, his A.A. sponsor usually laughs.
TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 26
Before my recovery from alcoholism began, laughter was one of the most painful sounds I knew. I never laughed and I felt that anyone else’s laughter was directed at me! My self-pity and anger denied me the simplest of pleasures or lightness of heart. By the end of my drinking not even alcohol could provoke a drunken giggle in me. When my A.A. sponsor began to laugh and point out my self-pity and ego-feeding deceptions, I was annoyed and hurt, but it taught me to lighten up and focus on my recovery. I soon learned to laugh at myself and eventually I taught those I sponsor to laugh also. Every day I ask God to help me stop taking myself too seriously.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
February 20
A.A. Thought For The Day
Liquor used to be my friend. I used to have a lot of fun drinking. Practically all the fun I had was connected with drinking. But the time came when liquor became my enemy. I don’t know just when liquor turned against me and became my enemy, but I know it happened, because I began to get into trouble. And since I realize that liquor is now my enemy, my main business now is keeping sober. Making a living or keeping a house is no longer my main business. It’s secondary to the business of keeping sober. Do I realize that my main business is keeping sober?
Meditation For The Day
I can depend on God to supply me with all the power I need to face any situation, provided that I will sincerely believe in that power and honestly ask for it, at the same time making all my life conform to what I believe God wants me to be. I can come to God as a business manager would come to the owner of the business, knowing that to lay the matter before Him means immediate cooperation, provided the matter has merit.
Prayer For The Day
I pray that I may believe that God is ready and willing to supply me with all that I need. I pray that I may ask only for faith and strength to meet any situation.
Walk In Dry Places
February 20, 2012
A day of Acceptance
Releasing the Past
“We will not regret the past nor fear the future,” goes one of the promises in Twelve Step programs. Neither the past nor the future should control what we’re thinking and doing today. After all, if our higher power is everything, no person or action can be outside of this supreme control.
Today, I will rise above anything that was said or done in the past. I will also hold the idea that the future is bright with promise, and that this promise will be fulfilled. Nobody’s opinion or criticism can be unsettling to me if my beliefs and self-worth are anchored in my Higher Power.
It’s true that there might have been lots of wreckage in the past…. Even more recently when we have been living sober. It doesn’t matter. I amazing ways, our higher power sometimes turns negative conditions into future benefits. This was actually what happened when our compulsive condition led directly to a new way of life.
I will accept life today and will look for unexpected blessings. No person or group can keep me from good as I accept God’s direction in my life.
“In all your ways acknowledge [God who] shall direct your paths.” I’ll remember this frequently as I go about the day.
Keep It Simple
February 20
Let Go and Let God.
–Twelve Step slogan
Some days we might ask ourselves, Is it worth it? We feel alone. No one seems to care.
Life seems hard. Recovery seems hard. This is when we need to slow down and take a look at what’s going on. We’re feeling this way because we’re off our recovery path. We may be back into wanting people to see things our way. We want control. Remember, all problems are not our problems. All work is not our work. We can’t have everything the way we want it. But we can do our part and let go of the rest. Than we can feel better.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, help me remember my only work today is to do Your will for me. It is not my job to be You.
Action for the Day: I’ll talk with my sponsor or a program friend today. I’ll talk about how to deal with things that seems to pull me down.
God, please help me let go of my expectations and accept the gifts that you give me each day, knowing that there is beauty and wonder in each act of life.
–Melody Beattie“Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.”
–Mother Theresa“Life has a way of creating roadblocks that end up as building blocks in our lives.”
–Doug Firebaugh“Turn your troubles into treasures. Learn from them and grow from them.”
–Mark Victor Hansen
Father Leo’s Daily Meditation
February 20
CHRISTIANITY
“Going to Church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.”
— Laurence J. Peter
I cannot help but believe that the truth of Christianity is about bringing the world and mankind together, rather than creating divisions and resentments. It must be much bigger than what we do or say in any building. Christ’s truth seeks to discover God in the splendor of His varied world. In this sense, Christianity is an aspect of the world’s spirituality!
My addiction made me a small man with a small god. Constantly focusing on the differences in the world stopped me from seeing the glaring similarities; my exclusiveness kept me a lonely man. The world of black and white, rather than shades of creative color, is a sick and dangerous world to live in. Jesus Christ reveals for me the “man for others”; the bridge by which reconciliation and harmony can be achieved. His message for me is not so much a series of dogmas as a revealed journey into Truth.
In the created stranger, help me to discover the friend.
Daily Inspiration
February 20
Prayer helps us see that God is not the cause of unpleasant happenings, but the healing of them. Lord, I trust in You for the right outcomes in all situations.
Each day is new! Each day is an opportunity to start again and be our best selves. Lord, silence my old ways of thinking, my old habits, and my old tapes inside my head.
Elder’s Meditation of the Day
February 20
“When a community does something together, that community is very happy, jovial, connected, and unified.”
–Larry P. Aitken, CHIPPEWA
The Indian People have always been able to adapt. If the hunting changed, we found new hunting grounds. If the earth changed, we moved to a better place. If the river changed course, we followed the river. But with every change, we kept our Indianness and spirituality. Our culture and spirituality have always been our strength. Our culture and spirituality taught us to live in harmony. We must change with the times, but we must maintain our culture and spirituality, always living in harmony.
Great Spirit, You have taught us to survive. Let me always maintain my Indianness.
Journey to the Heart
February 20
Spread Your Wings and Fly
I sat on the ground on a dirt road that wandered off a main highway in Idaho. I leaned against a tree and watched a mother eagle and her babies in a nest overhead. She fussed as she protected them, watching me closely, responding with her call to any noise she heard. She was very protective now, but someday it would be time to push them out of the nest. It would be time to teach them to fly.
Many of us have been pushed out of the nest. Something unexpected happened, and our world changed. We may have fought valiantly to get back in the nest, to return to the safety of life as we knew it. But life had pushed us out. We had no choice but to flap our wings and learn to fly the best we could.
See how magical this time has been? See how much you’ve learned? With all our fears and resistance, it has still been a grand and powerful time. You flailed around a bit, wondering who to trust. You tried to trust others, then found that didn’t work. Finally you understood. The very lesson you were learning was that of trusting yourself.
You were learning to listen to and trust your inner voice. You were learning to open your heart. Despite all your fears, you have done a grand job. Look how much you’ve changed.
See all the powers you’ve gained? You’ve opened up to your healing powers, your creative powers,too. You know and sense things in a way that used to seem beyond reach and now seems both magical and commonplace. Your instincts and intuition are finely tuned. Your inner voice is clear. And despite all your fears about being abandoned, you now see how much you are loved.
When life pokes and prods you, it’s not punishment or abuse. You’re being pushed out of the nest. Spread your wings and take flight. See how well you can fly.
Today’s Gift
February 20
Say what you like: say I’m ill,
Say I broke my leg on the stairs,
Say we’ve had a fire
—T. S. Eliot
Think of the trouble of excuses and lies. They force us to make ourselves sick, live with a whole broken leg, start some sort of slow burn. When we tell someone we’re not at home, we have to hide in that place. When we invent a long line of lies, we have to memorize each one. It’s easiest just to come clean, use plain and simple words, and speak true. When accusers spear us with their stares, we can disarm them by looking them right in the eye.
Not only do lies deceive others, they keep us hidden from ourselves, and make our real reasons for the choices we’ve made seem unworthy, if we feel we can’t express them. Better that we be truthful, even if a little pain results. Truth keeps communication lines open. Then, when someone really wants to know what’s on our minds, we can simply open our hearts.
Is anything too terrible to tell to a friend?
Touchstones Meditations For Men
February 20
That’s what happens when you’re angry at people. You make them part of your life.
—Garrison Keillor
Our problems with anger and our problems in relationships go hand in hand. Some of us have held back our anger, which led to resentment of our loved ones. Some of us have indulged our anger and become abusive. Some of us have been so frightened of anger that we closed off the dialogue in our relationships when angry feelings came out.
Some of us have wasted our energy by focusing anger on people who weren’t really important to us. Do we truly want them to become so important? Yet, perhaps the important relationships got frozen because we weren’t open and respectful with our anger. It isn’t possible to be close to someone without being angry at times. We let our loved ones be part of our lives by feeling our anger when it is there and expressing it openly, directly, and respectfully to them – or by hearing them when they are angry. Then, with dialogue, we can let it go.
I will be aware of those people I am making important in my life and will grow in dealing with my anger.
Daily TAO
February 20
BEAUTY
Lavender roses.
Incarnate fragrance,
Priestly hue of dawn,
Spirit unfolding.
Even on the road to hell, flowers can make you smile. They are fragile, ephemeral, uncompromising. No one can alter their nature. True, you can easily destroy them, but you will not gain anything; you cannot force them to submit to your will.
Flowers arouse in us an instinct to protect them, to appreciate them, and to shelter them. This world is too ugly, too violent. There should be something delicate to care about. To do so is to be lifted above the brute and to go toward the refined. When we offer flowers on our altar, we are offering a high gift. Money is too vulgar, food too pedestrian. Only flowers are unsullied. By offering them, we offer purity.
The tenderness of flowers arouses mercy, compassion, and understanding. If that beauty is delicate, so much the better. Life itself is fleeting. We should take the time to appreciate beauty in the midst of temporality.
Daily Zen
February 20
To train in the fullest sense of the word, one needs an awareness of the impermanence of all phenomena, including our own lives, and an eye that isn’t blind to cause and effect; emotionally speaking, great compassion and courage on behalf of all beings; practically speaking, a firm faith in the Way and a firm resolve to actualize the Way through practice. If there is even a speck of any one of these present when beginning to train, that is enough. All will then become manifest through practice.
– Anon