Daily Reflections
March 1
IT WORKS
It works — it really does.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 88
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
March 1
A.A. Thought For The Day
When I find myself thinking about taking a drink, I say to myself. “Don’t reach out and take that problem back. You’ve given it to God and there’s nothing you can do about it.” So I forget about the drink. One of the most important parts of the A.A. program is to give our drink problem to God honestly and fully and never to reach out and take the problem back to ourselves. If we let God have it and keep it for good and then cooperate with Him, we’ll stay sober. Have I determined not to take the drink problem back to myself?
Meditation For The Day
Constant effort is necessary if I am to grow spiritually and develop my spiritual life. I must keep the spiritual rules persistently, perseveringly, lovingly, patiently, and hopefully. By keeping them, every mountain of difficulty shall be laid low, the rough places of poverty of spirit shall be made smooth, and all who know me shall know that God is the Lord of all my ways. To get close to the spirit of God is to find life and healing and strength.
Prayer For The Day
I pray that God’s spirit may be everything to my soul. I pray that God’s spirit may grow within me.
Walk in Dry Places
March 1
Danger in excitement
Mood alterations
The lure of excitement is hard to understand. While we may think of ourselves as sensible, practical people, the hard truth is that many alcoholics have a strong need to feel excited. This excitement can take many forms, and some of them are dangerous.
One lure of excitement comes through the impulsive need for change. Some of us have had weird habits of suddenly quitting jobs and pulling up stakes for no reason other than being bored. An even more destructive attraction is the belief that a new romance can restore our zest for living and bring new joys and happiness.
The sober truth is that nobody can live sensibly and sanely by seeking continuous excitement and stimulation. We are better off with steady growth in the patterns we know best than with seeking excitement that finally leads to destruction.
At the same time, we should not belittle the pleasures and joys we get through ordinary living. If we earn those pleasures and joys through responsible actions, they will give us far more happiness than momentary feelings of excitement.
In quietness and confidence is our strength. I do not need to be excited in any way today. I am more effective and more in control when I am not being swayed by feverish emotion that distorts my judgment.
Keep It Simple
March 1
Made the decision to turn our will and lives over to God as we understand Him.
–Step Three
Care. This is what turn our will and lives over to care of our Higher Power. What peace follows! We see our God as caring, as loving. We turn everything over to this Higher Power, who can take better care of us than we can by ourselves. Care can guide us. If we want to do something, we can ask ourselves, “Would my Higher Power see this as an act of care?” If the answer is yes, then we go ahead. If the answer is no, we don’t it. If we can’t be sure, we wait and talk it over with our friends and sponsor. We wait until we know whether it would be an act of care or not. What wonderful guidance!
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, I give to You my will. I give to you my life. I gladly jump into Your loving arms.
Action for the day: Today, I’ll care about others. I’ll find as many as I can to care for others.
“When I dig another out of trouble, the hole from which I lift him is the place where I bury my own.”
–Chinese proverbNotice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.
–Bruce Lee“The spiritual journey, the path of recovery and personal growth, is a detoxification process in which we bring up and out the negative beliefs we have carried with us from the past and that now poison the present.”
–Marianne Williamson“The principles you live by create the world you live in; if you change the principles you live by, you will change your world.”
— Blaine LeeSometimes there are no answers, there are only examples.
–Mark KostewPart of intimacy with God is listening.
–Lori Sweety
Father Leo’s Daily Meditation
March 1
UNDERSTANDING
“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.”
— Saint Augustine
Today I understand that God is love and that it makes more sense to live my life with love than with anger, resentment and despair. I know that the answer to life, with all the problems that may arise, is love. Not simply loving those people who love me, but beginning to love and understand those who dislike or hate me. Being imperfect people in an imperfect world produces enemies. Today I love my world by listening to my critics, changing unreasonable attitudes, growing in the humility that comes from silence. Change is part of God’s blessing of love.
This I believe. This I understand. And step by step it is beginning to work in my life.
May my love for the world give me an understanding of self.
Daily Inspiration
March 1
If you look for things that make you happy, those are the things that you’ll find. Lord, help me remember how lucky I am to be alive and how much goodness surrounds me.
Determination and faith will carry you through to your goals. Lord, You and I together can accomplish my dreams.
Elder’s Meditation of the Day
March 1
“The beginning is purification, that’s the first step. And purification means purification of body and mind. You don’t purify the body without cleansing the mind; that’s the way it works.”
–Rolling Thunder, CHEROKEE
If we have bad thoughts or poison in our minds, they will eventually show up in our bodies in the form of headaches, pains, and stomach problems. It works this way because we are interconnected. Our minds and our bodies are one system. So when we start to grow, or commit to the Red Road, we need to start cleaning up our thoughts and start showing respect for our bodies. We start purifying our minds by prayer and meditation, and we start cleansing our bodies by getting the right amount of sleep and developing good eating habits. Today, I’m going to observe my thoughts. Will my thoughts be clean today?
Great Spirit, let me focus on Your love today so my mind will be pure.
Journey to the heart for March
March 1
Find Healing and Magic Within Yourself
She was an Osage shaman. Her land, next to Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona, was landscaped with a totem pole, a fire pit, a bridge leading to her house, and a garden of flowers and rocks. A river ran across her property, singing to all who quieted themselves enough to listen. A teepee stood close by, one used to house the sweat lodge ceremonies.
It was during one such ceremony I had met her. I returned later to talk with her for a while. She welcomed me back, welcomed all who visited her to return to her land. She didn’t call it her land, she called it the land. She said it belonged to us all.
“You don’t have to take this journey,” she said. “You don’t have to travel around searching for spiritual spots. All the wisdom, the experiences, the spiritual places you seek on this quest are within you.”
While it’s fun to go on a trip, and trips often coincide with going to new places in our personal lives, we don’t have to load up the car and hit the road to find what we’re looking for. The places of power we seek are within us. Places of comfort, joy, wisdom, silence, healing, peace. The places we visit often reflect those qualities, reinforce them, remind us that they’re there. But the places, the locations we visit, are only mirrors, extensions of ourselves.
The healing and magic we seek are not someplace else. They are within each of us.
Today’s Gift
March 1
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
—Ursula LeGuin
The world around us changes constantly. Trees turn from green to beautiful shades of yellow, orange, and brown in the fall. Yet, even if we watched the trees carefully, every minute of the day, we could not actually see the colors change. Change requires time, preparation, and patience.
To make the changes we want, we need to let go of unhealthy but comfortable patterns that we’re stuck in, the way the trees let their colors change and finally let go of their leaves altogether. We can’t have total change right now, no matter how much we want it. It’s important to accept both who we are now and who we are becoming. Just as the tree trusts without question that its leaves will grow and lets go of them when the time comes, we can believe in our own power to grow and let go of our accomplishments when the time is right.
When we do, we can be assured that our lives will blossom again, like trees in the spring coming to life after a cold winter.
Do I have any new blossoms today?
Touchstones Meditations For Men
March 1
As my fathers planted for me, so do I plant for my children.
—The Talmud
The first seeds of this spiritual program were planted years ago by men who also were desperately in need. Rather than restrict their attention to their own painful circumstances, they broke through to a new creative idea – it is in helping others that we help ourselves. They reached out eagerly to help fellow men and women in need. In the process they carried the message to others and found new healing relationships for themselves. This program, which is saving our lives, is here because men before us were willing to reach out and pass it along.
We inherit countless resources and teachings from both our biological and our “foster” fathers in this program. The gift of a spiritually full life inspires and requires us to do as they did – pass it on. We keep the benefits of our recovery, not by holding on to them, but by planting new seeds from our harvest for those who come after us.
I will give freely of my time and resources because the giving enriches me.
Daily TAO
March 1
CELIBACY
In winter, animals do not mate.
Preserve your Tao
By preserving your essence.
We follow the Tao of the universe with great effort, but Tao is within us too. It is not something abstract, not something conceptual. Our personal Tao is our very life force. This energy begins with the physical and extends into the spiritual.
The source of this energy is partly chemical : our hormones, nutrition from food, and genetics. Whatever we have that is spiritual arises from these substances. Followers of Tao call this the essence. Preservation of this essence through sexual conservation is crucial. This doesn’t mean suppression of sexuality, for the impulse to make love is natural and irrepressible; it means to harmonize sexuality with spirituality.
The follower of Tao makes love according to the seasons. In winter, it should be less or not at all; in spring, it may be at its most frequent. The young should restrict themselves to about once every three days, while the middle-aged should reduce it once a week, and the elderly even less than that. The secret is not to indulge too much, without killing one’s sexuality altogether.
Overindulgence is to waste one’s resources. Suppression kills the body on its most basic level. Find the proper balance, and you will have a happy life and full spirituality.
Daily Zen
March 1
Too much knowledge leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider, the greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
Water dripping ceaselessly
Will fill the four seas.
Specks of dust not wiped away
Will become the five mountains.
– Wang Ming (6th century)