Daily Reflections
March 4
WEEDING THE GARDEN
The essence of all growth is a willingness to make a change for the better and then an unremitting willingness to shoulder whatever responsibility this entails.
AS BILL SEES IT, p. 115
By the time I had reached Step Three I had been freed of my dependence on alcohol, but bitter experience has shown me that continuous sobriety requires continuous effort. Every now and then I pause to take a good look at my progress. More and more of my garden is weeded each time I look, but each time I also find new weeds sprouting where I thought I had made my final pass with the blade. As I head back to get the newly sprouted weed (it’s easier when they are young), I take a moment to admire how lush the growing vegetables and flowers are, and my labors are rewarded. My sobriety grows and bears fruit.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
March 4
A.A. Thought For The Day
Having surrendered our lives to God and put our drink problem in His Hands doesn’t mean that we’ll never be tempted to drink. So we must build up strength for the time when temptation will come. In this quiet time, we read and pray and get our minds in the right mood for the day. Starting the day right is a great help in keeping sober. As the days go by and we get used to the sober life, it gets easier and easier. We begin to develop a deep gratitude to God for saving us from that old life. And we begin to enjoy peace and serenity and real quiet happiness. Am I trying to live the way God wants me to live?
Meditation For The Day
The elimination of selfishness is the key to happiness and can only be accomplished with God’s help. We start out with a spark of the Divine Spirit but a large amount of selfishness. As we grow and come in contact with other people, we can take one of two paths. We can become more and more selfish and practically extinguish the Divine Spark within us or we can become more unselfish and develop our spirituality until it becomes the most important thing in our lives.
Prayer For The Day
I pray that I may grow more and more unselfish, honest, pure and loving. I pray that I may take the right path every day.
Walk in Dry Places
March 4
Don’t feed the Habit
Enhancing Sobriety
We quickly learn that it’s wrong to do anything that “feeds” a drinking habit. A recovering person would be foolish, for example, to spend time in a drinking environment simply to “be with friends.”
It’s constructive to take that same approach toward other problems we’d like to get out of our lives. If gossip has been my problem, I should not feed it by listening to gossip or even by reading gossipy articles and books. IF I have accumulated debts through overspending, I should cut off window shopping and other practices that may bring on more unnecessary debt. And if I want to rid my life of self-pity, I should not spend a single moment brooding over the bad breaks I have had in the past.
Bad habits have a life of their own. They are somewhat like rodents that have found their way into the house and have become star borders. One way to control rodents is to eliminate their food supply. That same principle applies to bad habits we want to eliminate from our own lives.
I’ll make a strong effort to cut off any line of thinking that feeds my bad habits, whatever they are. This might include avoiding practices that others see as harmless and trivial. However, nothing is harmless or trivial if it has become destructive in my life.
Keep It Simple
March 4
Better bend than break.
–Scottish proverb
Our program is based on bending. We call it “surrender.” We surrender our self-will to the care of God. We do what we believe our Higher Power want us to do. We learn this as an act of love.
Many of us believed surrender was a sign of weakness. We tried to control everything. But we change as we’re in the program longer and longer. We learn to bend. We start to see that what is important is learning. We learn to do what’s best for us and others. To learn, we need an open mind. To bend, we must stay open. Love and care become the center of our lives.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, teach me that strength comes from knowing how and when to bend.
Action for the Day: Today, I’ll check myself. How open am I? Do I bend when I need to?
God, help me find and create true joy and peace in my world.
–Melody BeattieIt doesn’t matter what we have done in the past.
–Melody BeattieLearning and maturation in the life of the spirit cannot be hurried, and as in physical and intellectual development, a great deal depends on our readiness.
–Mary McDermott ShidelerGod’s will never takes me where his grace will not sustain me.
–Ruth Humlecker
Father Leo’s Daily Meditation
March 4
HELL
“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those, who in time of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.”
— Dante Alighieri
Each human being makes a personal hell here on earth. Often we do it not by what we perpetrate but in what we allow to happen. So much of the loneliness and isolation that many addicts and their families experience is caused by them remaining hidden and silent. The pretense that everything is okay is not only untrue but deadly. Silence and compliance kills more addicts than a thousand needles!
Today I choose not to be neutral in my life. I speak about my alcoholism so that I can on a daily basis make war on the disease that nearly killed me. I speak out about the disease of addiction so that society cannot say that it did not know what was happening. I speak up for treatment and recovery because I know it can work in the vast majority of cases. I am not neutral when it comes to addiction because I am fighting for my life.
God, give me the courage to speak up in the crowd; let me live the message I was privileged to receive.
Daily Inspiration
March 4
Life isn’t always fair, but don’t let that stop you from making the world a better place every chance you get. Lord, help me to serve You where I am right now.
The first and most powerful commandment is love. Through love we unite ourselves together with God and with each other and bring ourselves closer to our desired goal. Lord, I love You with all my heart and soul and mind.
Elder’s Meditation of the Day
March 4
“My father told me that Hopi earth does contain my roots and I am, indeed, from that land. Because my roots are there, I will find them.”
–Wendy Rose, HOPI/MIWOK
Everything that comes from the earth will return to the earth. We should be able to realize the connectedness to the earth. We should be able to feel toward Her just like She is our real Mother. We can easily feel this connectedness if we can answer these three questions: why am I?, who am I?, and where am I going? If we cannot answer these questions, then perhaps we need to talk to the Elders. Go to the Elders and ask, “Grandfather, why am I?; Grandmother, who am I?; Oh Great One, where am I supposed to go?” The Elders will help us with these three questions.
Grandfather, help me to stay centered today.
Journey to the Heart
March 4
One Step at a Time
One step at a time. That’s all you can take, That’s all you have to take,
Yes, you have visions you’ve created of where you want to go. But you don’t get there in one leap. You get there one step at a time. That’s how you receive your guidance. That’s how you respond to the guidance you’ve received.
Let your faith be strong. Your faith will keep you going through those moments in between steps. When your faith is strong, you don’t look in fear at the journey ahead, wondering if you will get all the guidance you need, or if you will get to where you’re going. You know you will, so take the simple steps, one at a time, that lie ahead. You take them in joy, because you know you’re being guided. You have faith that the simple steps you are led to do will take you to your destination.
One step at a time. That’s how you will get where you are going. You are being led, each step of the way.
Today’s Gift
March 4
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume, you shall assume.
—Walt Whitman
Some of us may think Walt Whitman must have been terribly conceited to have written words like that. But he wasn’t. He knew himself well, and accepted himself, even his darker side. He could laugh at himself and celebrate his humanness.
And because he loved and accepted himself just as he was, others could do the same. That’s difficult to understand sometimes, but it’s true: no one else is going to love and accept us until we come to love and accept ourselves.
We teach others how to treat us by the way we treat ourselves, so perhaps it makes sense to apply a variation of the Golden Rule: “Do unto ourselves as we would have others do unto us.”
Can I allow my kindness to myself overflow to another person today?
Touchstones Meditation For Men
March 4
Heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act.
—Sophocles
Growing into masculine wholeness is a journey into greater responsibility for our lives. We have choices to make every day. Taking responsibility means choosing between the options we have and then accepting the consequences. Sometimes both choices are undesirable, but we have to choose anyway. Do I expect to be perfect in my choices? Do I demand that someone else take responsibility for me? Do I defiantly refuse to accept the options I have?
This program seems like a paradox- the First Step asks us to accept our powerlessness, then we are expected to go on and stop being passive in our lives. The Serenity Prayer speaks to us about this dilemma. We ask for the serenity to accept what we cannot change and the courage to change what we can. Fully admitting our powerlessness sheds a burden and frees us to go on from there, actively doing what we can.
If something is awaiting my action today, may I have the courage to move forward with it. Even small movement is progress.
Daily TAO
March 4
ARTICULATION
Rain dripping from eaves
Sounds nature’s poetry.
We speak and write to
Explain to ourselves.
Knowledge of Tao lodges in the same part of the mind as poetry. That is why the ancients expressed themselves in verse: There is the same quick perception.
When we are in touch with Tao, it is not our academic learning that is speaking, but the spirit of Tao itself. The old texts are very specific about this. That is why there is such a vast difference between the words of scholars and the words of a practitioner, just as the words of academics differ from the words of poets.
At the elementary stages of study, we need to articulate our experiences and let Tao flow through us. Followers of Tao frequently use writing, art, and even poetry as tools for self-discovery. By articulating their experiences, it helps them to understand the stages they are going through. Once they can do this, it satisfies and neutralizes their rational minds. The process clears away intellectualism and leaves the true Tao, which is not subject to words or images.
Daily Zen
March 4
Clouds release the hillsides
And wake the scene of spring
Where is the plum tree
That wafts that subtle scent
I grab my staff intending
To search secluded valleys
Then find a single branch
Against the eastern wall.
– Han-shan Te-ch’ing (1546-1623)