Daily Reflections
September 29
EXACTLY ALIKE
Frequent contact with newcomers and with each other is the bright spot of our lives.
-ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 89
A man came to the meeting drunk, interrupted the speakers, stood up and took his shirt off, staggered loudly back and forth for coffee, demanded to talk, and eventually called the group’s secretary an unquotable name and walked out. I was glad he was there–once again I saw what I still could be. I don’t have to be drunk to want to be the exception and the center of attention. I have often felt abused and responded abusively when I was simply being treated as a garden variety human being. The more the man tried to insist he was different, the more I realized that he and I were exactly alike.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
September 29
A.A. Thought For The Day
Having got this far, shall we pause and ask ourselves some searching questions? We need to check up on ourselves periodically. Just how good an A.A. am I? Am I attending meetings regularly? Am I doing my share to carry the load? When there is something to be done, do I volunteer? Do I speak at meetings when asked, no matter how nervous I am? Do I accept each opportunity to do twelfth-step work as a challenge? Do I give freely of my time and money? Am I trying to spread A.A. wherever I go? Is my daily life a demonstration of A.A. principles? Am I a good A.A.?
Meditation For The Day
How do I get strength to be effective and to accept responsibility? By asking the Higher Power for the strength I need each day. It has been proved in countless lives that for every day I live the necessary power shall be given me. I must face each challenge that comes to me during the day, sure that God will give me the strength to face it. For every task that is given me, there is also given me all the power necessary for the performance of that task. I do not need to hold back.
Prayer For The Day
I pray that I may accept every task as a challenge. I know I cannot wholly fail if God is with me.
Walk In Dry Places
September 29
When should I be Grateful?
Gratitude
One spiritual writer believed that our only reason for gratitude should be that we are part of God’s universe. Others point out that gratitude helps us, not God or the other people to whom we are grateful.
Their point is that it’s not very uplifting simply to tie our gratitude to certain gifts or benefits. Such gratitude is fairly shallow and is almost no more than good manners. As recovering alcoholics, we need more than that.
The best reason for gratitude is the outlook it creates as we cultivate it within ourselves. We will actually feel mentally and physically uplifted if we know true gratitude. This is the true spiritual outlook alcoholics seek in the bottle but can find only in the new way of life.
I’ll find ways to practice gratitude today without letting others know what I’m doing.
Keep It Simple
September 29
Al didn’t smile for forty years. You’ve got to admire a man like that.
–From the TV show, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”
Remember how we used to live? We were always trying to cover up some lie or mistake.
We were all like Al. Our energy was going into our illness, not into living.
Gratitude is the key word in the program. Gratitude is being thankful for the getting to know our Higher Power. Remember what it was like to not smile for all those years?
Recovery has given us back our smiles. What a relief! We can relax and enjoy our new life.
Prayer for the Day: I pray that I’ll always remember what is was like when I was using. I pray that I’ll not take my recovery for granted. I prayer for gratitude.
Action For the Day: I will list all the things the program and recovery have given me. I will smile about them today.
Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.
–Hyman Judah Schactel“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
–Mother Theresa“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
–Abraham Lincoln“Being rich isn’t about money. Being rich is a state of mind. Some of us, no matter how much money we have, will never be free enough to take time to stop and eat the heart of the watermelon. And some of us will be rich without ever being more than a paycheck ahead of the game.”
–Harvey B. Mackay“If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.”
–Krishnamurti“Sometimes you have to get to rock bottom in order to see the right way back up.”
–Kate Bell
Father Leo’s Daily Meditation
September 29
BLACKOUTS
“It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.”
– Anatole France
I experienced blackouts in my drinking. Often I would wake up and not know where I had been, what I had said or what I had done. I would awake to peer through windows searching for my car. I would telephone to find out what time I had left the party and if anything had happened. Often as I bathed I would discover bruises or bleeding from an unremembered incident.
There were other times I knew what I had done, knew what I had said, remembered how I behaved — and yet still I went back for more. I drank alcoholically for years because my pride would not allow me to be alcoholic. I created the wisest excuses for staying sick!
Today my sobriety requires a wisdom that is based on reality.
Lord of action, teach me to place my feet alongside my best thinking.
Daily Inspiration
September 29
Start something you’ve been putting off or finish something you’ve started so that you can remove the frustration that comes with procrastination. Lord, help me in my little way to do my little part to make this day a little better.
With our blessings come responsibilities. Much is required of those to whom much has been given. Lord, may I use my blessings to be a blessing to others.
A Day At A Time
September 29
Reflection For The Day
In our first weeks or months in The Program, our shaky emotional condition sometimes affects our feelings toward old friends and family. For many of us, these relationships heal quickly in the initial stages of our recovery. For others, a time of “touchiness” seems to persist; now that we’re no longer drinking or using other chemicals, we have to sort out our feelings about spouse, children, relatives, employer, fellow workers, and even neighbors. Experience in The Program over the years has taught that we should avoid making important decisions early in our recovery — especially emotion-charged decisions about people. Am I becoming better equipped to relate maturely to other people?
Today I Pray
May God help me through the edginess, the confusion of re-feeling and re-thinking my relationships, the “getting-it-all-together” stages of my recovery. May I not rush into new relationships or new situations that demand and investment of my emotions — not yet.
Today I Will Remember
No entangling alliances too soon.
One More Day
September 29
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our culture encourages a quest for outer beauty, even though we know it is more important to have inner beauty. This is the beauty truly valued by others. We can live joyfully; we can delight in discovering and enjoying beauty. We are surrounded with loveliness in nature an din people’s thoughts, words, and deeds. To accept that beauty, we must carry within ourselves a sensitivity, an appreciation for what is offered, and that sensitivity is a large part of the beauty we carry within us.
Life is full of beauty. I will keep my eyes open to the beauty that is in others, in nature, and in myself.
One Day At A Time
September 29
Togetherness
“Take my hand, and no matter how dark the night, the light of day will come, and we will share the tomorrow.”
–Ken Grant
When we first walk into our recovery rooms, we are all afraid: afraid of more rejection, afraid of more failure, and afraid of more loneliness. Once we sit and listen, we realize that we are not much different than the other people there. We ease up, start sharing, begin trusting our Higher Power and ourselves more.
Our darkness of the past is drawn out by our sharing with other addicts. We realize our deep, dark secrets are not as bad as we thought.
We are not alone! Then hand-in-hand, we begin climbing the ladder of recovery and the light of day begins to shine brighter and brighter.
One Day at a Time …
When we let our guard down and let Higher Power and other people in, we learn that at the end of a dark day is the light of our next today. We learn that together we can do what we can never do alone.
~ Jeanette
Elder’s Meditation of the Day
September 29
“So I prayed, but I had to pray from my heart. All of my concentration and thoughts went from my head to my heart. All of my senses – hearing, smell, taste, and feeling – were connected to my heart.”
–Wallace Black Elk, LAKOTA
The heart is the gateway to the Unseen World, to the Spirit World. It takes real concentration to do this. To connect to our own heart is also a mental state. It starts in the head and transitions to the heart. This mental state is our inner stillness. Be still and know. This place of the heart is very joyous and peaceful. It is this place that we become one with God, our Creator.
Great Spirit, teach me to be a heart warrior.
Today’s Gift
September 29
When people envy me I think, Oh God, don’t envy me, I have my own pains.
—Barbra Streisand
A forest is full of many different kinds of trees–they are all sizes and shapes and shades of color. It is hard to imagine a pine tree wishing it was an oak. Or a fir tree envying the birch its white bark. Instead, each tree catches raindrops and reflects the sunshine in its own way.
We often find ourselves envying someone else. We think they have more money or more friends. We see them as better looking or luckier in some way than we are.
It is so easy to overlook our own gifts when we do this. We get fooled by what looks good and forget that all human beings have some weaknesses and pain, just like we do. Like the trees in the forest, we each have our own unique beauty and talents to offer. If we believe in ourselves, rather than envy those around us, we will grow green and tall in our own way.
What qualities do I have that someone might envy?
Touchstones Meditations For Men
September 29
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We must have hope or starve to death.
—Pearl Buck
Our ideals, the principles that order our lives, are essential to a healing life. Some of us have lived a pattern in which we did not know what we believed. If someone we liked stated a viewpoint, we might wear it for a while like a new shirt – but with no personal commitment. Others of us have indulged in negativism and hopelessness. Life is more fulfilling when we assert our beliefs and give ourselves to them. As human beings, we are unable to perfectly live out our beliefs, but we become whole men by giving our energies to the attempt.
Is beauty in music, art, and nature a worthwhile ideal for us? Are fairness and justice for all people what we value? Are love and brotherhood ideals we hold dear? When we dare assert these values in our lives, they are life giving to us. They mature us. Reaching for what is worthwhile, rather than cursing what is not, gives us a design for making all our choices, and we have hope.
I will dare to meet my negativism with my ideals. My spiritual health will give me life.
Daily TAO
September 29
DETERMINATION
Lady butterfly,
I saw you a week ago.
Now you are back,
With your lover,
In tandem flights
And helical tangents:
How many times
You return gladly!
In the legends there is the story of the butterfly lovers. They loved each other so much that even in death, their hearts were fixed faithfully upon one another. In honor of their devotion to each other, the gods changed them into butterflies and let them come back together in reincarnation after reincarnation.
Would that all of us could manifest such determination and faith to what we loved!
Daily Zen
September 29
After realizing the Dharma body,
There is not a thing;
Original self-nature is the innate Buddha
The five skandhas-the empty comings
And goings of floating clouds;
The three poisons- the vacant appearing
And disappearing of water bubbles.
– Yung Chia Hsuan Chueh