I've Moved this Blog to Wordpress

I have moved this site over to Wordpress because it has a wider based community of bloggers, and more of a chance to network with likeminded people.  You can access the same contact at 12 Step Recovery, Spirituality and Wellness at Wordpress.  Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you there for more and better content.  Namaste ~ Kate

No One Can Make you Feel Inferior

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

We are competent people.  We made a wise choice for ourselves when we decided to recover.  Each day that we continue working this program our Spirits are strengthened.  And our girts will multiply.

Feeling inferior can become a habit.  Being passive and feeling inferior go hand in hand and they prepare us for becoming dependent on alcohol, pills, food, and people.  We didn't understand, instinctively, that we are just who we're meant to be.   We grew up believing we were not smart enough, not pretty enough, not capable enough.  We grew up too distant from the source of our real strength.

How wonderful for us that we found the program!  How lucky we are to have, for the taking, all the strength we'll ever need to face any situation, to handle any problem, to resolve any personal relationship conflict.  Feeling inferior can be only a bad memory.  The choice is ours.  The program promises a better life.  The Steps promise the strength to move forward.  Our friends promise us outstretched hands.

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I will look forward to the challenges of today with hope and strength and know that I am able to meet them.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The free bird leaps
on the back of the win
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and is tune is heard
on the distant hillfor the caged bird
sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze
an the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

Maya Angelou

AA's Promises to Working the Steps

I just did a search on AA's various promises, and compiled the following for you and myself:

AA’s 3rd Step Promises

AA’s 3rd Step:  “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

All sorts of remarkable things followed.  We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well. Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our little plans and designs.  More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life.  As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter.
We were reborn.

Alcoholics Anonymous p.63


AA’s 4th Step Promises

AA’s 4th Step:  “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

We let Him demonstrate, through us, what He can do.  We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have us be.  At once, we commence to outgrow fear.

Alcoholics Anonymous p.68

We have listed and analyzed our resentments.  We have begun to comprehend their futility and their fatality.  We have commenced to see their terrible destructiveness.  We have begun to learn tolerance, patience and good will toward all men, even our enemies, for we look on them as sick people.

Alcoholics Anonymous p.70


AA’s 5th Step Promises

AA’s 5th Step:  “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted.  We can look the world in the eye.  We can be alone at perfect peace and ease.  Our fears fall from us.  We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator.  We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have a spiritual experience.  The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly.  We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.

Alcoholics Anonymous p.75


AA’s 9th Step Promises

AA’s 9th Step:  “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.  We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.  We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.  We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.  No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.  We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.  Self-seeking will slip away.  Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.  Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.  We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.  We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises?  We think not.  They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
They will always materialize if we work for them.

(Alcoholics Anonymous, pp. 83-84)


AA’s 10th Step Promises

AA’s 10th Step:  “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone-even alcohol.  For by this time sanity will have returned.  We will seldom be interested in liquor.  If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame.  We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically.  We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part.  It just comes!  That is the miracle of it.  We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation.  We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality—safe and protected.  We have not even sworn off.  Instead, the problem has been removed.  It does not exist for us.  We are neither cocky nor are we afraid.  That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.

Alcoholics Anonymous pp.84-85


AA’s 11th Step Promises

AA’s 11th Step:  “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action.  We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day “Thy will be done.”  We are then in much less danger of excitement, fear, anger, worry, self-pity, or foolish decisions.  We become much more efficient.  We do not tire so easily, for we are not burning up energy foolishly as we did when we were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves.  It works-it really does.

Alcoholics Anonymous p.88


AA’s 12th Step Promises

AA’s 12th Step:  “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice
these principles in all our affairs.”

If you persist, remarkable things will happen.  When we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God’s hands were better than anything we could have planned.  Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances!

Alcoholics Anonymous p. 100

Assuming we are spiritually fit, we can do all sorts of things alcoholics are not supposed to do.  People have said we must not go where liquor is served; we must not have it in our homes; we must shun friends who drink; we must avoid moving pictures which show drinking scenes; we must not go into bars; our friends must hide their bottles if we go to their houses; we mustn’t think or be reminded about alcohol at all.  We meet these conditions every day… Our rule is not to avoid a place where there is drinking, if we have a legitimate reason for being there.

Alcoholics Anonymous p. 100-101

God will constantly disclose more to you and to us.  Ask Him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man who is still sick.  The answers will come, if your own house is in order.  But obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got.  See to it that your relationship with Him is right, and great events will come to pass for you and countless others.  This is the Great Fact for us.

Alcoholics Anonymous p. 164

Please feel free to post anything you feel is special from your 12 step recovery program.  Namaste ~ Kate

Acceptance is My Solution

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.  When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation~some fact of my life~unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.  Until I accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms I cannot be happy.  I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”  He forgot to mention that I was the chief critic.  I was always able to see the flaw in every person, every situation.  And I was always glad to point it out, because I knew you wanted perfection, just as I did.  A.A. and acceptance have taught me that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us; that we are all children of God and we have a right to be here.

(A.A. Big Book Pg 417)

HOW TO OBTAIN GOD’S PROMISES

HOW TO OBTAIN GOD’S PROMISES

4 Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.   5 And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; 6 And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; 7 And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. 8 For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

2 Peter 1:4-8 (KJV)

Equanimity

I read this this morning during my spiritual readings:  

Equanimity

“I am convinced, the longer live, that life and its blessings are not so entirely unjustly distributed (as) when we are suffering greatly we are so inclined to suppose.” ~ Mary Todd Lincoln

“The attitude “Why me?” hints at the little compassion we generally feel for others’ suffering. Our empathy with others, even our awareness of their suffering, is generally minimal. We are much too involved in our own. Were we less self-centered, we’d see that blessings and tragedies visit us all, in equal amounts. Some people respond to their blessings with equanimity, and they quietly remove the sting from their tragedies. We can learn to do both.

Recovery is learning new responses, feeling and behaving in healthier ways. We need not get caught by self-pity. We can always feel it coming on. And we can let it go.

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Self-pity may beckon today. Fortunately, I have learned I have other choices.” Each Day a New Beginning, Daily Meditations for Women; Hazeldon, 1982, Pg June 29, 2012

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Equanimity: “noun, meaning evenness of mind under stress; a habit of mind that is only rarely disturbed under great strain; Composure implies the controlling of emotional or mental agitation by an effort of will or as a matter of habit” Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, Springfield MA, 1994