Alcoholics Anonymous Blog & Video | Dec 13 | DonInLondon | Step 12 "Freedom To Choose"
Humility "open to learning life today," learning "Truth, Love and Wisdom in the moment of now," liberty, liberation, release, emancipation, deliverance, forgiveness, tolerance and love.
December 13, 2013 Step Twelve Month: "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..." Surrendering to the truth love and wisdom of today. I do feel this is a very important point to make, my will versus the current conditions of today. No matter which way I might struggle with the truth of now, how love works right now and the wisdom I am learning, going with the truth, love and wisdom will always open the door to a more informed understanding about what I can do and what I cannot do. This is where acceptance is key to living a real life today.
Letting go the old ways, and the imagination that old days were good and today is just a struggle, is me telling myself I am missing out on something. All I miss in reality is the old delusion that life is better with a drink or drug. Drink and drugging would take the edge off anyone, and depending on your poison, the poison would obliterate those parts of life we would deny. We only need denial when we cannot cope. And learning to cope only happens in the moment of now.
I have a lifetime of good, bad and ugly memories. And contingent on what was happening back in the day, I could be in love with the world and the girl of my dreams, or it could be the other extreme of hating the world and heartbroken by the girl of my dreams. Somewhere in the middle, life would have no meaning and so I turned in solace to the bottle. Alcohol, my best friend would take away the pain, or even exaggerate the pain and give me a sense of justified anger and resentment at an unfair world. The world is not unfair, it is what it is, how I deal with the reality would have been better without my best friend back in the day, because wisdom would have come more quickly, and I would have steered my choices to better times and better outcomes.
Time and distance can be very difficult because we all have selective memories about what happened in the past. Depending on our mood, depending on the joy in sadness of life, we can be moved and reflect on the good that came out of every situation, or the bad the came out of every situation. The good of giving up drink? Well these days, reality does not feel wrong, wrong things still happen all the time, it is how I cope with the bad and the ugly which returns life to the good far sooner these days than later.
I was listening to a current affairs programme about different ways to keep sober having had the usual epiphany that drink ruins reality when taken to the extreme. The person speaking had written a book about how to keep sober and the language spoken in the interview had many words associated with recovery fellowships. All well and good, use what works and work it. However people keep sober, find new meaning in life and learn how to cope with reality is good in my opinion. The person had rejected the fellowships because of the religious undertones. This is not surprising in a world which rejects formalised religions and other people's beliefs and opinions about God. No one ever forced me into any belief or opinion in recovery. Spiritual continues to be of the educational variety in my case, surrendering to the truth love and wisdom of now.
I am so relieved that people make up their own minds in recovery about what they come to believe. And hopefully, they approach twelve step living with a rational and common understanding of how to help another person suffering from the malady which is killing them. In any society, in any country in the world, the imposition of belief and opinion creates fractures rather than fellowship and common ground for people to build their lives and have the freedom of choice in what they do one day at a time.
If God is working for you, and is working to improve your life, work with God as you understand him. It does not mean that your understanding of God is the same as anybody else's, it might be, and at the same time you will find others belief in God and the God of their understanding completely incomprehensible. Live and let live means whatever works to the good of an individual and the greater good of humanity, without imposing believe and opinion on others identity simply must be the best outcome with tolerance, love, forgiveness, humility and faith to be oneself today.
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