Hiker, Writer, Traveler, Recovering Person
Just shared this in an online meeting:
I am glad to see the topic of sponsors today. I went to see my family for the holidays, and there was an issue I wanted to address while I was there.
The specifics don’t matter, but I thought about it and thought about it … and then I thought about it some more.
For me to make real progress in this program, I had to realize that I wanted to smoke pot — was good at it, craved it, etc. — AND I wanted to quit. Both of those things are true. When I realized that, I was able to accept the fact that I was an addict, and I quit beating myself up for wanting to get high. I was able to say, “Okay, I want to get high, and I want to quit, and for today I will choose, with the help of others and my higher power, to not smoke pot.”
Just posed this one on the Recovery Pipeline, where the topic this week is Anonymity — which, by the way, is as difficult to type as it is to say.
I think one of the original reasons AA adopted this tradition was that a pretty famous person (a baseball player, I think) got sober and told the world he was part of AA. Then he relapsed, and the credibility of AA took a blow.
Friends were among the first gifts of the program for me. I came in lonely as well as depressed, sick, freaked out, etc. The first thing I saw was a room full of sober potheads. Their existence gave me hope, and I quickly figured out that I needed to hang out with them — in meetings and after meetings and at events — if I was going to stay sober, because most of my other friends were either not sober at all or had no idea what I was going through. Continue reading “The Importance of Recovery Friends”
My girlfriend went to a small gathering of spiritual-minded folks last night, and when she came back she asked me, “What do you do when people say ‘God’?”
What followed was, typical of me, a long and rambling discourse that mostly left both of us confused. I could boil it down to this, though: depending on the context and speaker, when someone says “God” to me, I either:
A) do nothing, because there’s nothing for me to do,
B) translate their “God” into my “God” or some allegorical Being,
or
C) get a little defensive. Continue reading “What do You do When People Say “God”?”
First, some pretty cool comments on the previous posts. Somebody must have clicked in from MySobrietySpace.com. I set up a profile there. My first sponsor also sent me an email about Job, and I took the liberty of posting it here as a comment on that post.
Had lunch with a sponsee today, and he’s been on the 3rd Step. My sponsor had told me that it’s important at this point to have some workable image of a Higher Power, no matter how small, so we can have some idea of what we’re turning things over to. Something you can wrap your head around, as he said. Lots of folks use the group, or a more classic notion of God, whatever. Continue reading “Defining our Higher Power”
The topic for this week is dealing with cravings.
I guess it happens to all of us, especially if we happen to be around people getting high. I was at a concert recently in a small, crowded venue, and there were a lot of people getting high. Now, I’ve been sober for more than 7 years, but I won’t lie to you: It occurred to me for a moment how nice it would be to have one little hit, just to add a little something to how the music sounds. Continue reading “Dealing with Cravings”
The topic for this week is: Does God give is more than we can handle?
Thanks
This is one of those recovery phrases that I never really identified with — not that I have a problem with it, but that I never had a sense of a Higher Power that was doling things out, giving tests, checking results, and so on. Continue reading “God and those “tests””