Beside Restful Waters...Jump In!

“If you do something greater than yourself, you will be protected.”

Ojibway teaching

Steps 10, 11, and 12 of Alcoholics Anonymous are as follows”

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

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

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principals in all our affairs.

As I ponder this teaching from my ancestors, I am moved to these steps. These steps are about living greater than ourselves. Those of us who have been practicing these principals in all of our affairs can share daily witness to our protection.

FEAR: keeps me within myself. Fear holds me hostage to my anxieties, expectations, and projections. These are the stuff of my mind. My mind is a very dangerous place to be when alone. Within my mind lives the stories of my trauma and the addictive habits that held me within the walls of my addiction. These habits held me in shame, guilt, unworthiness, and the huge variety of illusions that defined my addictive reality.

GRATITUDE: Gratitude is about something and someone greater than myself. Gratitude is the evidence of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the evidence of my Higher Power’s uncreated love for me, for us, for the universe.

Meditation is the gift that keeps on giving.

Meditation offers the mindfulness needed to make a personal inventory a sacred habit.

This habit offers

• The grace of forgiveness

• The mindfulness of conscious contact with God

• The willingness to engage the power to carry out God’s will, my purpose

• The Spiritual awakening that connects me to the needs of others.

• The miracle of celebrating sobriety with you all.

• The acceptance of the mystery of miracle and action.

“We are hardwired to avoid the human mystery – that we are all a mixture of darkness and light – instead of learning how to carry it patiently through to resurrection.” (Richard Rohr)

The addict is hard wired to avoid reality, live in denial, and stay in a black and white, right and wrong mentality. The human mystery is one of Divine paradox. The God I know calls me to hold the reality of pain and carry it outside of myself where I can fully experience the pain while walking through its darkness into the light of sobriety – our resurrection. I carry the pain while God uses us to transform the pain to sobriety. We offer each other the stories of transformation through forgiveness, to our sobriety, to our celebration.

The mystery continues.

I don’t understand this stuff.

I do celebrate sobriety. My celebration is our sobriety, our resurrection, shared and lived to the fullest, one day at a time.

What do you think? Time for a happy dance? Time to churn the restful waters with our playfulness? I think so. We can call it our hydro dance!

Jump in.

Namaste’