Daily Reflections - Comments Welcome

[Ann]

HEALING HEART AND MIND

Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being
the exact nature of our wrongs.
TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 55

Since it is true that God comes to me through people, I can
see that by keeping people at a distance I also keep God at
a distance. God is nearer to me than I think and I can
experience Him by loving people and allowing people to love
me. But I can neither love nor be loved if I allow my secrets
to get in the way.
It's the side of myself that I refuse to look at that rules
me. I must be willing to look at the dark side in order to
heal my mind and heart because that is the road to freedom.
I must walk into darkness to find the light and walk into fear
to find peace.
By revealing my secrets - and thereby ridding myself of guilt
- I can actually change my thinking; by altering my thinking,
I can change myself. My thoughts create my future. What I will
be tomorrow is determined by what I think today.

[lanie67]

"It's the side of myself that I refuse to look at that rules
me. "

I love this, it seems I've read it somewhere else here recently too. This is so true, and I am grateful to AA for making me pull all of this darkness out into the light. Psychiatry has been useful to me but it focuses on others that hurt me. AA makes me focus on how I hurt others, inadvertently or otherwise. I think that with those two working together I can gain enough self-awareness to walk through the day without self-destructing. There is little more self-destructive to me than wronging others and rationalizing it because it puts me at war with myself.

[Grizzled]

I don't think that it is any mistake that, upon relection, when examining our character defects they are all anti-social. I know that toward the end of my drunkeness I isolated myself from as many people as possible.

I did not want them to know me and I did not want to know them. TV commercials actually pissed me off when happy people were selling something. F 'em I thought.

I now find myself interested in people, and that was something I lost what seems a lifetime ago. I thought everything in life was complecated.

I now realize that life is alot like sobriety, it really is simple.
My problem is me and me only, not anyone else.

It really is a blessed, miraculous change when we can grow to accept and be happy with being just one part in a larger cog of the universe than wandering around aimlessly like a little angry god.

[GlassPrisoner]

now find myself interested in people, and that was something I lost what seems a lifetime ago.

"We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. ......"

It's one of The Promises.

Also being a loner and isolationist all of my life, The Fellowship is one of the tru blessings of the program for me.