Daily Reprieve

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

We want to find exactly how, when, and where our natural desires have warped us. We wish to look squarely at the unhappiness this has caused others and ourselves. By discovering what our emotional deformities are, we can move toward their correction.  (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 43)

Today I am no longer a slave to alcohol, yet in so many ways enslavement still threatens – my self, my desires, even my dreams. Yet without dreams I cannot exist; without dreams there is nothing to keep me moving forward.

I must look inside myself, to free myself. I must call upon God’s power to face the person I’ve feared the most, the true me, the person God created me to be. Unless I can or until I do, I will always be running, and never be truly free. I ask God daily to show me such a freedom!

END OF QUOTE

————————————————————————-

There is a positive side to the moral inventory that is so very often overlooked.  There is a negative and positive aspect to freedom and both are needed.  “Freedom from” needs to be followed by “freedom to.”  Freedom from the tyranny of addiction needs to be followed by the freedom to dream, to become, to manifest my highest and most powerful form of Self.  If I never see what I am to become, then I become a professional judge promoting fear in what I was.  I become the crusty old timer whose nasty example of sobriety repulses me.  “I have been sober for over 20 years and I have protected the world from the horrible person I was, and am.”  The same could have been achieved by suicide, and often is.

I believe this is a missing aspect of sponsorship and it weakens recovery examples.  Showing the positive freedom of high-self manifestation is an important path from the purgatory of abstinence to the spiritual domain of sobriety.  Are we to become monks beating our backs with the whips of self-castigation?  No, I think not.  We are to take a business-like attitude and inventory what is harmful or of no benefit and take steps to remove that from the internal stock.  Then we get on with the business of life and identify what is strong and worthwhile and market that for the healing and empowerment of our species.

The moral inventory should lead us to the power and pleasure of being alive.

This entry was posted on April 8, 2014 at 5:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.