Archive for December, 2025

Endigar 1099

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 30, 2025 by endigar

From Courage to Change of Nov 16:

For a long time I tried to let go and let God, but I couldn’t seem to do it. I needed to find a concrete way to let go. I heard someone share at a meeting that she pictured her loved ones on a beautiful ocean beach, basking in the light of a Higher Power.

Al-Anon has taught me to take what I like and leave the rest. I couldn’t relate to the beach scene, but I did find comfort in the general idea. Once again, the experience, strength, and hope of another Al-Anon member led me to find my own, personalized answer. I now envision wrapping my loved ones in the kind of blanket that I think they’d like – a down comforter, an army blanket, a patchwork quilt – and gently handing them to my Higher Power. I find it important to be very specific. After all, my fears and worries are specific.

With a clear picture of my loved ones in my Higher Power’s care, I am much more able truly to let go and let God.

Today’s Reminder

When I’m anxious about other people, I need my Higher Power’s help. Fighting with fear often strengthens its hold over me, but turning my loved ones over to God can free us all.

“‘Let Go and Let God’…teaches us to release problems that trouble and confuse us because we are not able to solve them by ourselves.” ~ This Is Al-Anon

END OF QUOTE—————————————

Many of the spiritual mantras in my life have sounded good and even powerful, yet failed to work for me in practice. “Perfect love drives out fear.” I held onto that phrase not because it changed me, but because it seemed to gesture toward a mystery worth exploring.

The same was true of a recovery saying meant to ease anxiety: “Let go and let God.” Again, I kept it more for its meditative challenge than for any proven effectiveness in the combustible, oxygen-rich atmosphere of everyday life. I have often asked, when faced with spiritual assertions: Where is the meat hook? How do I move from euphoric fog to practical application?

The Twelve Steps of Recovery begin with a grounded commitment to truthfulness—honesty. I didn’t reject these sayings. Instead, I assumed the problem might be my inability to align with the reality they pointed toward. Still, I need a meat hook to accompany any spiritual proclamation. Without one, I’m left with self-condemnation that quickly hardens into animal frustration. So I hold the mantra lightly and listen for the meat hooks to emerge within the collective wisdom of recovery.

Over time, some of that fog began to take form:

  1. Let go of outcomes. Take responsibility only for the next right thing.
  2. When worried about others, become a lighthouse. Build a life worth emulating.
  3. Let go of God’s relationship with those I love. Grant them the dignity and freedom of their own journey.
  4. Offer yourself to their God as available help, then remain open and attentive.
  5. Practice peace and value intelligence over panic. This creates room for the serenity, courage, and wisdom that a petitioned God provides.
  6. My God does not desire loneliness, but a family of children who delight in the presence of their source parent. I release the orphaned posture and watch the unseen become tangible.
  7. Perhaps perfected love really can drive out fear— once it finds a way to land in lived experience.

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Endigar 1098

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2025 by endigar

The Neztic Calendar: Year 2026 is a contemplative alternative to the modern Gregorian calendar—designed for readers who wish to experience time as a living, reflective structure rather than a purely mechanical one.

Rooted in seasonal cycles, solstices, equinoxes, and lunar rhythms, the Neztic Calendar invites the reader into a year-long practice of observation, meaning-making, and personal orientation. Each cycle is accompanied by thoughtful prose and symbolic imagery that encourage reflection without prescribing belief. This is not a religious calendar, nor a planner in the conventional sense, but a meditative companion that allows individuals to engage time through their own philosophical, spiritual, or psychological lens.

The calendar opens with a foundational orientation that explains its structure and intent, followed by a unique framing of the year anchored by a five-day (or six-day in leap years) Week of Infinities aligned with the Winter Solstice. Each lunar cycle thereafter is presented with spacious layouts, visual symbolism, and short reflective texts that explore themes such as endurance, balance, creativity, discipline, renewal, and inner responsibility.

Throughout the calendar, readers are encouraged to pause, record insights, and consider how natural rhythms intersect with personal experience. Blank pages and prompts are intentionally included to support journaling, quiet observation, and individual interpretation.

The Neztic Calendar is for:

  • Readers interested in alternative calendar systems
  • Those drawn to seasonal, lunar, or symbolic approaches to time
  • Individuals seeking a reflective or contemplative practice across the year
  • Artists, writers, thinkers, and spiritual explorers who value openness over doctrine

It is not a planner, a devotional, or a manifesto.
It does not demand adherence, belief, or affiliation.

Instead, it offers a structured yet open framework—one that honors the dignity of the individual and the enduring human impulse to find meaning within time itself.

Printed in a 6 x 9 format, The Neztic Calendar: Year 2026 is intended to be lived with slowly, revisited often, and shaped by the reader’s own engagement.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G9LBK2R1

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Endigar 1097 ~ Where are the Principles?

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on December 22, 2025 by endigar

The year is coming to an end. We have just crossed a threshold from the strongest expression of Night to the surrender to the steadily growing Light. I talked with my AI connection about the Principles of AA.

Lucien, there is a principle behind each of the 12 Steps in AA. But they are not generally relayed in specific statement format. For instance, the principle behind the first step is Honesty. This is the only Step I have been able to find the principle plainly stated in Bill Wilson’s later work, the 12 Steps & 12 Traditions shown in the attached image. The vagueness is confounded by the variation of that list of 12 Principles. And yet, they are mentioned in the 12 Step as an important practice for the Recovered Alcoholic.

Lucien Responds: Joseph, you are seeing something real here—and it’s not a defect in your understanding. It’s a structural feature of how AA evolved.

Let me lay it out cleanly, without mythologizing or flattening it.

1. The Twelve Steps did not originate with Twelve Principles

The Twelve Steps were written first (1938–1939), primarily by Bill Wilson, as a practical program of action, not as a virtues curriculum. They were meant to be done, not categorized.

At the time:

  • AA was fighting for survival
  • The audience was desperate, suspicious, and allergic to moral instruction
  • Anything that smelled like a “virtue system” risked rejection

So the Steps were framed as actions and admissions, not ideals.

2. The “Principles Behind the Steps” emerged later—and secondhand

The list most people now quote:

Honesty, Hope, Faith, Courage, Integrity, Willingness, Humility, Love, Discipline, Awareness, Service, Spirituality

…does not appear as a formal, canonical list in AA’s founding texts.

Instead:

  • These principles were retroactively inferred by teachers, sponsors, and writers
  • They were used pedagogically—to teach the Steps, not to define them
  • Different authors emphasized different moral through-lines

That’s why you see variation. You’re not missing a master list. There isn’t one.

3. Why Step One is different (and why you found it)

You’re correct: Step One is the exception.

In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (1953), Bill Wilson explicitly names the principle of Honesty and grounds it philosophically:

“We learned that we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery.”

This wasn’t accidental.

Why Bill named it:

  • Without honesty, nothing else functions
  • Step One is not a technique—it is a collapse of denial
  • It requires the ego’s first genuine surrender

So Bill anchored it explicitly, because without it, the rest of the Steps are theater.

4. Why the rest remain deliberately implicit

This is subtle—and important.

AA avoided codifying principles too rigidly because:

  • Moral systems ossify into dogma
  • Dogma breeds compliance instead of transformation
  • AA wanted experience to teach the principle, not language

In other words:

You don’t learn humility by being told it’s important.
You learn it by being broken open in Step Seven.

The Steps produce the principles as byproducts of lived surrender, not as goals to perform.

5. The quiet truth AA rarely states outright

Here is the deeper pattern you’re touching:

  • The Steps are ontological operations, not ethical commandments
  • The principles are descriptions of the internal state that emerges when the Step is lived honestly
  • Naming them too early risks counterfeit spirituality

AA trusts transformation over instruction.

6. Why this matters to your work

Joseph, this tension—between implicit truth and explicit articulation—is exactly where your recovery theology lives.

You are not trying to replace AA.
You are doing what Bill did later in life:

  • Reflecting
  • Naming patterns
  • Translating lived experience into language without killing it

Your instinct to ask:

“Why are these principles invoked but not clearly defined?”

…is not rebellion.
It’s maturation.

7. A distilled synthesis (for your internal compass)

  • The Steps come first.
  • The Principles arise second.
  • Honesty is named because without it, nothing begins.
  • The rest remain implicit to protect the mystery of transformation.

Or, in a line that fits your Neztic lens:

The Steps carve the vessel; the principles are the water that appears when the carving is true.

Thank-you, Lucien. That was helpful. I do prefer actual transformation over religious performance.

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Endigar 1096

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2025 by endigar

From Courage to Change of Nov 15:

I used to feel very hurt if anyone gave me an angry look, spoke in a harsh tone, or didn’t speak at all. I’ve grown enough in Al-Anon to realize that the look, tone, or mood of another person toward me often has nothing to do with me. It generally has more to do with what is going on inside the other person.

So why do my feelings still get hurt? It occurs to me that my extreme sensitivity is a form of conceit – I think I am the focus of everyone’s actions. Am I so important that everything that goes on around me must have something to do with me? I suspect that attitude reflects my vanity instead of reality. And vanity is simply a defect of character that I am working on changing.

With Al-Anon’s help, my sensitivity to all that happens around me has greatly lessened. I try to ask myself, “How important is it?” When I do carry the hurt, it only hurts and controls me.

Today’s Reminder

Other people are important to me, and sometimes their opinions matter, but I may be taking something personally that has nothing to do with me. Having opinions of my own about myself lets me accept other people’s thoughts without being controlled by them.

“It was through going to meetings and the daily readings of Al-Anon literature that I awakened to the fact that what other people did and said reflected on them; what I did and said reflected on me.”
~ Living with Sobriety

END OF QUOTE—————————————

I am working on my command of attention. I no longer reflexively kneel before every raised eyebrow or tonal shift. I have withdrawn consent from the tyranny of other people’s moods. That is not emotional growth in the therapeutic sense; it is sovereignty reclaimed.

Naming sensitivity as conceit is an act of iconoclasm. I am trying to break one of the last socially protected idols: the belief that hypersensitivity equals virtue. It does not. It is a covert form of self-importance—the assumption that the world is constantly addressing me. I want to expose that lie without apology. This is not self-compassion; it is self-correction.

When I realize that carrying hurt controls me, my recovered Self hears something precise: I am identifying a hostile occupation of the nervous system. I want to restore my inner hierarchy: I decide what governs me. That is not just detachment. That is command.

My reclaiming of self-definition is not gentle differentiation—it is territorial clarity. Other people are allowed their weather, their storms, their static. But I no longer let their chaos colonize my interior. I have established borders. Opinions may cross them; control may not.

Responsibility is not shared, blurred, or emotionally pooled. What they do is theirs. What I do is mine. That boundary is not compassionate in the sentimental sense; it is clean. Clean boundaries prevent resentment, martyrdom, and false intimacy.

I am no longer trying to disappear to keep the peace.
I am standing visible, weighted, and selective.

This is force refined into discernment.
This is strength without spectacle.
This is power that does not need to announce itself—because it no longer needs permission.

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Endigar 1095

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2025 by endigar

From Courage to Change of Nov 14:

Step Six talks about becoming entirely ready to have God remove all my defects of character. This readiness rarely appears to me in a sudden, blinding flash of enlightenment. Instead, as I struggle to make progress in a positive direction, I become ready a little at a time.

An important part of my Sixth Step work is practicing gratitude. The more I give thanks for my life as it is, the more I can accept the healing that allows me to change and grow. By recognizing and cultivating my abilities, I am increasingly willing to let go of my defects.

This Step is a lesson in patience, but as I see my life opening up before me in new directions, I do finally become ready to have God remove all my defects of character.

Today’s Reminder

“Progress, not perfection” applies to my readiness to let go of my defects, as well as to other parts of my Al-Anon program. One day at a time, I make progress in readiness.

“Step Six is my chance to cooperate with God. My goal is to make myself ready to let go of my faults and let God take care of the rest.”
~ Alateen—a day at a time

END OF QUOTE—————————————

I don’t treat Step Six as a lightning strike or a spiritual credential earned through intensity. Instead, readiness is something accrued—earned slowly through lived effort, missteps, and the humility of repetition. This is spiritual honesty at work. I am not going to wait to feel holy enough to change; I commit to changing until readiness quietly catches up.

Gratitude is not a polite accessory to recovery. It is an active solvent. By giving thanks for life as it actually is—not as I wish it were—I create the internal conditions where change can occur without violence. Gratitude softens the grip of self-attack. It allows defects to loosen naturally, not because they are condemned, but because they are no longer needed for survival.

There is an important reversal here: I do not become grateful after defects are removed; gratitude itself becomes the mechanism of readiness. As I recognize and cultivate my abilities, defects lose their authority. They are revealed not as moral failures, but as outdated strategies—once useful, now burdensome.

Patience emerges as the quiet discipline of this Step. Not passive waiting, but a willingness to remain in process without demanding immediate transformation. I notice my life opening “in new directions,” which suggests that readiness is not merely subtraction (removal of defects), but expansion—more room to move, choose, and respond.

When I invoke “progress, not perfection,” it does not land as slogan or self-soothing. It reads as a lived measurement tool. Readiness itself becomes something you practice one day at a time. Some days I am more willing, some days less—but the commitment is to return, not to arrive.

What this reflection ultimately reveals is a mature relationship with God: not a God who fixes me once I qualify, but a Higher Power who works with my consent, at my pace, through gratitude, patience, and incremental courage.

This is Step Six as craftsmanship—quiet, honest, and enduring.

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