Daily Recovery Readings
March 16, 2023
Daily Reflection
AS WE UNDERSTAND HIM
My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. . . . “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?” That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last. It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
— ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 12
I remember the times I looked up into the sky and reflected on who started it all, and how. When I came to A.A., an understanding of some description of the spiritual dimension became a necessary adjunct to a stable sobriety. After reading a variety of versions, including the scientific, of a great explosion, I went for simplicity and made the God of my understanding the Great Power that made the explosion possible. With the vastness of the universe under His command, He would, no doubt, be able to guide my thinking and actions if I was prepared to accept His guidance. But I could not expect help if I turned my back on that help and went my own way. I became willing to believe and I have had 26 years of stable and satisfying sobriety.
From the book Daily Reflections
Copyright © 1990 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Big Book Quote
“At a certain point in the drinking of every alcoholic, he passes into a state where the most powerful desire to stop drinking is of absolutely no avail. This tragic situation has already arrived in practically every case long before it is suspected.”
~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, There Is A Solution, pg. 24~
24 Hours a Day – The Little Black Book
Thought for the Day
Before we decide to quit drinking, most of us have to come up against a blank wall. We see that we’re licked, that we have to quit. But we don’t know which way to turn for help. There seems to be no door in that blank wall. A.A. opens the door that leads to sobriety. By encouraging us to honestly admit that we’re alcoholics and to realize that we can’t take even one drink, and by showing us which way to turn for help, A.A. opens the door in that blank wall. Have I gone through that door to sobriety?
Meditation for the Day
I must have a singleness of purpose to do my part in God’s work. I must not let material distractions interfere with my job of improving personal relation ships. It is easy to become distracted by material affairs, so that I lose my singleness of purpose. I do not have time to be concerned about the multifarious concerns of the world. I must concentrate and specialize on what I can do best.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may not become distracted by material affairs. I pray that I may concentrate on doing what I can do best.
The Language of Letting Go – Codependency
Positive Energy
It’s so easy to look around and notice what’s wrong.
It takes practice to see what’s right.
Many of us have lived around negativity for years. We’ve become skilled at labeling what’s wrong with other people, our life, our work, our day, our relationships, our conduct, our recovery, and ourselves.
We want to be realistic, and our goal is to identify and accept reality. However, this is often not our intent when we practice negativity. The purpose of negativity is usually annihilation.
Negative thinking empowers the problem. It takes us out of harmony. Negative energy sabotages and destroys. It has a powerful life of its own.
So does positive energy. Each day, we can ask what’s right, what’s good – about other people, our life, our work, our day, our relationships, ourselves, our conduct, our recovery.
Positive energy heals, conducts love, and transforms. Choose positive energy.
Today, God help me let go of negativity. Transform my beliefs and thinking, at the core, from negative to positive. Put me in harmony with the good.
Touchstone – Men’s Meditation
When a man’s self is hidden from everybody else … it seems also to become hidden even from himself, and it permits disease and death to gnaw into his substance without his clear knowledge.
—Sidney Jourard
A man’s recovery is in knowing himself honestly and learning to have loving relationships with others. Many of us have had close calls with death as the consequence of our addictions or codependency. We ignored the dangers in our lives and many of us neglected our health. We wore ourselves out and wasted our energies.
Spiritual recovery and physical health go hand in hand. In recovery, moving toward fullness in life, our selves are returned to us. We leave behind our old learning and habits because they were lethal. We are becoming men who tune in to ourselves and to others around us. We are looking at ourselves and saying, “I’ll work with it!”
I will not hide myself; I will continue to be open with myself and others.
Elder’s Meditation
“Each of us must know in our minds and believe in our hearts that even though we are different, you are like me and I am like you.”
— Larry P. Aitken, CHIPPEWA
One of the definitions of humility is having an awareness of one’s own character defects. To recognize and acknowledge that one has imperfections is being humble. We should never pray for ourselves unless by doing so it would help another person. To have self-importance puts self first and this is not humble. We each have strengths and we each have weaknesses. Both the strengths and weaknesses are sacred. Life is sacred. We learn sacred things from weaknesses also. Therefore, all lives are developed through trial and error, strength and weakness, ups and downs, gains and losses – all of these are part of life and life is sacred.
Great Mystery, let me see and know about the sacredness of life.
Daily Horoscope – Cancer
The universe is buoying you up! Venus is dancing into your 11th House of Global Community, bringing plenty of people out of the woodwork who are all asking for your attention. This is a fabulous cycle to get to know anyone who has been hanging out on the fringes of your social circle, because they could turn out to be very valuable connections down the line. The only way to miss out on every opportunity would be to hide your gifts away by being anti-socia
The Wandering Enigma 