Constant Growth

January 30, 2024August 15, 2025 / Tim / 1 Comment

When I came into AA, I knew almost immediately that I had found my tribe: I belonged here.

After a month or six weeks I shyly asked a man who had a quality of sobriety that attracted me to be my sponsor. And very soon after that I was on my knees repeating, phrase by phrase, the Third Step Prayer. At the time, I really had no idea where that prayer came from nor did I really understand what it meant. But I trusted my sponsor. I at least had enough faith to know that this man knew more about this stuff than I did.

I didn’t realize then that in this prayer I was making a bargain with my Higher Power: I’ll surrender my will and my life over to Your care and share that with others and You’ll release my from the slavery of Ego and remove difficlties from my life, which will further show just how powerful You are.

On the surface it was easy enough to understand. But like many aspects of the AA program, I’ve learned that there’s a whole lot more depth to the words.

Like most newer members I spent the first few years cleaning up the wreckage of my past. Then I moved into my character defects.

I had spent very little time in Step 6 and 7 when I first went through the steps. And with six years of sobriety, with the help of my sponsor and the book Drop the Rock, I made a much deeper dive into these steps. One of the main ideas that I took away from my time spent on those two steps then was this: if I want a new Tim to arrive, I had to let go of the old Tim. Not only did I have to be willing to give up the character defects that were holding me back I had to be willing to put the ones I thought were positive aspects of my character on the table as well. Slowly, I began to let go of the old Tim, once again turning my life over to that Higher Power.

I know that it was a growth experience for me and I believe that I grew from where I was into someone different.

However, with time, it’s very easy for old character defects to return, especially if one isn’t vigilant, and I wasn’t. I see now that I was “resting on my laurels.” Looking back over my years from six to twelve I see that arrogance, perfectionism and selfishness had crept back into my life and I had a tighter grip on my will. I was able to see this because, again with a sponsor and this time armed with the Big Book, I worked through all the steps again.

This experience has taught me many things about myself, the program, my relationships with others and with my Higher Power.

It has taught me that not only do I need to let go of the old Tim, I also needed to stop putting conditions on how the new Tim would show up. If I’m really putting my will and my life into God’s care then I can’t have conditions at all. I can’t hold back what I like about myself. Nor can I tell my Higher Power how I should be in the future. It’s a full and complete surrender. Yes I thought I surrendered that first time I recited the Third Step Prayer and I did, to the best of my ability at the time.

But my abilities have changed over the years. So my understanding of what a complete surrender means has also changed.

My first uttering of the Third Step Prayer was a beginning. And like all beginnings, there’s a lot to learn as the journey progresses. Old ideas must be released and new ones embraced. I can see that I couldn’t have understood the prayer the way I do now; new understandings are built upon old ones.

I don’t know where the next stage of my journey is taking me. I don’t need to know. My Third Step decision reminds me that I only need to trust and my Higher Power will bring me where I need to go, meet the people I need to meet and learn the lessons I need to experience.

I don’t need to navigate the river…just enjoy the ride.

Back To Basics

April 12, 2023 / Tim / 1 Comment

Photo by Ekaterina Astakhova on Pexels.com

I’ve been in recovery for a good number of years, twelve to be exact. I know I have grown and changed in that time. I am not the same person that started the journey, thank heaven. And I am very grateful for how far I have come. I had tried everything I could think of before I started a twelve-step program, except start one. That was until I couldn’t come up with any more of the options that I thought ‘might’ work for me, but hadn’t. I certainly didn’t want things to stay the same as they were, and I knew I couldn’t stop on my own. So I gave it a go.

One of the first surprises after my first meeting was getting an invitation to return; I wasn’t getting many invitations at the time. And I realized that I had a lot of misconceptions about the program that I could put aside. I’m grateful that I was still open minded enough to listen. I soon started to try the suggestions I heard from other members and the literature. To my great surprise, they worked! It didn’t take long for me to understand I had finally found my ‘tribe’.

In the ensuing years I have been privileged to work with a lot of other folks in the program as well as participate in the day to day running of our local group, serving on the group executive for much of my time. I have learned a lot about myself, my relationship to others and to a Higher Power. However, as with many things, I began to tire a bit of the program. About a year ago I stepped back from the group work and took a deserved and probably needed break. I still kept up with meetings and the daily stuff like reading and meditation to maintain my sobriety, but I was sort of coasting along, enjoying life.

Then I heard someone at a meeting a couple of months back say, “If you’re coasting, you’re going down hill.”

And, I had to ask myself the question. Am I really coasting? Am ‘I’ going down hill?

The honest answer was a resounding “Yes!”

In sobriety I am granted a daily reprieve by my Higher Power, based upon my spiritual condition. And I believe that it’s not enough to just maintain the status quo, I have to work to make sure that apathy and self-satisfaction don’t take hold. Addiction is the disease that tries to tell you that you don’t have a disease. We have a saying that while you’re in a meeting, your disease is in the parking lot doing push-ups. I have to keep myself strong too. I know from working the program over the years that it has a great deal of depth and here I was just sort of swimming on the surface and not exploring its breadth and wealth.

I set my alarm clock a half an hour earlier again and started doing an early morning meditation followed by some journal writing.

Since I’m not in the same country as my sponsor right now, I figured I could use a fellow up here that I could do some more work with. I talked with a good friend who’s known me as long as I’ve been in the program and asked him to suggest someone for me. He matched me up with a great guy who is full of enthusiasm and is willing to share some time with me in discovering more about our program and how we can not just ‘do’ the steps, but ‘live’ them each and every day of our lives.

I am so enjoying the process. We’re doing a ‘back to basics’ kind of approach, focusing on the literature of our program from the beginning. This young man’s insight is amazing. I am seeing things in a fresh new light that make me feel like a newcomer again where everything is about to be discovered. His work with me is a tribute as well to the great sponsorship that he has received and his application of what he has learned in his own life. We have had many great discussions in the last month and I look forward to many more.

This also means that I need let go of my old ideas about who I am, how I am and where I am going in life. Sometimes that’s tough to do, but I do it anyway. I trust the process because I know from my own experience as well as that of others that this is a time of growth. How can I become the best version of me if I don’t let go of the old version?

You can teach an old dog new tricks, as long as the old dog is willing to leave behind what he thinks he knows and listen.

I am listening, and learning. And for that, I am very grateful.

CHOOSE THE CHALLENGE

August 28, 2022August 27, 2022 / Tim / 2 Comments

Every day life places plenty of options before us. For some of us it begins with whether or not to push the snooze button on the alarm. Do we go to the gym and do our workout now or later? Will I spend my commute listening to the latest hits or listening to an educational podcast? It goes on from there. There are always plenty of options and choices for us to make every day, from what we choose to do, our attitude for the day and the perspective we can take towards it. But how do I know that I am choosing the right option?

The simple truth is that we don’t know; we make a choice and move forward because we will never know what might have happened if we had chosen ‘the other thing’. Perhaps instead of getting up the morning I do press the snooze and end up late for work, the start of a pattern or the end of the job. Or perhaps, even though we do press it, that last ten minutes of dream gives us the answer to a question that we’ve been looking for. There’s no way of knowing. So, if there’s no right answer, what do I do?

Choose the most challenging option!

I have discovered that the best thing to do when faced with options is to choose the most challenging one. Over and over life has taught me that I learn and gain the most from the more difficult options available to me. When faced with a choice between a warm bed or a sweaty gym, it’s easy to know which I really need to do this morning. The hard one, the challenging one, the one that will help me to grow. For me, I don’t or rarely remember my dreams, so the next ten minutes of shut-eye won’t help me to invent the next sewing machine.

I have learned that if I feel challenged, if I feel some trepidation, or if I feel out of my league, that’s usually where I really need to go. Life is easy inside my comfort zone of keeping everything the same and not upsetting the schedule that I have made for myself. However, the ‘fun’ part of life, the times that I know that I am really living, are when I push myself to do that ‘hardest’ thing. It’s the difference between a life well lived and enjoying the adventure of it all. It doesn’t mean that I should run out and skydive or quit my job and join the circus. Facing a challenge, trying new things, putting myself in uncomfortable situation are what makes life more livable and enjoyable. Life really does happen outside my comfort zone.

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” John. F. Kennedy

And if the truth be told, I usually know in my ‘gut’ what I should do. I don’t always do it, but I pretty much always ‘know’. And the result of doing that which is hard? There isn’t always a clear winner, but for the most part, even if I fail, at first, I am winning because I rose to the challenge, I faced my fear, I learned something new. That, for me, is what life is all about. The moon or Mars or even the gym may not be in my future, but I can still do things that will challenge and mold me into a better version of the guy who didn’t push the snooze button.