Recovery

Attraction

/ Tim / 1 Comment

At my home group there’s a guy who gets dropped off . He comes into the room, sometimes he uses the washroom. When he’s sure the car that dropped him off has gone, he takes off up the road. Several have tried to talk to him but he’s evasive and declines all invitations to stay and listen.

There’s often one. You know who it is. The one who sits at the back of the room. He comes and goes without regard for others. He doesn’t say much if anything at all. Sometimes he comes in with eyes glazed over and slight smirk.

It’s easy to feel sorry for folks like this. It seems that they just can’t get it. Or they don’t know where to begin. Sometimes we say they just ‘aren’t ready’, or if they would only sit down for a bit, they might hear something that they could use to help them stop.

Recovery is a slow process for us. Before it begins, most of us ‘hang around’ recovery a bit to see how it might fit us. Before I came into the rooms of a Twelve Step recovery program, I tried many other options: meditation, counselling, self control, medication, even acupuncture. None of these had lasting effects. I called the local hotline to hear about meeting locations and read the announcement about local groups in the paper. And finally, one Monday morning, I arrived, entered and began the process of recovery.

We can’t sell this stuff; it can’t be promoted. It has to be desired. I remember what I used to think when someone said I should ‘slow down’. In my insanity, I would take it as an insult and use it as an excuse to get fried. An full scale intervention probably would have just given me one more excuse to really ‘show them!’  I had a lot of preconceived ideas about recovery and meetings. I didn’t want to admit that I was ‘one of them’. I wasn’t ready until I was ready, until I had the desire.

It’s kind of like buying a car. We go to the lot when we know it’s closed and walk around and look at the selection of vehicles. Maybe we’ll come back to a particular lot and test drive one or two. Some people check out the reviews for the model. Some folks rent a similar model for a weekend. Many of us take time to make the final decision. Meanwhile we are still driving around in the old one and we’re used to it’s clunks and shimmies and maybe we think the price to pay for a new one is too much.

We arrive at recovery when we arrive and some never arrive. We aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. I am grateful that when I finally arrived I was greeted with a smile. I was welcomed and I was invited back. If you’re the guy who’s sitting at the back or who doesn’t stay for a meeting that’s fine. Take your time. Check things out. Kick the tires. One day, when you have the desire, please come in and listen. We’ll share what we’ve discovered.

 

 

Paying Attention

/ Tim / Leave a comment

When I was looking for my first house I ‘knew’ which house it was from the time I saw it. It was a small cottage looking over the lake and it was ‘perfect’. I was in the village to look at a house with an agent. He mentioned another place that wasn’t listed on the market but whose owner was looking to sell ‘if the price was right’. I ‘knew’ that this was the house when he drove into the driveway. There’s a spot just below the sternum where I ‘felt’ it, and I ‘knew’. Two months later I was sitting on the deck of that house looking out over Lake Erie, a view that I would relish for the next nine years.

I got the same feeling one morning about seven years ago when I woke up one morning and I ‘knew’ that something had to give. My world was crumbling before me. I was losing the battle. I could feel it in that same place, just below the sternum. My guts were telling me that the show was over. I needed to make changes or I would be heading down a path I ‘knew’ I did not wish to tread.

I have no idea if everyone has that place in their body where they ‘know’.  It’s hard to describe. It’s almost as if knowledge becomes a physical sensation in the body. I’ve had this sensation various times in my life and I know now that it is one of the ways my Higher Power speaks to me. I suppose it had to be this way for me to pay attention. I wasn’t the most intuitive and sensing person.

Learning to listen, to follow one’s intuition is not easy, especially at first. When I began my journey in recovery, my thinking wasn’t my greatest asset: a good reason for me to work with my sponsor, go to meetings and listen. Going through the process of the steps I began to fathom the depths of what it really meant to ‘turn my will and my life over to the care of my Higher Power, a ‘God of my understanding’. And, if I’ve really done this, it only makes sense that he would communicate with me, right? How else will I know what my next step is to be? Slowly my trust of those feelings began to grow. I’ve learned that the more connected I am with myself and my Higher Power, the more aware I am of my intuition. I’m learning to pay attention to what’s happening around me.

It’s not always that physical sensation; it doesn’t have to be now. Most days I start off with a prayer. Most days I write. Most days I go to a meeting. These are the things that maintain my spiritual condition that keeps me in recovery. I’m able to see the patterns in my life and the mosaic of this world and I marvel. My life continues to evolve and morph into new experiences because I am open to them, I take the time to listen. I truly am grateful for my life today.

Do It Any Way

/ Tim / 1 Comment

There are no shortcuts in recovery. It’s not a buffet of items I can pick and choose. Rather it’s a recipe that I need to follow on a daily basis in order to get the results of happiness, joy and freedom. Initially I may not like doing a step or part of the step but leaving it out is an open invitation to return to the life I had before. Leaving out the sugar or substituting salt is going to alter the results of your mother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, regardless of how much love and care you put into their making. The same is true of a recovery program: “If you want what we have, then you do what we did.”

Is it always easy? No. There are times when I want to skip an apology to someone I had an argument with. I don’t always feel like praying. What if the meetings are boring? Why should I do it all? I’ve been in recovery a month, or a year or ten years. I’m doing fine. Right? How do you think the cookies taste without the sugar?

“Do it anyway: do it any way!”

Larry was a friend of mine in recovery who often said this. A recovery program requires trust. Even if I don’t understand what is happening, even if I don’t believe it is going to work, even when I don’t have any desire, I need to do ‘it’. And I need to find a way to do ‘it’. ‘It’ has to get done. ‘It’ is part of my recovery work.

What is ‘it’? Perhaps it’s working the next step. Perhaps it’s making amends for the argument I was in yesterday or last year. It might be sitting down to pray or meditate. It could be looking into the real reason why I’m depressed or why I avoid social situations. It’s that which gnaws and knots our stomach. We all have an ‘it’. And if we’ve been in recovery even a short time, we won’t have to dig very long to know what that ‘it’ is: the next right thing I need to do.

If you ask anyone who returns to the program after a relapse if they were ‘thoroughly following their program the answer is always ‘no’. They left something out of their program that was vital to their success in it. In going to meetings you will run into members whose recovery is much less than happy, joyous and free. They too are living without some of the ingredients of a healthy recovery program. They aren’t doing ‘it’.

I’ve learned to trust the Twelve Steps as my guide. I learn to go over and review them regularly because I don’t want to go back to where and how I was living before. I can’t guarantee that I’ll still be in recovery ten years from now, but I don’t need to. If I keep doing the next right thing, if I live my recovery today then I will be okay today. Tomorrow is another day.

Today I’ll do it anyway/any way because I want recovery.  I am grateful that Larry was a part of my recovery. RIP big fellow!