Quotes, Sayings and Slogans

[MajestyJo]

"If life is a bowl of cherries, what am I doing in the pits?"

-- Erma Bombeck

When I saw this, I thought it read, "What am I doing with the pits?"

Both are worth thought and require action on my part. The 12 Steps are applicable to both.

Am I practicing the principles in all my affairs? Do I work the Steps into my daily life? Do I just think program in meetings and leave my program at the door when I go home, to work, or out into the community?

Do I think, oh woe is me? I am an alcoholic. I am so hard done by, forgetting that I should be grateful that I have found this new way of living. If I wasn't an alcoholic, I wouldn't have known that there was a chance at recovery.

Do I sometimes need to eat my words? Do I give others a second thought? Am I so caught up in self that I don't have time for others?

[MajestyJo]

I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural, clean in mind and clean in body. . . to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.

--Elbert Hubbard

Growing up, we learned there were many places to make wishes: the first star, a well, candles on a birthday cake. We saw Dorothy return from Oz after she wished she were back home. Fairy tales taught us wishes can come true.

We don't have to stop wishing, even though many of our wishes never came true. We may have wished for the impossible when we said "I wish things would get better at home." But we may have gotten our way when we said, "I wish this pain would end." Our dreams came true with the program.

Our best wishes can be about ourselves and the lives we want to have. We can wish for riches and find friends with hearts of gold. We can wish for comfort and health, and get a night of uninterrupted sleep. Whatever we wish for, we can receive.

You are reading from the book:

Night Light by Amy E. Dean

Posted on another site in 2011

This reminds me of what my spiritual advisor once told me, "God meets my needs, sometimes my wishes and my wants. As a dear friend of mind use to say, "Put it out to the Universe and see what you get back."

[MajestyJo]

Walk in dry places
____

What causes a binge?

Understanding Honesty.

In the foggy world of drinking, we were sometimes confused about cause and effect. A person might think of a binge as having been caused by a fight with his or her spouse. The real truth, however, is that he or she provoked the fight in order to get out of the house to launch a drinking spree. It was really the need to drink that caused the fight, and not the reverse, as the alcoholic believes.

We must always understand that the compulsion to drink is the root cause of every binge. We may blame certain things that seemed to trigger a drunk, but it is always our own compulsion that gives force to such an action. Non-alcoholics have the same human experiences we do, but such things do not cause them to have binges.

Seasoned AA members are trained by they experience to detect and defuse these false causes. "There are excuses but never good reasons for drinking," they say. We always drink because we want to drink., not because another's actions forced us into it.

Once we've established real sobriety, we also learn to identify the excuses and devices that helped us blame our binges on other people and conditions. We learn that we are always responsible for maintaining our own sobriety.

............................

I intend to get along with everybody today and to meet all conditions and circumstances in a mature manner. Nothing can trigger a binge but my own desire to take a drink.

From an old site of Bluidkiti's

This reminds me of a co-sponsor I had for several years. She couldn't be my sponsor because she was a counsellor in the treatment center I went to. I had her in my life, because she was a Native American and I connected to her culture.

She asked a fellow client, "What does binge taste like?" It was one of the reasons I was attracted to her. She was very old school. She was short and had the tiniest hands that seemed as though they could move mountains.

One of my fellow clients was having a difficult and she asked me to go with a walk to see if she would open up to me. She didn't think she was an alcoholic. When we got back, she came to the realization that she too belonged and she later became my next door neighbour. You just never know.

The ultimate excuse, the devil made me do it.