Sharing and Caring

[MajestyJo]

For so many years, I was so busy in service, that I didn't know how to practice self-care. I still didn't make healthy choices for me. I had to learn balance. I can't give away what I don't have.

I had gotten away from a lot of the meditation I use to do. I stopped lighting candles. I stopped using my crystals. I still took time in the morning. I still took time during the day when I came upon a situation. As Osho says, "Even doing dishes" can be a form of meditation and a connection with God.

When I go to post, I always ask that I be guided in what I say and the choices I make. It has always been the Serenity Prayer, Third Step Prayer and the Seventh Step Prayer for me. The asking for help and the getting out of the way, so God can work through me instead of going around me.

I also had to learn to not take on what is not mine! That was a big one. I was and still can be a perpetual sponge that just seemed to absorb other people's stuff! I took it all personal.

Acceptance is the key to my sobriety. Accepting what is allows me to keep my emotions balanced. Without it, I can be off the charts. What I don't find acceptable, I ask to leave. I accept and love my son, I did not love and accept his behavior. His going away to treatment through my life out of balance and made me realize how much I had depended on him to do things for me. His talk of leaving for B.C. turned my life out of balance again after I got to a place of acceptance. My life doesn't depend on him being in it. It just seemed empty and void with him gone, because his father left when he was 2 months old and there has always been him and me, even when we never lived together. So I as a result of that void, I had to fill it up with spiritual things. I had to bring my life back into balance. Reach out and ask for help. It has been a grieving process.

The other day I met someone who said to me, "Giving rides home to people from meetings is not AA's job." What ever happened to, "Get yourself to a meeting and you will always get a ride home." I can get out in the day light hours, but have difficulties at night. With my sleeping patterns being off, I am not always awake to go to morning meetings. My recovery has been online for several years, without it, I would not be sober today. Many nights when I have been in pain, I have gone to sites and looked at old posts to find the spiritual food I needed. Have never done chat rooms except at three recovery sites. Another Empty Bottle which is no longer, Essence of Recovery, where I use to chair a weekly meeting, and Milkman's Circle for Recovery.

The last time I asked the doctor for help with my sleeping, he wrote a prescription for Clonazapam." I refused to take them. For one thing they are for anxiety disorder and panic attacks and I don't have either. I did prior to recovery. I haven't had them for the last 12 years. Before that in part, but there were occasions prior to that time when I was 7 years sober. I had migraines for the first 7 years of my recovery and haven't had one bad enough to put me in bed let alone in the hospital since then.

God has been very good to me. "We have the tools to apply to our life. Life doesn't always get better, we do. I have a lot of the same issues that I had when I came into recovery, the arthritis, sleep disorder, eating disorder, relationships, a son who chooses to use, and the list goes on, but one day at a time, I choose not to use. I choose to use the 12 Steps. The help balance my life.

Balance is so important in my life and is so hard to maintain because of my fibromyalgia and the chronic fatigue and pain that goes along with it.

It is important that I balance my chakras and centering myself, not trying to balance myself with what is around me.

www.quotegarden.com/chakras.html

Trying to be there for myself and others is not always easy. Often I have to look at what is my priority for the day and try to live my life with that goal in mind. It often means I can't always do what I want to do and I have to accept it and know that I am as powerless over that disease as I am over my codependency and addiction although I hesitate to separate them. The 12 Steps can be applied to both and I must remember that in order to maintain a sense of balance, I need to live the program in all areas of my life.

I am grateful that I no longer have the peaks and valleys of the emotional roller coaster I was on in early recovery.