Pause For Thought

[MajestyJo]

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The Twelve Steps: One to Three: Clear up; Four to Nine: Clean up; Ten to Twelve: Contact up. These are also called the Foundation Steps, the Action Steps, and the Maintenance Steps respectively. Are you looking for something easier?

The easier, softer way is the Twelve Steps.

This could have gone under the Steps, but I am thinking back to when I came into recovery. I was one of the really sick ones. All I was capable of doing was go to meetings, go to meetings, go to meetings. What I did do, was go to Step meetings and Big Book meetings and discussion meetings where the Steps and Traditions were discussed and well as topics like acceptance, patience, tolerance, surrender, honesty, willingness, all the things, I need to learn about staying sober.

I had this big empty void that needed to be filled. I filled it up with meetings and people of recovery. Every meeting was a deposit in my insurance account and as a dear woman shared many years ago, one day when I can no longer go to meetings, I will be able to reap the dividends. Today, I am reaping the dividends of going to 2 meetings a day for 2 years.

They say 90 meetings in 90 days. That is the easy softer way. What are you suppose to do then. Are you suppose to be cured and fixed. I don't think so, you aren't even detoxed. In 90 days, you shouldn't be past the first step to my way of thinking, but then most people don't think the way I do. Most people's 4th Step is a 1st Step in disguise. I did my 1st 4th when I was two years sober.

These Steps aren't there to play lip service and say, there I'm done. Know what you do? You start again!

Someone said, "You must not have been honest." I was as honest as I was capable of being. For the most part, I didn't remember nothing, it was all a blank and a lot of things took years to come up. Maybe that is because I am old, but it was the way it was. I was honest to the best of my ability. As I grew in the program and as I healed, my perception changed, and I was able to get more honest and see things from a different reality and from a broader sense that before.

The easier softer way is to push it under the carpet and say that happened then, this is now, I can't change it, forget it. If you don't heal, if you don't deal with it, what took you to the bottle and to the drugs, will take you back out. A proven fact, many times over, especially those who have never done a 4th & 5th Step.

You only get out of it what you put into it.

Posted in July 2012. It is still true in today.

Dream big, all things are possible when our God is at the helm.