Sometimes, when I sit down and start to think about what it is I’m doing today, I don’t have a clue. This is one of those times. I know what I really want to do, because I have a quiet moment. As much as I don’t think I’m all that connected to living a real spiritual life, I still want to do those things I think I’m supposed to. Especially in the Eleventh Step. To not only pray, but to take the time to meditate.
I know all of this has to do with what I’m supposed to be doing. Working this program and staying sober. I realize full well that my Higher Power has been supporting and carrying me through all this stuff I’m powerless over. People, places, and things. Things I would tell myself so many lies about. I would tell myself I didn’t want to change anyone or anything. That wasn’t true I discovered in time after I was sober for a while. A long while. And then I began to get a look at what I would say or think I wasn’t doing. But I was. Interference in my program to stay sober.
Someone would say or do something which made me angry. Over time I would begin to pray and to tell myself I was forgiving whoever and forgetting whatever it was. Putting it out of my mind. No way I found out. I would find myself saying or doing something which would call attention to what I believed they had done to me. I think that was what began to pull my attention to the truth. I did that twice recently and it stopped me in my tracks. I definitely had to truly turn it over and begin to pray and forgive.
Why am I bringing this up? Not because I want to do the Fourth and Fifth Steps, the Tenth or whatever. But to bring my thoughts about my Higher Power and the life I’m trying to live in here, the spiritual way of life, into my consciousness. To see where it takes me. Where I think it should. In other words the Eleventh Step.
For one thing it has brought the center of my attention to how my Higher Power has worked in my life. For instance, when I think about what I had just written, I can almost see how I was allowed to stumble and fumble my way through things, only to receive the help I needed to wake myself up and to do the right thing and change once again. It also wakes me up to just how my emotional life can still trap me and draw me into places I never want to go. But that’s exactly what happened. I can actually look at one situation and see where I let my emotions come up and take over and develop a resentment. And that allowed my emotions to hang around and run my thoughts and my actions.
And this brings me right back to what I had learned in here and have tried to discipline myself to practice changing. To begin to mature, to grow up, emotionally. Learning to turn my emotions and my responses over to my Higher Power for healing them. Reducing their influence on my thinking and living. Has it worked? Over time there has been a big change. But then there is still the fact that I’m a human being. Hardly a really spiritual person I think I’m trying to become. So my faults, my weaknesses are still there. I can tell myself that I’m trying to live a better way until I’m not paying attention or am caught off guard.
So today I now find myself where I think I should be going. To seek and do the will of the God of my understanding. My Higher Power. To practice that Third Step. To remind myself of the surrender and acceptance of that Second Step, which allowed me to begin to enter into a spiritual way of life and the rest of these Steps, the restoration to sanity, and to stay sober.
I was just thinking that maybe what I have just been doing is called Safe Harbor. Enough.