No criticism should be allowed to intrude on this. We can be grateful for the opportunities meetings provide for sharing our personal experiences. Meeting attendance is one of these things. There are many activities in life that are required for our peace and freedom. We should never consider meeting attendance a form of bondage. If we’re gong to overdo something, at least it’s an activity that helps us. In addition, meeting attendance is a constructive activity, while drinking was destructive… at least for us. We might be going to more meetings that seems necessary, but we are the judges of our own needs. When we hear such remarks, we must remember that our survival insobriety is always the main issue. are we compulsively addicted to meetings. Twisted relations in his family and on the outside will improve surprisingly.Ī few critics have noted scornfully that AA members can be as enslaved by the need for meetings as we were by the bottle. Wonderful and unaccountable things will start to happen. His physical health will be likely to improve. His sense of purpose and of direction will increase. The idea that he may have been hypnotizing himself by auto suggestion will become laughable.
Problems and calamity will begin to mean his instruction, instead of his destruction. He can look at “failure” and “success” for what these really are. He will acquire a quiet courage, the kind that isn’t tension-ridden. If he persists, he will most surely find more serenity, more tolerance, less fear, and less anger. I pray that I may set my sights on higher things.Īs the doubter tries the process of prayer, he should begin to add up the results. I pray that I may not keep my eyes forever downcast. The heights of the Lord, whence cometh your help, will become nearer and dearer and the false values of the earth will seem farther away. Train it more and more until distant heights become more familiar. Train your insight by trying to take the higher view. “I will lift up my eyes unto the heights whence cometh my help.” Try to raise your thoughts from the depths of the sordid and mean and impure things of the earth to the heights of goodness and decency and beauty. Have I got my sex life under proper control? It also says that we subjected each sex relation to this test - was it selfish or not? “We remembered always that our sex powers were God-given and therefore good, neither to be used lightly or selfishly, nor to be despised or loathed.” We can ask God to mold our ideals and to help us to live up to them. We can act accordingly. The big book says that many of us needed an overhauling there. And yet putting sex in its proper place in our lives is one of the rewards that has come to us as a result of our new way of living. My physical condition has improved dramatically, but my illness is minor compared to what I almost lost completely. But primarily I relearned the whole meaning of the Eleventh God allowed me to recognize my dishonesty and to become teachable again. As I kept hitting new bottoms I had to ask myself why this was happening to me. Despair settled in when I enrolled in a rehab program, after which I suffered two small strokes which revealed two large brain tumors. Eighteen months later, a checkup revealed a malignant tumor and a prognosis of certain death within six months. Although I had fifteen years of sobriety and was still very active in the program, I knew that the quality of my sobriety had slipped badly. I had been slipping away from the program for some time, but it took a death threat from a terminal disease to bring me back, and particularly to the practice of the Eleventh Step of our blessed Fellowship. We A.A.’s are active folk, enjoying the satisfactions of dealing with the realities of life, … So it isn’t surprising that we often tend to slight serious meditation and prayer as something not really necessary.
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