Blog entry for:

a few very simple spiritual principles. when faced with a moral choice, i learn to stop, recall spiritual principles, and act appropriately. i have a friend in the program who has a line that i have stolen, ands used for my own, namely that when he came to the program he would not have known a spiritual prinicple even if he tripped over it. the reason i have taken it for my own, is that for me, this is a statement of fact. but enough dwelling on what was, and move on to what i have come to accept for reality these days. that reality is that no matter how much time i seem to accumulate, the self-obsession that is indicative of the core of my addiction is still there, and is still active. i still want what i want, when i want it. the changes that recovery have manifest in my life, however, tempers my behavior with an examination of the means i will undertake to fulfill those wants. and here is where the reading comes in. i no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to my less than spiritual actions. i can no longer be oblivious to the harm i cause when i act out. and most of all, i can no longer be oblivious to my ‘TRUE’ motives. i KNOW better these days, and i have a choice which road to take in any given situation. knowledge is power here, and that knowledge comes from a force that is GREATER THAN ME! when i was using, that force was the relief i seemed to need from the travails of life. in recovery, that FORCE is something wholly unexplainable by me, but one that i accept on FAITH, that will provide me the means to make a decision and move forward. it would be wonderful to say i always do the next right thing, however i am just another human being who happens to be an addict in recovery. those two facts, coupled together mean that i will choose to do the next wrong thing from time to time, acting with utter indifference to the spiritual principles i espouse. those two facts also mean that in any given situation i can choose the spiritual road, and living in recovery allows me to make that particular choice more often than not.
so where is the HOPE? well i am better than i was, i crate less chaos than i did, and i choose to act less out of self-centeredness and more in accordance with spiritual principles. i am walking the path of spiritual awakening and in a process that will allow me to choose the spiritual road more often. in short i am becoming the man i always wanted to be, not some sort of saint or guru, just a man that is true to his values and ideals. and that transformation is one of the gifts for choosing not to use today. so off to meet the day with a reminder that i do have choice today.

∞ DT ∞