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that is the spiritual death we experience when i am separated from my concept of a Higher Power, i will feel truly alone. i have been thinking about the relapses of those who have been in my life and looking for the common factors that allowed them to decide that using was an option that they should choose. all of this introspection and examination of the events that surround me, is healthy i guess, as it allows me yet another tool, to continue to make the choices i need to make to stay clean today.
the part of relapse that frightens me the most is what is spoken about in the reading, the disconnection of my spiritual self from my physical self. i do not think i would be lucky enough to be one of those who dies on the first use after deciding that this recovery gig was not paying off. i also believe that i would have an immediate and possibly irrecoverable death of my connection to the divine. i did not coem to recovery with a spiritual connection, nor did it just spontaneously appear the day i finally accepted i was an addict. no that connection was painstakingly built over time, bit by bit, by trail and error. i was actually open-minded enough to try something and replace it with something else if it did not work. my problem was i held on to what i knew far longer than i needed to, even after it had stopped working for me. a case in point was getting on my knees to pray. even though that was never a requirement of the concept of any HIGHER POWER i was noodling around with, i did it for almost three years. when i finally figured out, with the help of my sponsor, that it was just a superstitious ritual and not really something i believed in, my spiritual growth took-off once again.
these days i am grateful that i no longer am a slave to anyone else’s concept of the what and how of maintaining my spiritual connection. i do understand that this is a result of growth in all aspects of my recovery, and that growth will be over the day that i choose to use. and in this stage of my life, it is a choice, and one that choose not to exercise today. so is a relapse in my future? well it is not predestined and i still remember my counselor words as i was leaving treatment. she said " the best i could ever hope for was shorter and shorter periods of using followed by longer and longer periods of abstinence."
i can take that as a predestination and live up to it, or do as i choose to do today, do my utmost best to prove her wrong. recovery and my spiritual connection allow me to prove her wrong day after day, and when i think about using i remember her words and how angry they made me way back when, then i do thte next right thing to sustain my recovery just one more day. so off to the real world to see what i can get done.

∞ DT ∞