Blog entry for:

...to attend meetings and to stop talking long enough to learn to listen. the latter is truly the most important, because if i am yapping away, the chances are that i am missing out on something that is really necessary for my recovery. this was especially important in my early recovery and it is so now. it amazes me what some of the newcomers i see in meetings are saying, especially those that have "been around" the program for years and years. what i here when they say6 they have been around is "i am a frequent relapser, i remain unteachable, and i am a victim of my self-will. i mouth the words of recovery, but i am unwilling to take the actions necessary to change myself from a hanger-on to a member."
and yet they prattle on and on, making me wonder how i sounded way back when. i know today that i was so full of bullsh!t, that my grey eyes should have brown, i knew the language, and i am smart enough that i picked up on what i should be doing, and yet i could not get thirty days clean in a row. the delicious irony in that is i went to two or more meetings a day, in two different fellowships, and shared at every single meeting. what finally changed is that i shut up for long enough to take some suggestions from my sponsor, i finally realized that what i thought i knew was not anything close to reality for an addict in recovery, and i GOT the gift of desperation. oh by the way, i committed to a single fellowship in which to seek my recovery, even though it was the wrong one in the long run, that fellowship and those loving members got me clean and helped me to stay clean the first thirteen months of my recovery, after which i finally truly arrived in the fellowship in which i belonged.
okay the rant is over, the fellowship is softer and kinder now. no longer do we tell our newcomers regardless of how long they have ’been around‘ the program to SIT DOWN -- SHUT-UP -- AND LISTEN.
i digress, what the topic is, is meeting attendance, namely my meeting attendance. it is not what it used to be, in fact i have pared it down to two a week. which i am discovering is the bare minimum for me. will i attend a meeting today? probably not, and probably not tomorrow either, BUT i will go to one on Sunday. for me, it is now important to be a regular at one meeting a week. that no matter how busy i am, i attend that meeting with religious zeal. the Sunday meeting is the one i choose for this purpose.
i am running out of words so i do believe i will say:

Happy 11^TH Anniversary of your clean date Jayme S!
One more miracle that i can look up to!

so long and thanks for all the fish!

∞ DT ∞