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i needed the help of some POWER greater than addiction.
so this could quite quickly turn into a whine about theism, my churning ELEVENTH STEP, or a history of the concept in my recovery. yes it could, i choose however to go a bit of a different direction today, as i have covered all of those topics ad nauseum. while all of those topics are relevant to this reading and certainly pertinent in my life today, none of them generate any desire to be written about, at least just for right now.
coming to terms that i was without any power at all, in respect to addiction, was a long and arduous process, for me, and yet today, i see it as a no-brainer. my belief system has changed over the course of my recovery, and in some aspects one might describe it as tectonic shifts, with what felt like the earth-shattering consequences of a 7.0 earthquake of my spirit and psyche. among those shifts is how i define addiction and what it means to me. as i see from peeking ahead, to write about that today, may be a just for tomorrow topic, so i will leave at this, no matter how i view addiction today, the one part of my belief system that has not changed, since the day i finally took the FIRST STEP internally, is that i am powerless over addiction. that simple admission, with all its implications is what keeps me clean today. i do not need to twist and turn about why, it just is, and as such i need something more powerful than addiction to stay clean. part of my current ELEVENTH STEP journey, in fact the largest part of that journey, is where does prayer fit in. i have not ever been a real “prayerful” kind of guy, with the exception of my “Santa God” phase. in active addiction, it was foxhole only. in early recovery it was “\'please & thank you” in a very grudging manner. today? well today it certainly is thank you and please from time to time and all i ask for is the power to stay clean, as i am quite certain that is part of the will of the POWER that fuels my recovery. while i try this and that, to get to a balance where i am humble about where my power to stay clean comes from and be true to the spiritual path i have embarked upon, i am even more certain that without some sort of outside intervention and redirection, the inertia of my active addiction would have spun me to an early and degraded demise. coming to terms with addiction as a destructive force in my life was the easy part. accepting i needed some outside help to stay clean, not so much. so for those first few years i spun and spun about this and finally, collapsed in spiritual exhaustion and conceded defeat. i stopped fighting the notion and started ion the path of embracing it. today, that was the first of one of those tectonic spiritual shifts and that one, so altered the landscape that when i think back past that, i wondered what the fVck took me so long and why i was so resistant. the answer of course is self-centered pride and ego, but that part is a topic for another day. suffice it so say, that today, i know where the power to stay clean comes from and it ain't me. today i can surrender to addiction and ask that i get the power to stay clean from the POWER that fuels my recovery, regardless of what it may or may not look like today. so it is off to work i go, hi ho!

∞ DT ∞