Blog entry for:

seems to be my greatest need in recovery, regardless of how **successful** i may appear to be. this kind of reading seems to be a**no-brainer** when i first see it, after all, i have been broke and i have had money socked away. i have been without a job, working for myself and part of the corporate world in my recovery journey and have stayed clean despite all of that. so it seems to me, that my material success has very little to do with recovery, except in one very real sense: when using i had no material success and was barely scraping by. recovery set the stage for me to get more out of life than just a job that pays the bills. so in that sense it is my “success” that is dependent upon my recovery. which of course takes out the whole spiritual part of my life since i came to the rooms. so many of my peers seem to eschew “success,” that it could appear that being “successful” and having a rich spiritual life are mutually exclusive. yet, here i sit, in a very comfortable life, and one that certainly could be judged as a “success” and am writing about spiritual stuff. what has changed for me, goes back to the original notion, my recovery is not tied to my bank balance and the quantity of toys i happen to possess, but those things are certainly nice.
so what it is that i really heard this morning when i was pondering the nature of material success and a spiritual connection? i heard that HOW i measure my success in recovery is different today that it was when i came into the rooms. to say that there have been times in my recovery when i did not covet the success of others, as measured by what i saw externally, would be a flat-out lie. i wanted the career, the relationships, the bank account, the toys and the ability to take exotic vacations. sure i got most of that because of recovery, but what i really wanted and denied myself was the balance i saw many of them possess. ironically it seemed to me that those who were the most balanced spiritually were the least concerned with material possessions. many of them had material possessions, but they seemed to lack any real attachment to getting and keeping them. their ease of getting through the day, even when their worlds seemed to be falling apart, was what eventually attracted me, but not until i let go of who i thought i was and where i thought i was going.
am i still driven by material success? of course i am, that part of me has yet to be morphed into anything else. i still am a creature of desire, the only change internally is my DESIRE is being tempered by a desire to achieve balance and wholeness in a spiritual sense. i want internal peace. i want balance within. i want to find a deep and meaningful connection to something beyond the mundane reality of living. i am not about to run out, give away all my stuff and sit in a cave in the Himalayas and spend my days contemplating the nature of things, but i am not going to allow myself to do things that violate my spiritual values, just to get ahead. recovery these days, is all about finding a balance between the spiritual and the material for me. recovery has been the only path that i have ever found that could bring me to this place and i am not about to go looking for anything “new and improved.”. it is after all a great day to be clean and to be living a program of recovery that may start with abstinence but goes far beyond the no matter what club. i am grateful for my peers, who continue to show me that the rewards of staying clean go beyond my next vacation or new car.

∞ DT ∞