Blog entry for:

techniques and trendy psychological cures can only take me so far.
Coffee, Sky, surf and a bit of solitude is doing more these days than affirmations and proper thinking. As I was riding in the back of the shuttle from the gate last evening the two young ladies I was sitting next to, were practicing how to say they were fat and beautiful in Spanish.i wanted to ask them why they were being so self-deprecating and taking a what one would see as a “positive” attribute and diminishing it with a “negative” one. Sometimes, not saying anything is the correct course of action, as I sit here this morning, I see that they may not have been self-deprecating, it was me that attached the values judgements to what was correct and true, man that was quite a shock as it was touched upon on my 10TH step last night and completed after my 11TH this morning, before I go and flog myself for my bigoted judgement I need to shout out to a friend:

Derek R,
13 years clean!
Thank you for being a part of my recovery
as a friend and as someone who keeps me honest and clean!
Congratulations my friend.

Okay let the self-flagellation begin! Not really, part of what I have been hearing in this apparent step pause I am experiencing, is the echoes of the biases and prejudices I am carrying along my journey. I once said that the only people that I was prejudiced against were the willfully ignorant, those that had the opportunity to know better and chose to not learn something. I still have a problem with that today and fake news and demagoguery plays well to this class of people, as evidenced by the last election cycle. I see a similar set of circumstances in the rooms of recovery, where those who do not progress in their spiritual growth are being willfully obtuse to the damage they wreak in their personal lives.
Oops there is go again focusing on others, when thi was supposed to be about seeing my part in maintaining and building the walls that keep me from being comfortable as myself. Ironically it seems that the 12TH STEP is doing more to uncover my defective characters, than all the inventories in the previous 11. I am starting to get the feeling that what I NEED to be doing, is letting go of what I see as the fatal flaws of the world around me, and start looking at the external beauty of what I have inside, a double paradigm flip, as it were. I am grateful for what I have in the ether and now, even if there are times I do not believe I have enough. I am beginning to sense intuitively what I have missing all these years and what I am hearing this morning that maybe the willfully ignorant choose that because they are afraid of seeing the reality of the world we live in. Perhaps, they feel justified and can rationalize believing the most outrageous things, because if they saw how they were contributing to the mess, they would want to slit their own throats. It is out of FEAR that they stay ignorant, not out of spite or sloth. HMMM sort of like the person who once upon a time told the judge he was an addict, to play on his liberal sympathies and get a easier, softer sentence for himself. It was a calculation I made and one I never considered would lead to where I am today. Perhaps I should remember that sometimes saying it out loud, does make it true.
Time to shower off and head on over to breakfast, my mouth is already watering of the cocoa caliente!

∞ DT ∞