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and the wild up-and-down emotional swings i used to experience begin to settle.
and they have, long before i started even thinking about prayer and meditation as part of my routine. honestly prayer was part of my life even before i got clean. you know the whole ‘Santa God’ thing.
"please give me...."
or, even worse "save me from this..."
and in early recovery i was taught to focus those sort of pleas into a more positive channel such as asking for the power to stay clean just for today. so the prayer part of this equation really has been developed since i made the decision to do this whole recovery gig, and the pay off over the days has been tremendous, especially the smoothing of the emotional roller-coaster ride my life can take. do not get me wrong -- what i do not desire was the effect i was trying to achieve while using. yes one of the myriad of reasons i used was to level out the bumps and turns of my emotional life. i was more than willing to trade ‘postive’ emotions away so i would not have to feel the ‘negative’ ones. No what the gift of emotional stability means for me today, is that i GET to feel all of my feelings but because most of the time they are no longer swallowed and suppressed and because i have developed a dependence on THE POWER THAT KEEPS ME CLEAN AND PROVIDES FOR ALL MY NEEDS, the hills and valleys are nowhere near as extreme as they were in early recovery, or in active addiction when i lacked the means to kill them off chemically.
so even though this reading on the surface speaks to me of the eleventh step, it does remind me that i too, got a start on the gift of achieving some kind of emotional stability before i worked an eleventh step, all i had to do is surrender my will and amazing things can occur. funny how that works!

∞ DT ∞