Blog entry for:

not that of my HIGHER POWER, and the result has been dissonance in my life.
this reading was once again about the value of doing a daily tenth step inventory, it is ironic that i had a dream just before waking up about the tenth, eleventh and twelfth steps, i must have read ahead or had a memory or something. the dream itself is unimportant, what is important is the line i seem to have skipped over all the times i have read this particular entry -- the part about living in harmony with my values. well at least behaving in concordance with my values, and this was a conversation that was started with my sponsor during the course of my fifth step last week. the whole values gig was also a conversation i had with one of my sponsees just last night, so it is no wonder that this part of the reading jumped out and grabbed me by my short hairs!
the conversations consisted of among many things which values are truly mine, ones that i accept and which values i have had imposed upon me by culture, society, family, my peers in recovery and Madison avenue. sorting that list out has been a priority in my recovery, although i was unaware of it up to this point, and will continue to be a life long process, or at least one day at a time during my recovery. this whole line of thought is leading me to add a few other questions to my daily inventory. perhaps as early as tonight. what i am thinking is not only asking if i behaved according to my values, but where in the list that particular value comes from. it seems to me that behaving according to values that i readily accept is much easier than behaving according to values that have been imposed upon me. it is true that many of the values that have been imposed upon me from the first day i discovered right and wrong are good values and ones that i truly accept today. you know not murdering anyone, or not stealing. and some of those imposed values have been discarded across the course of my recovery, ones like ‘big boys don’t cry’, and ‘never let them see you down’ or even the ever present ‘you can never be rich or thin enough!’
so i see now that looking at the values i behave or do not behave according to, is a good thing. i may discover i have been doing better than i believe!

∞ DT ∞