remain in light

image credit ... pascal meunier

Week 4: Smart Things 10 12 and A vision for you 

• When you are hurt or upset, what do you do to comfort yourself?

• How has your recovery helped you develop a personal compass in your life?

• The Ninth Step promises in Alcoholics Anonymous, page 84, indicate that "we will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us." How has this manifested itself in your life?

• How do you respond to conflict or tension in your relationship?

• What perspective would you need to take in order to see the tension in your relationship as an opportunity for you to work on your emotional sobriety?

• What would it mean to you if you started to look at the real problem as how you cope with a situation rather than the problem being the problem?

• Emotional sobriety creates emotional resilience. This means that we can stay clean and sober regardless of a difficult situation or circumstance, regardless of health or illness, regardless of success or failure. Is your recovery this stable? Do you have this kind of faith in yourself? What idea would you need to give up to have this kind of faith in your recovery?

from "12 smart things to do when the booze and drugs are gone" by allen berger


with the continuing change going on in my daily work life, i find myself perpetually moving or shifting or adjusting or waiting for any or all of those. the clients i work with have expanded to well beyond hiv. i am working with opioid replacement clients, with hep-c positive patients, and with dually diagnosed patients- all of which i certainly worked before, however the challenges and the life experiences are more diverse.

adding to this, i have been asked to chair a board for a recovery advocacy organization. this is a request which i am not quite ready to provide an answer at this time. i am waiting to hear a response from the lender who holds the note on my townhouse, because that transition will affect my life the most primarily. and to add to the shake-ups, i have applied for an additional counseling position to replace the 12K that i dropped this last year- which set some of this current richter scale action in motion and i continue to wait to discover if this is a good fit.

i am in awe of the confidence i have rendered in all this chaos. and i feel comforted by the lack of panic. i don't know what is next, but i am moving forward with faith and trust in my relationship with the world. wow- did i even write that? but it's true. i feel connected and i welcome tomorrow.

i don't always satisfy the expectations of those around me. i still often judge my actions very harshly at first. i stumble in new situations and misspeak and misstep as often as i get it right. but what really keeps me going is my fairly newly acquired sense that i am okay. nothing great certainly, but nothing broken. for all my life, i felt-no believed- that i was flawed- twisted and warped. this is a belief that has had a metamorphosis into something else and been carried away with the winds. this is definitely an easier way to live.

image credit- bob jagendorf

i have recently heard some sets played by this dj named nick warren. i like him very much. it sounds so contemporary to me. i hope you like it, too.