Latest / Sober Readings / A Resting Place
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Welcome to Sober Readings. Today is Friday, the 8th of May. Happy Friday, everyone. Let's begin today's episode with a serenity. the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Today I have a special guest reader, my friend Aaron is here to help me read today's daily reflections, 24 hours, and then a special third reading from a book called Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone, Choosing Emotional Sobriety Through Self-Awareness and Right Actions by Alan Berger. So we'll get to that, we'll start off with the daily reflections for May 8th. A resting place. All of AA's 12 steps ask us to go contrary to our natural desires. They all deflate our egos. When it comes to ego deflation, few steps are harder to take than five. But scarcely any step is more necessary to long-time sobriety and peace of mind than this one. And that's from the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, page 55. After running down my character defects, I was unwilling to talk about them and decided it was time to stop carrying this burden alone. I needed to confess those defects to someone else. I had read and been told I could not stay sober unless I did. Step five provided me with a feeling of belonging, with humility and serenity when I practiced it in my daily living. It was important to admit my defects of character in the order presented in step five. to God, to ourselves, and to another human being. Admitting to God first paved the way for admission to myself and to another person. As the taking of this step is described, a feeling of being at one with God and my fellow man brought me to a resting place where I could prepare myself for the remaining steps toward a full and meaningful sobriety. Today's reading from 24 Hours a Day, May 8th, AA Thought for the Day. grateful that I found a program in AA that could keep me sober. I'm grateful that AA has shown me the way to faith in a higher power because the renewing of that faith has changed my way of life. And I've found a happiness and contentment that I had forgotten existed by simply believing in God and trying to live the kind of a life that I know he wants me to live. As long as I stay grateful, I'll stay sober. Am I in a grateful frame of mind? Meditation for the day. God can work through you better when you are not hurrying. Go very slowly, very quietly, from one duty to the next, taking time to rest and pray between. Do not be too busy. Take everything in order. Venture often into the rest of God and you will find peace. All work that results from resting with God is good work. Claim the power to work miracles in human lives. Know that you can do many things through the higher power. Know that you can do good things through God who rests you and gives you strength. Partake regularly of rest and prayer. Prayer for the day. I pray that I may not be in too much of a hurry. I pray that I may take time out often to rest with God. And so our final reading today is from a book called Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs are Gone. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being rigorously honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. The actions described below are designed to help us to discover and deal with our underlying problem that puts us in an unfit spiritual condition and in danger of that first drink. They help us pause and step back from the thing that is bothering us and into the sea of our conscious awareness. Peel the onion and see the unrealistic expectations and unhealthy dependencies upon people, places, and things in the horizontal of our lives. Where our dilemma is lack of power that we have for identity, validity, and a sense of belonging, and which puts us in the RIDSs, or Restless Irritable and Discontent, in danger of that first drink. Try something different. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. A good rule of thumb is to do something that is 180 degrees from what we have been doing. If we are hard, Soften. If we are passive, become proactive. If we are reactive, become thoughtful. If we are a pushover, become assertive. If we are paralyzed with fear, be daring and outrageous. If we are too serious, lighten up. Reconsider issues, options, and solutions that we rejected as unacceptable or undoable in the past. In order to do this, we need to ask ourselves what we would have to change about ourselves or what we would have to accept or give up for this to become a real option. Maybe we will discover that what we need to give up is something that is worth letting go of and that we would like and respect ourselves more if we could do it. Stop awfulizing. Accept the present reality as it is and settle down. I am and life is. Quiet ourselves with prayer and meditation instead of exacerbating our anxious state of mind. Practice restraint of tongue, pen, email, and text. Focus on containing our behavior when we're having trouble soothing ourselves. Don't make things harder on ourselves than they need to be. Remind ourselves that this too shall pass whether we act out, drink, or not. And that brings us to the end of today's reading. Before we close out, first of all, I want to say thank you, Erin, again, for coming on and helping me read today. You're welcome. And so I wanted to revisit this reading that we just read and there's a line in here that's really important to me. says, good rule of thumb is to do something that is 180 degrees from what we have been doing. And so in sobriety, what that reminds me of is one of my favorite mantras. I think it might be from N.A. but either way, it says, if I do what I always did, I get what I always got. And that's a famous quote that's often attributed to Henry Ford. And really, it emphasizes the need for change, innovation, and adapting behavior to achieve different results. And that's the key, different results. Because in my past, bad decisions have always led to bad results. And we all know that history tends to repeat itself if we continue with the same behavior. And so that's it for today's readings. I'd like to thank Erin again for reading with me today. It was wonderful to have you. If you enjoyed today's show, please do me a huge favor and hit that like button and share this episode with someone you think might need it. Drop a comment and let me know what you thought. And if you'd like to be a guest reader on the show, send me an email at soberreadingswithscott at gmail.com. And if you'd like to drop a dollar in the donation basket, just go to soberreadings.com and click the donate button. So again, thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Aaron, for speaking. Stay sober, keep reading, and I'll see you in the next episode. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other. And remember, just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.