Four Things

Four things a man must learn to do

If he would make his record true:

To think without confusion clearly;

To love his fellow men sincerely;

To act from honest motives purely;

To trust in God and heaven securely.

by Henry van Dyke

This poem is so simple. Yet simple is what keeps me going right now. The program teaches me to keep things simple too. For now I can only get through each day one at a time and do the next right thing. Trust God, clean house and stay close to my program, my goal for each day. I have no idea what the future holds and i have fears and doubts but I know that strength and trust in my Higher Power will get me through all this and in the end, whatever happens will be just the way it is suppose to be.

Trust

You are reading from the book The Language of Letting Go.

Learning to Trust Again

Many of us have trust issues.

Some of us tried long and hard to trust untrustworthy people. Over and again, we believed lies and promises never to be kept. Some of us tried to trust people for the impossible; for instance, trusting a practicing alcoholic not to drink again.

Some of us trusted our Higher Power inappropriately. We trusted God to make other people do what we wanted, then felt betrayed when that didn't work out.

Some of us were taught that life couldn't be trusted, that we had to control and manipulate our way through.

Most of us were taught, inappropriately, that we couldn't trust ourselves.
In recovery, we're healing from our trust issues. We're learning to trust again. The first lesson in trust is this: We can learn to trust ourselves. We can be trusted. If others have taught us we cannot trust ourselves, they were lying. Addictions and dysfunctional systems make people lie.
We can learn to appropriately trust our Higher Power - not to make people do what we wanted them to, but to help us take care of ourselves, and to bring about the best possible circumstances, at the best possible times, in our life.

We can trust the process - of life and recovery. We do not have to control, obsess, or become hypervigilant. We may not always understand where we are going, or what's being worked out in us, but we can trust that something good is happening.

When we learn to do this, we are ready to learn to trust other people. When we trust our Higher Power and when we trust ourselves, we will know who to trust and what to trust that person for.

Perhaps we always did. We just didn't listen closely enough to ourselves or trust what we heard.

Today, I will affirm that I can learn to trust appropriately. I can trust my Higher Power, my recovery, and myself. I can learn to appropriately trust others too.

I was having a tough day today. I found myself feeling out if control. Had to stop and look at the day.....rather than trust that God could help and will not put me in a place I can't take, I fought going to that place inside me all day. I read another blog that reminded me that acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I stop and do that it is time to trust that if I only ask, God will give me the strength to get through this. My part is accepting that it won't look like I think it should and very well will go totally in a different direction than I think it should....but it will be okay!

Dreams

Today's thought is:

How will you dream if you don't sleep? How will you hear yourself?--Michael Dorris

Sleep is a wonderful gift in our lives. For eight hours, we rest our bodies. We let the thoughts, feelings, and events of our lives tumble through our sleeping minds as they sort themselves through our dreams.

But dreams are not always happy. Some of us are afraid to sleep. Our dreams scare us. We may dream about using again or about bad things that happened. But we shouldn't let our dreams fool us. They are not reality. They are just feelings, thoughts, and memories working themselves out.

In early recovery, there are a lot of things to sort out.
We create the reality of our lives by the choices we make when we are awake: how much we trust in our Higher Power, how we care of ourselves, how we treat others, how we work our program.

Prayer for the Day
Higher Power, help me listen to the messages of my dreams. Help me understand that my dreams will get better as my life gets better.

Today's Action
I will listen to my dreams. What is my mind working out in my sleep? If I remember my dreams, I will talk about them with my wide-awake friends.

You are reading from the book:

God Grant Me... by Anonymous

This was a good read for me. For so long I have battled with dreams. There have been times when I got to the point of not sleeping almost all week because I didn't want dreams to come. I have learned to take the dreams as they come. They don't frighten me much anymore. Instead, I now see them as guides, indicators that there is new work to be done, new lessons to learn. When things are right the dreams are pleasant. When things are not balanced in my life my dreams often are the first thing that tells me to take a look in a differrent direction. Thanks to Mable for sharing this reading with me, as well as, the lessons of my dreams.

Fear

Tonights meeting was about facing fear. That is a subject I have been emersed in a lot this month. I heard a lot of great things tonight. Several things I've learned thus far are that when we face our fears and work through them they lose their power, their hold on me. I have also learned that fear cannot exist in the face of faith. My program teaches me to trust in my Higher Power and when I do that I find that I have strength to overcome all that life brings my way. All I have to do is reach for the outstretched hand of my Higher Power and I can face anything.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1833

William Allen White:
I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.

Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death. Author: Unknown

Trust Yourself

Trust yourself

"I never know what the next lesson is going to be, because we’re not supposed to know; we’re supposed to trust ourselves to discover it."-- Melody Beattie

How deeply do you trust your own guidance?Always trust that you know what's best for you. To move forward in your life, gather information from the 'experts,' consider how their advice relates to your situation and then act only on what feels right for you. What does your whole being (mind, body and soul) say ‘Yes!’ to?

You are the only expert for your own life.

"I trust so much in the power of the heart and the soul; I know that the answer to what we need to do next is in our own hearts. All we have to do is listen, then take that one step further and trust what we hear. We will be taught what we need to learn."-- Melody Beattie

"Ultimately, we must learn to trust ourselves. When we do this intimately and intelligently, the world opens full of meaning before us. We find that we ourselves are the doorway to a fathomless understanding of the source of life itself. We need only to learn to walk through it."-- James Thornton