A We Program

My Sundays are dedicated to Spiritual Practice.  I love Sundays for this reason.  I love coming to the well to fill up.  So much of life is drawing energy out of us.  So much of life the way it is lived in our society is a head game and whether we like it or not, we are drawn into our heads.  Then when we get home after a long day at work we wonder why we are feeling so squirly.  The best answer for this is that life lived in one’s head is a squirly venture at best…. The heart and the root where Intuition, Love and Wisdom live are the residences of peace, power and freedom within our body.  When I spend a day dedicated to becoming rooted in my heart and addressing and releasing fear, attachment, future focusing, past identifying and become unified and identified with my heart and my intuition, I become calm and free.  I feel like the center of a lake right now…. subtly but powerfully peaceful and free.  This is what often happens in a meeting or on our mats, we drop from the head to the heart.

I have the beautiful opportunity to chair our Friday morning meeting here in town and my experience of community and love a few days ago is still with me.  I asked a dear friend to speak and she spoke on the first step.  She spoke of the paradox in the program to do with powerlessness and becoming powerful – that in order to become powerful we must first admit that we are powerless over alcohol.  For a lot of us, we were fiercely independent in our using – I know I was, at least when it came to “dealing” with something that brought up fear for me.  I am finally just beginning to understand the magnitude of the foundational principle that this program is built upon – one alcoholic helping another – this is the crux of it all - this is a “we” program and the crux of it all.  It’s definitely a journey into unchartered territory to learn to open and share and be vulnerable… even baby steps are great in this area…. but don’t feel bad when you crack one of those soul birthing smiles from the center of your being when you experience the love of a total stranger lifting you out of your darkness with a simple word or a touch.  It’s crazy when you first get sober because we often feel like we don’t deserve anything…. that we don’t deserve love…. and then someone loves us without condition and it is the most unfamiliar and profound gift that an individual can receive…. If you can, open….open…..Open to the “we-ness” of this program.  Allow others in to the best of your ability.  This experience of love is the high we were always looking for – you may not believe it, but it’s true.  Come and get addicted to the good stuff of life – to the love.  Know too that there is always more where that came from but in order to receive, you have got to find ways to give it away.  There is an old adage that what you resist persists and what you give away, you become available to.