Month: December 2013

Oh Those New Year’s Resolutions…

It’s New Year’s Eve, and tomorrow is a day that often holds a lot of significance for people. For some, it will mark the end of the shopping madness that began around Thanksgiving. For others, it will simply be the last day before the holiday season is considered officially over for one more year. But then there are all those out there who are going to begin some annual pledge to themselves by creating a New Year’s resolution.

“I’m going to quit smoking starting on New Year’s Day.”

“I’m going to quit drinking starting New Year’s Day.”

“I’m going to start eating less desserts beginning New Year’s Day.”

“I’m going on a diet to start losing all this weight starting New Year’s Day.”

“I’m going to start saving more money beginning New Year’s Day.”

“I’m going to start watching less TV beginning New Year’s Day.”

New Year’s Day holds such a significance to these people who create resolutions like this for themselves. Weeks, sometimes even months are spent prior to New Year’s Day delving into what they might give up or start doing on that seemingly magical first day of the new calendar year. The ironic thing about doing this is the amount of energy these same people will spend prior to that date doing that thing as much as possible.

Let’s take the desire to quit smoking as an example. Back when I was still regularly smoking cigarettes, I found my health rapidly deteriorating the more I did it. Even though I continued to state again and again that I needed to quit, I didn’t. But New Year’s Day would loom around the corner each year with my renewed vow that I would quit smoking beginning on January 1st. As that day got closer and closer, I’d go from smoking a few cigarettes a day to almost a pack a day. My ego always convinced me that if I smoked more that it would cause me to be sick of it by New Year’s Day. It made me believe that in doing so, I’d have a greater desire to quit them. But I never did. On one particular New Year’s Day, my father even threw in several thousands dollars as a bonus if I would quit the habit for at least six months. I guess he was hoping I would quit smoking permanently if I went 180 days consecutively without a cigarette. Guess how long it took me that year to pick the habit back up after my father’s six month contract passed? Less than 24 hours! And the longest I ever went without a cigarette for any other New Year’s resolution where I tried to quit it was only a few weeks.

The same thing held true for anything else I’ve ever tried to give up or start doing on New Year’s Day. On many January 1st’s, I would attempt to quit drinking. Or I would attempt to stop looking at porn. Or I would attempt to start eating healthier. Or I would attempt to work out a set number of days a week. Or I would attempt any number of other things. My intentions were always good but they never lasted. As soon as I made even a single slip with any of those resolutions, the new pledge to myself would quickly fall apart. Truthfully, it was never more than a short period of time after the first slip before I’d return to the exact same person I was before beginning the resolution.

So why didn’t these New Year’s resolutions stick for me?

And why is it that I’ve rarely heard of success stories from anyone else who made a New Year’s resolution for themselves?

The answer to those questions can be found in what I saw through all of the ones I attempted to set for myself each New Year’s Day. I never had any long term success with any of them, ever. I learned through their failures though, that I was always trying to change things in my life because of something outside of myself, such as a magical date. It wasn’t until the pain got great enough inside myself where I became willing to quit or start whatever I needed to, and they would consistently happen on dates I never planned for.

One of those happened for me on June 10th, 1995, when my life had deteriorated so greatly from the alcohol and drugs I was putting in it. The pain and anguish from them had become so great on that day that I became truly humble, probably for the first time in my life. It was then that I got on my knees and asked for God’s help. That day became the last one I’d ever put any alcohol, illegal drug, or cigarette in my system.

I’m very grateful for all the changes like these that have manifested in my life through the pain I’ve gone through. I’m also grateful that I’ve learned the real truth about making resolutions, especially New Year’s based ones. As you reflect on whether to still make one or not, I ask you to remember only this. The real changes in life are made when you are truly ready for them to manifest from within. And they often come when enough pain has built up in your life that you become willing to do just about anything. Please understand that relying upon some magical date to make changes is only going to set you up for failure, disappointment, and looking for another date down the road to try again.

So maybe the resolution you should be making this year is to not make one at all. Instead, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and then pray to your Higher Power for direction to begin the New Year. I can promise you in doing so, that it will bring about all the changes your heart and soul truly seek, and they’ll manifest when they are meant to and not because of some magical date.

Happy New Year’s Everyone!

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

The Power Of Prayer – An Introduction

It is said that four out of every five adults in the world pray at least once to a Higher Power during the course of any given week. That being said, I have decided it is finally time to add a new category to my writing that will deal with this very thing. While each and every entry in my blog up to this point has been a complete article about a specific topic, the entries I’ll be placing in this new category will be actual prayers that you can use throughout your daily life.

When it comes to prayer, there are many people who feel it’s a religious thing. I know there are those who totally refuse to pray because of this. So let me get one thing clear that will help anyone out there who might feel this way, I’m not religious, I definitely don’t like formalized religion, but I do pray. For me, praying is simply just another way of saying I’m reaching out to talk to my Higher Power.

I have many friends who tell me they struggle to do this because they don’t know what to say. What I tell them is that prayer doesn’t have to be some elaborate thing that sounds like what a preacher says from behind a pulpit. I wrote about this awhile ago when I said that even the most basic prayer is as simple as speaking these three words, “God Help Me!”.

There are a lot of studies out there that have been done to show that prayers like this work. One such study involved a group of physicians who took patients from the San Francisco General Medical Center and randomly divided them into placebo and test groups. Patients in the test group were prayed for while the placebo group were not. The results showed that the patients who were prayed for suffered “less congestive heart failure, required less diuretic and antibiotic therapy, had few episodes of pneumonia and cardiac arrest, and were less frequently intubated and ventilated”, than those who weren’t. Prayer has become an integral part of my life today because I have seen the results of studies such as this in my own life.

While my prayers don’t always come in the way I want or in the time frame I hope for, I have to say that I’ve always received an answer to them when I’ve spoken them from my heart. I say that in this way because there were times in my life where I used to pray for ego-based things such as “Dear God, will you help me win the lottery?” or “Dear God, will you make that person fall in love with me?” Anytime I’ve ever prayed for my own selfish desires and interests, I haven’t gotten any answers. But when I have brought a level of humility to a prayer, I have always received a positive answer to it at some later point in time.

Praying really is a humble action and I say my prayers on my knees for this reason. Many balk at the idea of doing this and I was once one of them. It took me years to figure out that the only reason why I didn’t want to pray on my knees was solely for the fact that my ego was in charge of my life and not my spirit. That’s not the case anymore as I now start each day on my knees in prayer and I end each day doing the same. I also say short prayers throughout the day as well when I am feeling my heart moving me to do so.

While there are moments that I do question whether my Higher Power is truly hearing my prayers, I still continue to speak them from my heart believing they are. After all, my life has improved greatly from the mess that it once was since beginning my prayer practices.

So it’s my hope that you will begin using the prayers I write in this category as I believe that they will help you to improve your life too. Please understand that while I’ll be using “God” as the reference to my Higher Power in each of them, substitutions can be made with any other word that might help you connect to your own Higher Power. There are many words out there to choose from such as Creative Intelligence, Universal Truth, Loving Creator, Spirit Of Life, or whatever else your soul guides you to use.

Regardless of whatever words you may end up choosing, I wish you well on your prayer journey and I truly hope that my prayers I share in this new category will guide you to developing a much closer relationship to your Higher Power, as they have for me.

Peace, Love, Light, and Joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Putting the 10th Step Into Practice

It’s easy to get caught up in self, especially when I’m not feeling too well. But that doesn’t completely excuse my self-centered behaviors that arise during those times, especially when they end up affecting others negatively. Thankfully though, I have the 10th Step in my recovery program to handle those situations when I have:

“Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

One of those 10th Step situations occurred recently with a holistic practitioner who I’ve been seeing for awhile now to deal with my physical pain issues. I had scheduled an appointment with her to take place on the day I was driving out of town for the Christmas holidays. My plan was to see her and then get on the highway to head towards my partner’s house. On the morning of the appointment and that drive out of town, I received a phone call from her indicating she wasn’t going to be able to see me that day. When I inquired as to why, I learned she was very sick and physically unable to get out of bed. Unfortunately, I was going through that day with an incredible amount of physical pain myself where I wasn’t in the best state of mind to listen to her very well. So instead of hearing just how sick she was, I started saying to her over and over again how bad I felt, that I was heading out of town that day for the holidays, and that I really needed her to keep my appointment. When she became even more adamant that she wasn’t going to be well enough to do so, I then asked if she knew anyone else who might be able to see me that day. The sad thing about this is that I was so caught up in myself that day due to my pain levels, that I didn’t even consider the idea that maybe I wasn’t meant to have the appointment at all.

What I mean by this is that I truly believe God can intervene at times in our lives to prevent things from getting even worse than they already are. I never put thought to the possibility that my pain could have increased from the work she would have been done on me in that appointment. I also didn’t think about the possibility that getting on the road sooner could have prevented me from getting into an accident that would have occurred from leaving at the later time. Regardless of whether God truly intervened in this situation or not, the fact remained that my appointment wasn’t meant to be that day and I struggled to accept that. Instead, I became inconsiderate of my practitioner’s poor state of health. And what I didn’t know was how much I had upset and angered her because of it.

It took me almost six days to realize it and fully take my 10th Step inventory on the situation. I felt off the entire time but couldn’t quite figure out why until my pain levels finally dropped a few notches. By the time they did, I was able to see things a lot more clearly on what had transpired between myself and her. It then became evident to me that I needed to make an amends to her, which I did both through an e-mail and verbally over the phone. And afterwards, I felt so much better like a weight had been lifted off my chest.

This is the precise reason why the 10th Step exists in all the Twelve Step recovery programs. None of us are perfect and we’re going to make mistakes throughout life. We are all going to still get wrapped up from time to time in selfish and self-centered behaviors, even if we are working a strong God-centered program. The key is to be open to seeing it when we do and then to be humble enough to admit where we were wrong.

I’m grateful God helped me to do this with one of my holistic practitioners by showing me how I negatively affected her during a moment of my own pain-filled self-centeredness. I’ve even more grateful that God helped me to humble myself enough to make an amends to her because of it. But I’m most grateful to God for the 10th Step itself, because it’s through its actions where I continue to find myself growing more and more spiritually each time I practice it.

The 10th Step is a critical step in the Twelve Step recovery programs that should never be overlooked. I encourage you to try practicing it each and every day of your life, and you’ll probably find yourself like I have, becoming a lot brighter and a lot lighter in doing so.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson