Month: June 2014

An Attitude Of Gratitude

When I began my recovery work on the 12 Steps many years ago, my first sponsor told me I needed to develop an attitude of gratitude. She was right. The fact was I was extremely ungrateful in just about every area of my life back then. Today, that’s definitely not the case, but it took me a lot of work to get there.

That path of me learning to be grateful actually started with a gratitude journal. My sponsor suggested I write five things in it each day that I could be grateful for. At first that proved to be quite difficult because my brain was so focused on being negative and ungrateful. Initially, all I could think of were the big things I had such as food, water, shelter, clothes, money, etc. As time went on though, my repetition of writing things down like that each day began to change my attitude in life. I started finding gratitude in many other ways and began seeing things happening all the time around me that I could feel that way about. Ironically, I know today that those things were always around me. I just couldn’t see them back then because I usually focused on what I didn’t have versus what I did. Thankfully that gratitude journal was the catalyst to get me there.

Don’t get me wrong, there have a number of days when I’ve had high levels of physical pain or when everything seemed to be falling apart, where I struggled to maintain that attitude of gratitude. Regardless of how bad I ever felt on those days though, I never stopped writing down those five things I was grateful for. Trust me, I often wanted to, but I never did. I know that recovery is all about doing the things that are healthy for you when you want to, and even when you don’t want to. It’s really all about consistency and I know that’s helped when I’ve had those types of days.

It’s been seven years now since I began my gratitude journal and now I find myself writing at least eleven things each day that I’m grateful for. While this exercise used to take me much longer to do, I can now complete it in just a few minutes. Developing my attitude of gratitude took a lot of work. It’s not something I did here or there as that action only got me temporary results. It’s something I had to practice each and every day. In doing so, my attitude has truly changed in life, as I am so much more grateful in it than I ever used to be…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Having Faith In A Higher Power

There are many people in this world who have great difficulty placing faith in a Higher Power. I’ve seen many of them come through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. For most of them, it’s due to the fact they don’t have visual proof of a Higher Power working in their lives. But what many of them don’t realize is that they are already placing faith every single day in quite a number of other things where they have no visual proof there either.

Take for example a mobile phone. How many of us truly understand how they work? Don’t most of us just pick it up and place faith that the text or call to someone will travel through the airwaves and connect to our intended recipient? In that action alone, aren’t we placing faith in the workings of that phone itself even though we don’t truly understand how it works?

This same principle holds true with so many other technologies that exist today. Most of us really don’t know how any one of them fully works as well. From gadgets to appliances to vehicles, there are quite a number of those things that we use day in and day out. Yet as we utilize them, aren’t we placing faith in them to work even though we don’t completely know how any of them works either?

So why is it such a leap then to place faith in a Higher Power?

When I came into the rooms of recovery for my addictions, I struggled greatly with my faith. My sponsor helped me to see this principle on how I was placing faith in many other things each day. I also saw how many recovering individuals were placing faith in a Higher Power. It seemed to be working for them, as they were happy, joyous, and free from their former addiction-based life and at the time, I wasn’t.

My journey to finding this faith in a Higher Power began with that sponsor. I placed faith in her and the Higher Power she believed in only because she was extremely positive, upbeat and had been sober for a very long time. Something obviously was working in her life to have gotten her to that place, so was it that much of a stretch to have faith in that?

Eventually, after a period of time in maintaining that faith in my sponsor’s beliefs, I found it for myself. Today I have faith in my own Higher Power even though I still don’t understand how my Higher Power works. I clearly see now that this type of faith is no different than anything else I place faith in daily throughout my entire life.

The bottom line is that every day we place faith in something in this world that we don’t fully grasp or understand how it works. Is it really that much of a stretch to place that same type of faith in a Higher Power then? Think about that the next time you pick up your cell phone and are having a conversation with another person who is miles and miles away from you. Somehow the two of you are communicating, and this is truly no different that what would happen if you place faith in a Higher Power.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

“What Would Jesus Do (WWJD)?”

“What Would Jesus Do (WWJD)?” is a phrase that became incredibly popular back in the 1990’s. It was something that was placed on jewelry, bumper stickers, t-shirts, art, and so much more back then. Once utilized primarily by many Christians, it was a tool that was meant to demonstrate how Christ would act in any given situation.

The greatest thing that Jesus Christ represented in this world was unconditional love and that was the underlying message that WWJD was meant to portray. Two decades ago, I would have been one of those you would have seen out there sporting the paraphernalia that had this slogan on it. In fact, I did it quite often actually. Ironically though, I rarely demonstrated that in any of my actions back then. Instead, I was frequently consumed with addictions, selfishness and self-centeredness, which were the exact opposite traits of Christ.

Also during that time frame, I often got in heated arguments with others when I saw doing them doing things I felt was unloving. The words “What would Jesus do” came out my mouth more times than not to place greater weight behind how I felt. While it may have helped me win many of those arguments, the sad truth was that I was being a hypocrite. Not only was I just as guilty of all the same unloving actions I was condemning in others, I also generally offered only conditional based love to people. In other words, there was a price tag usually attached to my love.

Jesus Christ never attached any price tag to the love he offered the world. Instead, he freely gave it to each and every individual he came across, no matter who they were, what their background was, or what they had done. That is something I truly am striving for these days, but back then I wasn’t. Although I sported the WWJD slogan on most days in some fashion, I was far from living the life that Christ once did. I realize today that I utilized this WWJD phrase because it was the in-thing to do and it made me feel like I was being a good Christian. It also garnered me positive attention from other fellow Christians. While I’m not religious nor am I solely a Christian anymore these days, I still do consider myself a follower of Christ. To me, Christ was a man who died having dedicated his entire life to serving God’s will and being a vessel of unconditional love. And that is the root of the spiritual journey I find myself on today.

You won’t find me sporting the WWJD phrase anymore or any like it, because I believe it’s more important to live it through my words and actions. You also won’t find me asking someone else that question of “What would Jesus do?” either these days. On some level, I believe I was judging others when I was did it with great frequency.

The only thing I really want in life today is to live a life like Christ once did, which is one that’s filled with nothing but unconditional love for everyone. I want to do what Jesus did each and every day of his life and to be that, I know it’s not going to come from wearing a WWJD message or pushing it in someone else’s face. Instead, I need to become a living example of it by allowing my Higher Power to guide me that way one day at a time…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson