“Living One Day At A Time, I Know This Too Shall Pass”

There are many slogans in recovery that people choose to hang onto. Two of the most difficult sayings that I have learned to apply from my twelve step recovery meetings were “One Day At A Time” and “This Too Shall Pass”. This has only been able to occur through enduring much pain throughout my life.

Over the seventeen years that I have been clean and sober there has been a lot of tragedy in my life that has come and gone. My father committed suicide in the fall of 1996. I was diagnosed with Fibromyaliga in the spring of 1997. One of my only friends passed away at a very young age due to a sudden brain aneurism in the fall of 2000. My Grandmother who I was very close to died shortly after due to a stroke. A few years beyond that during the winter of 2005 my Mother fell down the stairs and broke her neck dying instantly. Two years later, a seven year relationship I thought I was meant to be in for the rest of my life ended. And then within the next few years, the bed and breakfast that I owned went under and was sold as a short sale with me losing all the capital I had invested into it.

Each of these made my life seem impassable. I thought I would never recover from the trauma I endured in each of them. When I was in the worst pain with each of them I couldn’t see through the clouds or the forest. Being in the middle of any storm in life and living day in and day where the pain never seems to change, a common reaction for me is to want to give up. I realized after enough of these had happened in my life, that combining two of them together helped me to make it through ones that would happen later.

“One Day At A Time”. What does this mean? It means living in the moment. It means not worrying about tomorrow because it’s not here yet. It means focusing on just getting through the day I’m in.

“This Too Shall Pass”. What does this mean? It means that what I’m going through will pass in time. It means that no matter what I am enduring, at some point it will lift. It means that no matter how bad it may feel inside, that I will feel good again.

With each of the tragedies and traumas that I have gone through, I have found greater and greater success and healing by applying the two of these slogans together. If I can live one day at a time, in the moment, telling myself that this too is going to pass, then inevitably at some point, whatever it was I am going through will end and I will feel better again, even more so than before the thing ever started.

For the past few years, since April 27th, 2010, I have been enduring chronic pain that I believe to be coming from my body’s healing process in releasing all the old toxic energy I had stored within me. Where I once found these twelve step recovery slogans to be silly and useless, I now rely upon them greatly and even find myself saying them in my head over and over again.

I know there will be a day soon that I am free from living in the physical pain I have felt for so long. I will keep doing my best to live in the moment each day telling myself that what it is I’m feeling is going to pass and I will keep on praying to God for strength to continue to endure. And so far, thank God, this has helped me sustain almost three years of this. Between my prayers, my faith in God, and living by these slogans, I am getting better. I am healing.

And I know that…

The clouds will part again.

The clearing in the forest is just on the horizon.

And…

The sun will rise again.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Accepting Acceptance

One of my most challenging, but deeply meaningful, prayers in AA comes from the 3rd edition of the Big Book on page 449 (or Page 417 in the 4th edition).

“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation – some fact of my life – unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes.”

This is a profound prayer with deep meaning and insight. Most of my life I spent trying to change everything and everyone around me to make me happier. It never worked. There are infinite situations that will continue to happen around me and within me, that I cannot fix them all, if any of them really. I used to point the finger at everybody and everything saying that my life was bad because of them. What I never realized is that I didn’t accept any of it both outside of myself and within myself. Truthfully, I never sat still long enough to see this.

Lately, I’ve come to greater acceptance of people and things that go on around me. This came through the realization that I needed to accept those people as they were. Most of the time I prayed about them, and sent them happiness, love, and light when I found myself getting angry or irritated by someone or something that happened. Ironically, it has continued to work and I have been living a much more peace filled life at least in regards to the world going on around me.

The one challenge I still do face though when it comes to acceptance is my current state of health. Having temporary chronic pain in my life that has kept me reserved on so many levels continues to thwart my attempts at acceptance of life on life’s terms. Being unable to do sports, run, jog, or take part in any kind of physical activity that might cause me to break out in a good sweat is next to impossible right now for me. The memories of my life prior to these past few years where I was extremely physically active seem blurry now. I live with hope everyday in God’s healing hands with this but acceptance of it right here, right now, is extremely difficult. I spend most days praying for acceptance of it and sometimes even praying for accepting acceptance itself.

What I love best about this AA prayer is that if I take it literally that nothing happens in God’s world by mistake, then I am meant to be in this place right now in my life enduring this pain. I am not all seeing and all knowing. I don’t know why this has lasted so long. I don’t know why the process of healing from the previous toxic things in my life has been taking so much time. But this simple prayer has a deep truth to it. So I’ve been praying on changing my attitude towards it and just accepting it as best as I can that I am exactly where I’m meant to be right now.

Who knows? Maybe if these pains were all gone right now, that there is still some area within me that might drive me back out to my old unhealthy ways. Or maybe, I am meant to endure this awhile longer so that one day when it’s gone I may help another going through the same thing. For whatever reasons it may be, I am going to do my best to continue to pray for acceptance of how it is, trusting that God is guiding me, healing me as He sees fit, and that relief is on the horizon.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Life Lessons for Andrew Arthur Dawson

Today’s entry is somewhat different. My spiritual advisor gave me a homework assigned to write in a third person about what I have learned so far in this lifetime. So I’ve placed that assignment’s result below that I produced.

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A long time ago, Andrew spent much of his life living in addictions and obsessions chasing after money, power, men, relationships, possessions, and quick highs. Each of these things was believed to bring happiness but over time they brought nothing but temporary satisfaction to a gnawing hunger for something deeper.

In the first chapter of Andrew’s life, he experienced the lack of unconditional love and kindness in his own family and how that manifests into conditional love based actions. He also experienced what it was like to be robbed of his sacred sexuality when an adult violated him. The first chapter ended of Andrew’s life at the age of 17 when Andrew decided that being alone and unloved externally was too painful.

In the second chapter of Andrew’s life, he learned how to numb himself from pain of the lower vibrations of life using sex, alcohol, drugs, and anything else that provided quick stimulation. Using people, manipulating, lying, being deceiving, lusting, becoming filled with greed, Andrew’s only source of happiness was in what he could gain with money or people outside of his own self. A light showed into Andrew’s darkness in his second chapter of life when he met Susan. Susan provided a temporary beacon to show what was possible when Andrew was able to connect to Source energies. For a brief period that lasted approximately six months, Andrew saw what was possible if he was living in more of his Divine Self serving Source’s needs and wants on this planet. The lower vibrations unfortunately took over for Andrew and he fell back into the veil of illusion for many more years. The second chapter of Andrew’s life ended on April 27th, 2010 as Andrew was soon to be turning the age of 38. Andrew had prayed to God in a moment of great mental and emotional pain just prior to this date to release him from the bondage of the addiction based life he had been living. Having committed many acts of lust and conditional based love centered relationships; Andrew had found himself dependently attached to a married man who was an active alcoholic. Andrew soon realized that he was in relationship with the energy of his parents who he had been unloved in so many ways from the beginning of his life.

And so the third chapter of Andrew’s life began with the letting go process. On April 27th, 2010, Andrew’s body began to manifest physical limitations and uncomfortable sensations that slowed his life down immediately. From that night to the present day, Andrew has gone through major releases in his life. For two more years after that night when the physical manifestation began, Andrew went through two more toxic relationships to learn that no human being can make him happy, no human being can fix him, and no human being can save him. Andrew also learned that each of the toxic relationships that he had in his life stemmed from the way he was brought up in his own family. As the awareness increased, Andrew cut the cords to all of the unhealthy people in his life especially all those that came into his life from 2007 forward until that date in 2010, each of which were teachers on some level to show him how sick he was. For over nine months now Andrew has been free from toxic friendships and relationships. Andrew has stayed clear of those that might re-animate those connections. And Andrew has done his best to keep his body, mind and soul clear of all unhealthy behaviors including what he says, thinks, eats, and does.

The following are a list of just some of the lessons that Andrew has learned in this life.

1. Andrew lived many lives of adulterous lust based relationships. God brings into Andrew’s life those relationships that are healthy. Those that Andrew finds a quick drive towards, are always from his ego and self-will.

2. Andrew learned that caffeine, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, lust based sex, and any other stimulant producing thing that induced a quick high was counteracting any ability for him to serve Source.

3. Andrew learned that teachers will appear when the student is ready and many of the teachers were just mirrors for showing actions and behaviors that Andrew was guilty of doing himself but pointing the finger instead at those teachers.

4. Andrew learned that what energy necessarily might have felt great when doing or performing certain things in his life, the release process of that same energy generally is quite painful if that initial energy was done out of toxicity.

5. Andrew learned that the healing process begins on the spiritual level and works its way from spiritual to mental to emotional and finally to physical of which he is patiently waiting for now in his journey.

6. Andrew learned that most people in his life left because they were manifestations of his lower self and as he began to remove his lower self, those people no longer fit in his spiritual journey.

7. Andrew learned that controlling things might get one ahead in life, but when a spiritual journey truly begins, it starts back to just before the control had started in life. In other words, the spiritual journey begins back when the student abandoned himself and looked outside of himself for happiness.

8.  Andrew learned that a truly centered spiritual person doesn’t always have to speak and when he does speak, his words match his actions when he’s not speaking. He learned at the same rate that many people may sound wonderful when they are speaking but it is only their ego driving them and that who they are when not in public view is not aligned with who they are when they are speaking.

9. Andrew learned that lust has dominated most of his life from just around the age of when he was molested at 12 until the age of 39 and that lust is not love and that love is not conditional and that true love is not about having to perform sexually or give certain things to someone. True love loves someone no matter where they are in life, no matter what they do, and no matter what they are able to offer.

10. And finally, Andrew learned that to be happy in life, it was never about how many people were in his life that wanted to spend time with him, it wasn’t about how many things he could buy, it wasn’t having the best looking partner, it wasn’t about how much money he could earn, it was always about going back to that wounded child and spending time loving that child with God holding his hand and driving the healing process. And even more importantly, that Andrew can achieve true healing and a spiritually centered life only if God remains at the center of his journey.

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I believe I’m still currently in my third chapter in life. And, I believe there is still one more chapter in my life beyond this one and that chapter will be the one where I am teaching to others that which I’ve learned in this life. But for right now, I’m still in the healing aspects of my life repairing the damages that I’ve done to myself in this life and in previous lives. I am grateful to Source for getting me this far.

Peace, Love, Light, and Joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson