Category: Recovery From Addictions

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

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

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on getting this new blog up and running and it hasn’t been easy. When I was first notified that my former blog tool was going away for good, it triggered a lot of fear within me. That fear reminded me of a passage that Bill Wilson once wrote in Step Seven of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions book and it read as follows:

“The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear – primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded.”

Bill Wilson really did have incredible wisdom when it came to the source of all fear. His words have rung so true with every fear-based situation I’ve ever been in, including this one. The root of my fear here was definitely that I was afraid of losing something I already possessed. In my mind, what I possessed was something that was working just fine and that I had finally gotten used to. It also had a built-in readership and decent search results on the web.

Regardless, I had no choice but to begin working on those fears by taking steps to migrate from the old tool to the new one. Night after night I spent hours and hours wracking my brain with this new tool facing many challenges. Each of them kept my level of fear higher as they all were based around me being afraid of losing what I had possessed for the past year and half. Now that I finally have my new blog site up and running, my level of fear has dropped tremendously. While I still do have some fears with WordPress because of some of its limitations, I understand that the only way to get through them is to practice acceptance.

Like I mentioned the other day, I believe that acceptance is truly the key to all my problems today, including any fears I might have. Thus, I have been working on accepting the issues I’m still having with my new blog site and WordPress. In doing so, I find I am feeling a lot more serene then I probably would be feeling otherwise.

I realize now that the next time I face another fear, I only need to apply Bill Wilson’s words from Step Seven to see what the source of that fear is. Once I discover it, I know the solution is to then practice acceptance, as only then I’ll be able experience the serenity I seek in every area of my life.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson