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sat morning serenity posted: Sat 2017-06-10 17:27:10 tags: healing
Many recovery meeting groups follow a monthly cycle of formats: Speaker, Chair's Choice, Step Study, Annniversary. Each time I go to a meeting and hear the reminder that anniversaries are this part of the community traditions, I think "gee I should decide when to count my anniversary from". I ordered the Kindle ed of the "Big Red Book" 2016-08-24 and sampled a number of different meetings (GA FLL, NA Pompano, ACoA Boca FUMC East and Glades Presby) in Aug-Sept., so I'm good with rolling that anniversary up with my birthday.

Beginner meeting: "One Day at a Time"
"living in fear is paying on a debt you may not even owe"
One day at a time? Or a half-day, an hour, each moment at a time if necessary. Learning to live "one day at a time" means living in The Now, letting go of reliving the past, letting go of worries and expectations of the future, seizing what this moment holds. "Living in the now" or "being present" is the teaching and aim of mindfulness practice, formulated in Eastern meditation and yoga teachings and validated in Western mind-health science.

Someone's share prompted me to write "If the moment feels wrong [i.e. if your intuition is flashing the "something's wrong" warning signals], a little courage can change a moment". On reflection I feel like that's a naive and potentially hazardous oversimplification.

Between meetings I made a note of the literature for sale:
- Paths to Recovery: Al-Anon's Steps, Traditions and Concepts
- (Companion) Workbook for Paths to Recovery
- Blueprint for Progress
- Reaching for Personal Freedom

"Regular" meeting: "Chair's Choice", and the chair's topic - they considered "powerlessness" but then they left it up to bibliomancy (that form of divination where you open a book somewhere other than the beginning) and came up with "fear". There were a few bookmarked readings passed around but I chose instead to share my reflection that when normal relationship friction over boundaries, control and influence leads to flaring tempers, then by looking within ourselves we will find these issues are fundamentally rooted in fear.

Knowing it stems from fear, we can put it in its proper place and proportion: Is the fear realistic? Is it proportional? Are lives at stake or just spilt milk? Is it solvable? Can I fix it by worrying or dictating, or does it need to be dumped out of MY control box into The God Box?

- One reading suggested "fear separates us from our Higher Power". A more theologically correct formulation would be "fear blinds us to the presence of our Higher Power" - for if He is truly God then He is with us whether we're feeling His presence in the moment or not.

- Serenity is found in the Now - not in reliving the past or anticipating the future.

- One veteran observed that in all the literature they had read, the paramount point is this: You can't control other people. The Serenity Prayer is all about it, the First Step is all about it.

- (from the literature) "If I could take back all the time I've spent on worry, I'd add years to my life"

One person's share acknowledged that fear is a primal, reptilian stem-brain circuit. So we accept that it's asking too much to expect to transcend biology and eliminate fear entirely, but courage is a trainable skillset to at least keep fear in its place.