An AA Education...

Spiritual experience of the more educational variety gains a whole new perspective when long time slipper meets the rehab of their dreams and becomes an AA guru....

Or so the story goes...If you Google Treatment Facilities the the list is long and exhaustive, if you simply switch to an image search the game changes and you are pleasantly greeted with a whole host of aerial shots of Waste Water Treatment Plants.

What do these two things have in common with one another?

I say they have more in common than what you might think. Both bring in the dirty, the beaten and the unusable and through a process that is baffling to most spit out something that is of use to society.

That process is God, and it must not be confused with some sort of change brought about through an increase in educational status by way of group therapy or lots and lots of reading. I am a product of treatment, it was and will continue to be the most expensive trip to an AA meeting I ever take. They filled my head full of knowledge, they attempted to take me through some steps and teach me about triggers and reasons why I drank and how to avoid those thing in the future, but at the end of the day, despite all of the fancy names and top notch people and good food, they took us to an AA meeting, because they are no better at treating alcoholism than the local Denny's.

The reason we drank was alcoholism, we drank as the result of an internal condition, which looks to the professional community to be a lot like bi-polar...though it is not, and this internal condition can only be treated by means of a spiritual experience. The ground work can be laid at one of these facilities, they dry out a drunk, pump them full of vitamins and good food, get them rested and into better health and then they bring them to us...why? Because for as long as society can remember, there has been nowhere to send a drunk, until AA came along they looked us away to rot in institutions.

We must be careful in our meetings that we don't allow ourselves to be misled by the professional community and their attempts at healing alcoholism. They have been tasked with something we don't want to have to do. They are expected to produce results $XX.XX = sobriety and that is simply not the case, but if you through enough information at the problem, facts, figures, slogans, etc...then it will cloud the issue long enough for you to cash the check.

The cure for alcoholism, the only thing that has been found to work consistently for the last 70+ years has been the spiritual program of action that we call Alcoholics Anonymous. Let's bear in mind always that the book clearly states that we have found a solution on which we can all agree, that means that we needn't stumble in the dark for what might work any longer, we need only do what we have been told to do.

Take a minute to visit our sponsor at www.thetokenshop.com

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Posted in AA, acoholism, action, alcoholic, alcoholics anonymous, alcoholism, direction, God, path, Recovery, sobriety, spiritual

Understanding

"We have entered the world of the Spirit. Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness."  

Alcoholics Anonymous  page 84

The above statement makes the bold assumption that the reader has in fact rigorously adhered to our stringent spiritual way of life and has had, as a result, an experience which has placed them in the realm of the spirit. If the reader has not reached said point then you missed something along the way.

How many times have you heard this little statement at a meeting?

"The longer I am sober, the less I know."

Don't you wonder about those people? My sober experience increases, nearly exponentially, with each passing day. I know things today that I didn't know 5 years ago that have made it possible to help others in a way I never could have imagined. This again is an extreme example of false pride and eludes to the idea that we can easily level the playing field in AA to allow everyone to be liked, understood and ultimately respected. But this idea of a level playing field is counter to the way our fellowship was designed in which new people followed us down the path, doing what we did to get what we got.  It is vastly important that someone have gone before us and that the path be laid out and we cannot snub our noses at sober time.

Take this for example:

Let's pretend for a moment that a loved one is sick, they are suffering from a congenital heart defect that is going to require open heart surgery. They come to you for advice on where to seek treatment and which doctor they should choose. Do you advise them to go to the local community college and volunteer to allow some surgical techs to open them up? Absolutely not, you point them in the direction of the best treatment they can get from the surgeon with the most experience. 

So let me ask you this, why is it that when a guy with 20+ years of sobriety shares in a meeting we allow another member with 2 years to argue with them?

Now I will leave you with this...in the spiritual world there exists a paradox in which the closer one draws to God the smaller they see themselves before him and as one's knowledge grows so does the understanding of just how little they know. However the amount they didn't know is always decreasing, the awareness of how much that is should always be increasing.

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Posted in AA, alcoholics anonymous, effectiveness, life, path, pride, sober, spiritual, understanding