Paradoxes: "Suffer To Get Well

June 30, 2024, 8:32 pm

When pain comes it will test your Spiritual wellness by your reaction to the pain. This means that we rely on our defenses to try to avoid the call to us that something needs to be taken care of. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionistic dreams and specifications, I fought for them. "A keen sense of humor helps us to overlook the unbecoming, understand the unconventional, tolerate the unpleasant, overcome the unexpected, and outlast the unbearable. The book may also be sold by Intergroup/Central Offices or recovery book stores at List Price. For instance, we can "accept" failure as a chronic condition, forever without profit or remedy. It wasn't until in a moment of frustrated clarity I blurted out, "I'm acting like an addict! " This benign healing process of repetition, sometimes necessary to persist with for days, has seldom failed to restore me to at least a workable emotional balance and perspective. Someone once remarked that pain is the touchstone of spiritual. The queen of night is at her most perfect roundness, closer to us than at any other time of the year. Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual progress means. If I feel that my pain has in part been occasioned by others, I try to repeat, "God grant me the serenity to love their best, and never fear their worst. " To have nothing in your mind is naturalness. Great Spirit, teach me the significance of spiritual values. Becoming abstinent from compulsive eating removed the veils of delusion and dishonesty that I had over my eyes.

Pain Is The Touchstone Of All Spiritual Progress Means

Racing at top-speed in his Jaguar, Luke gave me a gentle nudge on the shoulder and asked if that got my attention. PAIN IS THE THRESHOLD OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH. Humility springs from pain, at least for me, a near perfectly self centered alcoholic. It says in the Big Book that "they will always materialize if we work for them".

And, then, am I willing to be a good listener, not interrupting, but hearing them out to the end? Leonard George, Chief Councilor. I didn't realize I was also numbing myself to happiness and joy. Only through being beaten down by my own misery would I ever have accepted the term "alcoholic" as applied to myself. It is partly what I believe as well although I can't say what the intention of the writers was. It is a sharp fight which you are waging, but Jesus has stood foot to foot with the same enemy. The way through is the way out. Acceptance - Bill W (Co-founder, AA. I am addicted to food. All of us will encounter failures, some retrievable and some not. Pain is an initial touchstone. From the books... Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) and.

Assurance is that calmness born of a deep certainty of God's strength available to us and in His power to love and guard us from all harm and wrong doing. To ourselves, "This. Creator give us strength to see the good things of our suffering. These experiences and the tests we go through take us from pain toward healing... and progress. Touchstones Into Stepping Stones By Christine R. That's our unfinished business, the unfinished business of the heart.

There had been no irretrievable disaster. Bill Wilson's Depression. Yes because someone with a good spiritual foundation is never really in pain, the comfort offered by spirituality pretty well takes the pain shouldn't that mean something like "the quality of your spirituality is revealed when you are in pain"? But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, That shines brighter and brighter until the full day. Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual progress meaning. The harvest moon symbolizes the ascendancy of cool darkness over the bright heat of summer. From the book Daily Reflections. At long last, I've conceded my powerlessness; as a result, my life has taken a 180-degree turn for the better. … Your natural self is quite fond of accomplishing the tasks you give it. Lord, help me be aware that today will never return so that I will not misuse my time or waste it unwisely.

Pain Is The Touchstone Of All Spiritual Progress Meaning

Do I belittle them to myself? It means accepting the reality of the situation and then deciding what, if anything, I can and will do about it. Will I do all I can to help them along the path to sobriety? Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual progress summer 2016. Surely, then, a novice ought not lay himself open to the chance of making foolish, perhaps tragic, blunders. Cling to the thought that, in God's hands, the dark past is the greatest possession you have - the key to life and happiness for others. Then you will understand what he says. And when I realized it and felt the truth of it, and became more willing to practice love in this manner, my brief depression came to an abrupt end.

It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. In what ways can I bring light and warmth with my words today? Alone, I face the empty window. We act this way because of our fear. Bill wrote "the pains of failure are converted into assets.

Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:14 pm. Are someone else's intentions influencing your own? All rights reserved. Back then the only feeling I felt was anger, outrage.

It helps me stay focused and grounded in what is important. Let it go in peace, thankful for all you've learned along the way. PAIN IS THE THRESHOLD OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH. Long after a bitter failure, some of us still cling to the hope that we can erase the defeat in some spectacular way. Hence we constantly try to remind ourselves that these perversions of acceptance are just gimmicks for excuse-making: a losing game at which we are, or at least have been, the world's champions.

Pain Is The Touchstone Of All Spiritual Progress Summer 2016

Your inner self is literal and does not understand ambiguity so whenever you direct it to manifest your desires, give it absolutely literal instructions. Again and again, we shall need to return to that unflattering point of departure. This had not been done with old-fashioned will power; it was instead a matter of developing the willingness to accept these new facts of living. This is what I have been pondering most of late. The struggle for wealth, power, and prestige was tearing humanity apart as never before. I would say it's painful having no job and no family and scraping to buy booze to stop the shakes, and once again that pain had me thinking along spiritual lines, AA reinforced that idea and it worked very well. We also were stubborn when anyone tried to help us. And because I believe shitty things about myself, any story that has me suffering, getting left, being humbled and hurt seems like TRUTH. Then surrender those intentions to God. Pains of alcoholism had to come before sobriety, and emotional turmoil. This is a maladaptive decision to accept pain that does not produce higher states of self awareness and consciousness. God has created me with free will and I need to respect this gift in others.

Watch yourself as you go through life encountering different situations. We all have something to share. UNREMITTING INVENTORIES. It is during the busy times that we especially need to remember our priorities. So we shall have to settle, respecting most of our problems, for a very gradual progress, punctuated sometimes by heavy setbacks. That might be the beginning, where we set down our last drink - OR it might be the points in our sober journey where we have our personal "Dark Night of the soul" experiences and then come to relief in acceptance and surrender. If we procrastinate and refuse to deal with the underlying cause of the pain, it actually causes us much more pain in the long run. Shrieking like banshee, I shouted, "Ok! Letting go of rigid adherence to what our perceptions were yesterday assures us of heightened understanding of life's variables and lessons. Consciousness and Healing To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. This never really works, even when we do become winners at some later time. It has been on my mind a while.

Click the page number or the book cover icon. The program is not something we pick up and put down when we feel like it. Now Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, "Oh that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my border, and that Your hand might be with me, and that You would keep me from harm that it may not pain me! " When brimming with gratitude, one's heart-beat must surely result in outgoing love, the finest emotion that we can ever know.

"Well, Doc, " I said, "what are we going to do? If I ended it then I will tell myself the story that I will be alone forever and I will never find someone and if they ended it I will tell myself the story that I was never worth loving anyway. The tenth step is a perfect way to discover what's going on. Therefore our very first problem is to accept our present circumstances as they are, ourselves as we are, and the people about us as they are. I knew from my general reading that alcoholism was irreversible and fatal. This Evenings Reading. We might have destroyed opportunities that will never rise again. Contradictory responses, our own and also ours in relations with others, keep us on our toes, lend an element of excitement to our lives, and push us to think creatively about our perceptions.