For Today - Application, not just theory

He does not believe that does not live by his belief.  -- Thomas Fuller

This morning's reading has the powerful sentence:  "Anyone can 'learn' the program, but to achieve the recovery it promises takes more than intellectual understanding; it takes a sustained effort to apply its spiritual principles in every area of my life. ...  If I believe that ours is a program of recovery, I will live by that belief."

And so I pray.  I breathe.  I use food to sustain me, not prop up my emotions or avoid feeling.  I write.  I read.  I reach out to my fellows.  I take inventory.  I practice serenity, courage and wisdom.  And I fail and try again. 

Someone used the word compartmentalism with me yesterday.  As in, can I access my emotions and memories when they upset me?  Or have I walled them off in favour of living in the realm of intellect and reason instead?  I believe in living whole, embracing all of me, but I struggle to actually do it. 

For the longest time, I searched for an intellectual answer to the pain I feel.  As a woman writes in the Big Book, "I was an intellectual and I needed an intellectual answer, not an emotional one." [Big Book, p.205].  But the disease is a physical, spiritual and emotional one.  Not an intellectual problem to be solved.  Recovery requires faith.  And I can choose my own conception of God.  Like Bill W.:

That statement hit me hard.  It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years.  I stood in the sunlight at last. [Big Book, p.12]

I step in and out of the sunlight, I think.  My belief is imperfect as is my understanding of God.  I return  now to Step 1 with a deeper sense of what it means, in practice, again.  I find comfort in the OA 12 and 12 which says:

In step one, we acknowledge this truth about ourselves:  our current methods of managing have not been successful, and we need to find a new approach to life.  Having acknowledged this truth, we are free to change and to learn.

Once we have become teachable, we can give up old thought and behaviour patterns which have failed us in the past, beginning with our attempts to control our eating and our weight.  Honest appraisal of our experience has convinced us that we can't handle life through self-will [or intellect] alone.  First we grasp this knowledge intellectually, and then finally we come to believe it in our hearts.  When this happens, we have taken the first step and are ready to move ahead in our program of recovery. [OA 12 and 12, end of chapter 1]

 My way is difficult, troubled, and has failed me physically, emotionally and spiritually.  Those compartments get in the way of my whole self standing in the sunlight of the spirit.  So I start the process of letting them go.  Living my beliefs.