For Today - podcast on relapse

Even with my friend visiting as a house guest, I excused myself to listen to a podcast on relapse today. Well, half of it yesterday, the rest today.  So I had to excuse myself twice.  That is progress for me to take time for what I need. I also took her to the gym with me yesterday so I didn't have to give up my training.  Well, she chose to come with me - she could have stayed home, gone for coffee, or whatever.  Also a first for me. 

The part of the podcast that really resonated was that Roseanne did not intend OA to be a "fat and happy" club.  The speaker, John, said if you are 300 pounds and not losing a pound or so a week, you are not abstinent.  After all, the definition is:

Abstinence in Overeaters Anonymous is the action of refraining from compulsive eating and compulsive food behaviors while working towards or maintaining a healthy body weight.  Spiritual, emotional and physical recovery is the result of living the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve-Step program.

I am not a healthy body weight.  The way I'm going in relapse, I am not working towards a healthy body weight.  I am not abstinent.  So I need to rework my Steps.

For today - love

Listen - are you breathing just a little, and calling it life?

...
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.  - Mary Oliver

This. 

For Today - Waiting

Despair.  Reaching the end of a given road in our lives - or the end of the road of our lives in addiction - we find ourselves at a point of despair, recognizing our powerlessness, not knowing where to go next or if we can even begin again.  Sometimes it's a matter of waiting through this painful moment, allowing the heart to experience what comes, to feel its way through darkness, and to emerge with whatever it finds.  We have come to Step One.  - Marya Hornbacher, Waiting, A Nonbeliever's Higher Power (Hazelden, 2011)

On page 1 of chapter 1 of Waiting, Marya writes about driving toward the Canadian border in January for reasons she can't quite explain.  Driving toward a place where maybe the landscape will match the emptiness she feels spreading through her chest.  I know this emptiness.  I live in this landscape.  She continues:

There are times when the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.  Thay are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation.  There is a barrenness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a barrenness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

And I know this internal landscape.  But I also saw snow drops in bloom yesterday.  As sure as this despair is here now, I know, from experience if not from hope, that spring does come.

With the help of two wise friends in OA and a very strong meeting last night, I have recommitted to asking my Higher Power for patience with the changes that take time.  I have faith that I am exactly where I am meant to be in this moment.  It's hard and it hurts and I cry.  But that's ok.  Tears don't kill me.  It's the times when I am not able to cry that I am at the most risk.

Right now, the tears are always close.  They spill out and slide down my face, like water weathers stone.  Maybe tears are my soul's way of smoothing out the rough edges, of softening where I hold on too hard or set myself against Nature. 

 My For Today reader quotes e.e. cummings this morning:  "To be nobody but myself, in a world which is doing its best night and day to make me everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."  This is definitely the hardest battle I have faced and continue to face.  The despair is real.  And the fleeting moments of hope are just enough light in the darkness to make me reach out for change.

The reading today ends with this -- which seems as good as any ending for a piece of writing.  "In accepting myself as I am, I accept God's will for me today.  Only through self-acceptance am I able to change."  I can live in this tundra.  I know there are snow drops pushing against the dark, the cold heavy wet earth of January.

For Today - Trusting Myself

Self trust is the essence of heroism.  - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This morning's reading starts with Ralph and ends with this:

Complete trust in myself is not always possible, but when it comes, self doubts disappear, furtive struggles and fears are gone.  I treat myself with kindness and consideration, and my word to myself is as good as the commitments I make to others.

I'm struggling.  My depression is a heavy wet wool shroud and I sleep to escape my life.  My sleep is restless; it's filled with dreams, nightmares, and periods of half wake.

This morning, I started to read the OA Slipping and Sliding reader but the questions just seem too daunting.  My willingness to engage with my compulsions is low.  I bore myself with this.  So let's give me some space to pray for willingness.

This is What You Shall Do

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Walt Whitman, 1855, The Leaves of Grass, preface excerpt

For Today - Being Here

If we find nothing of interest where we are, we are likely to find little of lasting interest where we wish to go.  - Edwin Way Teale

Wherever I go, I take myself with me.  A blessing and not. 

Edwin Way Teale was a writer and naturalist from the United States.  He also wrote "For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature's finest balm." 

And he wrote this:

Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors.  Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees.

The reading in For Today concludes this morning:  "Through this program, I am regaining the zest and enthusiasm for life that is my birthright."

One day at a time.

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, 1927