October 19

DISCIPLINE MONTH: DAY 19: “Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.” ― Nathaniel Branden

If my goal is comfortable recovery from addiction(s), I must find ways to live with myself all the time.

To me, this means I have to be aligned with my heart, where the truth and honor live. This is my source of right and wrong and my personal radar for the way I want to feel about myself.

If I am living an integral and committed life, I will feel it in my heart. When I am sitting still, I cannot ignore my heart, because it will begin to make me uncomfortable with reminders of who I have been that was not right for me. This also occurs when I do that daily 86, 87 and 88. I will begin to recognize things that are problematic or less than who I want to be.

If this keeps going on, I may be in deep trouble with my way of seeing and being in the world. I have discovered that I am frequently justifying my behavior to make others wrong. (Gasp!) If I do this long enough, I will build a fortress of resentment and anger that keeps me completely shut off from the “sunlight of the spirit”. And I may eventually return to active addiction. For sure, I am living in what is referred to as a dry drunk.

I have certainly felt these things. It is horrible! I am not able to sit still for very long with this kind of ICK in my heart or in my spirit. So, I need to maintain this conscious contact that has been built up and with which I am always very comfortable.

The truth is, that I am so content with being in the presence of this consciousness that I am aware almost within the minute of it leaving me. That is the process of doing this repeatedly and with self-discipline for many years now. And I am blessed to say that I am very happy to live in that realm.

I believed it would be very boring and that I would be some kind of “goody-two-shoes” if I ever achieved a deep connection with my heart and left my ego to scream into the void. That has not been my experience. I am still ME, a better version of me than I could ever have believed possible.

The goal is met, yet the work goes on. An important distinction made in the BB is that we are in the “grip of a progressive illness.” In other words, substance use is a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself, nor the cause of it. So, it progresses whether we participate or not. I have had this experience with recovery. I believe I need to have progressive recovery to remain comfortable within myself.

And the deeper and longer I work through these things that keep me uncomfortable, the better it gets! I don’t necessarily believe it is the time element involved so much as it is the quality of the recovery I get as I continue to process, each time more deeply, those things that were seen in the very first steps as my “causes and conditions”, as well as my “old ideas”.

More has certainly been revealed, and I do believe there is a reason that it did not all come and sit with me in that first year or the first ten years or the first twenty years. I had to do this in a progressive way to deal the progression of my addiction. IT progresses, so I must match IT with the recovery that has come to be my most cherished treasure.