Daily Reflections

WDS, based on over forty years of clinical practice with alcoholics, was convinced that alcoholism was a physical illness not a psychiatric disorder, nor a moral issue.  He believed that alcoholism had not been studied properly by the medical community because of the stigmatization of alcoholics.  He further believed that the underlying pathology was some type of allergy to alcohol that developed, over a variable time course of drinking, into a physical change in the alcoholic that...

I was at two meetings in a row where the topic of the place where one's spiritual experiences the church, temple, mosque, ashram, etc take place.  At the first meeting a Jewish psychiatrist long alienated from temple and quite secular when he came to recovery, said that our group was his spiritual home. It was in the room where we meet with the people who comprise the group that he experienced and continued to experience the spiritual.  The following evening a guy raised Catholic, on...

I was listening to a man speak briefly at a discussion meeting.  He was quite an accomplished person, a physician and a leader currently in the field of addiction treatment. He said that all his life he had followed the rules.  He had he said colored inside the lines. Church, school, professional life, relationships w others, he had always more or less done the right thing but had become an alcoholic anyway.  He accepted that and he was at present doing what he needed to do to...

In A.A. we are reminded that as long as we put A.A. first "everything that we put second will be first class."  It appears paradoxical to the newcomer that if we put our recovery program first all of the other things will be fine and if we do it the other way around, put our recovery program second or third, or even further down the list, we are courting disaster.  A man I know after achieving a pretty good recovery has been re-united with one of his daughters (and the rest oif his...

I was at a meeting recently where Step Seven was under discussion: “Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.” The conversation, a very elegant conversation I might say, focused on humility but veered from the topic of “humbly asking to have the shortcomings removed” to a rehash of the shortcomings themselves.  

The meeting required me think again about the origin of the Steps and the essence of A.A.

Bill Wilson composed the Steps with some constructive...

"As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action.  We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day 'Thy will be done.'"

"We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems.  We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends."

We met at the parking lot of the now vacant A&P supermarket in the Peterborough Mall off route 101.  Dave the group bookie was coordinating the commitment and I thought there would be four of us and we could take my Jeep.  As it turned out Dave showed up in his van with Dennis his adult son who's the greeter and ticket seller at our meeting and Ed, a slight, bearded guy, with an injured right hand, who had about 60 days, so he was "just coming along for the ride."  Larry and...

"Here (in thinking about our day) we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or decision."

I was in Clearwater.  Claude, a recovering friend who is a cardiologist, was staying w Barbara and me because of the renovations to his newly purchased condo.  We decided that we wanted to go to a meeting and I had noticed the Serenity Club in the Pinellas Meeting List.  So we showed up Sunday evening fifteen minutes before the 8:00 p.m. meeting time.  It was only a short distance from Island Estates but world’s away, most everything is world’s away from Island Estates...

I read a brief report of another "placebo"  study this morning.  The novel thing in the study was that the subjects were told that they were being giving a placebo, an ostensibly inert substance, but to take it anyway and see if it worked.  Of course it worked, it reduced their symptoms measurably.

Medicine now regards the placebo as one of the most powerful and effective medicines in medicine.  Ponder that for a little while,.  One often hears the injunction...

In his series of lectures delivered in 1906, printed as the book Pragmatism, William James identifies what he describes as the "current dilemma in philosophy."  This dilemma is that while people need and want science and empiricism because they can see the practical results in the modern world and in their lives, they also want and need some type of spiritual life and spiritual experience.  This dilemma had been intensifying throughout the nineteen and twentieth century and...

Writing on the topic of modesty versus the narcissism and self indulgence of our current culture David Brooks, who exemplifies modesty in his speech and writings wrote,

"Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty.
In a famous passage, Reinhold Niebuhr put it best: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. ... Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No...

"Continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment and fear. When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them."

I was at a downtown Boston A.A. meeting listening to a speaker who was a sixty year old man, looked to be in pretty good shape, currently living in a sober house.  He was an excellent speaker.  He was the type of person you find who has lived in a subculture where going to A.A. is a part of a lot of peoples' lives and then not going to A.A. is also part of their lives.  Its a subculture where people understand the chaos and violence associated with alcoholism and drug addiction...

I was reading a novel in which one of the principle characters was sitting on a train waiting for it to leave the station.  Abruptly the train appeared to move,  but then the character realized it was the train opposite his window that was moving not the train he was on.  Such changes in perspective are not uncommon, but always seem to evoke a little surprise.  The Necker Cube, the skeletonized cube is used in introductory psychology courses to demonstrate that perception is...

The "normal," "conscious," mind focused on a linear task is a surprisingly hard process to maintain.  One might think from an evolutionary point of view that this is what the conscious mind is all about.  But apparently linear task oriented focus is only an aspect of brain function.  During routine tasks your mind wanders most of the time, e.g., driving.  Rather than talking about day dreaming and stray thoughts and reveries interrupting this highly valued activity, it...

"Each might pray about it having the other one's happiness uppermost in mind."

Dr. Silkworth, Bill Wilson’s physician, told him two important things.  First, he told Bill that he was a sick person, he suffered from a genuine illness called alcoholism.  Second, he told Bill that the illness, alcoholism, was hopeless as there was, and still is, no effective treatment.  Thus the person w this illness, if he does not stop drinking, which is highly unlikely because of the loss of control, the obsession w the first drink, and those moments of temporary insanity...

Time is a big issue for everyone, but perhaps especially for recovering individuals.  In early recovery in A.A. people count the days, and your first sober day begins a repeated accounting of how much “time” in recovery you have.  Time often weighs heavily on the hands of the newcomer.   Newly sober people are often jealous of the “time” old timers have and often don’t really believe that old timers could have been “like themselves” in the past, or truly understand the panic...

"Reminding ourselves that we have decided to go to any lengths to find a spiritual experience, we ask that we be given strength and direction to do the right thing, no matter what the personal consequences may be."

We went out for a walk at 6:00 a.m. this morning in Dublin.  It was pitch black and the thermometer read 2F.  We’ve had record snowfalls and the road is narrow and the snowbanks high.  The occasional vehicle was simple a pair of headlights and a rush of air.  The two mile uphill segment was icy, Barbara held my arm the whole way.  When we turned the sky and clouds in the east were beginning to fluoresce in shades of pink, salmon, and scarlet, that grew more intense as...

1. An increased tendency to let things happen rather than make things happen.

2. Frequent attacks of smiling.

3. Feelings of being connected to others and to nature.

4. Frequent overwhelming episodes of appreciation.

5. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experiences.

6. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.

7. A loss of ability to worry.

8. A loss of interest in...

Last evening at the W. Acton Big Book meeting Jeff, a student of the Big Book, pointed out the phrase on page 128 “beyond human aid.”  He said it ought to be made into a bumper sticker and the phrase occurs first on p. 24.

After thinking about his comments for a bit I spoke to say that while the book may describe the alcoholic as beyond human aid, it was human aid that got me sober.  It was George Baldwin, now dead, taking me to my first meeting in Boston, and the guy at...

In “Doctor Bob’s Nightmare” (2002) the first of the Personal Stories found in Part I “Pioneers of A.A.” we have the personal story of A.A.’s cofounder Dr. Robert Smith. In this account we have a description of Dr. Bob’s meeting with Bill Wilson.  Dr, Bob notes that as a physician and an educated man he had, “…read a great deal and talked to everyone who knew, or thought they knew anything about the subject of alcoholism. (2002, p. 180)” and he writes this pregnant statement, italicized in...

"If we still cling to something we will not let go, we ask God to help us be willing."

"We asked God to help us show the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended we said to ourselves, 'This is a sick man/woman.  How can I help him/'her? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.'"

"My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad.  I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows.  Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen."

The meeting is in the basement of a church.  The room is obviously used for some type of preschool activity.  We bring two heavy, eight foot, tables from a large upstairs room, typical folding metal leg tables with formica tops, and we place them together making a big conference table.  This makes for about a dozen places at the table.  In a ring around this central setup we put other chairs.  They have metal frames and blue or green cushioned plastic seats and backs....

"In meditation, we asked God what we should do about each specific matter."

"We asked him to mold our ideals and help us to live up to them."

In an article in Scientific American (Hauser, M. (2009) The Mind. Scientific American, p. 44-51) Hauser points out that the human mind is distinct in at least four dimensions from the mind of any other animal and that this distinctiveness, which Hauser labels humaniqueness, emerged approximately 800,000 years ago “crescendoing” about 45,000 to 50,000 years ago.  The explanation for this distinctiveness is unclear and unknown (although its interesting in this context to note Terrence...

Last evening at the Big Book meeting we were reading a few final paragraphs of “Crossing the River of Denial” and a quote from the author leapt off the page,” But this time I asked with all my heart for God to help me, and a strange thing happened.  A physical sensation came over me, like a wave of pure energy, and I felt the presence of God in that dingy little room (p.335).”What struck me at first was the phrase “presence of God in that dingy little room.”  I’ve been in so many of...