Welcome to the Central Coast Area of Narcotics Anonymous
Serving: Paso Robles, Cambria, Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, Arroyo Grande, Santa Maria, Lompoc
Just for today daily meditation
We watch them walk in to their first meeting defeated, their spirits broken. Their suffering is obvious, and their desire for help even more apparent. They collect a welcome chip and go back to their seats, shaken by the effort.
We see them again, and they seem a little more comfortable. They've found a sponsor and are attending meetings every night. They still won't meet our glance, but they nod their heads in recognition as we share. We notice a spark of hope in their eyes, and they smile uncertainly when we encourage them to keep coming back.
A few months later, they are standing straight. They've learned how to make eye contact. They're working the steps with their sponsor and are healing as a result. We listen to them sharing at meetings. We stack chairs with them afterward.
A few years later, they are speaking at a convention workshop, They've got a wonderful, humorous personality. They smile when they see us, they hug us, and they tell us they could never have done it without us. And they understand when we say, "nor could we, without you."
A Spiritual principle a day
For many of us, everything is a trigger when we're newly clean. We are 100 percent impulse. Reactive. Protective. Feral. Territorial. The person next to us is sitting too close, even though there's an empty chair between us. The lights are too bright . . . in a candlelight meeting. Someone hugged us, and now we smell like his cologne! We complain about these things to anyone who will listen. Or we never go back to that meeting.
As difficult as it is to accept, the world doesn't revolve around us. Often our need to fix, manage, and control knows no bounds. Fortunately, recovery teaches us this: While we are powerless over our addiction, other people, and our feelings, we aren't powerless over our actions. We have a choice. More often than we would like, people don't behave as we'd wished, situations don't work out the way we imagined, and life . . . well, life can get in the way of our plans. A car accident, a case of crabs, a breakup, bad cologne.
Even with time in recovery, our first instinct may be to react negatively and impulsively. Our sponsor may be giving us the most insightful and loving feedback ever offered to an addict since the dawn of time, and before he's even finished, we're snapping, "I know, I know, I know!" Or, a sponsee tells us she's dating a woman with 72 days clean, and we flip out on her, pointing out 17 of her character defects without a second's delay.
Over time, we learn to pause. We put distance between our impulses and inappropriate reactions. We do, say, transmit nothing until we've vented to a trusted friend. We breathe, in and out, with our feet on the ground. We pray for guidance. Some of us even practice a radical acceptance: Everything is as it's supposed to be.
WHAT IS THE NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS PROGRAM?
NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We are recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean. This is a program of complete abstinence from all drugs. There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop using. We suggest that you keep an open mind and give yourself a break. Our program is a set of principles written so simply that we can follow them in our daily lives. The most important thing about them is that they work.
For more information on Narcotics Anonymous,
please go to the:
Narcotics Anonymous World Services Website,
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