Gratitudes Today

I am grateful:

1. Power as long as I had it yesterday
2. As it did go out later yesterday, I’m grateful for nice time with a friend at her powered home today.
3. And the friend at whose house I now sit, even though they’re out, and where I will get to sleep and shower. So much better than home alone freezing and cramping up and dark and depressed and so lonely.
4. I am grateful that my mom has power and is warm and safe and dry.
5. And that J seems to be making the best of his powerless place.
6. And that he has the doggie. Even though I miss her so much, I’m so grateful to know she’s ok where she is, and I didn’t have to worry about her too. So, good for all.
7. I’m grateful for the growth I’ve begun to experience.
8. I am grateful for Oct 28th’s For Today: “You can be healed (of depression) if every day you begin the first thing in the morning to consider how you can bring a real joy to someone else. If you can stick to this for two weeks you will no longer need therapy.” Alfred Adler. Wow.
9. And it goes on to say: “It’s simple: every time I get my mind off myself, I feel better. Each day, I select a member of my family, a friend, a colleague or an OA member and think about what I can do for that person.
10. “I spend some of my free time planning what I will do; then, at the first opportunity, I carry out the project. It need not be a major undertaking: a phone call, a letter, a small surprise, an offer to babysit or take and elderly person for a drive.
11. “There are so many things to do, one lifetime is not enough.
12. “For today: It isn’t necessary to be depressed to adopt the practice of making others happy.
13. Oct. 29th’s For Today: “Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.” Pearl S. Buck
14. And it says, and I see this as a promise: “Discovering one’s own inner resources is a reward of abstinence.
15. “New found energies and a soaring spirit take up the time and space of what was once compulsive overeating.
16. “Abstinence brings other substitutions: I have courage in place of fear,
17. “challenging ideas in place of shallow thought,
18. “action instead of wishful thinking
19. “and an honest desire to share in place of selfish interests.
20. I see this as a promise too: “The longer I am abstinent, the more experience I acquire in the art of living and the more I am able to give myself and others.
21. “For today: Part of my new way of life is looking within for inspiration.”
22. Oct. 21’s Voices of Recovery: “A deep inner courage resides within each of us.
23. “The disease has told us for so long that we don’t have enough courage, but that is another is its lies.
24. “Tapping into that courage requires only the tiniest bit of willingness to change – to take a chance that the literature and people with long-term abstinence are telling the truth and that we deserve recovery.
25. “It never has to hurt like this again.”
26. Oct 22: “Nothing that happened yesterday or that may happen tomorrow is more important that NOW.”
27. “My compulsive nature wants to keep my mind occupied with events over which I have no control.
28. “I wish for some future dream and forget to work on my current defect.
29. “I want to blame the past for how I behave today.
30. “This type of thinking only causes me pain and ruins my pleasure of the present moment.
31. “Gratefully, I now recognize this as a part of my disease, so I can turn to my Higher Power and accept events as they are, not as I might want them to be.”
32. So much I’m reading and grateful for right now. Oct 23: “…we focused on others’ faults and thought for hours about what they should do to solve their problems, while our own problems went unsolved.” OA 12 & 12 p. 12
33. “I’ve done that for hours. I’ve done it for days when someone made me angry. I’ve done it for years when I thought about how I was brought up.
34. “When people share the mess instead of the message, at meetings or elsewhere, I realize that I am not alone in getting things backward.” I am grateful to not be all alone in this. And that there is an answer others have found.
35. “I’m grateful that something (Could it by my Higher Power?) has been waking me out of these long reveries with the question, ‘And am I doing what I would suggest to them?’ It’s promising when I realize how my advice would apply to myself.
36. “It’s progress when I put my advice into practice. May I tell myself early and often to mind my own business. May I take notice and act accordingly when my Higher Power gently makes a suggestion.”
37. Oct 24: “Rather, we came to understand that the basis for stopping our compulsive eating behaviors – and staying stopped – is personal inner change.” A Plan of Eating p. 1
38. “Change is the key word for me in the above quote. I went into the program looking for another diet club. I kept coming back because I couldn’t understand how Overeaters Anonymous worked.” I still don’t, but I know the only two times in my life I’ve had success with eating, I was/am in OA.
39. And then it says: “I kept looking and listening for the solution, and finally I found it. I would have to change the way I was eating, behaving, and thinking.
40. “The changes would happen inside myself, so the outside could change.
41. “the directions for how to change were in the Twelve Steps.
42. “Somehow, I knew that if I followed the Steps, I would achieve physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
43. “I am grateful to a program of recovery that has allowed me to understand that recovery from compulsive eating is possible if I choose to change.”
44. Oct 25 “I didn’t want the other fellows to start noticing what I ate.” To the Man Who Wants to Stop Compulsive overeating, Welcome, p. 3
45. …”When we talk about using the telephone as a tool, we observe that isolation is common among us. Being secretive about eating is a symptom of our disease. What that mas was sharing identified a symptom of our disease.
46. “As I further notice the quality of my behavior, I have more desire to change.
47. “Good things have happened when I’ve listened to others sharing in order to recognize my own symptoms.
48. “I need to notice the quality of my listening. It is a measure of my spiritual condition.
49. Oct 27 “Since entering program, it has taken years to allow more and more of the truths of the program to permeate my defensive armor. I have had to set aside many preconceived notions, much book learning, and rationalization along the way.
50. “I now have a truly three-dimensional life as compared to the flat plane of existence I once endured without knowing any better (as bright as I was).
“I thank God for striking me dumb.”
51. Oct 30: “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” Step Six
52. In This Moment. Oct 30. “In This Moment, I embrace change.” Gulp. But grateful still.
53. “Change is often uncomfortable and scary. Some days I’d rather stay in bed and hide under the covers than deal with the changes I know I need to make.” Yes!
54. “Often, change can be good – just unfamiliar.
55. “It helps to remember that if I make a change and don’t like it, I can try something else.
56. “Sometimes, when I run from change, life situations occur that require change, whether I’m ready or not.
57. “When I embrace change and move into the new flow, my life improves in ways that I couldn’t have imagined.” Worth repeating. It says: “When I embrace change and move into the new flow, my life improves in ways that I couldn’t have imagined.” Wow. Wow.
58. “I trust that through my Higher Power, the changes I face will bring lessons that encourage me to grow and experience life more fully.”
59. Language of Letting Go Oct 30: “We have a real life of our own. Yes, we do.
60. “That empty feeling, that sense that everyone except us has a life – an important life, a valuable life, a better life – is a remnant from the past.
61. “It is also a self-defeating belief that is inaccurate.
62. “We are real.
63. “So is our life.
64. “Jump into it,
65. “and we’ll see.
66. “today, I will live my life and treasure it as mine.”


more later?