For Today: "Will cannot be quenched against its will." Dante Alighieri Willingness. There is no other key to this program. To receive the gift of abstinence I need to be one hundred percent willing. "But i AM willing," I said many a time. "Haven't I suffered through all those diets? I definitely want to be thin; i hate being fat." Alas, it is not enough to want to be rid of the unpleasant side effects of any illness. I need to be willing to give up that which attracts me in the first place: the gratification, sedation or whatever other payoff I get for practicing my compulsion. For today: I surrender everything that compulsive overeating means to me, trusting God to put something incomparable better in its place. -- Voices of Recovery "Looking back at how far we've come, many of us have been tempted to think we've arrived at the end of the journey." OA 12 &12 p. 100 Compulsive eating is an insidious disease. Many of the attitudes and beliefs we've clung to are also faulty and insidious. We always have to be on the lookout for them. One of those attitudes is that we've finally arrived at recovery for good. Then we think we can slack off on taking all the actions that got us to this wonderful point in the first place; we don't attend as many meetings as we used to:; we don't make as many phone calls or have a sponsor or give as much service as before; we may think we don't need to plan our food anymore or be as rigorously honest about it as we were; we many think that we don't need to keep studying and living the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions to the best of our ability. WE cannot rest on our laurels because in OA there are no laurels. There is only today, and only the actions we take for our program today determine how recovered we really are. -- In This Moment In This Moment, I comfort myself. I was a lonely child. My parents couldn't give me the lvoe I needed. I've been lonely ever since, desperately grasping at others to fill that void. It was very painful, u til i learned new behaviors in CoDA. Now when I'm sad, lonely, or scared, I do something different. I reach within. I hug my pillow and talk to myself the way I wish my mother had talked tome. i feel comforted. -- Perfection Many of us picked on ourselves unmercifully before recovery. WE may also have a tendency to pick on ourselves after we begin recovery. "If I was REALLY recovering, i wouldn't be doing THAT again. . ." "I should be further along than I am." These are sentiments that we indulge in when we're feeling shame. We don't need to treat ourselves that way. There is no benefit. Remember, shame blocks us. But self-love and acceptance enable us to grow and change. If we truly hae done something we feel guilty about, we can correct it with an amend and an attitude of self-acceptance and love. Even if we slip back to our old, codependent ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, we do not need to be ashamed. We all regress from time to time. That's how we learn and grow. Relapse, or recycling, is an important and necessary part of recovery. And the way out of recycling is not by shaming ourselves. That leads us deeper into codependency. Much pain comes from trying to be perfect. Perfection is impossible unless we think of it in a new way: Perfection is being who and where we are today; it's accerpting and loving ourselves just as we are. We are each right whher we need to be in our recovery. Today, I will love and accept myself for who I am and where I ma in my recovery process. I am right where I need to be to get to where I'm going tomorrow. ==