Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Today's Gift
Shame can hold us back, hold us down, and keep us staring at our feet. —Beyond Codependency
Watch out for shame.
Many systems and people reek of shame. They are controlled by shame and may want us to play their game with them. They may be hoping to hook us and control us through shame.
We don't have to fall into their shame. Instead, we'll take the good feelings - self-acceptance, love, and nurturing.
Compulsive behaviors, sexually addictive behaviors, overeating, chemical abuse, and addictive gambling are shame-based behaviors. If we participate in them, we will feel ashamed. It's inevitable. We need to watch out for addictive and other compulsive behaviors because those will immerse us in shame.
Our past, and the brainwashing we may have had that imposed "original shame" upon us, may try to put shame on us. This can happen when we're all alone, walking through the grocery store or just quietly going about living our life. Don't think . . . Don't feel . . . Don't grow or change . . .Don't be alive . . . Don't live life . . . Be ashamed!
Be done with shame. Attack shame. Go to war with it. Learn to recognize it and avoid it like the plague.
Today, I will deliberately refuse to get caught up in the shame floating around in the world. If I cannot resist it, I will feel it, accept it, and then be done with it as quickly as possible.
Higher Power, help me know that it's okay to love myself and help me to refuse to submit to shame. If I get off course, help me learn to change shame into guilt, correct the behavior, and move forward with my life in immediate self-love.
From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie ©
Action for the Day: Today I'll talk to a friend about what my mistakes taught me. Today I'll feel less shame.
Only Step One, where we made the 100 percent admission
we were powerless over alcohol, can be practiced with absolute perfection.
The remaining eleven Steps state perfect ideals.
They are goals toward which we look,
and the measuring sticks by which we estimate our progress.
Seen in this light, Step Six is still difficult, but not at all impossible.
The only urgent thing is that we make a beginning,
and keep trying.
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 68
Thought to Ponder . . .
There are no endings ... only new beginnings.
AA-related 'Alconym' . . .
A B C = Accept, Begin, Continue.
Daily Motivation
You can always live the life you choose. Because you can always choose, in each and every moment, how to be.
Sure, life in this world sends all sorts of seemingly random and often disturbing occurrences your way. Yet the choice of how to think and feel about them, and what to do with them, is yours.
It is through the use of that choice that your life is fashioned. From the perspective you select comes the world you experience, in this hour, this month, this decade, this lifetime.
Whatever comes, will come and go. What you choose to do with it, is what makes your life the way it is.
It is never too late, and you are never too far off track to live the way you wish to live. For in this very next moment, no matter what it may contain, you can choose how, and why, to proceed.
You never have to resign yourself to less than the best. For now is always your time to choose.
— Ralph Marston
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