We all know about the “emotional wringer” that A.A. speaks to us about  in the Twelve and Twelve. It is here that we  can read  the  St. Francis  Prayer  and how Bill W., the co-founder of AA recommends it to all those of us in recovery.

“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace – that where there is hatred, I may bring love – that where there is wrong, I may bring a spirit of forgiveness – that where there is discord, I may bring harmony -that where there is error, I may bring truth- that where there is doubt, I may bring faith- that where there is despair, I may bring hope – that where there is sadness, I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted – to understand, than to be understood – to love, than to be loved. For it is by self forgetting that one finds.  It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to eternal  life. Amen.”

Twelve and Twelve. Page 99.

To continue our discussion on the importance of prayer and meditation the Twelve and Twelve says:

“Perhaps one of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us. We no longer live in a completely hostile world. We are no longer lost and frightened and purposeless. The moment we catch even a glimpse of God’s will, the moment we begin to see truth, justice, and love as the real and eternal things in life, we are no longer deeply disturbed by all the seeming evidence to the contrary that surrounds us in purely human affairs. We know that God lovingly watches over us.We know that when we turn to Him, all will be well with us, here and hereafter.”

Twelve and Twelve. Page 105.

Comment: ” Praying means to ask for something. We ask that we might let God take over our lives since we have admitted that we are powerless over sadding ourselves and that our lives have become  unmanageable. As it says in Alcoholics Anonymous: I saw that it was my LIFE  that was unmanageable -not just my drinking (drugs, overeating,  sex-add your own).”

Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition (2011) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Page 97.

“I very much like the whole spiritual orientation of the Twelve Step way of life–and just because we are a spiritual program doesn’t mean that we are denying the importance of other religious organizations or faiths. I feel that the greatest gift I have ever received is to know that I have an addictive compulsion to depress myself – it is this reality that brought me into the fellowship of DEPRESSED ANONYMOUS. It is here that I came into contact with and found a nonjudgmental  God who cares for me so much that God was willing to wait for me to reach out and receive such love.”

I became open, willing and honest to do what I needed to do to free myself from depression. Hugh

SOURCE: (c) Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. (2011) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Pages 95- 103. Step  Eleven.

Copyright(c)Higher Thoughts for down days: 365 daily thoughts and meditations for members of 12 Step fellowship groups. DAP.  JUNE 13.

“There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit. But, when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakeable foundation for life.” Bill W.

The 12 Steps have served as life giving signposts along the sometimes confusing journey of my life. Bill W., is right in that once we begin  to look deeper (self-examination)  into our beliefs, our thinking and how we live out these  realities  (behaviors), and then add to this our daily practice of conscious contact with God, our life truly becomes a prayer.

In my own recovery over these past 30 years, it was by my getting still , making conscious contact with my Higher Power, and living out the truth in my personal and communal life, that my surrender to its will for me, continues to give me freedom this very day.

Hugh

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AFFIRMATION

” When I place more value on my serenity and sobriety than on anything else, I can maintain them at a higher level.”

REFLECTION

I have learned an amazing lesson in adopting the Twelve Step principles to my personal life. The more I let go of what I expect to happen and just relax, that which I expect happens. The message for me today is that I know that this program works for those who work the program. In the Twelve Steps I have found a healthy program where I find that the more I try and give up control over others, the more serenity and peace flows through me and out to others.

My fears seem to attract fear. I expect only to keep my mind and heart at peace by keeping my heart and mind on God.  I now believe that my love for God’s will, can bring that much more love to me.

MEDITATION

We pray that God will hear our plea and  that we might be able to live just for today!

SOURCE: (c) Higher Thoughts for Down Days: 365 daily thoughts and meditations for members of Twelve Step groups. DAP. Louisville.

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AFFIRMATION

I will be in touch with my feelings throughout the day. I refuse to run from what I feel.

“..The ability to experience one’s feelings without resisting or running from them determines to a large degree whether a person is healthy or not.” (9)

REFLECTION

I am going to make a real effort to do what I see works in depressed persons like myself. They all say that the longer they are in the program, the more feelings they are able to express and the less the unpleasant feelings of fear dominates their lives. I am finding that by writing my feelings down, the less frightening they seem to be to me. I am now able to deal head on with my feelings. I find this experience to be a freeing one.

My addiction was a way of walling off pain. In time, I became addicted to the pain and in doing so, I lost myself in the process. Now the pain is more important than what I am running away from,..

What I experience in my life determines to a large extent what I predict life to become. My past experiences are predictors of a life not as yet lived. I am wanting to experience the fact that my good days are more frequent now and my bad days occurring not as often.

MEDITATION

God, the more I give up my need to be depressed the more I am finding that I am becoming more assertive and truly present to others in my life. I want you to help me feel my feelings and express them today. (Personal comments).

RESOURCES: Copyright(c) Higher Thoughts for Down Days: 365 daily thoughts and meditations for members of 12 Step fellowships. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. June 9th.Page 116.

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“The idea of twenty-four living applies primarily to the  emotional life of the individual. Emotionally speaking, we must not live in yesterday, nor in tomorrow.

“But I have never been able to see this means the individual, the group, or A.A., (or Depressed Anonymous group) as a whole should give no thought whatever to how  to function tomorrow or even in the more distant future. Faith alone never constructed the house you live in. Faith had to be a blueprint and a lot of work to bring it into reality.

Bill W., in  As Bill Sees It. Page284.

The mind is a wonderful organ and more powerful and complex than the greatest computers made. In fact so many of us  who live to plan, organize and get things done, it is seemingly impossible to  produce anything without a blueprint. We have to have a plan, a business plan if we are business people, a  route to take, a personal vision that will make happen what we want to happen. Sometimes  one hears that we must just “let go and let God.” I  hope that what a person picks up here  is not that we just let God run our lives without input from us. That is not what is meant. Like Bill points out above, faith alone never built a house but combined with the energy/work of getting something done, that is where we must be. And so it goes with the Depressed  Anonymous mutual aid program of recovery. And this is true of all our 12 Step programs.

In DA we have a myriad of literature  offered to members where they can apply the Steps to their daily lives and gradually work their way out of the pit of depression. And if they stick to the plan as outlined in our Manual they will soon discover the truth of the Second Step, which tells us that we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And of course this takes work, a belief that we too can feel better if we do all that is suggested in the program. I know it is true and so do the thousands of those other folks who have worked the program.

But first we must have a faith that something good can happen to me just as it has happened to all those other people who by following the Twelve Step blueprint, have found themselves in a better place in every way.

If this is your first visit to find out what we are about and who we are we believe  that if you give yourself the time and effort to read our literature at our website, plus our newsletters, that you will begin to grasp what is possible for you just as it was for me. You will have  a blueprint that will definitely give you all the resources and tools to build a better life–without depression. That is a Promise!

Hugh

To cast out the darkness, familiar to all of us, we do have an options. We can either allow the dark side of our thinking to ruin our day or we can light a fire in our mind and have light and hope.

There are daily  uplifting  thoughts  to be found in  Higher Thoughts for Down days:365 daily thoughts  and meditations  for members of  12 Step fellowship groups,  now available on KINDLE e readers. In fact you can take all these wonderful thoughts with you on your KINDLE and they are as available anywhere and everywhere.

Light the light in your mind today and get hopeful. Higher Thoughts will give you something positive to think about and reflect upon as you go about your day.

The following testimony is  part of an ongoing look inside a person who is in recovery. The Anonymous author will continue to share with us her self and her personal struggles, as well as victories gained through her belief in a power greater  than herself.

“They say avoid emotional complexities in early days of recovery. I had come to the same conclusions on my own. The worst thing on earth for me was to be pushed back into the mood swings and terrible depression, but the fact that I didn’t have a “conventional”   type of relationships did not stand in my favor. After a year in recovery I came to believe true relationships don’t have to be a strain as long as people involved in that be straight and frank.

But my non-conventional type of relationships tied in a bit with the question of “Models” and coming to conclusions  of one’s own…I didn’t have “new models” myself earlier in life, so I was at the mercy of things in   society (or unworkable things from my family background), but wrongly enough again  I was believing in unconventional  type of my relationships without pressures.  It’s possible to work out “one who really is” and what one really wants from life…to see more fully what one wants to avoid and what to cultivate. The best way to become “Full person” while avoiding pitfalls.

With me, in my own life any sense at all of an alternative Model for living really arose when I found my Depressed Anonymous meeting. Before that looking back I was always searching but inevitably perhaps I usually met up with the wrong (unstable, rebel without a cause) sort of people, so there was no one helpful to talk to.

I had faced problems …like “who am I” and “what’s the best way to live.”  My inquiring spirit hasn’t been for books alone.  I was driven to books as one way of finding answers to these bigger questions of “how to live”, it’s an ethical question, so I tended to be “a moral”  person,  but not in the usual and social or religious rules sense.

My longer family trajectory, from rural surroundings to the “big city” added to my confusions for :finding  “true model.”  It was my parents who made this (very painful, disruptive journey (they had come from rural, peasant society to the big city).

So there is this big generational difference and I personally have  had to face the kind of problems that were around here in my country in the late 2oth century, the sort of thing one can see on the Lowry’s paintings: poverty, misery, oppression.

My family always had to try to “make ends meet”.  There is not much room for thinking through one’s values, working out “who am I” in such circumstances, but miraculously Hafez (Persian poet) smiled on me. I was allowed to make mistakes, to be unstable for a time. What matters is the basic human heart, the rest of my life will be an “upwards ascent.” That is why it is better to ‘hit rock bottom’ to have the severe problems early on, then things can get better.

Life after this ‘rock bottom’ is not a bowl of cherries as they say in meetings, but it’s a damned sight better that it ever was before and one could insure against non-recurrence of more severe problems by continuing with this search for ‘change of model’, by following some kind of ‘program for living’.  May God bless us for the courage we’ve had searching to be honest with ourselves. Not many people are in our league.”

–Anonymous

We are grateful for this testimony and pray that it may touch others as it has touched me.

We look forward  to more pieces in the story that make up her journey out of the prison of depression

“When you are depressed you know that nothing in your surroundings has changed, yet for you the color has drained out of the world and a barrier as impenetrable as it is invisible cuts you off from the rest of the world.

The experience of depression is the sense of being alone in a prison.

Someone who is depressed doesn’t say, “I feel as if I am in a prison’ but ‘ I am in a prison.’

If you want to find out if someone is depressed, ask that person, “if you could paint a picture of what you’re feeling what sort of picture would you paint?  ”

Each person will give you a different image.  Here are some images that have been described to me.

I’m  in swirling water and being slowly sucked down.

I’m walking endlessly in the dark.

A drooping, dying flower wrapped in a  blanket.

A child in a dark corner facing a wall.

I’m walking along an empty road that’s going nowhere.

I’m on a quay and the last boat is sailing away. I can’t leave the shore.

I’m in  a box without doors or windows.

I’m in the center of an empty, treeless plain. The plain goes on forever and I cannot move.”

All these images have the same meaning. The person is alone in a prison.

If you asked the same question of someone who is unhappy the answer given would describe a miserable  scene but there would be no sense of being trapped and alone.

It is this sense of isolation which makes depression so terrible. As all prison warders and torturers know, complete isolation for an indefinite period will break the strongest person.

Because the experience of depression is so exceedingly painful many people call it an illness and try to get rid of it. Yet, if ever you’ve tried to help someone who’s   depressed you’ll know the depressed person, while asking for help, manages to turn aside all your efforts.”

SOURCE: Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to life.1995. HarperCollins/Publishers . Pages 78-79.