Every moment I have a 3rd Step decision to make - do I take the well worn path of my old habits, the path of my defective habits, or , do I take the new, less traveled path toward Higher Power, love and a new way of living? When I am in closer "conscious contact," more connected, I make the decision toward Higher Power more easily and more often.Conscious contact is the real-time relationship with Higher Power. I have moments, sometime short, sometimes longer, while I am not in meditation when I am aware of my Spirit Self, the spiritual being aspect of who I am. In these moments I experience a higher level of creative and perceptive thinking and empathising with others. I intuitively know the next right thing to do. I am able to perceive.As we work the 11th Step we see evidence of our Higher Power working in our life. One of the ways that we can maintain a conscious contact is to practice being in a state of gratitude. Gratitude is to show appreciation of benefits received. We can demonstrate our gratitude to God by feeling the feelings of gratitude. Gratitude is the emotion that expresses thankfulness from our PersonalSelf through our SpiritSelf to our Higher Power.
We have so much to be grateful for in our new lives. As we practice our new perspective on life, we can strive to maintain a constant state of gratitude through out the day. This is a form of walking gratitude meditation. Remember meditation is prolonged concentration. One of the ways to achieve and maintain a conscious contact with God is work towards seeing the good in all things and feeling gratitude for all that God provides for us. As we have learned in our recovery, there is good in even the worst of times. Practice a walking gratitude meditation throughout your day and begin to see how much easier and lighter your day and life becomes.
“When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others, of what we could pack into the stream of life? But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review we ask God's forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken.”
This is often referred to as the Evening Review. We can apply the reflective meditation techniques that we learned in Step 4 and Step 10 to our Evening Review. After we get sober and have begun to clean out and nurture our Spiritual Garden our primary healing ground is in the realm of emotions, thoughts and relationships. It is our emotions and thoughts that cloud our ability to recognize and understand God’s will in our lives. Meditation works to help us separate our perspective from our PersonalSelf to our SpiritSelf. The Evening Review is a most effective way to really practice seeing where we fall short of expressing our SpiritSelf in each encounter and moment through the day. We are not perfect, but this is a wonderful tool to help us make tremendous progress each day. We can also combine the Evening Review with a gratitude meditation and we give thanks for all moments of our day and the lessons we have to learn from them.
“In thinking about our day we may face indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don't struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind. Being still inexperienced and having just made conscious contact with God, it is not probable that we are going to be inspired at all times. We might pay for this presumption in all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it.”
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