Seaweed The Brat

 "Keep this in mind: By greeting trouble with optimism and hope, you are undermining worse troubles down the line.  Beyond that, imagine that you are easing the burden of everyone suffering problems of that kind.  This practice - imagining that by accepting your  pain you are using up the negative karma of everyone destined to feel such pain - is very helpful.  Whether this meditation really helps others or not, it give me peace of mind.  Then I can be  more effective; the benefit is immense."

So sayeth the Dali Lama . . . 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: spirituality is chock full of basic principles that stay remarkably consistent as you move from religion to philosophy and back again.  The same themes come up over and over.  Unfortunately, there are some flaws in organized religions that seem to come up over and over, too, especially when I look at the behavior of the most committed, hard-line adherents of the three monotheistic religions.  But the point here is that in Alcoholics Anonymous we believe that a difficulty surmounted makes us uniquely able to pass along a message of comfort and hope somewhere down the line.  Choosing my timing carefully, gauging each situation on a case by case basis, I often tell someone in some pain that sometime in the future they'll really be able to help someone who is experiencing a similar problem.  The idea of accepting my pain right now so that I can take away someone else's pain later on is a different way of saying that my experience, strength, and hope will benefit another member going through the same experience.  It's a little goofier and mystical to talk about karma for us Westerners but, boy, the basic idea is sound.

Brat:  An annoying, spoiled, or impolite child.

When I introduce newcomers to a woman I've known since you got sober seven years ago I playfully remark on what a . . . ah . . . pain in the ass she was for her formative years.  Last time she matter-of-factly stated: "I was a brat." I love that word.  A bunch of brats.

The good news is there's a solution - the bad news is that it's us.