Energy Vampires Roaming the Neighborhood

More from "Freedom from Bondage: " I would not only find a way to live without having a drink but I would find a way to live without wanting a drink.  A.A. taught me that willingness to believe was enough for a beginning.  Nor could I quarrel with 'restore us to sanity,' for my actions drunk or sober, before A.A., were not those of a sane person.  Rationalization is giving a socially acceptable reason for socially unacceptable behavior, and socially unacceptable behavior is a form of insanity."

This is key, in my opinion. It's not the stopping drinking that is the most important - it's the staying stopped.  If quitting was the magic key then sober living houses and psych wards would be turning out miracles by the thousands.  Plenty of us stop - at least for a while - but almost as many don't maintain the stoppage.  We don't find a solution for the reasons that make us drink.  If I have suppurating wounds all over my body because I don't know how to handle a kitchen knife the most important thing to do is to stop cutting myself, not to learn good wound management, antibiotics and bandages and all that.  While good wound management is crucial at the start we're going to figure out that we either have to learn how to handle a knife or we have to throw the suckers away.

"A.A. has taught me that I will have peace of mind in exact proportion to the peace of mind I bring into the lives of other people, for the only problems I have now are those I create when I break out in a rash of self-will."   

Other people, other people, blah blah blah, I am so sick of thinking about other people.  Other people are the worst.  Other people drain the energy out of me and so prevent me from thinking about myself.  Other people are Energy Vampires.  Why can't they think about me?  And the thing is, in my sobriety, I'm speaking mostly in jest here but not as thoroughly as I should be . . . and when I was drinking?  Forget about it.

"If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free.  If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free.  Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free.  Even when you don't really want it for them, and your prayers are only words and you  don't mean it, go ahead and do it anyway.  Do it every day for two weeks and you will find that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love."

I like the part of this . . . Promise, really, when you think about it, this path to freedom from resentment . . . that suggests that we don't have to be sincere when we're praying for peace and serenity and good health and good fortune for some rival, some irritant, some enemy we actually wish would move to Antarctica and then freeze to death when they get there.  Even when we're just saying words that we don't mean an effect is made upon us.  We grow and we feel better and we often lose that resentment.  Now, granted, there are some really irritating sons of bitches out there that are going to require sustained and repeated praying but the magic really does happen when we stick with it.

Instead of praying that the irritant in your life goes blind how about praying that he only goes blind in one eye?  It's not great, it's not a form of advanced spirituality, but it is only half as vile as it used to be.