Steps on our Road to Recovery

Daily Steps On Our Road to Recovery for 2 to 8 August 1999.

Published Last Week. A daily hint published each day since June 1996. This is past my third year anniversary since starting my web pages. Page Down for the next days that are added a day at a time. I have moved to http://www.recoverybydiscovery.com and this daily page is now here at daily.htm . I would appreciate any feedback, questions and suggestions that you have.

2 August 1999

Peace

We are peace. We are the ones who upset our own peace.

When we are not at peace, we are the ones who attract upsets

to our peace. We are the ones testing ourselves to see how

much peace we have.

When we want a more peaceful world, we are the ones

that will create that. The only place to begin, is to start with

ourselves. We can not tell anyone else what to do, people

do not like being told what to do. We do not even like to

tell ourselves what to do.

The secrets of finding peace are many. The secret to

finding upset is one. We just do it. We create our anger,

fear, upsets, pain, ... That is why there are so many roads

to recovery, we need them.

3 August 1999

Pain

Saint Paul wrote that he counted it all joy. How could he

count pain as joy? He certainly had pain and disappointments.

One reason is that pain is very useful. Pain is part of our healing

processes. Pain is telling our lord most high within what needs

healing. Pain is telling us to go away from something and Pleasure

is telling us to come closer to something.

Having life and life more abundantly means that we need

to resolve our pains to find our pleasure. I wonder how we can

find more pleasure and less pain.

4 August 1999

Pleasure

We were meant to live in a garden of pleasure, that is the

Garden of Eden. The problem has not changed. We mostly live

in the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That is, we are

judgmental. To get back to the tree of life, we need to drop

judgments. All judgments.

What is a judgment? Very simple, when we are upset, we

are in judgment. When we are at peace, we are returning to

the tree of life.

That is why the first card below is about forgiveness. That

is one way, to regain our peace. That is not what the world

teaches. It is beyond what the world teaches. So, when we

play this card, we have to keep playing this card, in spite of

our world.

5 August 1999

Plans

When we do not have something we want, that is the time

to make a plan to get what we want. When we have something

that we do not want, that is the time to make a plan to get

something different. We have many options from transforming

what we have, to going for something entirely different. When

we are going for something entirely different, it is wise to

change ourselves first. When we do not change ourselves first,

we might end up back where we started.

Sometimes we have to make a dramatic change, to protect

ourselves or those we love and are close to. When we are safe,

we have the time to gradually change and gradually influence

our relationships to change.

People

This can apply to people. We can want a better relationship

or a different relationship. I know that we can improve any

relationship. We have the power to improve our relationships

or to keep our relationships where they are or to make them

worse.

How do I know that we can improve our relationships?

Because I made a plan to improve my relationship with my

wife. I executed my plan and it worked to take our relationship

to another level. It also worked after I completed the plan,

because I had some new habits that fostered an improving

relationship.

6 August 1999

Purpose

To improve anything we need a purpose. Our purpose could

be to just improve our relationships. In order to see how we are

doing on our plan to improve our relationships, we need to keep

track of how our relationship is going. We need an objective

rating scale from like 1 to 10, that we can use to measure how

things are going. You see, keeping track of how things are going

and plotting our trends on a chart has a miraculous effect. We become

more conscious of what is happening. We become more capable

of effecting what is happening.

So, we need to make up or find a rating scale to use. Then we

need to ask ourselves each day: "I wonder how I could improve

our relationship today and long term?" Then we can do our daily

actions and make plans for our long term actions. Then we add

our long term actions to our daily actions and just keep track of

how things are going. When we find what is working we do more

of that. When we find something is not working we do less of that.

When something stops working, we do something different.

7 August 1999

Proving

One of the shows I like, that is in reruns, is "Due South". The last

one I saw, added Frazier's wisdom that we can not prove our own

virtue. We can prove someone did not have virtue, that is broke

a rule. We can prove that there is reasonable doubt that they broke

a rule. What we can not prove is our innocence. That is why it is

so important to be considered innocent, until proven guilty without

any reasonable doubt. Perhaps that is why that God gave us His

Righteousness, innocence. His atonement makes us all innocent,

when we are willing to let all others be innocent. That is the catch.

That is why I keep saying that we all are doing our best considering

our unconscious baggage. God has already taken that into

consideration.

I learned some more on a show about the Inquisition. Before the

Inquisition, accusers were given the punishment of those they

accused, when the accused was acquitted. The Inquisition may

not have happened, if the priest were give the punishment of

their accused, if the accused were acquitted. Perhaps more

prosecutors today would not be having so many being proven

innocent by DNA, if we still had the old standard. John Kennedy

did not like being a prosecutor, since he could see better ways than

he could do in that office. Perhaps we have too many with logs

in their eyes, trying to get the splinters out of others... I know that

it is an exaggeration, since it often is a case of log to log and splinter

to splinter. :))

8 August 1999

Flashbacks and Forgiveness

For those that have experience flashbacks, perhaps my

experiences and information may provide some better perspective.

I am a grandfather that recovered from bipolar at midlife crisis

time. My flashbacks included past lives, child abuse, and times

of terror, panic, fear...

I recovered because I decided to forgive everything, no matter

what... And to trust in spirit, no matter what...

I know of another therapist that checked on some memories

that came up and found some of them to not have happened this

lifetime. Some of them did happen.

I know of an experiment in a dentist office where they had

hidden observers watching the dental procedures while the

female clients were given laughing gas. When they were

interviewed in depth after the procedures, many of the women

thought the dentist had taken sexual liberties with them, while

the hidden observers knew that it did not happen.

There are memories from accurate to "false". There are memories

in the present, that may come from before we got here this time, or

even picked up from others. In any case, I do not want to be dragging

any of my past baggage. That is why I choose to forgive, no matter what...

That is why I choose to get on with living a better life. After all, the

greatest revenge, is living a better life, in spite of them and because

of them. I would rather make them a blessing in disguise, than a

curse that I live...

Very Respectfully,

Michael Foster, MA

Discovery Coach

https://www.recoverybydiscovery.com

DiscoveryCoachemail

"Learn HOW to recovery by discovering the blocks you need to remove and the actions you need to take and what you need to let go of as your blocks to your blessings."

From my book in process, The Spiritual Cookbook (Generic Recipes for a Better Life)

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I started my daily page, because it is useful for me to look for some recovery tip or secret each day for my spiritual growth. we and I only need one secret to work on and let it work on me each day. They are secrets because they are usually the opposite of what the majority of society teaches. They must be secret because they are not commonly used. A friend of mine once said "Common Sense is not much in Common.". Now that I have grandchildren I am also writing for them. I would have really liked for my grandparents to have passed on what they learned.

I am including Sunday as it is my formal day of learning the lord most high's secrets. If you would like ask questions, or contribute some of your wisdom, or want to make some comments or want to vote for which day to put on my tip of the month page or tell your success stories, click Michael Foster, M. A.