CLEAN

We stay clean even when our diseased feelings tell us to die. We survive all of the emotions that go along with a personality change. We have felt such immense and dangerous pain that we can't even imagine our live getting significantly better. We have gained an advantage by differentiating ourselves from the way we are when we are using from when we are clean. After we get clean from drugs, we can now begin to get clean in other ways. We remove anything that holds us back unreasonably or that makes us feel dirty or unworthy. We have learned that it is okay to back out of a bad deal and that it doesn't make us a quitter. Because of our backgrounds, we don't realize that we're repeating past mistakes until the situation gets bad. We learn to recognize the actions and patterns that have brought us pain in the past. We may not believe it yet but it's perfectly all right to say, "Yo! Wait a minute. I gotta be somewhere else." We can then leave, walk, run, or go away. If our partners in the drama choose to go on without us, so be it. If they put us down or laugh at us later - so what, we stayed clean.

The concept of being clean is not restricted to 'not using'. Being clean is a state of mind. It is a conscious choice. It's about keeping our spirits clean as well as not doing drugs. When we have these two things in place, the rest comes. We can undertake being clean in order to explore our new lives fully. Cleansing our bodies, environments, habit patterns, and removing what is not a part of us allows us to see that what remains is often better than we expected. Being clean is making new again. Clean is removing the accumulated dirt that is a natural part of life. One difficulty we face is that a relapse can undermine our willingness to the point that the fear of going all the way to the bottom again can make staying clean seem to be difficult to impossible. We keep returning to the power that we found in our initial recovery and we get results. If we find it hard to turn to that power, we talk about it at meetings and with supporters of your recovery.

When we take a closer look at our lives, we find some of the things that we thought we had lost forever. Courage dispels cowardice. Honesty replaces living in fear. It wouldn't be loving for God to make us want things that we can't have. We can play around with this but the reality is that all forms of self-improvement are possible if we only take the time and make the effort. Most things are available to us if we only have gratitude, pay the price, and take care of them. Our relationships improve when we give freely and fall apart when we just take. We have an internal witness called instinct that keeps track of these things. We can't really lose these potentials or abilities but we do forget where we put them at times. Our addiction then makes it hard to find them even when they're nearby. Being clean means being able to maintain the focus of our attention and act consistently with our values. Being clean allows us to act in ways that make sense to us.

When we have relationships and inflict no harm, we obtain sufficient growth and vision to go our way in peace. We have to learn how to live without creating debt. Actually, having fun is now possible for us. We use spiritual principles to eliminate distractions and character defects. We gain the ability through application of mind, body, and spirit to get to a desired reality or to draw those objectives to us.

Our addiction tells us that our character defects are just pleasant or whimsical likes and dislikes that only lend color and variety to our life. It leads us to believe that they are only personal touches that may be strange or mildly irritating but certainly not harmful. We continue this delusion even when getting clean. Our disease tells us that those who complain about these particular aspects of our personalities are not our friends or that they don't love us. If we have experienced more good results than negative behind these characteristics and are pleased with them, we ask, "Why should I change?" Why would we even consider it? However, if we aren't happy, totally happy, we may view change as a way to get out of a trap or a series of traps. If we have hurt, suffered, failed, and adapted to a life of pain or felt lost and beyond hope, it might just be time to revise the way we live.

By discarding the ideas, habits, and ways that helped us get by in the past, we can take time to re-examine ourselves and begin to move in other directions. If we have feelings or thoughts that disturb our peace of mind, we now have several ways to deal with them effectively. We write it down, talk about it, listen to others, check the recovery literature, pray, meditate, inventory, make amends, and get with our sponsors to resolve the problem. We surrender, develop new beliefs, admit our faults, and make amends. Then we seek through prayer and meditation to find the strength and guidance that we need. The objective of learning and using spiritual principles is to eliminate suffering. Being clean means freedom from having to do things that we don't like - for people we don't like - for reasons we don't agree with - for rewards that are meaningless, distasteful, or dangerous to our safety and well-being. Instead of only having rough edges, many of us wear our character defects like protective spikes or thorns. We get clean by wearing these spines down to the point where we can hug someone without them screaming in pain.