Living Clean - Cape Atlantic Area – of Narcotics Anonymous

1 Living Clean The Journey Continues Approval Draft for Decision @ WSC 2012 Living Clean Approval Draft for Decision @ WSC 2012 Living Clean Approval Draft Copyright 2011 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc. All rights reserved World Service Office PO Box 9999 Van Nuys, CA 91409 T 1 F 1 WSO Catalog Item No. 9146 3 Table of Contents Preface .. 7 Chapter One Living Clean .. 9 NA offers us a path, a process, and a way of life. The work and rewards of recovery are never-ending. We continue to grow and learn no matter where we are on the journey, and more is revealed to us as we go forward. Finding the spark that makes our recovery an ongoing, rewarding, and exciting journey requires active change in our ideas and attitudes. For many of us, this is a shift from desperation to passion.

2 Keys to Freedom .. 10 Growing Pains .. 12 A Vision of Hope .. 15 Desperation to Passion .. 16 Why We Stay .. 17 Chapter Two The Ties That Bind .. 19 In recovery, we are free to explore and to consider who we are and who we want to become. The changes we experience in the process can feel pretty disruptive to our identity and our relationships, but through that struggle we find that our acceptance, love, and faith continue to grow. Though our goals and our methods may vary, what we have in common are the tools and principles that allow us to be who we are. Together we rise to a point of freedom. Connection to Ourselves .. 19 Connection to a Higher Power .. 21 Connection to the World Around Us .. 24 Connection to Others .. 25 Chapter Three A Spiritual Path .. 29 The spirituality we experience in NA is simple and practical: It allows us to live in harmony with our world and to experience empathy and compassion for others.

3 The steps are a path to spiritual growth; we awaken to our own spirituality. As we develop a relationship with a Higher Power in whatever way we understand that, we come to understand that our spirituality is not a part of our lives; it is a way of life that brings us to an understanding of our purpose and the freedom we had been seeking all along. Awakening to Our Spirituality .. 29 A Spiritual, Not Religious Program .. 31 A Spiritual Journey .. 33 Spirituality Is Practical .. 35 Walking the Walk .. 37 Spirituality in 39 Conscious Contact .. 42 Creative Action of the Spirit .. 44 4 Living Clean Approval Draft for Decision @ WSC 2012 Chapter Four Our Physical Selves .. 47 Learning to live in our bodies isn t easy. We haven t been kind to them, and often they bear the painful scars of our addiction. Making peace with our physical selves is necessary for our physical survival but it is also a part of our amends process, an act of self-acceptance, and a way we experience freedom, healing, and joy.

4 This chapter addresses the way we treat ourselves in recovery, learning to find pleasure in being physically alive and aware and facing our aging, our vulnerability, and our mortality. It s a Relationship .. 47 Letting Ourselves Go .. 48 Sex .. 51 Thrill-Seeking and Adventure .. 52 Wellness and Health .. 53 Illness .. 55 Disability .. 58 Emotional and Spiritual Crisis .. 60 Aging .. 61 Death, Dying, and Living with Grief .. 62 Courage .. 65 Chapter Five Relationships .. 66 Our recovery is based in relationships, and most of us struggle with them in one way or another. Our relationships with one another in the rooms, with the families we come from and the families we create, are all places where we learn to practice principles, including honesty, empathy, and intimacy. Love is a healing presence in our lives, and we experience its power when we allow ourselves to reach out.

5 Fellowship .. 67 Friendship .. 70 Bridging Two Worlds: Relationships Outside NA .. 73 Family .. 74 Being a Parent .. 76 Amends and Reconciliation .. 80 Romantic Relationships .. 81 What We Want .. 82 What We Ask For .. 84 The Courage to Trust .. 86 Conscious Contact .. 89 Chapter Six A New Way of Life .. 91 As we get some time in recovery, we get some time in the world as well. Social acceptability does not equal recovery, to be sure, but that doesn t mean they re mutually exclusive, either: For many of us it is something we must learn along the way. Our work habits and our beliefs about work, education, money, and stability change and grow as we stick around sometimes in surprising ways. Learning to deal with success and Table of Contents 5 Living Clean Approval Draft for Decision @ WSC 2012 failure, with risk and responsibility, with stability and change are all part of the process some of us call growing up in recovery.

6 Moving Beyond Social Acceptability .. 91 Finding Our Place in the World .. 93 Stability .. 96 Getting Out of Our Own Way .. 97 A Leap of Faith .. 100 Commitment .. 101 Education .. 102 Money .. 103 Work .. 106 Anonymity .. 108 The Gift of Hope .. 110 Chapter Seven The Journey Continues ..112 From the first time we find hope, we are in an ongoing process of spiritual awakening that can last our whole lives, if we are willing. Continuing to feel that our recovery is alive requires us to keep growing. Isolation and complacency hold us back from freedom in ways we may not even feel until we are stuck. Generosity of spirit is the antidote for loneliness and alienation. Being of service frees us into our own lives and opens us to the spirit of love that surrounds us. We experience unconditional hope and understand that there is no limit to how much better we can get.

7 No matter how far we have come, the journey continues. Awakenings .. 112 Living Our Principles .. 113 The Lifelong Practice of Surrender .. 115 Complacency .. 116 Setting Ourselves Apart .. 118 Keeping It Real .. 120 Being of Service .. 123 Principles, Practice, and Perspective .. 126 Love .. 128 6 Living Clean Approval Draft for Decision @ WSC 2012 7 Preface ur Basic Text assures us that more will be revealed, and our experience bears that out. More has been revealed in the years since those words were written, and more continues to be revealed every day that we live Clean and practice the principles of recovery. We grow as individuals, and we also grow and mature as a fellowship. As we learn from our experience, we pass on that knowledge. This means that each generation of newcomers has more resources available in NA than the one before.

8 Whether this strengthens or weakens us depends entirely on how well we understand our primary purpose and practice the principles of sharing, caring, and service. Our greatest treasure and resource is the depth of our personal knowledge of the recovery process. We share that treasure at meetings, at our celebrations, over coffee, and in our literature. Once again, we offer in written form as much as we can of our collective experience, strength, and hope. This book, written by addicts for addicts, is a snapshot of our fellowship: addicts in recovery who have helped each other face life on its own terms, without the use of drugs, for consecutive days, months, years, and decades. It is intended both as an offering to new members and to rekindle the passion of our oldtimers. It could not possibly contain all that our members know or believe, but it does reflect what we have been discovering and sharing since 1982, when our Basic Text was approved.

9 The first draft of a book titled Living Clean was created in 1983, but the history of this project goes back even further. As our Basic Text, Narcotics Anonymous , was being written, some of our members knew that it would not be our last word on the subject of Living the NA way. The versions that were created in 1983 and 1990 contained a lot of concrete advice, suggestions, and rules for how to get Clean and stay Clean . But most of us don t follow rules very well. Our experience is sometimes very different from what we wish were true about the process. We found that what we share in common are not the particular actions we take, but the principles we try to practice as we live. In the years that have followed, generations of addicts have gotten Clean and stayed Clean using the Basic Text as our guide, and that experience has given us a perspective on the principles of recovery unlike any other.

10 We knew from the beginning that we were describing a problem not related to any single substance, but a disease that, left untreated, would manifest in one symptom or another until it killed us. A focus on one symptom or substance is too narrow for us. Just as we understand that addiction affects all aspects of our lives, we can see that recovery affects everything we do. Our relationships with our families, our work, our spirituality even our own bodies are profoundly shaped by where we come from and the ways in which we address our disease. Just as the rewards of our recovery are often beyond our wildest dreams, we know that the impact of our recovery on our own lives and on those around us is beyond measure. We may never know the good we do just by staying Clean and Living a principled life to the best of our ability.