hi family and friends, today i went to a nooners meeting of NA and we used the Just for Todays meditation for our topic. we have all heard that we will love you until you can learn to love yourself. we come into Recovery, lost, broken, downhearted, low self esteem, addictions, and so much more baggage that we feel that we can never be repaired. but rest assured we can. with the love of the fellowship, it's members,God and our sponsors we can truly find a new way to live.

we learn to live in our beat up bodies chemically free, we build on our own spirituality, we work the 12 steps with vigorous honesty and things start to change. our outlook on life starts to change. we realize that we have a disease. that disease is addiction. yes it can become arrested but we will never be cured. that is great as we grow in our everyday lives. you have to think that our minds have not developed since the day we started using. we think they have but if you look back on all the years we used it truly did not grow because all we had to look forward to was our next fix. we did not care about anything else. using was our lives. i truly did not grow up until i was 34 years old. but for me it was time. i suffered from the Peter Pan syndrome I never wanted to grow up.

Now we belong to a select group of people who we call family today. our recovery friends are just that family. we are a mixed bag of people, people who hold high paying jobs, people who are Dr.'s, Lawyers, Sales people, Radio Announcers (me), Pilots, Nurses and so many more diverse backgrounds. but we are all here for the same thing. seeking Recovery. a way out of our former miserable existance so we can become the person our parents wanted us to be, the person that God meant us to be. The person that we truly want to be.

we all have Egos. me being a guitar player and lead singer in rock bands for over 25 years and a radio announcer for over 35 years had a huge Ego. in fact i was the biggest egotistical asshole you ever wanted to meet. but E.G.O. stands for Edging God Out. unforetunatly i am still an asshole but that comes with age. today we can check our egos at the door and attend meetings with an open mind. we go to NA lengths to change who and what we were into who we truly want to be.

I wish you all nothing but the best in your journey through recovery. whether you have 4 days or 40 years F#@K keep coming back….Just Stay.

NA hugs,

JJ