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JFT August 13 Difficult people
(Preview)
"By giving unconditional love...we become more loving, and by sharing spiritual growth we become more spiritual." Basic Text, p.103=Most of us have one or two exceptionally difficult people in our lives. How do we deal with such a person in our recovery?First, we take our own inventory. Have we w...
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JFT August 11 Active listening
(Preview)
"Through active listening, we hear things that work for us." Basic Text, pp. 106-107=Most of us arrived in Narcotics Anonymous with a very poor ability to listen. But to take full advantage of the therapeutic value of one addict helping another, we must learn to listen actively.What is active list...
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JFT August 10 Regular prayer and meditation
(Preview)
Most of us pray when we are hurting. We learn that if we pray regularly, we wont be hurting as often or as intensely. Basic Text, p. 44 = Regular prayer and meditation are two more key elements in our new pattern of living. Our active addiction was more than just a bad habit waiting to be broken by force...
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JFT August 9 The power of love
(Preview)
August 9 The Power of love "We begin to see that God's love has been present all the time, just waiting for us to accept it." Basic Text, p. 46 = God's love is the transforming power that drives our recovery. With that love, we find freedom from the hopeless, desperate cycle of using, self-ha...
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JFT August 8 Responsible recovery
(Preview)
August 8 Responsible recovery...we accept responsibility for our problems and see that were equally responsible for our solutions. Basic Text, p. 94 = Some of us, well accustomed to leaving our personal responsibilities to others, may attempt the same behavior in recovery. We quickly find out i...
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JFT August 7 The gratitude list
(Preview)
August 7 The gratitude listWe focus on anything that isnt going our way and ignore all the beauty in our lives. Basic Text, p. 77 = Its easy to be grateful when everything runs smoothly. If we get a raise at work, were grateful. If we get married, were grateful. If someone surprises us with a nice prese...
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JFT August 6 The joy within
(Preview)
"Since the beginning of our recovery, we have found that joy doesn't come from material things but from within ourselves."Basic Text, p. 107=Some of us came to Narcotics Anonymous impoverished by our disease. Everything we'd owned had been lost to our addiction. Once we got clean, we put all our e...
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JFT July 15 Relations with others
(Preview)
"We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all." Step Eight=All human beings struggle with self-centeredness. The chronic self-centeredness that lies at the very core of addiction makes that struggle doubly difficult for people like us. Many of us have l...
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Clean B-day
(Preview)
Another trip around the sun, very blessed and grateful to be here and be clean. Thanks for keeping the light on for me. 
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JFT August 5 The shape of our thoughts
(Preview)
By shaping our thoughts with spiritual ideals, we are freed to become who we want to be.Basic Text, p. 105=Addiction shaped our thoughts in its own way. Whatever their shape may once have been, they became misshapen once our disease took full sway over our lives. Our obsession with drugs and self...
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JFT August 4 When is a secret not a secret?
(Preview)
"Addicts tend to live secret lives...It is a great relief to get rid of all our secrets and to share the burden of our past."Basic Text, p. 33 = We've heard it said that "were as sick as our secrets." What do we keep secret, and why? We keep secret those things that cause us shame. We may hold onto s...
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JFT August 2 Practicing honesty
(Preview)
"When we feel trapped or pressured, it takes great spiritual and emotional strength to be honest." Basic Text, p. 81 = Many of us try to wiggle out of a difficult spot by being dishonest, only to have to humble ourselves later and tell the truth. Some of us twist our stories as a matter of co...
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JFT August 1 Freedom from guilt
(Preview)
"Our addiction enslaved us. We were prisoners of our own mind and were condemned by our own guilt."Basic Text, p. 7=Guilt is one of the most commonly encountered stumbling blocks in recovery. One of the more notorious forms of guilt is the self-loathing that results when we try to forgive ourselve...
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JFT July 31 Freedom from active addiction
(Preview)
"Narcotics Anonymous offers only one promise and that is freedom from active addiction, the solution that eluded us for so long." Basic Text, p. 106 = NA offers no promises other than freedom from active addiction. It is true that some of our members meet with financial success in recovery....
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JFT July 30 Regular inventory
(Preview)
"Continuing to take a personal inventory means that we form a habit of looking at ourselves, our actions, attitudes, and relationships on a regular basis."Basic Text, p. 42=Taking a regular inventory is a key element in our new pattern of living. In our addiction, we examined ourselves as littl...
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JFT July 29 Expectations
(Preview)
"As we realize our need to be forgiven, we tend to be more forgiving."Basic Text, p. 39=Our behavior toward other people in our life is a mirror of our behavior toward ourselves. When we demand perfection of ourselves, we come to demand it from others around us, too. As we strive to repair and heal our...
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JFT July 28 Secrets and Intimacy
(Preview)
"We feared that if we ever revealed ourselves as we were, we would surely be rejected."Basic Text, p. 32=Having relationships without barriers, ones in which we can be entirely open with our feelings, is something many of us desire. At the same time, the possibility of such intimacy causes us more f...
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JFT July 27 We do recover
(Preview)
"After coming to NA, we found ourselves among a very special group of people who have suffered like us and found recovery. In their experiences, freely shared, we found hope for ourselves. If the program worked for them, it would work for us." Basic Text, p. 10 = A newcomer walks into his or he...
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JFT July 26 Unconditional surrender
(Preview)
"Help for addicts begins only when we are able to admit complete defeat. This can be frightening, but it is the foundation on which we have built our lives."Basic Text, p. 22=Most of us have tried everything we can think of, exerted every ounce of force possible, to fill the spiritual hole inside us. ...
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JFT July 25 Twelve step failure?
(Preview)
"Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs."Step Twelve=There is no such thing as a failed Twelfth Step call. Even if our prospect doesn't get clean, we have accomplished two purposes. ...
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JFT July 24 The masks have to go
(Preview)
"...we covered low self-esteem by hiding behind phony images that we hoped would fool people. The masks have to go."Basic Text, p. 33=Over-sensitivity, insecurity, and lack of identity are often associated with active addiction. Many of us carry these with us into recovery; our fears of inadequ...
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JFT July 23 Surrendering self-will
(Preview)
"We want and demand that things always go our way. We should know from our past experience that our way of doing things did not work."Basic Text, p. 93=All of us have ideas, plans, goals for our lives. There's nothing in the NA program that says we shouldn't think for ourselves, take initiative, and p...
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JFT July 22 Spiritual death
(Preview)
"For us, to use is to die, often in more ways than one."Basic Text, p. 82=As newcomers, many of us came to our first meeting with only a small spark of life remaining. That spark, our spirit, wants to survive. Narcotics Anonymous nurtures that spirit. The love of the fellowship quickly fans that sp...
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JFT July 21 Surrender is for everyone
(Preview)
"If, after a period of time, we find ourselves in trouble with our recovery, we have probably stopped doing one or more of the things that helped us in the earlier stages of our recovery."Basic Text, p. 95=Surrender is just for newcomers, right? Wrong!After we've been around awhile, some of us succu...
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JFT July 20 Step One
(Preview)
We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable. Step One = The First Step begins with we, and theres a reason for that. There is great strength in making a verbal admission of our powerlessness. And when we go to meetings and make this admission, we ga...
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JFT July 18 The gift of desperation
(Preview)
"Our disease always resurfaced or continued to progress until, in desperation, we sought help from each other in Narcotics Anonymous." Basic Text, p. 13=When we think of being desperate, we envision an undesirable state: a poor, bedraggled soul frantically clawing at something sorely needed, a...
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JFT July 19 Fulfilling our dreams
(Preview)
"Dreams that we gave up long ago can now become realities." Basic Text, p. 71 = All things begin with a dream. But how many of us fulfilled our dreams while using? Even if we managed to complete something we had started, our addiction usually robbed us of any pride in our accomplishment....
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JFT July 17 Using our using dreams
(Preview)
"Do we fully accept the fact that our every attempt to stop using or to control our using failed?"Basic Text, p. 19=The room is dark. Your forehead is bathed in cold sweat. Your heart is racing. You open your eyes, sure that you've just blown your clean time. You've had a using dream, and it was just l...
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JFT July 16 Self-esteem
(Preview)
"Deep inside, I had feelings of inadequacy and inferiority." Somewhere along the way, many of us developed strong feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. Deep inside was a voice that continually cried out, "You're worthless!" Many of us learn to recognize this characteristic of low self-es...
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JFT July 14 An inside job
(Preview)
"Social acceptability does not equal recovery."Basic Text, p. 22=One of the first things that happens to many of us in recovery is that we start to look better. We get healthier; we bathe; we dress more appropriately. And without the goading of active addiction, many of us finally stop stealing, l...
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