"Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results."
Basic Text, p. 23
Mistakes! We all know how it feels to make them. Many of us feel that our entire lives have been a mistake. We often regard our mistakes with shame or guilt-at the very least, with frustration and impatience. We tend to see mistakes as evidence that we are still sick, crazy, stupid, or too damaged to recover.
In truth, mistakes are a very vital and important part of being human. For particularly stubborn people (such as addicts), mistakes are often our best teachers. There is no shame in making mistakes. In fact, making new mistakes often shows our willingness to take risks and grow.
It's helpful, though, if we learn from our mistakes; repeating the same ones may be a sign that we're stuck. And expecting different results from the same old mistakes-well, that's what we call "insanity." It just doesn't work.
Just for Today: Mistakes aren't tragedies. But please, Higher Power, help me learn from them!
Yes and then we get to an even more excelerated stage"we do the same things over again and "know" what the results will be" CAUGHT IN THE GRIP AND CAN'T GET OUT! Only by the grace of God!
__________________
Our purpose is to remain clean,just for today,and to carry the message of recovery.
YEP and when begin to live on a spiritual basis which changes the way we behave and even the way we feel, when we become less self centered and become selfless ( not easy) then the mistakes become less frequent, notice I didnt say we STOP making mistakes because we're human beings not Gods, but we can choose to be God like
well put Vini, in fact, if I take off my own build-up about 'spirituality' and the distant high pedestal that I place spiritual principles on, and just try to apply the Steps in my daily life and situations, I realize that it's simple, as simple and normal to be spiritual as eating and sleeping. It's just me, an addict in denial, who has the tendency to make it all sound so difficult that I get a permission to not have to apply them... lol... staying comfortably in justified sickness is more appealing to this addict.
At times, I feel newcomers are better off with their denial, they only deny that using could be a problem for them. Over a few years in recovery, the kind of denial I get into, about the spiritual nature of this program and what's possible with this Program's help, I just dismiss it off altogether saying things like "I'm only human... spirituality is only for Jesus, Gandhi and Buddha, not for me..." stuff like that!
That's when I have to remind myself "There's one thing more than anything else that will defeat me in my recovery, and that is an attitude of indifference and intolerance towards spiritual principles."
Often, when I read NA literature or hear something spiritual at a meeting, if I find myself in discomfort, I know that my dis-ease is active
