"As we recover, we gain a new outlook on being clean.... Life can become a new adventure for us."
Basic Text, p. 91
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The using life is not a clean one--no one knows this better than we do. Some of us lived in physical squalor, caring neither for our surroundings nor ourselves. Worse, though, than any external filth was the way most of us felt inside. The things we did to get our drugs, the way we treated other people, and the way we treated ourselves had us feeling dirty. Many of us recall waking too many mornings just wishing that, for once, we could feel clean about ourselves and our lives.
Today, we have a chance to feel clean by living clean. For us addicts, living clean starts with not using-after all, that's our primary use for the word "clean" in Narcotics Anonymous. But as we stay "clean" and work the Twelve Steps, we discover another kind of clean. It's the clean that comes from admitting the truth about our addiction rather than hiding or denying our disease. It's the freshness that comes from owning up to our wrongs and making amends for them. It's the vitality that comes from the new set of values we develop as we seek a Higher Power's will for us. When we practice the principles of our program in all our affairs, we have no reason to feel dirty about our lives or our lifestyleswe're living clean, and are grateful to be doing so at last.
"Clean living" used to be just for the "squares." Today, living clean is the only way we'd have it.
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Just for today: I feel clean because I'm living clean-and that's the way I want to keep it.
The new life for me of living clean is amazing,I see all the things I missed while using.I have my family back.Me and my son both found NA in the same year , only two and a half months apart.I don' have to hide my problem anymore.I speak at a tech school to future substance abuse councillors,it was my first speaking thing I did.It had a healing feeling for me .I always want to be clean , no matter what .
