This morning a guy chewed me out at work. He tore into me about the problems he was having with the service my employer provides. I caught myself beginning to react emotionally to his verbal assault. I was starting to breathe hard, have difficulty thinking and to get angry. I paused and sought power and spiritual focus. I was able to record fairly precisely what he said and to just deflect his verbal blows. After I got him off the phone I asked God for releief and I was able to take the next right action.

Everything turned out ok, my boss was able to resolve it and the guy apologized.

I pray now that I can not just think of myself but to genuinely forgive another human being.

This was the third day of the roughest time of the year at work and I am again grateful for good employment.

I got to go to the noon meeting. As we finished the story we are on I realized that it related to the issue I had been pondering about the more sordid details of my story. The story details a life that started with an abusive childhood and detailed a very low bottom life. We started the next story and it detailed a very different beginning of a great childhood, religious life and success. It did end in a low bottom.

It made me realize that our spiritual sickness is not necessarily because of the bad things that happened to us. So therefore the focus must be on our condition not the circumstantial causes.

We have a physical allergy and a spiritual malady.

The spiritual malady comes from being disconnected from God.

How much we drank, how low we went, what abuse we suffered doesn't matter near as much as the description of the feelings of being spiritually vacant.

Tonight I went to a speaker meeting. I probably wouldn't have gone if I would have remembered it was a speaker. I am grateful that I went. The speaker gives a great face to CA.

She shared a very sordid story with a lot of abuse early in childhood. That didn't matter. What was good was that she balanced what happened, with what it was like and what it is like now. She had a solution to share. Even though she is going through some personal difficulty and was very distracted and she felt like whe was not on top of her game, she did a great job. I can tell that she has better in her, but it didn't matter because she is focused on the principles.

Even when our personality falls short, the principles come through if we are living them.

I had another one of those "WHOA" moments when I ran into another hard core dude from the old hood. He recognized me, we talked and knew some mutual acquaintances but I didn't realize WHO he was until he told me his name. He seemed alot more open minded than I would have expected.

I began to think that it is good for us addicts to hear the hard core stories. I guess the experiences can be categorized in high bottom, hard core and low bottom. I have more than one experience to share.