Once again I have a cold. This morning 10 minutes before rising I felt so bad that I didn't think I was going anywhere today. I had to abbreviate my prayers today. I am grateful to have this worked out and that I did get to make take my youngest daughter to school and make it to my first class.

We got to talk about isolation, loneliness, and solitude today. The professor introduced us to the existential approach to psychotherapy. This approach resonated greatly with me. I was immediately taken with the idea of a common set of givens of existence: Freedom, Death, Isolation and Meaning.

After class I fell into a great deal of discomfort and felt distressed. I stopped at the bookstore but was in so much physical discomfort that I had to leave. When I got home I thought that there was no way that I was going anywhere else the rest of the day. I ate some chicken soup and drank a 7 up, took some medicine and went to bed.

Amazingly I felt better later and made it to my afternoon class.

I got to go to a meeting tonight. I got to connect with some friends that I have been missing lately. Our topic was about spiritual fitness and the psychic change that comes with this work. I thought about when it happened for me. About how I had gotten sober many times and struggled through months of fighting off the obsession to drink and/or use every day like clockwork. This was a monkey on my back that I took as a given. But when I began the 12 step process and had begun the personal inventory, at about 35 days clean, I noticed that the obsession had not come that day. Then a little while later I couldn’t remember the last day that this happened. I also had begun to experience an entire paradigm shift in my life struggles. This was astonishing to me because I had never experienced this type of sobriety.

Thanks be to God.