Recovery Meeting Shares

Tonight’s topic was recovery and release, one of the open ones where the chair shares a little of his own experience and then hands it to the room. It felt different than most topics, harder to get a grip on right away. Nobody spoke up for a while. I think a lot of us…

Tonight’s reading was from the Twelve and Twelve, page 35, on the third step. Someone else was reading it out loud, and one phrase stopped me. It said the alcoholic has already shown his willingness to give his life over to the program, because of what it called the foundering vessel he has become.…

Tonight’s reading was from page 23 of the Big Book, on the obsession of the mind. It used the image of a man complaining about a headache who responds by banging himself over the head, trying to cure the very thing he’s causing. I sat with that for most of the hour, turning it…

Tonight the daily reflection was called “A Design for Living,” pulled from page 28 of the Big Book. Before I even got to sharing, one phrase in it caught me: “we sought the same escape with all the desperation of drowning men. What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proved to be the…

Tonight the topic at the meeting was self-reliance. It came from the reading at the start, and it stuck with me enough that I wanted to share. I sat there calmly and started to express myself, speaking clearly and loud enough for the whole room to hear, in hopes that sharing my experience, strength,…

I want to start this blog the way I actually started thinking about it: at a beginners meeting on a Monday night, listening to someone read from How It Works. It’s usual for our chair to run that meeting a certain way. He has someone read a passage out loud, a little at a…