Sober Blog

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” Saint Augustine

1. Admit you are powerless over Christmas, and that your life has become unmanageable.
1. Believe that a power greater than consumer credit can restore you to sanity.
3. Decide to turn your will and life over to Santa as you understand him.
4. Make a searching and fearless inventory of yoru material desires.
5. Admit to Santa, to yourself and to another human being the exaxt nature of your size, color preferences, and taste in furniture.
6. Allow Santa to remedy all defects of bank account.
7. Humbly ask Santa to pay off your mortgage.
8. Make a list of everything you want, and be willint to read the instruction manuals.
9. Cite model numbers and retail locations wherever possible, except when doing tso would require an internet search.
10. Continue to take personal inventory, and when you think of something else you need, add it to the list.
11. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve your conscious contact with Santa as you understand him, praying only for knowledge of his gifts fo ryou and the power to open them quickly.
12. Having had a spiritual awakeing as the result of these steps, carry Santa’s message to friends and family every Christmas.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” Buddha

Before you say or do anything, ask yourself the four letter word…

Will it help or hurt?

Purchase Glucophage

Fess Up

Look Up

Clean Up

Pay Up

Keep it Up

     Last year, 4.3 billion of us humans were taken off the surface of the planet at one place, transported about six miles up into the atmosphere for several hours, then taken back down again at another place. We went willingly, and, for the most part, we enjoyed the experience.

Alien spacecraft did not abduct us. We took trips in airplanes.

That statistic from the Federal Aviation Administration – more than thiree-fourths of the human race up in the air – may be difficult to get our minds around. Even allowing for the fact that one person could have made two or three or a dozen trips in airplanes in that twelve-month period, the number is still staggering – and meaningful.

All travel is, ultimately, inner travel – all the travel we do in the outer world is really a metaphor for the travel that we are doing at the same time inside ourselves. Every journey we undertake in the world outside ourselves is also an inner journey into the deepest parts of our psyches, our hearts, and our souls.

Given that all travel is a journey within, it is encouraging that so many of our human family are leaving the comfort zones of home – our present state of awareness – and venturing out and into the wild blue yonder: the hidden, yet undiscovered parts of ourselves.

Making a journey is always about going from where we are now, to another place, a higher realm of consciousness. Seen this way, all our travel has a spiritual character – and all our travel is sacred.

So, as a species we appear to be embarked on a spiritual quest of vast and unprecedented proportions, searching for the “stranger” – us, undiscovered – at the most profound levels of our individual being.

Looking at travel as a spiritual experience is not new. As far back as we have recorded stories, heroes have left their homeland to perform some mighty feat or find some lost treasure. Pilgrims, too, have left home on journeys of faith, and their tales have become the subject of great literature. Sages and spiritual leaders have compared life to a journey, and have likened us to travelers along a path to higher consciousness.

We are the hero of every journey we take, and all of our journeys are spiritual forays into the unexplored center of our being. Every time we go there, we have the opportunity to bring back the great prize – for the hero it might have been the head of the Medusa or the Golden Fleece or the Holy Grail, for us it is self-knowledge, self-awareness.

Once we begin to see travel as an inner journey, it’s possible to turn every trip we take into a spiritual practice – a hero’s adventure that enlivens our hearts and enlarges our souls.

   For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.  For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.  For beautiful hair, let a child run his/her fingers through it once a day. For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone. People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms.  As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself, and the other for helping others.

Liz B., 55 years, who will be speaking on the Halloween Gratitude Cruise 2008  announced recently to some friends that it was wonderful that she was getting to speak on cruise ships now this late in life. When asked if she was walking on water yet, she replied "Yes, because I know where the rocks are! The Twelve Steps!"

Gotta love those old timers!

"When he can look out upon the universe, now lucid and lovely, now dark and terrible, with a sense of his own littleness in the great scheme of things, and yet have faith and courage. When he knows how to make friends and keep them, and above all, when he can keep friends with himself.

When he can be happy alone and high-minded amid the drudgeries of life. When he can look into a wayside puddle and see something besides mud, and into the face of the most forlorn mortal an see something divine.

When he knows how to live, how to love, how to hope, how to pray—is glad to live…and has in his heart a bit of a song."   Joseph Fort Newton