Unity

Awesome Unity Day. South Coast Beautiful coastline ride, deep friendship and soulful fellow shipping. Everyone welcome. The Doors will never get thinner. Make the decision. Get on the recovery road. Rain hail or shine. Clean or using . Connect to the love, to the Hope, to the Spirit of recovery. Externally grateful. Keep what you have by giving it away.  Central Coast next stop. Those who get around stay around. Movember Day 18❤️🚀🏅🙏

Spiritual Ramblings of a Troubadour. Movember Day 16

MOvember Day 16. Spiritual song for those that are struggling.

Spiritual Ramblings of a Troubadour.

I have found the spiritual side of recovery a challenge the more I have travelled down its road. In the early days the choice was simple. I don't trust people, I certainly could not trust myself ( my best thinking had got me to a Crazy hospital!) so I actually thought there has to be a God, cause I knew I needed a miracle

So I just started praying. I didn't really know what to. In my desperation I was told to keep it simple, that spirituality had to be practical to a recovery addict , so I would read a reading on waking, journal, then after breakfast read the first three steps in the Basic Text to remind myself of the H.O.W. of recovery.

Honest to Self

Honest To Others ( who can help you)

Honest to GOD

Open Minded to self

Open Minded to others(who can help you)

Open Minded to GOD

Willingness to self

Willingness to Others ( who can help you)

Willingness to God

It was a challenge , but I had to practice not being in charge and that I had to hand my will and my life, My problems (Life) and my way of wanting it all fixed (my will).

I have always like the acronym G. (good) O. (orderly) D. (direction). When ever I was not sure what Gods will for me was I headed in what seemed the most Good Orderly Direction, which was always away from Drugs, and the people , places and things associated with them, and towards Recovery, and the the People- Places and Things associated with that.

The road at times has been confusing, sometimes rough, sometimes dark and sometimes delightful.

I have been baptised twice in recovery, the second time by Greg Hirst from the Brotherhood MC, in the ocean at Stanwell Park in the middle of winter. I will never forget it. I then went wide after a few years, tried Shamanism and we smoked Pipe and sweated and prayed and sang, here and in the USA.

Chanting and drumming at Sedona at sunrise with Annie Whitefeather who taught me as a student for years will always stay with me.

Then there was the Sai Baba years. Going to Puttaparthi, touching his feet, darshan every day form 3am, its like a dream now. I have left Baba behind but met my beautiful friends and Mavericks God parents Gary Poulton and Suzy Corcoran at a Sai Baba center in the Blue Mountains and we have been friends for Life, It was a wonderful time sunday mornings singing Bhajans with them.

Narcotics Anonymous though has always been the foundation fr my spirituality. I have never left its rooms i 30 years. It's openess for it's memebers to have a God of your own understanding has been a God Send ( pardon the pun) . Even though my understanding has changed at times, the way I used the power in fueling the 12 steps has not.

It was helpful for me though to learn Pia Mellody's Developmental Trauma model as I have been in many a spiritual Crisis. At times losing my sense of self, my sense of direction in life. Experienced mainly as indecisiveness and confusion. Pia states that when we experience trauma, we feel bad and flawed ( Implicit memory-timeless sense of dread that things will to be ok) and we cover it up with defense mechanisms and cognitive distortion and to try and act better than, Good and Perfect, or Rebellious like it doesn't matter. These two extremes lived out lead to spiritual crisis , and this spiritual crisis leads to Dishonesty , to self, others, and disconnects us from our center, the source of our intuition, which Neville Goddard states is the voice of and the doorway to God. It is no wonder then , folks like myself have found ourselves in spiritual crisis often and struggling to connect with the God stuff.

Learning to regualte, working through the trauma at a sub cortical level, has made it possible to mediatae more( some trauma survivors get to triggered doing seated mIndfulness and meditation-triggers trauma), be in my body, journal, hear that inner voice and get direction.

This post is for Movember. The song connected to it I wrote and recorded in Hendersonville Texas, just outside of San Antonio. It will always be my second home. It will always be a second home to me. Tommy Detamore engineered and produced. Texas Christian man. I rang him from Colorado, after we had finished our tour, to say we are on our way to record the album, and to check if everything was ok. He told me no it wasn't. The night before, his studio had burnt to the ground. The only thing he had left was a banjo, and he didn't play banjo!.I said I was so sorry to hear this, and that if he could find us somewhere else to record I wanted him to get the money at least for recording the album. He said leave it with me. The next day Christian country singer Bobby Flores, kindly let us use his studio, for the same fee, and they though in another engineer to boot ( I asked him what his highlights were as an engineer, and he said he had worked on We are The World). It was truly a miracle and something I will always be eternally grateful for..

I bought myself a triumph Speedmaster a year ago, and stated after 20 years heading back to the Brotherhood MC, for spiritual counsel. The men and women there have continued their tireless good works for others.I am and always have been inspired by people who live the spiritual principles that they say that they believe in. That's what I love about NA.

Recently I had the intuition to ask Pastor at the Brotherhood Grant Howard to be a spiritual advisor.I have been thinking about it, but doing nothing about it for a month. Then as God would have it , I came across him walking down a lane near my work, and the synchronicity and serendipity of it all was to much of a sign. I said what I had been thinking and he told me that he had been praying for me for a while , and that he had felt I was lost and needed grounding,that he had been speaking to Hirsty (President and Minister at the Brotherhood MC) and his prayers were for how to help me.

I felt I had fallen into a common spiritual trap. Putting God down the food chain. I had work at the top, then family, then myself, and friends and others behind that. It led me to another spiritual crisis. He reminded me that its crucial that God ( recovery) needs to be first, then Family, then work, and then friends and other commitments.

I am know in the process and re arranging the priorities. Thank God or the Angles that are placed in our life at just the right time when we need them.

GOD,

Grant me the serenity,

to accept the things I cannot Change,

The Courage to change the things I can,

and the Wisdom to know the difference.

https://youtu.be/6123WNGGGQE