I know it that I hate it when I find a recovery blog that I like and then the blogger just seems to disappear. Assuming there are those out there that have found my recovery blog helpful, I apologize for how I've been neglecting this blog. My recovery is still center most in my daily life and practice, I've simply not had time to regularly maintain this site.
Brief catch up: my son Pat celebrated 12 years clean yesterday and I still trail him by 5 months and 10 days. He will celebrate his 28th birthday in June with his one year old daughter (Harriet Charles.... the Charles is after me: I'm formerly Charles Michael L) and will be getting married to Harriet's mother in September. My oldest had her second child a few months ago: West Oliver Michael....yes, I'm one of the inspirations for Michael). My youngest is still going thru her grieving process following the loss of her first baby, Oliver, just over a year ago -- but she is also 25+ weeks into the process of carrying her second child, a boy like his brother), into this amazing and unpredictable world. And my "future ex-wife" and I celebrated 32 years of marriage last March. All's well with family.
My recovery is also doing well. Still going to average of 10 meetings or more a week. Actively sponsoring about 10 guys and meet with them any where from once every two weeks to once a month -- and I approach sponsorship pretty much as outlined in the wonderful AA pamphlet, Questions and Answers About Sponsorship). I still practice meditation via memorization and recitation while I commute 65 miles to/from work each day.
The only thing new that I've added to my daily practice of recovery is the commitment to a daily gratitude list. For over four months now, I have been consistent in writing a daily gratitude list: 10 things that I am grateful for in my life and, if needed, 3-5 short things that I am simply not grateful for --- yet. While I had developed a general habit of gratitude over the last 11years of recovery, I had never done an actual written and daily gratitude list. I had periodically suggested it for sponsees (with the appropriate disclaimer that this was not how I had developed the habit of gratitude -- I'd done it differently -- of course!) but had never done it myself.
Back in December of last year, I had a sponsee who was in a deep suicidal depression and in addition to suggesting therapy and much else...) I suggested he write a daily gratitude list as outlined above: every day for the thirty days it would hopefully take to morph this practice into a habit of gratitude. But he just couldn't do it. After several weeks of getting no where, I broke down and committed to doing my own daily gratitude list every day for 30 days. For some reason, that got him over the hump of unwantingness. But, more importantly, my life was changed dramatically as a result of writing this list, by sharing it with him and by him sharing it with me every day.
After the thirty days, we both ended the daily practice. It was wildly successful -- and we stopped doing it! With the next two weeks, I got into two huge and painful arguments with my closer to being "future ex-wife" when I noticed the nexus between the arguments and my premature termination of the daily gratitude list. I immediately resumed the practice and also began extending the number of people who decided to join me in this daily practice: something along the lines of gratitude shared us gratitude doubled. And tripled and so on.
Eventually, I ended up just setting up a new blogsite called AA Gratitude Project. Access is open only to those I invite to join. Once a member, each time someone posts or comments on a gratitude list, an email automatically goes out to all members with the list or comment included. In additition, there's an email address where members can email their gratitude list and have it automatically posted to the site without having to login. The only technical requirement to register with this blogspot.com site, the member has to have a gmail.com email account. That account is required only to login to the blog, the email notifications can go to you primary personal email account of any type.
The only membership requirement is that the person has a desire to develop a deeper sense or habit of gratitude. Members are currently all recovering alcoholics, men and women -- but I won't deny someone access simply because they are lucky enough to be a recovering alcoholic.
So. If any of my recovery blog friends would like to join us on this AA Gratitude Project, please send me an email (mikelrecovery@gmail.com) with your email address. You'll need to setup a gmail account on Google's site but I don't need to know anything about that. Once I set you up as an Author, you'll get an email with instructions on how to access and register on the site. I'll send you an email with further directions and you'll be welcome to participate as you wish. I'll reserve the right to remove someone's membership if I deem your continued participation to be harmful to the group's well being (now I'm not grateful that I have a law degree and work for lawyers!).
Take care!
Mike L.
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