joy Archives - The Recovery Show

Feelings – Episode 169

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:16:59 — 35.3MB)

Have you ever felt controlled by your feelings? What feelings could you identify in the past? How do you balance feelings and facts?

Were you able to identify feelings (before recovery)?
What did you feel?
Did you feel?
Did you think that certain feelings were “good” and others were “bad”?
Did it seem you had to act on/react to your feelings?
How did you deny/push down/hide from feelings?
Have you heard the saying, “feelings are not facts”?
What does it mean to you?
How do you use it now?
Have you found a “feeling vocabulary” in recovery?
How do you respond to feelings now?
How are you able to feel, but act from your head?
How can you accept that you have feelings, and that they do not have to control your actions?
How have your feelings changed?
What slogans or tools help you to deal with how you feel?
- Let go and let God.
- This too shall pass.
- Just for today.
- One day at a time.
- Easy does it.
- First things first.
- Prayer and meditation.
- Inventory
How have you become more aware of and able to feel?

Please call us at 734-707-8795 or email feedback@therecoveryshow.com with your questions or experience, strength and hope. Or just leave a comment right here.
Continue reading “Feelings – Episode 169”

Joy, Fulfillment and Wonder – Episode 144

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:51 — 28.0MB)

Do you have joy in your life? Do you feel fulfilled? Are you finding these gifts in recovery? Or are you still waiting for them to come?

In this first episode in a series, we explore a “Gift of Al-Anon“.

We will become mature, responsible individuals with a great capacity for joy, fulfillment, and wonder. Though we may never be perfect, continued spiritual progress will reveal to us our enormous potential.

Spencer and Brooke explore how this gift is appearing in their lives, guided by these questions.

If you had read or heard this statement when you had just arrived in Al-Anon, what would you have thought of it?
- would you have made sense of it at all?
- would you have believed it could be true for you?
- Did parts of that statement seem true already? Which parts and why?
As you have traveled your recovery path, how has your understanding of this statement changed?
- Are there parts you thought were true that you came to see were not true?
- Did parts of it start to make sense?
- Did you find a deeper understanding of parts of it?
- Did you see that this was true of others in the program, and come to want it for yourself?
How do you see this gift coming true in your life today?
What progress do you still look forward to?
What would you say to a newcomer who can’t believe this could ever come true in their own life?

Upcoming topics include recovery in divorce. Please call us at 734-707-8795 or email feedback@therecoveryshow.com with your questions or experience, strength and hope. Or just leave a comment right here.
Continue reading “Joy, Fulfillment and Wonder – Episode 144”

Laughter – Episode 121

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:23:37 — 38.3MB)

When you came to your first meeting, were people laughing? How did that make you feel? How do you use laughter in your recovery today?

When (under what circumstances) did you laugh before program?
When and how did you laugh as a child?
How did that change as you grew older?
How did that change as you were affected by alcoholism/addiction?
Could you laugh at yourself then? … about your pain? … about your foibles and shortcomings?
How did you feel when you first heard laughter in an Al-Anon meeting?
How has recovery changed the way you laugh? Why you laugh?
Can you laugh about your pain? … about your shortcomings?
How do you see laughter as a healing force?
What have you learned about laughter in recovery?

Upcoming topics include Al-Anon dreams, and imperfection. Please call us at 734-707-8795 or email feedback@therecoveryshow.com with your questions or experience, strength and hope. Or just leave a comment right here.
Continue reading “Laughter – Episode 121”

Tapestry – a meditation

Tapestry

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Carole King — Tapestry

When I look back at my life so far, it has truly been a tapestry. The path I have taken, the experiences I have had, the troubles I have gotten through, and the growth I have experienced are not anything like I envisioned my life when I was young. The reality of my experience is infinitely richer than my imagined future. I have lived in forest and desert, in hot and cold, in city and country, and in cultures familiar and exotic. I have had happiness and despair, love and anger, accomplishment and frustration. I have known the ecstasy of love, the agony of desertion, the despair of illness, and the joy of reconciliation. I have started new phases of my life with anticipation and wonder, had them ended with rejection and disillusion. All of these are threads in my tapestry. All throughout, binding those threads together, are the people who are in, and have been in, my life. People who celebrated with me in triumph and joy, people who held me in sadness and grief, people who taught me how to live life, people whose example showed me how I could survive my troubles, and most of all, people who loved me for who I was.

Are there things in my life I would rather not have experienced? Yes! But they are part of my tapestry, and it would be the poorer for their lack. Today, I will celebrate the tapestry that is my life. I look forward to what “wondrous woven magic” the future will bring to it.

A meditation for October 4, 2013.

Continue reading “Tapestry – a meditation”