One Day at a Time in Everything

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One day at a time is an awfully powerful concept. For us compulsive eaters, it means that we can only behave abstinently today, in this 24 hours. The past is done, tomorrow isn’t here yet. Which further means that we don’t need to worry about our abstinence in any moment but this one. And with our Higher Power’s help, we don’t worry, we just do.

But as we work this program of spiritual action, we come to find out that one day at a time works in every aspect of our lives. For example, if we have 100 pounds to lose, it won’t come off in one day, so today all we can do is eat abstinently and let the weight fall away in its due course. We may have fear of financial insecurity. But that next paycheck isn’t coming for two weeks, so if we can’t pay our bills until then, we ask God how to manage what we have today. Illness in our family? We can’t spend our time worrying about if someone will get better tomorrow when they need us today.

We must stay centered on today. Today, today, today!

Many of us worry about tomorrow because we’re afraid it will look like yesterday. We’re afraid of a rerun of prior events, so we skip right over today and project the past into the future. When we do this, we’re forgetting that our Higher Power is available to us, not only for soothing our fears but also for giving us strength and courage to do differently than we have before.

In some spiritual traditions, we are told explicitly that everything is always in motion, forever changing…sometimes rapidly, sometimes imperceptibly. In ourselves, we sometimes don’t see this. When we are out there eating, we might confuse hopelessness with unchangingness. In fact, we are changing into increasingly sick people. Our disease is always getting worse, never better. This is the progressive nature of our disease.

But when we enter the halls of OA, our hopelessness is eased and then removed. We see amazing personal transformations that show us how the steps and a relationship with a Higher Power upend our well worn idea that we can’t change toward the positive. Of course we can, but because of our disease, we can only do it with help from our fellows and the God of our understanding. This is where the idea of constant change, one day at a time, becomes our friendly companion. We progress each day that we practice the OA program, and when we understand this more fully, we get more and more hope. And eventually that hope itself changes into certainty. A certainty that there is a solution and that it works when we work it.

Sometimes we see the idea of one day at a time play out in less spiritual places in our world. For example, how many times do we hear a ballplayer say something like, “I’m just trying to take it one day at a time and stay focused on today’s game.” We especially hear this when they are asked about whether their team will make the playoffs or what they think about their own hot or cold streak. Keeping focus on what’s important (today, doing the work that needs done to stay on top, letting go of what’s outside our control) are the hallmarks of smart athletes and of strong OA programs.

This idea even plays out in popular culture. A certain famous, small green space person once said two things that resonate with the idea of one day at a time:

  1. “The future always in motion is.”
  2. “All his life he looked away…to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was…. What he was doing.”

While these are certainly not OA approved literature, they point out again that the world out there is also aware that we human beings have a tendency to forget that we change, others change, everything changes. That what we see one way this Saturday, we may see differently the next. That our enemy today may be our friend next month. That as we look toward the future in eagerness or fear, we forget ourselves and our Higher Powers now and become susceptible to the temptations that wreck us today because we’re trying to bring about happiness or avoid sorrow that may never come.

Maybe this all sounds a tad philosophical, but isn’t it actually life-and-death for us compulsive eaters? When we are eating our brains out, are we eating because something is happening to us RIGHT NOW? Of course not. We are eating because something happened a moment ago, a day ago, a lifetime ago. Or because we worry about something happening tomorrow, the next day, or the next decade from now. In this moment, the only trouble is with our thinking. And one day at a time, we’re working on that with the help of OA’s fellowship and steps and the Higher Power we are coming to know.

Tradition of the Month: Tradition 8

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8. Overeaters Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.

While our small Intergroup has no particular need of special workers, that doesn’t mean that we don’t adhere to tradition eight. There are two halves to this sentence, two sides of a coin. On one side, we don’t hire out for any job that relates directly to carrying the message of OA to compulsive eaters. On the other hand, we might hire people for jobs that only indirectly relate to carrying the message, if it is necessary.

Both the AA and OA Twelve and Twelves tell us the same thing. That we cannot expect to function long and effectively in this world if we don’t pay our bills, review our correspondence, and do the other niggling tasks required to keep OA going. In our area, those tasks are manageable by us because we are small. It is not necessary to hire professionals. We can handle both the administrative tasks and carrying the message. Not so in many places with significantly larger intergroups or within the broader service structure.

On the flip side, however, we can never, ever hire someone to do our twelfth step work for us. We do not pay workshop or retreat presenters for their time (though we do, rightly, reimburse their legitimate expenses). We do not pay our sponsors for their help. We don’t earn chits at the OA store for speaking up at meetings. There is no quid pro quo in carrying the message. That includes our time spent organizing events that carry the message.

Our payment is much greater than mere cash: staying in recovery, connecting more deeply to our fellowship, and seeing the newcomer change into the kind of person their HP wants them to be.

Monetary rewards would cheapen what we do. God does not appear to do business in dollars and cents, but rather in hearts and minds. Everyone who has ever paid for a diet system can understand why the lack of profit motive is vital to our ability to help others.

Tradition eight ties together with tradition seven to give us a working philosophy we might describe as DIO: Do it ourselves. We pay our own way no matter what. Similarly, we do all the work ourselves until it affects our ability to carry the message. Then we pay someone to help us, so that we can continue our twelfth step work unabated.

Like with so many things in life, tradition eight may not seem like much on the outside, but its spiritual significance lies just beneath its somewhat mechanical phrasing.

Step of the Month: Step 8

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8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step nine, the making of amends, gets a lot of air time, but in some ways, it is step eight where the truly hard work of amends gets done. Think of it like exercising. The hard part isn’t the actual exercise! The hard part is walking out the door to go to the gym. The big roadblock is not in the action itself but in our minds. In step eight, we are stepping out this proverbial door en route to the spiritual gym known to us as…our lives.

In the first seven steps we have spent our time on a solitary path toward recovery. We are supported by OA and our sponsors, perhaps even by family and friends, but no one can go on our spiritual journey for us; it is ours alone. But once step nine rolls around, we return to the world having undergone a massive psychic change. Our amends will demonstrate to those in our lives, most of whom we’ve probably not told much about our move toward spirituality, that we have changed and that a Higher Power can make change in us. But we have to know who to make this demonstration to, and sometimes when we recognize the who, we find ourselves wanting for willingness to walk out that door.

We have to be specific to make any progress. As we did in step four, we make a list in step eight. But this time, that list is who we harmed, not who harmed us. To review step four for just a moment: Page 65 of the Big Book shows us three columns to write out: who we were resentful at, the cause of the resentment, and what it affected inside us (how it harmed us). In that second column, we described what burned us up about another person. Then on page 67 we are asked to write a fourth column of inventory for each resentment: where were we selfish, dishonest, self-seeking, and afraid? Now in step eight, we are again asked to look at our inventory from the other person’s point of view. The self-seeking we wrote about in the fourth column of our own inventory is what we did to other people to get our way. We might imagine them writing inventory that includes us, and it turns out that our self-seeking behaviors are their second-column resentments! So we can start right there at making our list, and then we can ask God to show us other folks we may have harmed who were not in our inventory.

A question worth asking is what exactly is harm? Harm is usually defined as injury whether physical, emotional, or financial. In step eight we needn’t get overly specific about what harm we did to another, only that we caused it. For now, we are simply making a list of those we harmed. If we can answer yes, then their name goes on the list. If we aren’t sure, we pray for the truth from our Higher Power.

We need to be careful at this point that we don’t tell ourselves that we didn’t harm someone only because we know step nine is coming. Just because we don’t want to face someone doesn’t mean we didn’t do them harm. We might recognize that they did us a terrible harm, far worse than we did them. So what? That doesn’t negate the harm we did. And isn’t a willingness to proceed with an amends to that person a reasonable exchange for our abstinence, our happiness, and our freedom from the horrors of compulsive eating? Here our minds may place our pride and fear ahead of our recovery. If we listen to them, we will be troubled again. If we ask God to help us with them, we will make gains spiritually.

Step eight is not an overnight step. We may make a list of those we have harmed and find ourselves requiring time and prayer to achieve willingness for all the names on it. That’s OK. We become willing. If pride and fear put a wall up between us and willingness, we use the tool of prayer to chip it away. We will know when we are ready not because the fear and pride are gone, but rather because the way through them will seem passable, if not easy. In the meantime, we have made our list and are willing to be willing. We can move on to step nine and make the amends we are willing to make as we continue to pray about those we are unwilling to make. In other words, progress not perfection.

 

 

What do we do when we slip?

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A slip is not the same as a relapse or a binge, but it can become one. When we slip, we may have eaten something that is not on our food plan (such as a trigger food) or engaged in a food behavior that we eschew as part of our plan of eating (such as eating standing up). We hope they are relatively minor, one-off type events by comparison to full-on binge eating or a relapse.

The question is how to keep a slip from becoming something worse.

First off, what’s the number one thing that a slip does? It reintroduces a substance or way of thinking and acting into our lives that is known to cause major issues for us. If we ate a trigger food at a meal, for example, we are not doomed to eat it or any other unsafe foods again. God is more powerful than this disease after all. But we need to recognize that we are in danger, and over the next several days, we may feel things we haven’t felt in a while:

  • food-relations changes: cravings, food thoughts
  • physical changes: low energy, sleepiness, aches and pains, gastro troubles or headaches
  • mood changes: depression, anxiety, highs, lows
  • mental changes: confusion or fuzzy thinking, laziness
  • spiritual changes: a sense of distance from our Higher Power or our OA group.

What we do when these crop up determines whether we will return to our former compulsive-eating ways or whether we will simply resume with our abstinent way of life. An analogy that’s often mentioned at meetings is that of driving on the highway. If we get a little sleepy or distracted in our program, a slip is akin to hitting the rumble strip. Like any driver, we want to turn the car back toward the road, but we are in danger of that old thinking that says “I’m doomed!” and then fulfills the prophesy by turning the wheel straight into the ditch.

The ditch isn’t where it’s at for us OA members.

Instead, we can look toward the support we have in our meetings, our network, and our literature. We can talk to others and listen for helpful suggestions. We might ask ourselves questions such as:

  • Have I cut back on meetings recently?
  • Have I cut back on service recently?
  • Have I been honest with my sponsor recently?
  • Am I jammed up with resentment or fear?
  • Has my thinking moved away from OA principles and toward self-centeredness?
  • Am I in gratitude or am I in attitude?
  • Have I been passing the message of OA onto other suffering compulsive eaters?

We can ask God to help us answer these questions (and many others) honestly and openly. Because the substance or behavior is in our system once again, we may find the answers cloudy or difficult to locate. Talking with others can help us since they will have a more objective, outside point of view.

Whatever the answers are, we can safely skip over any kind of repetitive thinking that centers on the “If only…” of the situation leading to the slip, the kind that says “I’m so stupid…,” or the kind that says “I’ll never get my abstinence back.” These lies are the foundations that binges and relapses are built on. They are merely different flavors of the thinking that lead us to compulsive eating in the first place. We can’t go back to the moment before our slip, we needn’t judge ourselves harshly for being humans with a disease, and we cannot afford to seed the future with the junk from our past.

Instead, we can remind ourselves of some helpful slogans:

  • “Don’t eat no matter what; no matter what don’t eat.”
  • “Easy, easy, easy.”
  • “One day at a time.”

In addition, we should not tarry on taking action based on whatever answers we find. Stopped going to as many meetings? We can start going to more, immediately. Stopped taking effective inventory at night? We can start again. Never worked the steps? We can ask a sponsor right now for help. While the substance is in our body or the remembrance of the eating behavior remains fresh, we are in gravest danger. We can’t wait until the substance has washed out of us again, we must take action to prevent worse food lapses.

No matter how long we have been abstinent, a slip smacks us right where our pride is located. It triggers our fear of others’ opinions, our fear that we aren’t good enough, our fear that OA won’t work for us, and our fear that all that abstinence we had is no longer valid. This last point is especially insidious. It is helpful to remember that whether we had three days, three weeks, three months, three years, or three decades, every day of abstinence is a gift from our Higher Power. Just because we slip does not mean that our abstinent time wasn’t good enough or can’t return. It only means that we have some action to take to resume our abstinence. God hasn’t gone anywhere, we just need to remember how to get in touch with our Higher Power.

If we slip, a lapse, relapse, or collapse is not inevitable. Not if we can let a slip become a teachable moment. Humility is the idea of being teachable, and humility is one of the principles embodied in our steps. If we ask our Higher Power to show us what we need to know and do after a slip, we can resume the safe, sane, and useful lifestyle that abstinence gives us without first ending up in the ditch.

Tradition of the Month: Tradition 7

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7. Every OA group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

There’s nothing like money to spoil a perfectly good program of recovery. Its accumulation, handling, and dispersion lead to more fights in society than nearly anything else. Look at how marriages dissolve over it, how towns can be factionalized by it, how companies can be ruined by it. Multinational money crises occur all the time with countries demanding certain reforms of other countries, pitting peoples and countries against one another.

In other words, money divides people and institutions. That’s a big problem for a fellowship like ours. Our individual recoveries, says the first tradition, “depend upon OA unity.” Luckily, we also have a primary purpose, courtesy of the fifth tradition:  “carrying the message of recovery to those who still suffer.” The 7th tradition, therefore, shows us how to deal with our fellowship’s monies in a way that avoids disunity and helps us move our funds in the direction they are needed.

When we pay the rent or buy the literature for a meeting, it’s obvious what the money is going to: our primary purpose. Rarely do matters such as these cause any friction in the least among our members. In fact, they seem sometimes so utterly mundane that we might wonder why we stayed for the business meeting to begin with. Meetings in the Seacoast area are, however, quite small. Consider a group from a big city that might take contributions in one night that our bigger meetings receive in one month. These meetings could run considerable surpluses, and if so, what do they do about the money?

Luckily OA’s service structure and 7th tradition work together. OA’s World Service, which performs numerous crucial tasks related to carrying our message (especially, creating literature and operating OA.org), depends upon contributions from OA’s Regions. The Regions, which coordinate the activities of the Intergroups within them, in turn depend upon donations from their Intergroups. Finally, the Intergroups depend upon donations from their local meetings. In order to continue to enjoy the benefits of OA’s World Service, meetings are encouraged to only maintain a balance sufficient for operating expenses. The rest goes to the Intergroup, which either spends it on workshops and other ways of carrying the message or sends the money onward. Because our fellowship has taken a vow of poverty, because it ultimately depends upon local contributions, we need never keep extra funds on hand at the local level. To do so would curtail OA’s primary purpose. So we pay our group’s operating expenses, then send the rest on.

When we follow these suggestions, we rarely or never have to negotiate matters such as:

  • Which bank is giving the best rates?
  • Is the money safe with that institution?
  • What kind of account should we open?
  • What do we do with the interest money or dividends?
  • Who in this group do we trust to handle all this money?

We avoid suspicion of profit motive, hysteria about whether to buy or sell an investment vehicle, and worry about the liquidity or illiquidity of our money. We also have reassurance that the money is being used in a way that benefits people who need help (us!) rather than sitting idly without a primary purpose.

Money is often said to be the root of all evil. That may or may not be true, but it brings with it a host of decisions and consequences that can distract us from our primary purpose. Just like our food plans give us freedom from food obsession by structuring our relationship with food, the 7th tradition does the same for our meetings around money. We are free to think about how we can help others find abstinence and recovery instead of ever thinking about the status of our funds.

Step of the Month: Step 7, Independence Day

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  1. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

What better occasion to talk about step 7 than Independence Day weekend! That’s because step 7 is where we gain true freedom in recovery.

We learned a lot about how broken our thinking and conduct were as we wrote our 4th step inventory. We discovered new attitudes of humility and trust as we read that inventory aloud in step 5. Now understanding how our disease and our own minds enslave us in the bondage of self, in step 6, we became ready to be changed by our Higher Power. Now, finally, in step 7 we ask God to get rid of all the crap that’s kept us shackled to compulsive eating and to a way of life that doesn’t work and that is ultimately futile and fatal.

We recently compared steps 4 and 5 to a thorough house cleaning. To refresh and extend the metaphor:

  • Step 3: We call God and ask God to bring a dump truck that will take all our junk to the dump so we can be free of it.
  • Step 4: We carefully make a list of everything that can go.
  • Step 5: We show the list to a friend and God, and after God backs the dump truck up to the house, our friend and God help us put all the trash in the hopper of the truck.
  • Step 6: We take one last look and ask ourselves if we’re ready to let God drive the refuse away.
  • Step 7: We tell God to drive it away, please.

Once the junk is gone, we can walk back into our house and see the beauty of our lives again. Instead of goat trails full of dark reminders of our past piled floor to ceiling like old newspapers, we see the spaciousness of our lives, the pictures of family and/or friends on the walls that had been obscured by the piles of junk. We feel gratitude for the soundness of the construction of our home—and for that matter for our home itself. From here, from this now repaired home base, we can return to our daily lives free of the encumbrances of our past.

Will everything be perfect? Nah. Some of the walls will need repainting, or the plaster may have cracked behind all those old newspapers and junk. But we’ll be up to it. Will we be reminded of the bad old times? Of course, but the burning pain of them has been taken away and replaced with perspective. Will some new junk pile up? It could, but we’ll have the means to deal with it through OA’s twelve steps, twelve traditions, and nine tools.

And what truly comes of the 7th step? But freedom from is just one half the story. When our HP gives us freedom from compulsive eating, we gain freedom to eat sanely and safely. When we are granted freedom from our past, we gain the freedom to move on, to draw a line in the sand between our old selves and our new selves. The freedom to help others comes when we gain freedom from “helping” others in order to stanch the aching need for acceptance or validation. When we feel freedom from sticky enmeshment with others, we get the freedom to be in honest, two-sided relationships based on trust and love. As OA’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions tells us, once we have worked step 7,

When we make a mistake, we acknowledge that fact without claiming that we ourselves are mistake. From now on, we cease telling ourselves we are always going to be dishonest, selfish, abusive, stupid, or bad people. Instead, we repeatedly affirm to ourselves the truth about ourselves—that we are becoming honest, caring, nurturing, wise, and effective human beings as we practice our new behaviors, day by day. (64)

The day we first complete step 7 is our independence day. It is the day when we officially let God change us. As we do step 7, we step out of the drivers seat and let God into it. We get out of the way and stop trying to life our way. In return, we are given the freedom we’ve longed for from the broken thinking that has led us to hopeless compulsive eating.

What’s a Turn-Around?

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At our workshop earlier this month on steps 4 through 9, our speaker mentioned “turn-arounds” as being crucial to unlocking the power of step 4. She and others during meetings in our area have mentioned that this piece of the inventory has differed from other inventories they’ve done and ushered in a massive positive change for them. So what is this turn-around business? Why does it make such a big shift in our thinking? Let’s get some answers!

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous never mentions anything called a “turn-around,” but as our workshop leader explained, the concept is on page 67.

Referring to our list again [of resentments]. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man’s.

This paragraph comes after the famous three columns on page 65 where we list who we were resentful at, the cause of that resentment, and that which it affected in our psyches. Page 67 tells us that we should go back to what we’ve already written in those first three columns and write about our part in each situation where we felt resentment. Even if we don’t think it’s our fault!

Now if it’s not our fault, how can we possibly have a part in it? Here’s how. A trick our addict minds play on us is to continually re-feel pains from long ago. When we re-feel that pain, we are more vulnerable to the suggestion of our disease to eat again. After all, the other person involved in the resentment isn’t thinking about it for us. We’re eating the poison we intend for the other person. We’re the ones letting the situation fester inside of us, aren’t we? That’s why the Big Book tells us on page 62 that “Our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves.”

So what exactly do we write about? We can keep it simple by using the four questions in the middle of that paragraph from page 67. We ask ourselves:

  • Where was I selfish?: What did want in the situation?
  • Where was I dishonest?: What’s the lie I told myself about this situation?
  • Where was I self-seeking?: What did I do to get what I want or to feel better?
  • Where was I afraid?: What fear was driving my thinking and conduct in this situation?

This is where the rubber meets the road, and deepest honesty about our real motivations and actions makes all the difference.

Let’s take an example from one of our member’s own inventories, with the names and circumstances changed to protect the identities of all involved. First we see the three columns as described on page 65:

 
I'm resentful at:     The Cause:         Affects My:
----------------      ---------          ----------
Bobby                 Made fun of me     Self-Esteem
                      during childhood   Personal Relations
                                         Security
                                         (Fear)

Now here are the four turn-around questions.

Where was I...?
Selfish: I wanted to be accepted as I was.
Dishonest: I told myself a lie that I wasn't good enough.
Self-Seeking: I resented Bobby; later I made fun of him; I ate.
Afraid: I was afraid he was right about me, and that I wasn't good enough.

We might ask ourselves whether wanting to be accepted by others is selfish, and oddly enough, it can be. When we turn to the last question, we see that the motivation underlying this impulse for acceptance is fear! If Bobby had only been accepting, then I would have been good enough. The fear of our not being good enough motivates us to seek acceptance and then we feel pain when we don’t get what we want. So the lie about being not good enough is perpetuated, and it, in turn, gives license to eat and also to make fun of Bobby later as a way to feel better about the situation.

That’s the kind of mind bender our disease pulls on us all the time. We’re just so used to it that we can’t see the lies for what they are. That’s the power of the turn-around. That’s why it makes a huge difference. Once we can combine the recognition of this broken thinking with a sincere attempt to do our HP’s will via the rest of the steps, we can make progress by leaps and bounds. We no longer have to react to our worst thinking with self-loathing and self-destructive action. We can instead pause and ask our God for help as well as trusted OA friends. We can finally see that we are OK just like we are, and that we always were.

Notice also how short these answers are. The Big Book asks us to stick to facts, to make an objective inventory. Anything more than the barest facts allows our addict mind to start justifying our actions, telling us again the old stories that have led us to the food for so long.

And this is just a single example. We will have many, many situations to examine and, therefore, many opportunities for aha moments like these to be revealed to us through the steps. That is an important part of how our minds become untangled and restored to sanity.

So if you’ve wondered what a turn-around is, now you know. It may be known as the “fourth column,” by other phrases, or by no name at all. No matter what, however, it’s just examining our conduct the way the Big Book recommends: attentively, without self-judgment, and with our HP’s help.

Tradition of the Month: Tradition 6

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6. An OA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the OA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.

To understand how OA’s sixth tradition operates, imagine yourself at an OA event such as a workshop, retreat, or convention. You see a sign for a raffle, and it says: Prize: Relaxation-themed gift basket. That’s nice, our program encourages us to relax and take it easy, and someone in the group has thoughtfully put together a gift that can help us do so.

But what if the sign on the same gift basket instead read this way? Prize: Ultimate Relaxation Suite, donated by Luxury Bath Products of the Seacoast. You might still think it’s a nice basket, but the questions start boiling up fast:

  • Why would a for-profit company donate to an anonymous fellowship that claims a no-promotion policy?
  • Can I rule out the absence of a profit motive? Or a marketing motive?
  • Why OA would accept this gift from one company but not from another?
  • Is there some relationship between OA and this company?
  • Does the presence of this basket mean that OA endorses the company?
  • If so, will the company be collecting my name, phone number, and email address from our phone lists in return?
  • Is someone in OA receiving some kind of personal benefit from this association?

It’s amazing how quickly our focus can be diverted from gratitude for some help with relaxation (in accordance with our program) to wondering about money, power, and influence.

And this was just a small example.

Relationships are always a two-way street, and if OA or any of its groups enters one with an outside organization or enterprise, it will be transformed, sometimes quickly sometimes slowly, into something that no longer makes carrying the message of the twelve steps to compulsive eaters its primary purpose.

This is even true of other twelve-step groups. As The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous points out:

Members who put too much emphasis on other fellowships in OA meetings leave compulsive eaters with the impression that these programs and the problems they address are more serious or more important to the compulsive overeater, than OA” (157).

As individual OA members, keeping tradition six could take many forms. We can refrain from mentioning outside organizations, including religious and spiritual ones, by name. We can avoid mentioning the titles of books or materials from non-OA-approved sources (including other fellowships and spiritual organizations as well as for-profit publishers). We can avoid sharing that digresses at length about the principles, practices, or influence of outside groups. If we, ourselves, have created such materials or are in the business of supplying them, we can leave our business affairs outside the program.

If we hear ourselves prefacing our comments with “not to talk about outside enterprises…” then we can pause, even in mid-share, and assess whether what we are about to say can be phrased without mentioning or elaborating on an outside organization.

And lastly, if we hear sharing that obviously does not comport with this tradition, especially if it is repeated over time, we can calmly and gently ask that member to observe the tradition. Remember, they may not even know they haven’t been keeping tradition six!

As ever, the point of the traditions is not to control members but to create boundaries so that simple, everyday actions that are often done with fine intention don’t lead to foreseeable problems that experience has painfully demonstrated can splinter OA groups. That way, we have the freedom to keep on getting better and keep on carrying this life-saving message of hope and recovery. After all, it’s our primary purpose!

Step of the Month: Step 6

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  1. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

The leader of our workshop this past weekend helped us understand the action steps, 4–9. Step 6 doesn’t seem like an action. After all, it’s not even phrased as an action verb: “were entirely ready…”.

So what action are we taking, and why? Well, it’s this simple: We are approaching what might be the most important decision we will make in recovery, the decision to finally stop living our lives on self-will and to start living by God’s will.

As our workshop leader told us, there’s a blurry line between steps 5 and 6. The Big Book tells us, just before step six, that once we’ve read off our inventory we spend an hour with our higher power. Reading that inventory is like watching a slow-motion movie of our life. If we’ve been completely honest and thorough, we will be ready to have all that’s objectionable removed from us. But will we be willing?

On page 76, the Big Book asks, “Are we now ready to let God remove from us all the things which we have admitted are objectionable? Can He now take them all—every one?” In other words, do we want to keep holding on to a few things? A resentment against someone who wronged us deeply? Justified anger? A comfortable old way of looking at the world that we think keeps us safe from its ups and downs? The way we talk to others? The way we listen, or don’t? Aggressive driving? The need to be right? The need to control? The idea that we can rely on ourselves? Eating compulsively to quash our feelings?

These and a hundred-hundred worn out ideas and ways of conducting ourselves in the world have to go. Otherwise we will eat again. Think of our lives like a damaged ship. We wouldn’t go back to sea having repaired the boat save for one little hole in hull. Even if the hole measured just a few inches across, eventually enough water would stream in that we would sink. It is the same with our recovery. We are about the business of giving ourselves to our higher power so that we can be fully repaired—by God—and sent back into the world to help others. If we deceive ourselves into hanging onto just a couple little things, then, like the ocean filling the ship, our ego will find that weak point and fill our souls back up with the very kind of junk we’d just read about during step 5. The stuff that makes us want to eat.

Yet, despite the fact that we didn’t come into OA on a winning streak, we have this uncanny knack for hanging onto behaviors that have proven again and again to cause us pain and suffering. Step 6 is about getting honest on this account. About finally getting ourselves fully and unquestionably ready to abandon the stuff that doesn’t work in our lives. And because we are probably the worst judges of what does and doesn’t work in our lives, we have to give it all away to God, the good and the bad. That’s how we avoid even the potential for hanging onto to something objectionable that can lead us back to eating again.

Steps 6 and 7 get very little airtime in the Big Book, but they are the turning point in our recovery. Up until then, we’ve been dealing with our problems. Once we get through step 7, we restart our lives in the solution. But for step six, the good news is that we are only becoming perfectly willing, not perfectly able. It turns out that giving away our character defects is a lifelong process, and one that brings us closer and closer to God. So in step 6, we have simply to tell ourselves, that, yes, this is something I’m signing up for. From here on out, I’m going to get out of God’s way by not trying to do it my way.

Venue change for this Saturday’s 8:00 AM York meeting

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Due to a schedule conflict this weekend, the 8:00 AM York Hospital meeting will gather in the Mulville Room next door to the cafeteria.

A competing event, a road race, will also take up parking spaces in the Hospital lot, so they recommend parking near their Hancock Building (entrance off Village Drive) or at the York library (about a block away).

This will not affect the 9:00 AM meeting or the Intergroup meeting, which will meet in the usual location. The 8:00 AM meeting will resume its normal venue next week.