What Color Is Your Blood?

By Harry Arbuthnot

Seventy Seven statements recalling challenging and spiritually powerful perspectives put forth in addiction recovery meetings during the first twelve months of attending them after having hit bottom. Their impact on the author was a needed stimulus leading to first time spiritual growth. Subjects include society, sobriety, employment, self care, emotions, bottoming, chronic addiction, etcetera.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harry Arbuthnot
• Release date: Apr 12, 2010

Book preview

Introduction

Active addiction for me started in childhood and lasted until after my fortieth birthday. The number of times that I hit bottom and didn’t know it but, bloodied and clueless as to why it kept happening, struggled back to some semblance of a normal life is a clear demonstration of true spiritual blindness. A friend and mentor likened me to crawling in on my lips when I began to show up at recovery meetings. In truth, this is by no means unique within the fellowship. Such a state of affairs doesn't happen all at once. It takes years of back and forth with addiction to build up a tolerance for such a low functioning bottom dwelling existence. Even had I become clean, I would have remained far from a sober mental life in my blindness. However, sight may be regained through the miracle of spiritual progress, which is available to all who enter recovery with an open heart.

During my first twelve months attending recovery meetings I heard soul wrenching accounts by others of living a spiritually attuned life on life’s own terms. It was soul wrenching to me only because I was a spiritual maladroit, but for those whose spiritual muscles had had time to develop it was a normal part of daily experience. Yet it was as though I had sat in the rooms of recovery before, for the material has a universal applicability and is in fact being acted upon all the time in society by those with a penchant for such matters. Having my soul wrenched out of the unnatural socket it was screwed into was exactly what was needed for me to discover life had always been waiting for me to come to the table. Those twelve months were ones of shocking realizations and painful admissions, and the overall effect was much needed if a life of spiritual progress was to take root.

Equal to the misery of hitting bottom and entering recovery, I followed the guidelines I was given, worked diligently at the pace I was capable of going, and learned to forgive myself on a daily basis. I also kept a journal. This was the spring of 2002. Since that year I have remained in recovery and continued to make headway, not looking back to those dark miserable days until recently. In re-reading the journal of those first twelve months I discovered amazingly that the clarity and power of the thoughts I heard from sponsors and others in meetings had sometimes been captured in the writing. In former years many of the items I would have quickly dismissed as hopelessly cynical or pointlessly sentimental, but in hearing them shared with an open heart in a meeting, backed up by