DAILY CONTEMPLATIONS FOR MEMBERS OF

ACTIVE ADDICTIONS ANONYMOUS

THE WILD LIFE

DAILY CONTEMPLATIONS FOR THE MEMBERS OF
ACTIVE ADDICTIONS ANONYMOUS - THE WILD LIFE

is createdmanifested by

Harishchandra Sharma TuTu and Solvejg Sharma TuTu

TRANSLATED FROM DANISH

Third Edition

Published by: The Active Addictions Anonymous World Service Office

 Free Copyright

Art on front cover – The Wild Life Day
Art on back cover – The Wild Life Night

Courtesy: Harishchandra TuTu

The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions reprinted for adaptation by permission of AA World Services, Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Program of Active Addictions Anonymous was originally suggested in the book The TuTu Doctrine – The New World Order,
published by ToTos Solfond (Danish for TuTu’s Sun Foundation) as a pathway that the individual human being can use to move
from his/her addiction to chronic dissatisfaction to contentment in his/her life irrespective of circumstances.

The Program has come into being with permission from ToTos Solfond without any obligations to or affiliations with ToTos Solfond otherwise.

The Program has been createdmanifested as an adaptation of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous with permission from the World Service Office of AA. inc without any obligations to or affiliations with Alcoholics Anonymous otherwise.

CONTENT

JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH  APRIL MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER

JANUARY

January 01 Feeling small	January 02 Active Addiction	January 03 Being unique
January 04 Isolation	January 05 To Follow the heart	January 06 Addiction to chronic dissatisfaction
January 07 What is Active Addictions Anonymous	January 08 Self-respect	January 09  My Truth
January 10 Fear	January 11 To seek help	January 12 Step Three
January 13 The Group Conscience	January 14 Discernment	January 15 Easy does it!
January 16 Step Twelve	January 17 Fellowship	January 18 Death
January 19 Addiction	January 20 Simplicity	January 21 Group Readings
January 22 Freedom from guilt and shame	January 23 Mutual wisdom	January 24 The Fruit of the Right Action
January 25 Self-importance	January 26 The Ring of Hope	January 27 Poverty
January 28 From Self-centeredness to God-centeredness	January 29 The Gratitude Prayer	January 30 The 'For Free' Principle
January 31 Sharing in AcAdAn Meetings

JANUARY

January 01: Feeling Small

However, when we came to AcAdAn, we discovered we could learn to live a content life with the help of the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous whether our active addiction was mild, moderate or severe.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, Page 7 

Before coming to Active Addictions Anonymous, many of us were not aware that we were suffering from an addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, because our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction had been with us for as long as we could remember, but when we worked with the AcAdAn Program, we discovered that we had taken a big dissatisfied decision as children.

We had decided that when we became adult we would not feel as small as we did, when we felt limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable, but as the years passed by, it became evident to us that even if we had now become ‘grown ups’ we still felt small, when we felt dissatisfied with our humanness.

As a result of our childhood decision to never again feel small, we added injury to pain by thinking that we failed our self by being limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable, and this further contributed to that we became addicted to being chronically dissatisfied with our humanness.

Gradually, as our work with the AcAdAn program evolved and we thereby became better and better at letting go of using our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction on our humanness, at the same time, we became better and better at finding ways in which we could live our life with contentment.

Contemplation for the day

Today, I will accept my limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability by taking my human nature to heart, so I can become content with myself and my life.

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January 02: Active Addiction

Those of us who, even if we want to, cannot liberate our self from our obsession over alcohol, drugs, nicotine, food, our body, compulsive spending, sex, relationships, codependency, destructive thoughts and emotions, character defects, work, money, power, prestige, fame, material or spiritual ambitions, or any other obsession that drives us to act compulsively, suffer from an active addiction.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, Page

Our lack of capacity to accept our self as we were, settled in us as the constant low lying nagging pain, which stemmed from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with ourselves, others and our life, and this pain made us look for a magic cure that could stop the pain.

When we came to our first meeting in Active Addictions Anonymous, we discovered that we were not alone about experiencing the pain from use of addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, even if the other members spoke about being dissatisfied for reasons that were not necessarily the same as ours.

Although we and the other members maybe had different reasons to be dissatisfied, we all had one thing in common, and that was the constant nagging low lying pain from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and this helped us to understand that we could use the diversity to help each other.

When we heard the myriads of reasons to be dissatisfied both from within our self and from the other members, we realized that both we and they tried to understand, why we had this constant low lying nagging pain without us having discovered before we came to AcAdAn that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction was the pain we suffered from.

Contemplation for the day

Today, I will remember that the constant, low lying nagging pain I experience daily is due to my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, which I can recover from by the help of the AcAdAn Program.

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January 03: Being unique    

Each of us in AcAdAn have our own unique way of understanding and working the Steps, and that is what makes our Fellowship so diverse and interesting.

Active Addictions Anonymous – The Wild Life, Page 85

When we came to AcAdAn, many of us suffered under the perception that we should adjust to the Fellowships we were a part of, whether it was one of two in our coupleship or one of many in our family or at our workplace.

Little by little, as our work with the Rings of Joy and Pain in the Active Addictions Anonymous Program evolved, we became acquainted with the Small Ring of Arrogance with its superiority, inferiority, overcrowding and isolation.

We also became acquainted with the Small Ring of Truth with its humility, honesty, individuality, and fellowship, which is the antidote to the Small Ring of Arrogance, and thus we learned that our individuality means that we are unique.

This made us understand that our individuality was our unique gift, not merely to our self, but to everything and everyone around us, and that we could give our self and others this gift by standing by our individual uniqueness and thus make our own life and the life of others varied and interesting.

Contemplation for the day

Today, I will give my individuality's unique gift to myself and others and thereby enrich my own and their life.

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January 04: Isolation

Those of us who tried to achieve contentment on our own realized that it was together with others that many undiscovered points of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction surfaced.

Active Addictions Anonymous – The Wild Life, Page 23

Some of us chose to try to achieve contentment on our own, because we had noticed that it was especially when we were together with others that we experienced the emotional discomfort that is typical of our defects of character.

After coming to Active Addictions Anonymous however, we discovered that we could use those defects of character that surfaced in our interactions with others to come closer to our self as human beings and to grow spiritually.

In Step Ten we investigated one of the defects of character that we had used in our social life in the course of the day, and thus we came closer to our self as human beings, and when we transformed the character defect to the corresponding virtue, we came closer to our self as Spirit.

The more often we transformed our defects of character into virtues by the help of our daily Tenth Step, the lesser discomfort we experienced in our social life, and the lesser our urge to isolate our self from interactions with other people became.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Tenth Step to take care of one of the defects of character I used in a social interaction, by transforming it into the corresponding virtue so as to come closer to myself both as human being and as Spirit.

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January 05: To Follow the heart

The principle of Step Three is Surrender. Slogan: Follow your heart.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 83

It was a common perception among us that God lives in our heart, so when we followed our heart, we surrendered to God, but before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, many of us did not know what it meant to surrender to our heart and thus to God, so we worked with our Third Step principle of surrender by the help of the Third Step slogan in our AcAdAn Program, and gradually it became clear to us that in all its simplicity it meant that we surrendered to our heart, when we did what we felt like doing.

In Step Two, most of us had chosen a Higher Power, which was omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and immortal/unchangeable, and who was unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate, and merciful, which are the qualities most religions and spiritual creeds attribute to God, and these qualities in our chosen Higher Power made us realize that our Higher Power wanted or needed nothing from us other than what we our self wanted, so it became important for us to find out what we wanted.

We heard in meetings that no desire was to big, and no desire was to small to be fulfilled, that every desire of ours would be fulfilled in the long run by our chosen Higher Power, and that no desire would be judged by our Higher Power as unworthy or wrong so the only one, who prevented us from getting all our desires fulfilled was our self, and we prevented the fulfillment of our desires by judging them as unworthy or wrong or by thinking that we we were unworthy or did not deserve to get what we wanted.

When we fulfilled one of our desires, it could happen that we did not like the consequence of the fulfillment of the desire, and this might make us believe that there was something wrong or unworthy about our desire, which God now punished us for, but the consequence was merely the result of earthly principles that we our self, as humankind, had wanted so as to createmanifest stability in our life so that salt was always salt and did not turn into sugar because we had mistakenly put salt in our tea and wanted God to miraculously turn it into sugar.

Today's contemplation
Today, I choose to liberate myself from believing that there is something wrong or unworthy about my desires, or that I am not worthy or deserving of their fulfillment so I can begin to walk The Path of The Heart by me surrendering to working on fulfilling all of my desires and needs to the best of my capacity.

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January 06: Addiction to chronic dissatisfaction

We we began studying our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in Step One, we discovered that it sprang from the fact that we had difficulties accepting our four basic attributes as human beings - our limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, Page 15

We began to investigate our daily state of mind by the help of the concepts of Active Addictions Anonymous because we wanted to find out if it could be true for us that we were addicted to chronic dissatisfaction, and we became surprised at discovering that it was really so that we compulsively used dissatisfaction with our self, others, life or the World at large many times a day.

In spite of the destructive effect it had on our and their joy of living, we had made it a daily habit to be dissatisfied with our self, others, life, or the World at large, hoping that our dissatisfaction would be experienced to be so uncomfortable by our self, others, or the World at large, that it would give us or them that little push, we or they needed to move in the right direction according to our opinion.

As children, we knew innermost that our parents' task was to love us unconditionally, even though we discovered that their love was sometimes dysfunctional, and we often experienced that when they wanted to give us a little push in the right direction according to their opinion, the push often consisted in that they exposed us to various discomforts or punishments, which they believed would have the desired effect.

This had made us believe that it was that way we should give our self, others, our life or the World at large a little push in the right direction, but gradually as we investigated the matter, we discovered that this did not work according to intention and it was thus a dysfunction we had learned in our childhood that had developed into an addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in the course of our life.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my First Step in AcAdAn to get ready to begin my recovery from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in Step Two.

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January 07: What is Active Addiction Anonymous?

Active Addictions Anonymous is a non-profit Fellowship of men and women, for whom addiction to dissatisfaction with our self, others, life and the World at large had become a problem.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 8

Before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, most of us had done our utmost to become content with our self, others, our life and the World at large without success.

We were dissatisfied with that all our efforts had been to no avail, and even when we came to AcAdAn it was hard for us to face that we were addicted to use dissatisfaction.

It was also hard to face that we were powerless over our addiction, and it took many of us several years of struggle with our addiction to dissatisfaction before we were ready to receive help.

When we finally admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, we discovered that the Fellowship of AcAdAn was ready to give us the help we needed no matter how long it had taken us to become ready.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will participate in the Fellowship of Active Addictions Anonymous to have my desire fulfilled of being lead to contentment with myself, others, my life and the World at large.

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January 08: Self-respect

Instead of thinking that we had to sacrifice our time, energy, money and interests for others to be able to feel good about our self, we accepted that we needed to take care of our own needs first by the help of the time, energy, money and interests we had at our disposal.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 48

Most of our lives, we had been told that we were selfish if we wanted to spend our time, energy, money and interests on taking care of our own needs, whether our needs were material, physical, energetic, emotional, mental, social or spiritual.

However, in our AcAdAn Program, we worked with the Ring of Codependency from Step Four onward, and thus, we realized that such an attitude led to pain in our life, and we also learned that we could transform this pain to joy by working with the Ring of Emotional Sobriety.

The Ring of Emotional Sobriety says that it is an act of self-respect, when we take care of our own needs first of all, and that it is also respect for others that we do so plus allow them time and space to take care of their own needs, before we decide, if we have a surplus that we want to use on contributing to their life

If we believe that it would bring us joy to contribute, we do it, and if we feel that we are sacrificing our resources in a way, where we deny our self our needs for the sake of contributing to others, we do not do it.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will use my resources to take care of my own needs, and I will give others time and space to take care of their needs, before I consider whether it would give me joy to contribute to their situation.

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January 09: My Truth

The principle of Tradition Eleven is Truth.
Slogan: My truth is not the whole truth.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

Little by little, as our work with the AcAdAn Program progressed, we realized that there were as many perspectives on AcAdAn’s Steps and Traditions as there were members of our Fellowship.

When we realized this, we clearly understood that although we had our Program, our Traditions, our meetings and a sponsorship/recovery-buddy-ship in common, we had our own unique perspective on them.

This realization gave us the freedom to express our perspective, knowing very well that our perspective is unique so we do not need to seek others' approval of what we perceive to be true.

In the same way, we gave others the freedom to express their perspective, knowing very well that their perspective was also unique and we did not have to agree with them in what was true for them.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will express my personal truth without trying to overwhelm others with it, and I will listen to their truth and take to heart what I find useful for me and leave the rest

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January 10: Fear

Before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, many of us felt that we could not be fully understood by anyone, and we kept that a secret, which we perceived to be our failures out of fear of the condemnation of others, and we kept that a secret that we perceived to be our successes out of fear of the envy of others.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 43

When we began working with the Program in AcAdAn, we discovered that our life had been dominated by fear on all our planes of existence, and in the material field, it came to expression by us fearing not getting what we wanted of material advantages and benefits, in the physical area we were afraid of illness and death, and in the energetic area we were afraid of not having energy for the day.

Little by little, we also caught sight of our fears on our higher planes of existence, because we were afraid on the emotional plane of those pains we experienced when we or others had negative emotions, and on the thought plane, we were afraid of both of our own thoughts and those of others', as many of us perceived our own thoughts and those of others’ as demonic if they sprang from our defects of character and thus gave rise to painful emotions.

Furthermore, we were afraid of our self, other people and animals plus the World at large in our social life, and in our spiritual life, we were afraid that God would punish us for unknown trespasses, or would demand services from us that we did not want to perform so as to give us what we wanted and that could give rise to our disease of people pleasing, which made us try to flatter God and people, hoping to get what we wanted.

In Step Two, we discovered that we could choose a new Higher Power that were unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate, and merciful in place of the punishing Godhead that was unloving, uncaring, hardhearted and merciless, like most of us had been presented for in our childhood, and thereby we began to let go of our fear of our self, others, life and the World at large.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will stand by myself and courageously share with my AcAdAn Fellowship about a success that I have experienced recently, which I have kept a secret, and about a failure which still pains me that I have also kept a secret, so as to be able to begin my journey of recovery from my fear of myself, other people and animals, life and the World at large.

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January 11: To seek help

We admitted we were powerless over our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction – that our life had become unmanageable.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 9

In order to begin to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we needed to admit that we suffered from the disease of addiction, and that one of the many faces of our illness manifested itself by us actively using our addiction to give our self permission to be chronically dissatisfied.

When we had admitted that and investigated the consequences of our disease in this area and discovered that they came to expression by our life becoming unmanageable on all our planes of existence, we needed to seek the help that it took for us to become able to recover from our illness in this area, because we were powerless over it.

It took most of us many years both to admit that we were addicted to chronic dissatisfaction and that this made our life unmanageable, because we believed that we could become content if only we did the right thing in the right way at the right time with the right attitude, and this idea made our life into a daily struggle.

The struggle arose because we worked on carrying this out, however, without it giving us the contentment we had hoped for, and it was only when we joined like-minded people in AcAdAn that we understood that we could let go of our daily struggle with our dissatisfaction and open our self to receive the help we needed to recover.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Fellowship to get the help I need to let go of my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction instead of struggling with it.

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January 12: Step Three

We made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of our Higher Power, as we understood that Power.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 27

In our work with Step Three, we investigated our dissatisfaction with a Higher Power's contribution or the lack of it in our life, and to our surprise we discovered that our Higher Power ever so quietly had fulfilled many of our unfulfilled desires from our childhood and our youth without us having noticed it before.

Our dissatisfaction was thus an old emotion that continued to blind us so that we were not able to spot the abundance that our Higher Power had contributed with in our life from our childhood till now, and thereby we understood even clearer that our dissatisfaction only could be used if we denied Reality.

When we achieved these realizations in our Third Step work, we could finally give our self permission to understand that we were out of touch with Reality, when we used our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and thereby it became clear to us that we suffered from an illness that we could recover from in AcAdAn.

Simultaneously, by the help of these insights, our trust in our Higher Power's unconditional love, care, compassion and mercy grew, and that gave us the courage we needed to surrender our will and our life to our chosen Higher Power's care in Step Three.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will surrender my will and my life to my chosen Higher Power's care.

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January 13: The Group Conscience

When we address an issue or suggestion at our Group-Conscience meetings, each of us take our turn to express our individual conscience regarding the issue that is being discussed, and we listen attentively to what each of the group members have to contribute until all, who want to express something about this issue have spoken.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 87

In our Step Work in Active Addictions Anonymous, we learned to surrender to our chosen Higher Power, and in our service work we learned to surrender to a Higher Power on group level.

If we wanted to debate a topic that was important to our group in Active
Addictions Anonymous, it took place in a business meeting after our recovery meeting.

When we participated in our business meetings, we both became acquainted with our Twelve Traditions and with the Group Conscience that we perceive to be our Higher Power on a group level.

When each member, who wanted to had expressed his/her conscience about a solution to the topic/s that were up for debate, we perceived it to be our Group conscience that had spoken.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will surrender to my Higher Power in my groups by surrendering to the Group Conscience, whether my group consists of to or many.

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January 14: Discernment

When we began to seek our Higher Power’s guidance on a daily basis, we discovered that our ability to distinguish the voice of our Higher Power from our own began to develop, and thus Step Eleven began working for us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 69

In the course of our Step Work in AcAdAn, we had become more aware of the difference between purely physical feelings, and feelings that sprang from our thoughts and expressed themselves as emotional feelings.

Feelings such as hunger, thirst, tiredness, touch, etc., are exclusively physical, and feelings that spring from our thoughts and which could settle anywhere in our physical body we experienced as lightness or tensions in various body parts.

In Step Eleven, we we further developed our discernment to such an extent that it became easier for us to discern the feelings we experienced from each other, so we could know if they came from our Higher Power or from our thinking mind, our Ego.

When an impulse sprang from our Higher Power, the thought was accompanied by a feeling of joy without opposites, and when it sprang from our thinking mind, our Ego, it always had an opposite.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will use my discernment, when I seek guidance about my Higher Power’s will for me in Step Eleven to discern if the impulse comes from my thinking mind, my Ego or from my Higher Power.

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January 15: Easy does it!

It is also important to remind our self that we did not develop our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in one day and we do not recover in one day either, so remember – EASY DOES IT!

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 11

It took us so long time to realize that we suffered from an addiction to chronic dissatisfaction even though we maybe suffered under an addiction in other areas of our life that we had come to believe that dissatisfaction on a daily basis was a natural state of mind.

When it dawned on us that it was not a natural state of mind, and that the Fellowship and the Program of AcAdAn could help us to become content, we wanted to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction as soon as possible.

Our friends in AcAdAn, however, explained to us that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction began with the use of dissatisfaction that, on repeated use, grew into chronic dissatisfaction that grew into addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

We had become accustomed to our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, so when we began to let go of it, we could become afraid and feel empty and insecure about the change, so we accepted that it took time for us to recover and remembered to take it easy.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will work with my AcAdAn Program and thus take another small step forward in my recovery from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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January 16: Step Twelve

Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these Steps, we practiced these principles in all our affairs, and carried the message of AcAdAn to others suffering from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 82

When we reached Step Twelve in our Step work, our perception of our self, others. life and the World at large had changed dramatically from dissatisfaction to contentment in most areas.

In a Twelve Step inventory, we inventory a situation, where we used our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by using all the principles of the Steps from Step One to Twelve to recover from the situation.

Thereby, we became aware of those sufferings that sprang from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in the situation, we inventoried and how we could recover from them by the help of our AcAdAn Program.

Thus, we became ready to also use our Twelfth Step to share with others, how we had used our AcAdAn Program to recover from the pain of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, so they too could begin to recover from a similar situation.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my experiences with my recovery from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by sharing my recovery with others, who still suffer from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, if they want me to.

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January 17: Fellowship

Thereby, we became aware that we could seek and receive consolation, understanding and fellowship with others if we were brave and honest about our thoughts and our emotions, irrespective of the reasons we had to think and feel the way we did.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 44

When we thought of our AcAdAn Fellowship, many of us often remembered a story that circulates in our Fellowship about a Red Indian mother, who wanted to show her son the importance of the Fellowship.

She took out an arrow from the arrow quiver and said that it was supposed to illustrate a person, and then she asked her son to break the arrow, and he did so easily.

Then she took out a bundle of arrows from the arrow quiver and said that they were to illustrate the Fellowship, and then she asked him to break the bundle, but he could not do it.

This story showed us how important it was for us to seek Fellowship with others, because when we were alone our pains could break us, but together with others we could recover from them.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will seek consolation and release of my life’s pains in my AcAdAn Fellowship.

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January 18: Death

We also stopped fleeing from death in all its forms, which could actually be perceived in one word as ‘change’.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 18

For many of us, death was a scary and difficult area of life until we came to Active Addictions Anonymous and began working with the AcAdAn Program.

By the help of our Program, we became aware that we experienced death every moment of every day and not only when we separated from our physical form.

We realized that each NOW has a form, which consisted in everything that NOW contained, only to disintegrate into the next NOW, and the NOW that was before has thus passed into death.

By the help of this observation, we realized that death in Reality merely is change, and that change is what made our life vibrant and interesting.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will embrace both my own changeability and the changeability of everything and everybody everywhere at all levels of consciousness, by looking at Reality as a huge kaleidoscope showing me new pictures and giving me new experiences of Reality every single moment.

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January 19: Addiction

Our active addiction can be of a mild, moderate or severe nature, just as it is the case with any other physical or psychological illness.
Today many are found who suffer from a severe case of active addiction, and many more that have a mild or moderate form of this disease.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 7

Many of us found difficulties in perceiving our self as an addict, because we connected addiction with people, who were addicted to drugs, but in Active Addictions Anonymous, we present our self as people, who suffer from an active addiction.

This disease means that we became possessed by a dissatisfied thought pattern that could overwhelm us to such an extent that we felt compelled to act as our possessed mind told us to, only to discover that these compulsive acts did not give us the joy we thought they would.

As a result of these types of thought patterns, we became dissatisfied with our self, others, our life or the World at large, and eventually, our dissatisfaction was so extensive that we were dissatisfied on a daily basis in spite of all the benefits that life had given us.

We had sought many solutions to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, but only when we came to AcAdAn, we found the solution we had been looking for, because we really began to recover by the help of our work with the AcAdAn Program.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will work on recovering from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by the help of my AcAdAn Program.

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January 20: Simplicity

There are no restrictions for us as individuals to participate in other enterprises of a related nature, but an Active Addictions Anonymous Group strives to keep everything simple by maintaining that which is characteristic for an AcAdAn Group in its place and our other activities of a similar nature in their place.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 92

Gradually, as we got to know the principles of the Traditions in AcAdAn, we discovered that it became easier for us to live a life of contentment, when we followed the principle of simplicity of Tradition Seven, so we chose to simplify our life by prioritizing the various areas of our life and this also helped us to stay focused in the NOW.

We createdmanifested simplicity in our material possessions by creatingmanifesting a space for every thing and put every thing in its place, when we were done using it, and thereby we saved our self from using much time and energy on searching for our things, when we were going to use them and from getting dissatisfied for that reason.

We createdmanifested simplicity in our activities by setting off a time slot for each of the activities we wanted to prioritize and we followed our plan, as best as we could, and in our mental-emotional life we createdmanifested simplicity by setting aside a time slot for taking care of our emotions and thoughts by the help of our Step Work.

In our social life, we createdmanifested simplicity by making clear to our self how much of our time we wanted to use on social interactions and with whom, whether our interactions were with human beings or with animals, or whether it was face to face or by the help of social networks on the internet.

Today's contemplation                                      

Today, I will keep everything simple by creatingmanifesting a space for all what I want to prioritize, whether it is my material things, my activities, my care for my emotions and thoughts or my social interactions.

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January 21: Group Readings

The group readings can be read in the following order:

(at the beginning of the meeting:) Who has the disease of active addiction? What is Active Addictions Anonymous? Why are we here? The program of Active Addictions Anonymous Easy Does It!

(at the end of the meeting:) The Twelve Traditions of Active Addictions Anonymous What Can I do? Just For Today

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, pages 120, 121 & 122

Most of us use the meeting format as suggested at the end of our book Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life when we lead an AcAdAn meeting, because we feel that this suggested meeting format covers those areas that we think we can advantageously include in our meeting for the benefit of all.

Our meeting format includes the group readings from the beginning of our book, and we find these group readings so sufficiently informative that we think it is important to hear them again and again at our meetings, and the group readings remind us that we suffer from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and that this originates from our active addiction, which is a disease and not a moral flaw as many tend to think.

The group readings also remind us what Active Addictions Anonymous is and what our purpose is, as well as what our own purpose as AcAdAn members is.

When these group readings are read at our meetings, they also help us to introduce the AcAdAn Program to newcomers attending their first AcAdAn meeting, making it easier for them to decide if the AcAdAn Program would be helpful for them.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will listen attentively to the group readings when they are being read in the meeting, or I will read them myself to reconfirm my recovery in AcAdAn, if I cannot make meeting today.

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January 22: Freedom from guilt and shame

By applying these Steps in our daily life, we became able to keep our path free of guilt and shame.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 66

In many situations from our childhood to the present day, we did not feel accepted when our way of being in the World was in conflict with others' perception of the right thing, whether it was our family or others, who condemned us with words or with body language.

The natural impulse for all of us was to adjust our self in relation to our environment so as to be able to survive, and when it was not possible for us to adjust our self, we felt guilty and ashamed of our self.

In Step Eight and Nine, we pulled out all the things we felt guilty and ashamed of, and we decided how we would make amends to our self and others for what we had pulled out, and in Step Nine we made the amends that we had decided on in Step Eight.

By the help of Step Eight and Nine in our AcAdAn Program, we liberated our self from the guilt and shame we had borne from childhood to now, and thereafter we used Step Eight and Nine to keep our path free from guilt and shame on a daily basis basis.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will remember that my feelings of guilt and shame because of being who I am are the deadliest poisons for my spiritual life, and therefore, I will liberate myself from these feelings by the help of Steps Eight and Nine.

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January 23: Mutual wisdom

We need that fountain of mutual wisdom which is found in our group.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 85

In the AcAdAn Fellowship, we meet many different people with many different perspectives on AcAdAn’s Steps, Traditions, sponsorship and meetings as well as different perspectives on people in general and life as it is for a human being.

We listened to the wisdom of others and we also shared about our own, and little by little, we got to know each other well, and thereby we became familiar with each other's strengths and weaknesses in the same way at we were familiar with our family of origin.

This made it possible for us to approach those of our group members, who had found a solution to a problem that we are presently struggling with, so we could learn from them how we could solve the problem.

In this way, we made use of the wellspring of mutual knowledge and experience that is to be found in our Fellowship, and that made it easier for us to live with contentment, because we could have confidence in t hat our mutual wisdom would be at our disposal, when we needed it.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will seek solutions to one of my problems in my AcAdAn Fellowship either by sharing at an AcAdAn meeting or by reaching out to another member, who had found a way out of the problem that I need to solve.

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January 24: The Fruit of the Right Action

We have come to realize that the right action is the sweet fruit itself, which means that the joyful consequences of our virtues are sufficient on their own; likewise, the painful consequences of our defects of character are sufficient on their own, and both have theirs to give.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 24

When we came to AcAdAn, many of us had the idea that the joy we experienced when we did the right action was a reward from our Higher Power, because we had been 'good'.

In the same way, we had the idea that the pain we experienced when we used our character defects was a punishment from our Higher Power, because we had been 'bad'.

After working with the Steps in AcAdAn for a while, we realized that it was not the case, and thereby we became able to take the slogan of AcAdAn to heart, which says that the right action is the sweet fruit itself.

Thus we realized that our pain due to using our defects of character was not a punishment from our Higher Power, but an opportunity for us to to grow in wisdom and mercy using our AcAdAn Program to transform the pain to joy.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will rejoice in those of my actions that sprang from my virtues, and which therefore brought me joy, and I will use my AcAdAn Program to recover from those of my actions that sprang from my defects of character, and which therefore brought me pain.

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January 25: Self-importance

Some of us used a prayer that covers most of our defects of character, and we used this prayer for our Seventh Step work at adequate moments in the course of the day, thinking or saying, “God, liberate me from this self-important seriousness.”

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 49

Before we came to AcAdAn, we had taken our thoughts very seriously because we knew innermost that our Higher Power often used our thinking mind, our Ego as a sounding board for impulses that our thinking mind, our Ego translated into thoughts.

Little by little as our Step Work in AcAdAn progressed, we realized that most of our thoughts revolved around the past or the future that we thought negatively, positively, or neutral about, and thus they did not spring from our Higher Power.

These negative, positive and neutral thoughts were merely 'stories' that we told our self, and we could change these 'stories' to our advantage anytime we wanted to, and with that purpose in mind we worked daily with the Tenth Step in AcAdAn.

Therefore, it was important for us to use our Seventh Step in the course of the day to liberate our self from our self-important seriousness by preying the various Seventh Step Prayers so as to be liberated from painful thoughts and find a thought that felt better by telling our self a better ‘story’.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will use my Seventh Step Prayers every time I discover that a painful thought about the past or the future dominates my mode of thinking.

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January 26: The Small Ring of Hope

When The Small Ring of Hope became active in us, we had faith that our needs and desires would be met if we worked for it (Belief), and that our Higher Power would show us the way ahead (Enlightenment).
Therefore, we listened attentively to the guidance of our Higher Power (Discernment) before moving ahead along the shown path, one step at a time (Serenity).

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 35

In many areas of our life, we had given up hope that what we wanted could come to our lot even if we worked for it, and therefore, we had often given up even beginning to take the required steps to get our desires fulfilled.

When we began our work with the Small Ring of Hope in AcAdAn, we realized that the Small Ring of Hope was set into vibration the moment we opened our mind and came to believe that we could get our desires fulfilled if we worked for it.

Therefore, we began to gather information so as to become more enlightened about that, which could help us to achieve our goals, and we tried out some of the suggestions, and thereby we developed our discernment.

Little by little, we came closer to our desired goals, and when we saw the effect of applying the Small Ring of Hope in various areas of our life, we achieved serenity concerning the fulfillment of all of our desires.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my knowledge of the Small Ring of Hope to work on fulfilling my desires.

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January 27: Poverty

We always felt that something was lacking in our life, and we believed that if only we used our addiction to dissatisfaction to force our self and others to work more, change enough, think, feel and act differently or became better in some areas, we would become able to accept our self and others as we and they are; and if only others treated us better, were more understanding, loving and caring, we would be able to accept our self, them, life and the World at large as everything is.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 9

When we felt that something was lacking in our life, we feel poor, and that could make us believe that if we made a bigger effort to acquire more in the area in which we wanted more or if others would only use some of their time and money to help us getting, what we wanted, our sense of poverty would disappear.

In AcAdAn we worked with the Small Ring of Avarice with its stinginess, greed, poverty and gluttony, and thereby we discovered that our feeling of poverty had got nothing to do with what we had at our disposal of personal qualities and material possessions or with the help others were willing to give us.

It only had got something to do with our attitude to all the benefits and advantages we had at our disposal and it became even clearer for us in our Sixth Step where we learned to let go of using the Small Ring of Avarice and instead began using the Small Ring of Faith with its generosity, trust, prosperity and accountability.

As we began to consciously use generosity by taking the principles of the Small Ring of Faith to heart, we discovered that our feeling of poverty disappeared to give way to a feeling of us being wealthy enough to have something to share with others, and thereby we came to trust that we could both be accountable to our self and others.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will investigate, how the Small Ring of Avarice affects my attitude to my resources and find out how I can consciously choose to use the qualities of the Small Ring of Faith instead.

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January 28: From self-centeredness to God-centeredness

We investigated how our self-criticism had brought about depression and how our self-praise had brought about euphoria in us, and how this had impacted our life from childhood till today.
We also investigated how our open-mindedness had brought about help from unexpected sources, how this had empowered us to solve our issues, and how this had brought about gratitude and joy in us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 31

In Step Four in our AcAdAn Program, we began to work with the Rings of Joy and Pain that we perceived to be energy fields, also called archetypes, so as to analyze how our stay in these energy fields had influenced us from our childhood to our present, both when it was a Joy Ring and when it was a Pain Ring we found our self in.

We discovered that when we were in the energy field that is called the Ring of Self-centernedness, we suffered under a constant bipolar fluctuation from depression, which sprang from thoughts of a self-critical nature, to euphoria, which sprang from thoughts of a self-praising nature and back again, and that this fluctuation was painful and made us feel emotional unstable.

In AcAdAn, we used the Ring of God-centeredness for the healing of the pain of our self-centeredness, because when we were in the Ring of God-centeredness we opened our mind to new thoughts and ideas and that could give us the power to solve the problem we had criticized our self for having and thus we achieved an empowerment instead of becoming depressed.

When, in this way, we achieved the power to solve our problem, we used joy and gratitude in context with the help we had received instead of praising our self for having found a solution and becoming euphoric and in this way we remained in the joy from the Ring of God-centeredness.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will use my knowledge about the Rings of Joy and Pain in AcAdAn to let go, if I discover that I find myself in the pain from Ring of Self-centeredness, and then I will do my best to move into the joy from the Ring of God-centeredness instead.

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January 29: The Gratitude Prayer

The ‘I’ Version: God, You know what this, Your child, needs today.

The ‘We’ Version: God, You know what these, Your children, need today.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 77

When we used the AcAdAn Gratitude Prayer, we acknowledged that we were not necessarily aware of what we needed in the course of our day.

In particular, we had difficulty imagining that we might need illness, weakness, discomfort and pain, but nevertheless we needed it.

We needed this because we needed contrast to achieve the experience of life, so we needed a contrast to health, strength, well-being and joy.

If we did not experience contrasts, our life experience would be like looking at a white canvas instead of a canvas that held all the colors of the rainbow, as well as the black and the white.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Gratitude Prayer to remind myself that my Higher Power knows what I need today both of pain and joy.

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January 30: The For Free Principle

Active Addictions Anonymous is a non-profit Fellowship, and hence, we pass on our literature to anyone who wants to read it by making it available for free.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 92

The building blocks of our Earthly life are money, time, energy and interest, and generally, we can spend our time, energy and interest on making money, or we can use our money to buy other people's time, energy and interest for our projects.

If therefor we receive something from a stranger that we do not have to pay money for, we often become suspicious towards the free gift, because we have difficulties imagining that others give us this gift exclusively, because they wish us well.

Since the purpose of Active Addictions Anonymous is of a spiritual nature, we do not want to mix worldly means into our purpose, and therefore we do not want to take payments in any form to pass on our knowledge to anyone, who wants it

In AcAdAn, we mark that we are interested in our members' well being rather than their material situation by giving anyone, who wants it, access to everything we possess without demanding money in return.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the for free principle in AcAdAn to further my own well-being by making use of AcAdAn’s literature, sponsors, recovery buddies and meetings, and I will contribute to other people's well-being by passing on the message of AcAdAn for free to those, who want to know more about it.

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January 31: Sharing in AcAdAn Meetings

In AcAdAn meetings, each member shares how far he or she has come in this work with the help of the AcAdAn Program.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 90

Regardless of who we were and how our position in society were, our work in AcAdAn consisted in working with recovering from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction so we could become able to live a life in a state of contentment.

In meetings in AcAdAn we shared about how we worked on letting go of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and often we chose to tell how we had liberated our self from using our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in a concrete situation.

By sharing about our progress and our problems with letting go of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we got to establish for our self, that we had made much progress, although there could be areas where we still had not let go.

At the same time, our discoveries about how best we could let go of using our addiction to our chronic dissatisfaction in a specific situation help and inspire others to let go of their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will share in an AcAdAn meeting, how I have let go of my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in a specific area, and I will also seek inspiration from what others have to share about how they have liberated them self from using their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in specific area.

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FEBRUARY

February 01 New perspectives	February 02 Service	February 03 The Ring of Emotional Sobriety
February 04 The Serenity Prayer	February 05 Creatingmanifesting a Group Conscience	February 06 Tradition One to Four
February 07 The origin of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction	February 08 Membership of AcAdAn	February 09 Tradition Four
February 10 From addiction to chronic dissatisfaction to contentment	February 11 From emotional pain to emotional joy	February 12 Guilt
February 13 To let go of dissatisfaction	February 14 Growth	February 15 Prayer and meditation
February 16 Expansion of consciousness	February 17 Passing it on	February 18  Acceptance of the process of sorrow
February 19 Surrender	February 20 The victim role of codependency	February 21 Progress rather than perfection
February 22 Conscious contact with a Higher Power	February 23 Forgiveness	February 24 Honesty
February 25 The Newcomer	February 26 Humanity/fallibility	February 27 Willingness to transformation
February 28 Step Five to Eight	February 29 Guilt and shame

February 01: New perspectives

JUST FOR Today through AcAdAn, I will try to get a better perspective on myself and my life.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 14

When we began to work with our Active Addiction Anonymous Program, we discovered many opportunities to get the new perspectives on our self, our life, others, and the World at large that we needed, so as to make it possible for us to recover from our addiction to using our chronic discontent and thereby get to live a life in a state of contentment.

We had our four books Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, One Sponsor's suggestions for working the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous, Daily Contemplations for members of Active Addictions Anonymous, and Sixth Step Analyses for members of Active Addictions Anonymous, and from them we could find many new perspectives on our self, life, others and the World at large.

The four books contain a detailed description of our Program each in their own way, and they made it possible for us to be inspired in our daily recovery, because when we read these books or used them as encyclopedias, we recognized our own thoughts and emotions in many of these descriptions, and we also discovered new thoughts that could nourish us in our recovery.

In addition, we had our meetings where we met with like-minded people, listened to group readings, and told others about our recovery process and received inspiration from the recovery process of others, and we had sponsorships or/and recovery buddy ships, where we were together one on one to help each other to make the most of our membership of Active Addictions Anonymous.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will choose to use my membership of AcAdAn to get a better perspective on myself and my life.

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February 02: Service

Each of us serves the group by being part of our meetings.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 86

In the beginning, when we were newcomers in Active Addictions Anonymous, many of us thought that it was only to serve AcAdAn if we were either a chair person, treasurer, coffee-man/woman, Area Service representative, or if we had taken on a post in ASC, but later we understood that we also served AcAdAn when we participated in a meeting.

By participating in a meeting we did not only serve our self, but also others and AcAdAn as a whole, because we served our self by listening thoroughly to our group readings and to what others had to tell about, and we served others by giving them the opportunity to be inspired when we told about our own recovery process.

When we told about our recovery process, we also got an opportunity to share about our successes and failures in our Step Work, and we also got the opportunity to relieve our hearts from from various problems we sought a solution to by the help of the Fellowship and in that way we could make use of the mutual wisdom that our Fellowship holds.

By participating in Active Addictions Anonymous meetings in this way, we could thus serve both our self and others, and that was why we both celebrated members ' participation in meetings and members' completion of the work with a Step at the beginning of our meetings, because we as meeting participants is part of the life force of the Fellowship.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will attend an AcAdAn meeting and thus serve both myself, others, Active Addictions Anonymous and the World at large.

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February 03: The Ring of Emotional Sobriety

We also took a look at how we could move from the pain of our codependency to the joy of our Emotional Sobriety, by looking at how we could move from the attributes of the Ring of codependency to their corresponding attributes in the Ring of Emotional Sobriety.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 47

Instead of remaining in the savior role in the Ring of Codependency and thus try to save another from his/her life's pains, we entered into the Ring of Emotional Sobriety, and thus we liberated our self from his/her problems whether it was material, physical, time and space-related, emotional, mental, social or spiritual by relating to his/her problem with detachment, however without detaching from our love for, care for, compassion with and mercy towards him/her.

Thereby, we liberated our self from the idea that it was our job to solve his/her problem, which had been given to him/her by his/her Higher Power, and instead we gave him/her the time and space to learn the required from his/her life's pains in the same way that we our self learned from our life’s pains, and rather than offending the other by thinking or saying that he/she ought not have these pains, we respected that pain was one of life's greatest teachers, and that he/she was just as entitled to his/her pains, and the wisdom they lead to, as we were entitled to ours.

Instead of feeling like a victim of him/her, if we have chosen to show interest and spend time and energy on easing his/her existential pains without achieving it, not to speak of liberating him/her from them, we chose to accept that it was not always given to us to be able to ease the existential pains of others even if we had found a solution to a similar problem, because his/her Higher Power possibly had a different plan for him/her.

Instead of seducing our self and the other to believe that we were able to save our self and others from life's pain, we admitted that pain was a part of life that no one could avoid, and maybe we could even suggest a way out of the pain that we have discovered our self without thinking anything about it, if our path out of a specific pain was not at the same time his/her path out of the pain.

Today’s contemplation

Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to move into the joy of the Ring of Emotional Sobriety in a situation, if I observe that the pain of the Ring of Codependency has taken over my thinking.

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February 04: The Serenity Prayer

The ‘I’ Version: 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

The ‘We’ Version: God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 52

For us serenity implied that we could look at a situation from our neutral point, because we did not have a desire for a particular outcome, when we found our self in our neutral point, and we used the Serenity Prayer to remind our self that Reality is as it is, whether we accept it with peace of mind or not.

The Serenity Prayer helped us to realize that no matter how angry we got, because it rained when we wanted to go out for a walk, it still rained anyway and we wanted to learn to accept that with serenity, because rebellion against a Reality that already was a fact was painful and useless.

Many situations that we would prefer were different we could change however, so they were more in conformity with our desires, and this we also used the Serenity Prayer to remind our self about, because we did not want to be idle bystanders in the areas that called for an effort on our part so as to have our desires fulfilled.

Furthermore, we reminded our self that we needed to investigate whether we were in a situation we could not change or in a situation we could change, and if it turned out that it was a situation we could change, we wanted to show the courage it took to make it possible to createmanifest a voluntary change.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will practice the Serenity Prayer by accepting the things I cannot change and show the courage to change what I can to have my desires fulfilled plus use my wisdom to see the difference.

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February 05: Creatingmanifesting a Group Conscience

Active Addictions Anonymous is a Fellowship, which is governed by our Group Conscience, and the Group Conscience comes to expression, when each individual member’s voice is heard and taken into consideration before the group makes a decision.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 95

When we entered into a Fellowship with others, whether the Fellowship was Active Addictions Anonymous, a sponsorship, our coupleship or other Fellowships, we wanted our point of view to be heard and taken into consideration, and we knew that others wanted the same, both when a decision had to be made, and when we merely wanted to share our thoughts and emotions with each other.

To fulfill this desire, we createdmanifested a Group Conscience in each of our Fellowships, and we did this primarily by making sure that each member got time and space to express them self on the topic that was on the agenda, and that each member's thoughts and desires were taken into consideration before we made a decision together on a course of action, if action was required.

In AcAdAn there could be many perspectives that needed to be heard and taken into consideration, and therefore we could decide that each member had one voice, and that meant that when each member had spoken once about his/her perspective on the topic and his/her desire for action, the group was ready to make a decision, even though some might think that they could more easily have their desires fulfilled, if they were allowed to speak more than once.

In the Fellowship of our coupleship, we could make use of various ideas such as setting various time limits for each partner’s sharing time, thus giving both parties the time and space they needed to express them self about their perspectives on a given topic, but only imagination sets limits for how we can choose to design our Group Conscience in each of our Fellowships.

Today’s contemplation

Today, I will honestly express my thoughts and emotions to the other members of those Fellowships I am a part of and I will listen attentively and respectfully to what others have to share about their thoughts and emotions.

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February 06: Tradition One to Four

1: Our common welfare should come first; our personal recovery depends on the unity of our group and the survival of the group depends on each individual member’s sense of belonging to the group.
2: For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority, a loving Higher Power, as that Power comes to expression through our Group Conscience. Our leaders are trusted servants; they do not govern.
3: The only requirement for membership in Active Addictions Anonymous is a desire to stop using dissatisfaction.
4: Each AcAdAn group is autonomous except in matters affecting AcAdAn as a whole; similarly, each member of the group has the right to be autonomous except in matters affecting the group or AcAdAn as a whole.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 12

Some time after we became members of Active Addictions Anonymous, we begin to spot the Traditions and thus the foundation on which our Fellowship is built.

By taking the Traditions into consideration in our relationship with our home group and with AcAdAn as a whole, we find out that we can use the Traditions in our relationships with other groups and in relation to the World as a whole.

The Traditions call our attention to the fact that it is important that both we and the other members of our group thrive if we want to achieve the results that we became part of each group to achieve, and this will only be possible if we put the group’s welfare first, when we participate in it.

We put the group's welfare first by listening attentively and respectfully to each member's thoughts, feelings, actions and desires and then incorporate them as part of the solution to the issue under consideration.

We call that to surrender to the Group Conscience, which is the universal and impersonal voice of conscience, which comes to expression when all members have contributed to the subject that is being discussed, by expressing their thoughts, feelings and desires about it, and our Traditions teach us that when we surrender to the Group Conscience we surrender to a loving Higher Power at group level.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will surrender to the Group Conscience in all the groups I become a part of in the course of my day, whether the group consists of two people or two hundred.

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February 07: The origin of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction 

We felt chronically dissatisfied with self, others and our lives.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 9

Already in our journey of discovery in the First Step of the AcAdAn Program, we discovered that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction sprang from our dissatisfaction with our humanness, our limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

When we were dissatisfied with our limitation, we rebelled against the natural limitations of our Mother Earth body, we rebelled against the time things take, we rebelled against our emotions and thoughts, we rebelled against our social life and our spiritual life, because it seemed to us that there was something wrong with limitations of any type.

When we were dissatisfied with our ignorance, we tried to deny it and to pretend that we knew something about everything, although we had no personal experience with what we talked about, and when we were dissatisfied with being powerless over that, we knew nothing about, we became angry and bitter because of our ignorance that we perceived to be stupidity.

When we were dissatisfied with our mortality/changeability we became scared every time we traced changes in our Mother Earth body that could indicate that we were getting older, maybe we were about to get sick, that we thought we did not look as good as we did in the past, and we began to struggle with our physical bodies and our lives to stop the changeability.

Today’s contemplation

Today, I will find out how I can give myself permission to be content with myself, as I am, and my life, as it is, every time I am dissatisfied with myself or a situation in the course of the day.

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February 08: Membership of AcAdAn

You are a member if you say you are.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 119

In Active Addictions Anonymous we have no leaders; we have trusted servants, who are members, who have taken on serving the Fellowship in various ways.

Members can serve the Fellowship by coming to meetings and share their experiences, they can take on chairing meetings, be treasurers, coffee persons or group service representatives.

Because we have no leaders, we need not approach anybody to seek membership, so we were members if we said that we were.

It was only we, our self, who knew if we had a desire to give up our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and this is the only requirement for membership.

Today’s contemplation

Today, I will make use of what the AcAdAn has to offer me, if yet another time I have come to acknowledge that I need help to recover from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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February 09: Tradition Four

The principle of Tradition Four is Serenity.
Slogan: To meet and to separate and to meet again is the life condition of all creaturesmanifestations.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

The free flowing Spirit is found as the ruling energy just beneath the crisp surface behind any form we meet, whether the form is Earthly and thus from the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom or the human kingdom or the form in question is a space-time form, an emotional form, a thought form or the form of a social interaction.

When we interacted with others, it was thus in Reality always the Spirit behind the form, we interacted with, and this has made many spiritual teachers through the times call all manifested forms for an illusion, because any form is crystallized Spirit with a free flowing Spirit as the ruling energy.

Sometimes, we felt a special attachment to one or more people that met various of our needs for us, and we could be scared of losing these people to disease or death, because we forgot that the true Self inside any form is Spirit, and the Spirit could never be lost.

If we separated from a person, who had met a need for us, we would again meet this person, maybe in the same form, maybe in a new form, but we would always meet again, no matter how many times we seemed to separate, because basically, we are One Being that some choose to call God, and God can never be lost.

Today’s contemplation

Today, I will remember that it is the Spirit behind the form that is coming to meet me in all the forms I meet.

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February 10: From addiction to chronic dissatisfaction to contentment

If you become consumed by a thought that springs from your addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, then put yourself on a ‘5 minutes at a time’ basis to abstain from taking your addiction to dissatisfaction into use.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 13

Before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous many of us believed that we could get control of our dissatisfaction, if we only used it occasionally as a driving force for change, but when we came to AcAdAn we discovered that this was not how it was.

We became aware that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction would take our power away from us, if we used dissatisfaction in any way, so we had to abstain from using dissatisfaction to be able to liberate our self from our addiction.

Although we were scared that all driving force to improve our self and our life would dissolve, if we stopped using dissatisfaction, nevertheless, we chose to try to let go of our dissatisfaction, if necessary, five minutes at a time

Thus, we discovered little by little, that there was always space for improvements in all areas of our life without us having to be dissatisfied for that reason and thereby our life became an exciting journey of discovery of constant improvement of our self and our life.

Today’s contemplation
Today, I will use contentment with myself, my life, others and the World at large – if needed, five minutes at a time.

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February 11: From emotional pain to emotional joy 

Gradually, as we investigated The Big Ring of Pain and The Big Ring of Joy this way, we understood that these rings were named so, because our defects of character brought us pain and our virtues brought us joy.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 31

In AcAdAn we look at different thought patterns as energy forms and the outflow of these energy forms we look at as our emotional feelings.

Through our experiences with our work with our AcAdAn Program, we discovered that some energy patterns brought us emotional pain, and others brought us emotional joy.

In AcAdAn we investigated our personal use of these patterns by the help of the Rings of Pain and Joy and thus we became aware of where we were at in our psychological landscape.

Little by little, as our discernment developed, we discovered that we could move from the Rings of Pain to the Rings of Joy in many situations, and thus we became more content.

Today’s contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to work on moving from the Rings of Pain to the Rings of Joy.

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February 12: Guilt

We also knew that we were limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable, and thus fallible, and as such, we knew that we would make mistakes in the future too.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 77

In our Eighth Step in Active Addictions Anonymous, we investigated those areas we felt guilty about from our childhood to the present day in order to use this in our Ninth Step.

Our Ninth Step we used to make amends to our self and others for our mistakes and thus we purified our consciousness of guilt, which is the deadliest poison for our spiritual life.

Sometimes we were reluctant to make amends to another, because we thought that the other createdmanifested the situation, so we thought that we needed the other to make amends to us first.

In our Eighth and Ninth Step however, we exclusively dealt with purifying our own consciousness of guilt, and therefore we were not dealing with the guilt of others.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will focus on how I can liberate my mind from guilt without putting hindrances in my way by demanding that first, others must make amends to me for those mistakes they did to me.

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February 13: To let go of dissatisfaction

This is a Program of complete abstinence from using dissatisfaction with our self, others and life.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 8

For many of us, it had become a habit to use dissatisfaction in any area we wanted to improve, whether the area was about our material possessions, our physical body, our living space, our time, our emotional feelings, our thoughts, our social life or our spiritual life.

Until we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, it had not occurred to us to investigate how our dissatisfaction affected us, our relationships with others, our life and the World at large or that we used dissatisfaction daily, many times a day and that our dissatisfaction thereby had become chronic.

It had not dawned on us either that we were addicted to chronic dissatisfaction, and this meant that we were obsessed with dissatisfied thoughts, which were followed up by compulsive acts, and when we began to investigate the issue, we discovered that our dissatisfaction on top of it did not give us the results we had imagined.

When we used our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, on the contrary, we became sick in soul and body because of our use of it, and as a result of this discovery, we became willing to let go of our use of dissatisfaction under all circumstances, no matter what they were by the help of our AcAdAn Program.

Today’s contemplation
Today, I will let go of my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by moving my focus to satisfactory elements in the situation that I am dissatisfied with, or if I become aware that dissatisfaction has appeared in my thoughts.

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February 14: Growth

Some of us were angry about our ignorance and that of others, until we realized that no matter how wise we are Today we will always be wiser tomorrow.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 20

Many of us had great difficulties in admitting our human ignorance, because we had often experienced that others mocked or ridiculed us if they knew something we did not know, and we had also experienced that our ignorance was perceived as stupidity, if we were ignorant about something that our social circle perceived as common knowledge.

Our most painful experiences concerning our ignorance took place when others perceived us to be evil, so that they therefore thought that we we unloving, uncaring, hardhearted and merciless, if we were ignorant about how we could take care of our self or others in a loving, caring, compassionate and merciful way in one or more areas.

For all these and many other reasons, we tried to hide our ignorance by having an opinion about everything between heaven and earth, whether we knew something about the topic or not, but after we came to AcAdAn and realized that we could not escape our ignorance in any possible way, we finally became able to accept our ignorance.

Gradually then, we also realized that our ignorance had it’s advantages, because our ignorance made it possible for us to discover new things about everything on a daily basis without having to pretend that we already knew it all, and thereby we became more alive and our Reality became more vivid and interesting.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will even accept my ignorance in the areas that I have most knowledge about, and in this way I will open my mind to new knowledge, new inspiration and new growth in all areas.

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February 15: Prayer and meditation

Some perceived our approach to our Higher Power as prayer and our Higher Power’s answer to be meditation.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 69

In the Eleventh Step in our AcAdAn Program, we expanded our conscious contact with our chosen Higher Power by the help of prayer and meditation, and most of us chose to use the prayers of our Eleventh Step for this purpose, in particular the Two-Way Prayer.

Already in Step Two, we chose a Higher Power, in Step Three, we worked on surrendering our self to the loving, caring, compassionate, and merciful Higher Power that we chose in Step Two, and in Step Seven, vi began our cooperation with our Higher Power.

Our chosen Higher Power often used our thinking mind, our Ego as a sounding board to give us the guidance we sought, and our thinking mind, our Ego translated our Higher Power's impulses into thoughts that we could understand.

It could be difficult for many of us to discern the voice of our thinking mind, our Ego from the voice of our chosen Higher Power, but when we used the Two Way Prayer, we became better and better at distinguishing the impulses of our Higher Power from the impulses of our thinking of our mind, our Ego.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will to expand my conscious contact with my Higher Power by the help of the Two Way Prayer from Step Eleven.

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February 16: Expansion of consciousness

The principle of Step Eleven is Expansion of Consciousness.
Slogan: God, Your will be done.   

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 83

Little by little as we expanded our conscious contact with our Higher Power in Step Eleven in our AcAdAn Program, it became easier for us to be present in our life from moment to moment, whether we experienced joy or pain.

As we got accustomed to take the suggestion of our Eleventh Step to heart of practicing Constant Remembrance, we became more and more aware of the loving, caring, compassionate, and merciful intention of our Higher Power behind all our pains.

Gradually as our discernment developed, it became easier and easier for us to let go of our self-will, which was what we thought should happen during our day, instead of what actually happened.

Instead, we surrendered our self from moment to moment to the will of our Higher Power for us, which was that, which actually happened, whether it was the pleasant good or the unpleasant good that took place in the Blissful Flow of the Present Moment.

Today’s contemplation
Today, I will surrender to my day as it IS, while being consciously aware of my Higher Power's loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention for me both concerning the pleasant good and the unpleasant good.

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February 17: Passing it on

If somebody outside the Fellowship expressed a desire to know what we were up to, we readily shared about our experiences with the AcAdAn Program, and thereby, we passed on the message of AcAdAn to them.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 82

In the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous, we work with our deepest and most frightening existential sufferings; our fear of and our dissatisfaction with our human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

Our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, which is the result of our lack of acceptance of our humanness, had led to big sufferings both for our self, our life, others and the World at large, before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous.

When we began to achieve recovery from these sufferings by the help of theAcAdAn Program and thereby came to see the advantages that this entailed, we also wanted that our discoveries should benefit others and the World at large.

When others expressed a desire to hear about it, we therefore readily told them, what it had meant to us to be liberated from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and in that way we gave our contribution to ease the pains of the suffering humankind.

Today’s contemplation

Today, I will pass on my discoveries and experiences from my work with my AcAdAn Program in a meeting or to others, who are not members of AcAdAn, but who express a desire to hear about it

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February 18: Acceptance of the process of sorrow

Over time, after having consciously gone through the process of sorrow a few times, we became more accepting and patient, both with our self and with others, whether it was our own grief of having lost a loved one or our having to deal with a child who had just lost his or her favorite plaything.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 41

The process of sorrow consists of five stages that come to expression in different order as denial, anger, negotiation, grief and acceptance and could come to expression in our every day life when things and situations did not happen, as we thought they should, and the process could last from a few minutes to months or years.

Usually, the daily processes of sorrow consisted in that we grieved because we or others did not live up to our desires, and the long processes of sorrow also usually consisted in us rebelling against Reality, because we had difficulty accepting our own or others limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

Gradually, as we consciously observed our self go through the process of sorrow several times, we became more and more calm, even though we might be in the middle of a process of sorrow, because it was clear to us that the process had a beginning, a climax and an end, and therefore it would not last forever even if at times it could appear like that to us.

Consciously to live through a process of sorrow like suggested in our Active Addictions Anonymous Program meant, that we actually came out on the other side of the process of sorrow with acceptance and a greater knowledge of our existence as a limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable human being.

Today's contemplation
Today, with serenity, I will accept my processes of sorrow, because I know that I come out on the other side as a wiser and more compassionate human being.

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February 19: Surrender

No matter how we chose to perceive our Higher Power, we needed to surrender our will and our life to the care of our chosen Higher Power in Step Three, because we by our self alone were powerless over our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 27

In Step One it had been difficult for most of us to come face to face with how it made our life unmanageable that we were addicted to chronic dissatisfaction with our human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

Therefore, it was at big relief for us to come to Step Two, where we came to believe that a Power, greater than us, could help us to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

After having developed the faith in Step Two that a Power greater than us could help us, we came to trust that we could surrender our will, our life and thereby our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction to the care of our chosen Higher Power in Step Three.

Thus it became possible for us to let go of our struggle with our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction so as to instead let our self be led to contentment with our self and thereby with our life, others and the World at large by the help of the rest of the Steps from Step Four to Twelve.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will let myself be led to contentment with myself, my life, others and the World at large by surrendering to the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous.

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February 20: The victim role of Codependency   

When others failed to give us the praise we sought from them, we felt victimized, and this brought about a state of anger and disrespect for others in us, as the feeling of being a victim is accompanied by feelings of hostility.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 32

When we came to Active Addictions Anonymous and began investigating our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we discovered that many of us had felt that there was something wrong with us, because of the criticism we had been exposed to from our childhood until now.

In our desire to be as we believed we ought to be, we tried to please others, and we perceived it to be a sign that we had succeeded if others praised us, so we became addicted to praise, and thus we began to do something exclusively in order to receive praise from others.

If others failed to praise us, we felt like victims and got angry at them, because we had spent so many of our resources, our money, time, energy and interest on their wellbeing instead of on our own without them praising us and thereby giving us our antidote to criticism.

Little by little, we discovered however, that we had seduced our self and others by imagining that it was our job to save them from solving their own tasks, and we also found out that it was our task to use our resources on solving our own tasks.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will work on moving from my victim role by moving from the Ring of Codependency into the Ring of Emotional Sobriety.

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February 21: Progress rather than perfection

Thus, we became aware that we would continue to make mistakes, and we would still need our Program and continue to need guidance, help and consolation from everything and everyone around us, so as to get empowered to find solutions and move on instead of getting stuck in various dysfunctional patterns.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 58

When we began working with the Program in AcAdAn, some of us hoped that we could achieve perfection in all areas of our life by the help of the Program until we realized that we still made mistakes and still needed support and guidance from others no matter how far we had come in the Program..

At first, we became dismayed by the fact that there was always room for improvements of our well-being either materially, physically, time and space wise, emotionally, mentally, socially or spiritually, but then we realized that it was precisely this fact that made our life interesting.

When we thought that we could not improve a project further,  we were admittedly done working on this project, but this however, did not mean that we could lean back and not be exposed to more challenges or new projects that we needed to work on in our life.

Life would present us with a new project that could fill the empty space that the completed project had left behind, and in this way, we continued to develop our talents in many different areas without us ever reaching a point where our talents could not be further developed in one area or another, and so we realized that there was always room for improvements in our life.

Today's contemplation
Today I rejoice in my progress in the many small things that I improved in my life today and I will gratefully think of all the help and guidance I have received that made these little advances possible.

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February 22: Conscious contact with a Higher Power

The most important thing was that it worked for us to interact with our Higher Power.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 74

dawned on us when we reached Step Eleven that now we had to further develop our work from Step Two, Three and Seven so as to createmanifest an interaction that worked for us with our chosen Higher Power.

With this purpose in mind, we began to investigate, how we could learn to use prayer, meditation and Constant Remembrance like it has been suggested in our Eleventh Step.

Many of us used the Two Way Prayer to learn to expand our conscious contact with our Higher Power and moreover we used meditation to come into oneness with our true Self, our Spirit.

Gradually, as we became better and better at discerning between those impulses that came to us from our thinking mind, our Ego and those that came to us from our true Self, our Spirit, our Eleventh Step began to work better and better for us.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use Constant Remembrance to return to the meditative state of mind that I achieved during my morning meditation so as to maintain my conscious contact with my Higher Power’s guidance throughout the day.

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February 23: Forgiveness

In the end, we set aside a day that we called the Sacred Day of Forgiveness, where we went through our list point-by-point and forgave our self for the mistakes we had made in the past, and thus, we were ready to move on to Step Nine. 

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 64

We discovered in our AcAdAn Program that forgiveness could not be given as a decision, but had to spring from the heart however much we wanted to forgive our self or others.

We faced that what we thought others had done against us, which we thought they should be ashamed of, we our self could have done under similar circumstances.

By the help of this realization, we became better able to understand the actions of others, and the understanding of the actions of others made it easier for us to forgive them.

When it concerned forgiving our self for the mistakes we had done to our self or others, we could make it possible for us to forgive our self by making amends for our mistakes.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will ask my Higher Power for the capacity to forgive myself for my I have done to myself or others.

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February 24: Honesty

We strived to be as honest and thorough with our Fifth Step as we could be, because we realized that it was decisive for our progress in our recovery.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 44

Most of us strived to be as honest to our self as possible, so it had not occurred to us to stop and ask our self whether it was possible for us to tell the truth about anything before we came to AcAdAn.

After we came to AcAdAn and investigated the issue, we realized that we were actually unable to tell the truth about just a single event in our daily experiences, no matter how honest we wanted to be.

If for example, we walked from our home to the nearby bakery, it would be impossible for us to tell about all the people, animals, plants and things that we passed by on the road, and about all the thoughts, emotions and sense impressions, we experienced in that context.

Therefore, our honesty in our Fifth Step consisted in sharing our discoveries about the limited areas that we had chosen to focus on in our Fourth Step, no matter if we thought they put us in a less flattering or a more flattering light.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will be honest to my self both about a side of me that I find less flattering and about a side of me that I find more flattering.

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February 25: The newcomer

The newcomer is the most important person in AcAdAn as he/she is the source of growth for us and our Fellowship, giving us an opportunity to keep what we have received from AcAdAn by sharing it with the newcomer.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 8

As a Fellowship, we understood that our old-timers were very important for us, because they were the backbone of the Fellowship, and therefore it was important for us that they wanted to continue to be members, so we did our best as a Fellowship to ensure that they felt respected and comfortable.

When a newcomer came to his/her first meeting, we remembered that we felt a bit uncertain as newcomers and therefore we took well care of the newcomer by giving him/her all of our attention so we could find out what he/she needed from our side so as to feel safe among us.

As a Fellowship we also understood that the newcomer was the most important person in AcAdAn, because the newcomer gave both old-timers and other newcomers the opportunity to share our experiences with the AcAdAn Program, and thereby we could all broaden our own perspectives on the Program, thanks to the newcomer.

Last, but not least, the number of members grew, when a newcomer decided to become a member of AcAdAn, and the more members we got, the more perspectives on our Program, we gained access to and the greater freedom we got, and thereby we became more content.

Today's contemplation
Today I will further develop my social skills by taking care of a newcomer or an old timer in my AcAdAn Fellowship.

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February 26: Humaneness/fallibility

No matter how much spiritual information was passed on among us, we realized that we still needed to accept each others’ humaneness and fallibility.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 17

Before we came to AcAdAn, our existential sufferings made us seek for a solution to these sufferings, and in our search we heard from many quarters that the solution to our sufferings lay on the Spiritual Path, and this had led us to believe that if only we became spiritual enough, we would no longer suffer under being a human being on this Earth.

When we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we imagined that we would no longer feel that there was something wrong with being a limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable human being, if only our spiritual life became more and more prominent because of our work with the AcAdAn Program.

Gradually however, we discovered, that no matter how prominent our spiritual life became, we were anyhow still limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable human beings, and that our fallibility sprang from our humanness, so the fallibility was in inbuilt part of our humanness and not a moral flaw.

This realization led us to become completely calm, because we realized that now, we had an opportunity to become content with our self and thus with others, our life and the World at large, if we used our AcAdAn Program to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction on our humanness/fallibility.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to forgive myself for the mistakes that I think I have made today as compared to my goals.

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February 27: Willingness to transformation

This Step is exclusively about achieving the willingness to have all our defects of character removed through transformation; it’s not about becoming super human beings.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 46

In our Sixth Step, we began to transform our defects of character into virtues by shining light on them, and we did that by using Step One to admit that a specific defect of character was active in us, and how it makes our life unmanageable.

Next, we ask our self what we hoped to achieve by taking our defect of character into use, and in that way we discovered that desire, which lay at the root of our use of the defect of character in question.

Then we moved from the pain in the defect of character to investigate, how we believed that the situation would have transpired, if we had used the joy in the corresponding virtue to fulfill our desire.

The more often we went through the process of transformation from pain to joy, the more experienced we became at moving from emotional pain to emotional joy, and the more willing we became to go through the process of transformation in Step Six.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Sixth Step to go through a transformation process and thus transform my pain to joy.

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February 28: Step Five to Eight

The Program of Active Addictions Anonymous Step Five to Eight.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 10

We gradually discovered that it was not only Step One to Four that set the Big Ring of Joy  with its faith, hope, love, and truth into oscillations, but that it also was true for Step Five to Eight.

In our work with Step Five in our AcAdAn Program, we had faith in that it was to our advantage to share our realizations from Step Four with our self, our Higher Power, another human being and our Fellowship.

In Step Six, we hoped that the transformation of our defects of character would make us more content, and in our cooperation with our Higher Power in Step Seven, we received the unconditional love of our Higher Power.

In Step Eight, we came face to face with the truth about those areas we were ashamed of and received forgiveness from our self, our Higher Power, another human being and our Fellowship.

Today's contemplation
Today, Today, I will use Step Five to Eight to set the Big Ring of Joy into oscillations.

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February 29: Guilt and shame   

We brought all those areas out in the open that we felt guilty about from our childhood till today.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 61

In Step Four, we bring all that out into the open that others have done that we feel hurt by, and in Step Eight we bring all that out in the open that we feel guilty about and which we therefore are ashamed of, because we believe that we have harmed our self or others.

The intention of bringing our guilt and shame out in the open is to liberate us from these two emotions, which are the deadliest poisons to our material life, our physical life, our energetic lives, our emotional life, our thought life, our social life and our spiritual life.

Before we came to work with our feelings of guilt and shame in Step Eight, we have worked with many painful emotions and experienced the recovery from the pain, and that has given us the courage to bring our most secret painful emotions out into the open, so that the recovery process can begin.

The recovery process begins when we acknowledge our pain, admit how it makes our lives unmanageable and then use our Steps to transform the pain to joy.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will bring a painful emotion that I am ashamed of out into the open, so the work of transforming the pain to joy can begin.

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MARCH

March 01 The purpose of the group	March 02 To pass on the message of AcAdAn	March 03 Coming to believe
March 04 The Higher Power's will	March 05 The Small Ring of Avarice	March 06 The Seducer Role of Codependency
March 07 The Smile Meditation	March 08 To stop fleeing	March 09 To let go of control
March 10 Step Twelve	March 11 Artificial joy	March 12  Ignorance
March 13 To share understanding with others	March 14 Comparisons	March 15 Step Seven
March 16 Loss	March 17 To try to escape from life	March 18 Praise from others
March 19 The euphoria of self-praise	March 20 Task solving	March 21 Choice of a Higher Power
March 22 Appreciation of the group members	March 23 To learn by listening to other members	March 24 Acts of violence and war
March 25 Step Eight	March 26 Accountability in Service	March 27 Transformation
March 28 The changeability	March 29 The consequences of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction	March 30 Recovery from existential pains
March 31 Acceptance of the ignorance

March 01: The purpose of the group

As a group, we possess vital collective experiences and wisdom about recovery from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and we consider it to be the group’s primary purpose to make this wealth of knowledge available to our self and others.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 90

By creatingmanifesting an AcAdAn meeting, we createdmanifested a place where we could meet a group of like-minded people, who also had discovered that they were dissatisfied with them self, others, their life and the World at large on a daily basis, and that this dissatisfaction made them physically ill and gave them a feeling of being unhappy like it had happened for us too.

When our group held our meetings, we told each other about our experiences with recovering from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and about how we succeeded in finding contentment under all circumstances no matter what they were by the help of the Twelve Steps in Active Addictions Anonymous.

We listened to each other's experiences and began to understand that we were not alone about this suffering and that put together, we held a wealth of experiences about how we could recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, which made it possible for us to discover many sides of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we otherwise could not discover.

By the help of our meetings with the other members it became easier and easier for us to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction both physically and psychologically and thereby we learned to live a content life under all circumstances by the help of our AcAdAn meetings.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will attend a meeting in Active Addictions Anonymous to let myself be enriched by the experiences of other members and to enrich others with my experiences.

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March 02: To pass on the message of AcAdAn

The Twelfth Step suggests that we practice these principles in all our affairs, and when we did that, our way of being clearly reflected the rewards of working the AcAdAn Program in everything we did, and thus we carried the message by living it even when we were not passing it on to others by word of mouth. 

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 82

In AcAdAn, it was important for us to pass on the message that it was possible to recover from one’s addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with oneself, others, life and the World at large.

It was important for us both because we wished others well, and because growth in our AcAdAn Fellowship helped us to gain new perspectives on our Program.

When we passed on the message, it was important for us to remember that pressure createsmanifests counter pressure, so we did not try to overwhelm others with the message or to persuade them to become members.

Instead, we chose to follow the principles of our Active Addictions Anonymous Program, which states that our Program works through attraction rather than promotion.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will to apply the principles from my AcAdAn Program, when I pass on the message about AcAdAn to others.

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March 03: Coming to believe

After coming to AcAdAn, we discovered that it is a process to come to believe in someone or something greater than us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 24

When we came to AcAdAn, most of us had been completely confined inside by our fear of our human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability, and this fear had appeared so overwhelming to us that we had done everything in our power to deny our humanness.

In spite of all our efforts to deny our humanness, yet every day, we came face to face with the fact that it was not possible, and instead we tried to flee from it in many different ways, and when we did not succeed in that either, we became dissatisfied with our self, and thereby we ended up being chronically dissatisfied.

When we began coming to meetings in AcAdAn, we were relieved to hear that others had found a solution to our existential problem, and the solution was to begin the process of developing faith in a Power greater than our self to whom we could safely surrender control of our human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

The further we came with developing our belief in a Power greater than us, the more freedom we received to look at our humanity as a journey of discovery that gave our life an interesting content on a daily basis, and thereby our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with our self and others as human beings dissolved.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will work on developing my faith in that I can safely surrender the responsibility for my human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability to a Power greater than my self for in that way recover from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with myself and others.

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March 04: The Higher Power's will

The Eleventh Step suggests only to pray for knowledge of our Higher Power’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
This meant that we wanted to know our Higher Power’s will for us, which is, in Reality, our own will for our self when we are not blinded by our thoughts and emotions.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 74

In Step Eleven, we sought knowledge of our Higher Power's will for us daily by the help of prayer and meditation, because prayer helped us get into contact with our Higher Power, and meditation made it possible for us to intercept our Higher Power's guidance.

It was necessary for us to become empty of thoughts by the help of meditation, because it could be difficult for us to intercept the subtle impulses that continually streamed through our mind beyond our thoughts, and which were our Higher Power's constant guidance on what was the right action for us in this NOW.

In the beginning, many of us were afraid of becoming slaves of our Higher Power when we began to know the will of our Higher Power for us, but we have a free will, however, so we can either choose to surrender to the impulse and the action, the impulse suggests, or we can choose to surrender to what our thinking mind, our Ego suggests.

Little by little, as we harvested experiences with the work of our Eleventh Step, we became more and more willing to surrender to the will of our Higher Power for us, because we gradually discovered that when we did, we achieved what in Reality we our self wanted innermost, because our Higher Power's will for us was our own true will for us.

Today's contemplation

Today Today, I will open myself to listen to my Higher Power’s will for me, so I can become able to find my own true will for me.

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March 05: The Small Ring of Avarice

We discovered that when The Small Ring of Avarice became active in us, we wanted to receive something materially, physically, time-space wise, emotionally, mentally, socially or spiritually without having to use our own money, time, energy or interest to get it (Stinginess), and we readily received anything that we didn’t have to make an effort to get (Greed) even if we did not need it (Gluttony), while at the same time, we felt poor in spite of all the things and advantages we possessed (Poverty).

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 38

When we investigated the Small Ring of Avarice, we discovered that poverty did not consist in a lack of material things or money, but in that we found our self being in a particular state of mind that belonged to the Small Ring of Avarice, which made us feel poor in spite of the fact that we had our basic needs covered.

We both had food to eat, clothes to wear and a roof over our head and most of us could afford downright gluttony by possessing far more clothes than we needed, and we lived in big houses or apartments filled with furniture and toys for our entertainment, such as TV, computers, internet and games.

Our feeling of poverty led us to become greedy to procure more and more for our self, even if we did not need it and we became stingy towards others because we feared to come to lack something if we passed on to others what we did not need and therefore had in surplus.

As a result of our investigations in Step Four about how the Small Ring of Avarice affected us, a desire arose in us to move out of this energy field, and therefore, in Step Six, we began to investigate how we could move from the Small Ring of Avarice to the Small Ring of Faith, which is the antidote to the Small Ring of Avarice.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will work on moving out of the Small Ring of Avarice and into the Small Ring of Faith.

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March 06: The Seducer Role of Codependency

At times, we seduced others by claiming to know better than them and their Higher Power as to what their path and their truth in life ought to be or not to be, or by pretending to genuinely care for their wellbeing, whereas we were actually driven by this need for others to take our suggestions to heart, for us to feel better and more valuable than we were able to due to our self-criticism.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 30

Sometimes, we felt a need to have confirmed by others that we were valuable, in particular when we felt a low self-esteem, and we imagined that we could achieve this by doing something for others that would save them from the pains of life in those areas where we had found a solution to our existential pains our self.

This need to save others from their existential pains could make us try to seduce our self and them to believe that we were able to save them from the pains of their life, if only they followed our guidance and therefore did like we had done to recover from the pain in question.

When thus we seduced our self and others to believe that we could save them from the pains of their life it could lead to that we used our resources, our money, our time, our energy and our interest on saving them, and when we discovered that our attempts to save them usually had the opposite effect, we felt like victims.

We had overlooked the fact that each and every human being had a need to find his/her own way out of the pains of his/her life, so when we took on the existential pains of others as if they were our own, we prevented them from beginning the work of finding a solution to the pain, which their Higher Power had presented them for.

Today’s contemplation

Today, I will give others time and space to find a solution to their small or big existential pains instead of seducing myself and them to believe that it is my task to save them from carrying out this work.

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March 07: The Smile Meditation

This central area of our brain together with the healing power of a smile has been used by spiritual masters for millennia as an object of contemplation and has createdmanifested the smiling eyes that are so well known in spiritual masters, and this central area in the brain has been named the cave of Brahma in Hinduism and the Crystal Palace in Taoism.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 79

In our Eleventh Step in AcAdAn we used the Smile Meditation to help our Mother Earth body/physical body to recover from various weaknesses and illnesses during our state of meditation, where consciously we moved our attention into the central part of our brain to pick up power.

For many of us, it was a new thought that our physical brain and our state of meditation could be connected, but research has shown that the central part of our brain, which contains thalamus and hypothalamus, the pineal and pituitary gland plays a part in context with meditation.

These areas with associated glands secret oxytocin, endorphin, dopamine, serotonin and adrenaline, and when we focused on this central part of our brain with a gentle smile during meditation, we could release these hormones, which could help us to achieve a powerful healing meditation and a greater joy of living.

When we let our attention rest in this part of our brain with a gentle smile, we could infuse the healing power from here to our eyes, so they became smiling eyes that we could use to heal various weak or diseased areas of our body and that we could also use to infuse healing power into the eyes of others.

Today’s contemplation
Today, I will use the healing power of the Smile Meditation from my Eleventh Step in AcAdAn to heal my own existential pains and that of others, whether the pains are physical, energetical, emotional, mental, social or spiritual.

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March 08: To stop fleeing

Some of us became so despondent upon these realizations that we withdrew from life, but when we came to AcAdAn, we decided to stop fleeing from life's pains.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 18

As members of AcAdAn we investigated the existential pains that sprang from our lack of acceptance of our four basic attributes as human beings, our limitation ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

We had done much to flee from our humanness, but every time we came to the end of yet another attempt to flee, we had to face that we were still limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable.

In Active Addictions Anonymous, we found a Fellowship with others, who suffered from the same addiction to chronic dissatisfaction that we did due to our lack of acceptance of our humanness.

By the help of our AcAdAn Program and the Fellowship in Active Addictions Anonymous, together we moved from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction to contentment under all circumstances, no matter what they are.

Today’s contemplation
Today, I will use mu AcAdAn Program and my AcAdAn Fellowship to learn to accept my human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

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March 09: To let go of control

We feared that our lives would get out of control if we surrendered to a Higher Power, but we shared our fears and reluctance at the AcAdAn meetings and with others who had experiences with working Step Three.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 27

Step Three suggests we turn our will and our life over to the care of our chosen Higher Power, but many of us feared to take any such an action, in particular because many of us had been brought up with the idea of a punishing Godhead.

This idea had made us imagine that our Higher Power would be like a parent who ordered us to do things we did not feel like doing, and who punished us if we did not do as we were told.

In our Second Step, however, we had worked on choosing our personal Higher Power as an unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate and merciful Higher Power, and this has made it easier for us to use Step Three.

Although we had chosen an unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate, and merciful Higher Power so as to get the courage to surrender our will and our life to the care of our Higher Power, we discovered that surrender was a process, not an event.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Third Step to move forward in my process towards a wholehearted surrender to my Higher Power’s care.

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March 10: Step Twelve

The principle of Step Twelve is Mercy.
Slogan: We do not ask how your addiction to chronic dissatisfaction arose but what you want to do about it and how we can help.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 83

Before we came to AcAdAn many of us were not aware that we were addicted to chronic dissatisfaction in spite of us using our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with our self, our life, others and the World around us many times a day every single day.

We used our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, because we were trying to escape our powerlessness over our self, others, life and the World around us, hoping that our body, others, life and the World around us would change to our contentment.

It never occurred to us to investigate if what we did was working for us when we tried to gain control over our self, others, our life, and the World around us by using our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction before we heard about Active Addictions Anonymous.

Only when we came to AcAdAn we meet people, who worked on their recovery from their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and thereby we finally met people, who understood the sufferings that sprang from our disease and had begun their recovery.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will joyfully receive help from other members of AcAdAn by receiving the wisdom, they have to offer about recovery in AcAdAn so I can become able to recover from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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March 11: Artificial joy

The pattern of Codependency settled in us because of our self-criticism and depression creatingmanifesting within us a need for others to praise us so that we reach a state of euphoria, also called artificial joy, springing from self-praise, which for many of us was the only form of joy we knew before we came to AcAdAn.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 31

The only kind of joy most of us knew, when we came to AcAdAn was the artificial joy, which is called euphoria, that springs from self-praise, and because of this need we activated the Ring of Self-centredness with its euphoria, depression, self-criticism and self-praise.

When we used self-praise to get to feel better by becoming euphoric we could not however, avoid becoming self-critical and depressed very soon, because these four attributes are to be found in the same energy pattern that we call the Ring of Self-centeredness in AcAdAn.

When our self-praise and euphoria was replaced by our self-criticism and depression, we often got a need for praise from others to get to feel valuable without being aware that thereby we opened our self for the pain in the Ring of Codependency.

Thereby we added pain to pain, but gradually, as our work with our Sixth Step developed we became better and better however, at moving away from the pain in these Rings to the joy in the Ring of God-centeredness the Ring of Emotional Sobriety.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will let go of using the Ring of Self-centeredness in relation to myself and the Ring of Codependency in relation to others, and instead I will use the Ring of Godcenteredness in relation to myself and the Ring of Emotional Sobriety in relation to others.

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March 12: Ignorance

We respected our own and others’ emotions and stopped pretending that we knew something about everything, and as a result, we became more content.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 21

While we were growing up, many of us were mocked, if there was something we did not know, and sometimes, we were called evil when we accidentally harmed another living being.

At other times, we were called stupid, and it could also happen that we were teased, when we were ignorant about something or the other, in tones that made us squirm.

This made some of us decide that when we grew up we would no longer be ignorant, and therefor we had a harder and harder time admitting our ignorance.

As a consequence we pretended to know something about everything, because we were afraid that someone might disclose our natural human ignorance.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to liberate myself from my fear of my human ignorance.

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March 13: To share understanding with others

We also realized that the spiritual wisdom we were blessed with was inherent in each one of us as a natural part of our being; so it was not our task to persuade others to believe in anything that was not true for them, but their own task to seek help to come into contact with their inner knowing.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 17

Many of us became so excited about those discoveries about our true nature both as human beings and as spiritual beings which we achieved by the help of our AcAdAn Program that we wanted our fellow human beings to benefit from it as well.

Therefore, we had a tendency to share the pearls we had found with others, who had not expressed a desire them self to hear about it even when we senses the lack of interest from others concerning the happiness creatingmanifesting effect of our self-realizations.

Instead of letting go of further explanations to the deaf ear, some of us could become so eager to make the other person understand how it would be to his/her advantage to become member of AcAdAn, so he/she could achieve, what we had achieved.

Little by little as we had done this a number of times, we discovered however that it had the opposite effect, so we realized that it was not our task to persuade others to show interest in the rewarding aspects of self-realization by the help of our AcAdAn Program.

Today's contemplation
Today, I choose to only share my experiences with my AcAdAn Program with others, who express an interest in hearing about it them self.

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March 14: Comparisons

As a natural consequence of using the Ring of Emotional Sobriety, we came in touch with the Truth that any creaturemanifestation is equally valuable to creationmanifestation, exactly the way they are, and thus the Big Ring of Joy opened up to us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 33

Before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we could sometimes get an urge to compare our self with others, and when we did that, it could happen that we compared our best qualities with other people's worst qualities, or that we compared other people's best qualities with our own worst.

After we came to AcAdAn, we discovered however, that we are all so unique that even our fingerprints are so unique that none are found similar to our own in the whole World, and that made us realize that we could not achieve an understanding of our existence by comparing our self with others.

Instead of trying to find understanding of our self by comparison with others, we therefore began to use the Ring of Emotional Sobriety with its detachment, integrity, respect for self and respect for others so as to become able to understand our self.

Thus we let of looking at other people's character defects and virtues so as to look at our own instead by respecting that both we and the others held character defects and virtues, and it was our job to build up our integrity by being true to our own and it was the job of others to build their integrity by being true to their own, and thus we and others were at an equal footing concerning our existential tasks.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Ring of Emotional Sobriety from my AcAdAn Program so as to accept that it is my task to take care of my emotions and thoughts and it is the task of others to take care of their emotions and thoughts.

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March 15: Step Seven

Step Seven consists of two parts, and the first part we could do immediately after finishing Step Six.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 54

When we came to Step Seven, we had become entirely ready to allow our Higher Power to liberate us from our defects of character, and we began our Seventh Step by praying to be liberated from  all of our defects of character.

Next, we moved on to the second part of our Seventh Step, which is a daily cooperation with our chosen Higher Power about being liberated from our defects of character in those situations where we observed they arose.

Gradually, as we developed our Seventh Step we became better and better at spotting our defects of character and thereby we also became better and better at cooperating with our chosen Higher Power about being liberated from them.

As a result of our daily use of Step Seven, we experienced that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction was decreased, and thus we became more and more content with our self and our life under all circumstances, no matter what they are.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Seventh Step to cooperate with my Higher Power about liberating me from my defects of character.

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March 16: Loss

Because we accepted that the process of sorrow had to take its own course and it took its time whether we wanted it or not, gradually, we learned to not oppose it but to allow it to pass so as to become able to liberate our self from our sorrow that otherwise might turn into bitterness.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 41

When we lost something or someone, which or who were important for us, whether it concerned our possessions, our lifestyle, our health, or people who were important in our life, it often happened that we found it difficult to accept the loss.

Our lack of acceptance of the loss set the five stages of the process of sorrow into movement: denial, anger, negotiation, grief and acceptance, and it did not matter for the intensity of our pain, if our loss was of a material nature or it was a loss of our familiar life style.

Even if the loss of the familiar was to our advantage, it could still be painful for many of us, like it happened for example, when our life style changed for the better, like it did, when we recovered from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

When we suffered a loss of the familiar, it could make many of us turn our back to our AcAdAn Program so as to focus on our sorrow because our life was in constant change just like we were, and therefore it was important for us to learn to live through the process of sorrow.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to ease and heal the pain of my losses.

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March 17: To try to escape from life

We discovered that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction were just one of the many paths we had traveled in our attempts to escape from coming face to face with our four basic human attributes.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 15

Most of us had been on the spiritual path for a long time in our search for a solution to our existential pains before we came to AcAdAn.

At meetings in Active Addictions Anonymous we heard others talk about that it was good to stop trying to flee from life.

However, we could not put a finger on what it entailed to try to escape from life even if we had a vague idea about that it was something we did.

Only when we heard about our human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability we understood that it was our humanness we had tried to flee from.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to learn to be content with my human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

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March 18: Praise from others

Instead of thinking that we had to save others from the consequences of their thoughts, emotions or actions so as for us to be able to feel good about our self, we respected their right to own the consequences of their thoughts, emotions and actions, and hence, we gave them time and space to find their own solutions, and at the same time, we gave our self the right to the same.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 48

Our need to be able to perceive our self as good people when we do not feel that we are can make us use the savior role of our codependency so as to achieve praise from others so that we can feel better about our self, and as we can not expect to get praise from others just like that, we become willing to use our time, our energy, our interest and our money to save others from life's pains.

However, our true motive is not to save others from their life's pains, but to achieve praise from them or from others, who witness that we sacrifice our time, our energy, our interest and our money so that our fellow human beings may get well .

We can discover our true motives, if we begin to experience emotional pain, if no one expresses praise about our efforts.

If that happens, we know that our co-dependency is active, so we need to move from the savior role of our co-dependency to the detachment of our emotional sobriety concerning the existential pains of others so as to recover from our own.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to liberate myself from my need for praise from others.

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March 19: The euphoria of self-praise

Instead of praising our self for the successes we thought we had achieved in the course of a day and thereby creatingmanifesting a short-lived euphoria from the thought of how great we thought we were, we chose to focus on our gratitude about the help we received in the course of the day that made our success possible, whether the help sprang from within or without.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 47

When we look at the beauty and personal qualities of other people, we can feel that they are better off than we are, and it can make us want to praise our self for the successes that we have experienced.

When we praise our self for our successes, we have a tendency to forget that we have achieved them, because we have received an empowerment from our inner World in the form of inspiration or from our external World in the form of help, support and ideas from others.

When we praise our self for our successes, we achieve a short lived euphoria because of how good we think we are thereby we have stepped into the pain in the Ring of Self-centeredness, and self-criticism and depression will soon follow in the wake of our self-praise and euphoria.

At the same time we lose the capacity to feel grateful and hence the ability to move from the pain in the Ring of Self-centeredness with its self-praise, euphoria, self-criticism and depression til the joy in the Ring of God-centeredness with its gratitude, joy, open-mindedness and empowerment.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to move from the pain in the Ring of Self-centeredness with its self-praise, euphoria, self-criticism and depression, to the joy in the Ring of God-centeredness with its gratitude, joy, open-mindedness and empowerment.

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March 20: Task solving 

Some of us thought it wasn’t necessary to seek our Higher Power’s will for us so often in the course of a day as we had done so at the beginning of the day itself.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 70

Step Eleven suggests that we must seek guidance from our Higher Power, before we begin a task to be able to find the best possible solution to the task.

Furthermore, Step Eleven suggests that we thank our Higher Power for the guidance and the power to carry out the task, when the task is completed.

Many of us did not think we had the time to stop both before and after a task, because we wanted to proceed to the next task immediately.

We discovered however, that this impatience and rashness often led us to feeling rushed, irritable and belligerent, and thus we lost our contentment.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the suggestion from my Eleventh Step in AcAdAn to stop both before and after a task to seek guidance before the task and to thank for the guidance and the power to carry out the task afterwards.

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March 21: Choice of a Higher Power

The right to have a Higher Power of our own choice is unconditional and without traps.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 27

Before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we had some perceptions of a Higher Power that scared us, because we had been told that if we did not do certain things or neglected to do others, our Higher Power would punish us.

In AcAdAn, we had a need to liberate our self from this impression, which for many of us looked like our relationship with our parents, and instead we needed to select a Higher Power that did not reward or punish us for things we did or did not do.

The only suggested guidelines in our Second Step in AcAdAn was that we chose a Higher Power that we were able to perceive as unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate and merciful so reward and punishment could not get space in this relationship.

When we heard about the experiences of others with their unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate and merciful Higher Power at meetings, our trust grew in that we did not have to fear a punishing Godhead because of our choice of a Higher Power.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my faith in that my choice of my personal Higher Power is completely without traps so I can freely choose a Higher Power that I trust.

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March 22: Appreciation of the group members

We know that each and every group member is vital for the group to survive.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 86

When we moved around in society, we saw that people were treated more or less respectfully depending on their outer appearance.

Moreover, we saw that people were treated differently because of their wealth or prestige or lack of the same, in particular if they had a high position in society.

In our Fellowship we did not want to use this outer yard stick for how we related to each other, because our mutual purpose was of an inner nature.

We knew that each member was important for the survival of our group, and therefore we wanted show each member of our group the same respect.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will respect and appreciate every single member of my group both in my AcAdAn Fellowship and my other Fellowships, like for example the Fellowship of two people in my marriage.

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March 23: To learn by listening to other members

The Program of Active Addictions Anonymous might seem to us like a humongous task, and it helps us if we remember that we cannot do it all at once, and that nobody expects us to.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 11

In our first AcAdAn meeting we heard about many concepts that were new to us, and for many of us it seemed overwhelming to think about acquiring an understanding of them.

After the meeting, we talked with other members, and they told us that their understanding of the concepts also kept developing, so they had learned to take it easy.

They suggested that we took it easy and just listened to what others had to share about their understanding of the concepts, and little by little our understanding would develop.

Furthermore, we could consider beginning the work on our own AcAdAn Program and thus become even better at developing our own understanding of the concepts.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will participate in an AcAdAn meeting to learn about the AcAdAn Program by listening to other members' understanding of it.

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March 24: Acts of violence and war

We remembered that attack is the first act of violence and defense the first act of war, and an explanation would be an expression of our desire to defend our wrong.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 67

Most of us considered our self to be peaceful people, until we came to AcAdAn and investigated the issue further, and here we found out that we often attacked others, although we rarely did so physically, but in various other ways.

We had denied that it was a violent attack, when our violent attack on others happened by us using irritated, impatient, belligerent or bitter tones, when we looked at them with angry facial expressions or when we used angry words towards them.

We defended our attacks on others with that we defended the good against the evil, or that we saved the person in question from his/her misconceptions of what was the right and the wrong thing, so that he/she could be spared future pain.

After having worked with our Active Addictions Anonymous Program for some time, we realized that all these ways of attack on others were acts of violence, and our defense for these attacks on others were acts of war irrespective of whether they attacked us first or not.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to stop those acts of violence and war that I usually carry out in my social life.

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March 25: Step Eight

We began by looking at what we considered to be harm Today seen through the eyes we have gained through working the first Seven Steps in Active Addictions Anonymous. Therefore, we took an honest stand on how we had harmed our self and others materially, physically, time-space wise, emotionally, mentally, socially and spiritually.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 60

Until we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we had mainly perceived material loss and physical diseases as harmful to us, and it had taken many of us a long time to understand that we were addicted to chronic dissatisfaction, and that this was harmful to us.

We had slowly come to terms with this fact, when we came to Step Eight, and thereby we had become aware that we needed to make amends to our self and others for the harm our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction had inflicted on our self and others.

When we worked with Step Eight, it became clear to us that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction was a mindset, which had had humongous costs for our self, our dear ones and everybody around us, and that it was the root of many of the sufferings of our life.

Furthermore, we discovered that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction not only harmed our life socially, but also materially, physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, so we needed to make amends to our self in all these areas.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Eighth Step to make myself ready to make amends for the harms I have done to myself and others with my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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March 26: Accountability in service

Tradition Nine opens up the possibility that we may createmanifest service boards and committees if we want to take on a bigger project like writing new literature or organizing an event or a convention, but those who take on this service are directly responsible to those they serve – the members, groups and the Fellowship of AcAdAn as a whole.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 95

In AcAdAn our most important task was to help and support each other in recovering from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, which is a condition that has got nothing to do with our profession, our status or our position in our society.

To createmanifest the haven we needed to work with our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction without fear or favor, we needed that our Fellowship was non-professional, so our focus did not get removed from our basic purpose.

This meant that we did not look at ease others’ status or position in society, and therefore we had a need for that service work in our Fellowship happened on a voluntary basis, so our service structure did not depend on status or fear or favor.

Also when we needed to carry out a bigger project, we wanted it to happen by the help of a voluntary effort, and that those who served our Fellowship, kept the Fellowship informed about their line of action and the economics of the projects we had agreed on.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will be aware of that although the service work I do for the Fellowship is voluntary, an important part of this service is, that I keep the Fellowship well informed about my workflow and the economics in my part of the service work.

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March 27: Transformation

This way, by being thorough, meticulous and committed to do this work day after day, gradually, we became entirely ready to be liberated from all of our defects of character by allowing our Higher Power to transform them to their corresponding qualities in the Rings of Joy.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 53

Gradually, as our work with our Seventh Step in our AcAdAn Program progressed, we became aware of that our perception of what transformation of our defects of character involved, was not in conformity with Reality.

We had imagined that our Higher Power would stretch out his/her/its magic finger and transform our defects of character to virtues without us needing to contribute with anything but a single prayer one time only and our willingness to allow our Higher Power to transform them.

When we worked with Step Seven however, we realized that we had to contribute every step of the way to a working Seventh Step, because the first part of Step Seven where we prayed to our Higher Power to be liberated from all our defects of character were merely the beginning.

After completing this prayer, we discovered that we needed to begin the second part of Step Seven by using our Seventh Step many times a day to pray to our Higher Power to liberate us from using the character defect when we discovered we had taken one of them into use.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Seventh Step to allow my Higher Power to transform my defects of character into virtues by praying to be liberated from them, when I discover that I have taken one of them into use.

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March 28: The changeability 

Thereby, we became able to understand that every moment is precious and is forever over, when the next moment is born, and by looking at our mortality through this perspective, it became less frightening, and we became more content.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 21

When we worked with our four basic qualities as creaturesmanifestations – our limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability – in our AcAdAn Program, we discovered that our perception of death changed.

Most of us thought of death as that moment where we left our physical body, but by investigating death in everyday life, we discovered that mortality/changeability is an ongoing process throughout our day.

We also discovers that we needed the mortality/changeability to become able to continuously see our self, our life, others and the World at large in new perspectives, which arose all the time because of the changeability of everything.

In that way we could continue to find our self, others, our life and the World at large interesting, and thereby it became possible for us to enter the Ring of Fulfillment with its fulfillment, interest, meaningfulness and oneness.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to let go of my fear of change.

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March 29: The consequences of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction

Most of us realized that in spite of our continuous efforts to change, and in spite of all the understanding, love and care we received from others, we still felt dissatisfied with our self and others.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 9

Gradually, as we worked with our addiction to chronic satisfaction in our AcAdAn Program, it became clearer and clearer to us how deeply seated it was.

It also became clear to us that the thoughts we thought as a result of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, gave rise to some emotions that both hurt us and our loved ones.

This insight into our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and its consequences, made our desire to recover from it more intense.

Thereby, it became easier for us to let go of this disease by the help of the daily work with Step Ten, Eleven and Twelve for the maintenance of our contentment.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to maintain my contentment.

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March 30: Recovery from existential pains

Some of us tried to hide parts of our past in an attempt to look better, but we could not afford this mistake.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 44

When our Fifth Step is approaching, some of us may feel uneasy by the thought of sharing some of those discoveries about our self that we discovered in our Fourth Step.

That thought made us consider hiding them, so that our Sponsor/recovery-buddy should not think poorly of us or maybe even not loose interest in working the Step with us.

We spoke with other members of AcAdAn about our feelings, and they told us that Step One is the basis for the healing to begin, because in Step One we admit what pains us and how they make our lives unmanageable.

.
They told us further that Step Four is an inventory of many of our existential pains, and the more we have the courage to admit, the greater will be our possibility of recovering from the pains, so it is essential that we have the courage to stand by our self in Step Five by admitting our pains to another human being.

Today's contemplation
Today courageously, I will admit my existential pains, and how they make my life unmanageable to another human being.

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March 31: Acceptance of the ignorance

Many of us had equated ignorance with stupidity, and even with evil, and as we neither wanted to be stupid nor evil, we had problems admitting our ignorance, but when we accepted the fact that ignorance is an integral part of our humaneness, we gave up blaming our self and others for not knowing better.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 20

In our highly developed culture, we received a flow of information all the time through newspapers, magazines, TV and the Internet, and that could make many of us imagine that we knew a lot about this, that and the other.

As we were not personally involved in most of the events, we got information about, we were ignorant about the true nature of the events, but anyway we were expected to have a stand point on everything between heaven and earth.

If we admitted our ignorance, we could be exposed to reactions from others, which gave us the impression that there was something wrong with our ignorance, and this could lead us to get an urge to hide our ignorance.

The fact was, however, that both we and others could not escape our human ignorance no matter how much information we possessed, because there would always be a lot of areas that we knew nothing about.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will accept my ignorance as a part of being human.

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APRIL

April 01 Recovery from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction	April 02 Fellowship with everything and everybody	April 03 Existential pains
April 04 The Twelve Traditions of AcAdAn	April 05 Individuality	April 06 Decision-making process
April 07 Appreciation	April 08 To give and receive life force	April 09 Courage to be honest Courage to be honest
April 10 First meeting with the Big Ring of Joy via Step One to Four	April 11 The Truth	April 12 Responsibility
April 13 Cooperation with our Higher Power in Step Seven	April 14 Meditation	April 15 Priorities
April 16 The Ring of God-centeredness	April 17 Anger	April 18 Respect and love for myself
April 19 Trust	April 20 Self-will and God's will	April 21 Obsession
April 22 Tradition Five	April 23 Tolerance	April 24 Detachment
April 25 Changeability	April 26 To make amends to make amends	April 27 Sponsorship Sponsorship
April 28 To carry out a full Twelve Step Recovery To carry through a full Twelve Step Recovery	April 29 Self-createdself-manifested sufferings	April 30 A punishing Godhead A punishing Godhead

April 01: Recovery from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction

Our experience has shown us that, whether our disease is mild, moderate or severe, over time, it generally settles within us as an addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with our self, with everything and everyone everywhere, at all levels of existence, and thereby with life itself.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 7

Most of us perceived dissatisfaction to be a means we could use, when we wanted to createmanifest a change for the better in our life.

It did not occur to us that we were dissatisfied on a daily basis many times a day without changing anything for the better for that reason.

Before we came to AcAdAn we were not aware of that our daily use of dissatisfaction was a chronic condition that was harming us and our loved ones.

After we came to AcAdAn, we used the Program to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by changing that, which we were dissatisfied with, one day at a time.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program and my AcAdAn Fellowship to get the help I need to recover from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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April 02: Fellowship with everything and everybody 

In the course of our spiritual work in AcAdAn, we discovered that self-sufficiency is an illusion. We need everyone and everything around us, and we need to experience a sense of Fellowship with everyone and everything around us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 85

Before we began to investigate our perception of that we exclusively had a Fellowship with our loved ones and our like minded people in those groups we were part of, we missed out on the awareness of the Fellowship we have with everything and everybody everywhere on all planes of existence.

We may have felt that we did not have a Fellowship with a stone, and yet a stone is a creaturemanifestation that is limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal like we are, and Mother Earth is a stone, who gives us our food and everything else in our life as human beings.

A plant is also a limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable creaturemanifestation, and it is sensitive to light and darkness, heat and cold, like we are, and the same is true for animals, who are also sensitive to light and darkness, heat and cold, kindness and unkindness, like we are.

Besides this all of our fellow human beings without exception are also limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable creaturesmanifestations, and they too are sensitive to light and darkness, heat and cold, kindness and unkindness, positive and negative thoughts and emotions, like we are.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will open myself up to the Fellowship, I have, with everything and everybody everywhere on all planes of existence.

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April 03: Existential pains

We sought help and consolation from each other in AcAdAn, and thus we got the strength to go through the emotions of pain until they subsided.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 40

Little by little, as we worked with our AcAdAn Program, we began to accept that pain is an advantageous part of life even if we had not imagined that something like that could become possible for us.

We realized that pain protected us from sitting down on a burningly hot stove, and it made us go to the doctor if we had experienced pain in our physical body for a while without us being able find out why the pain was there.

When we experienced emotional and mental pain, our natural action was also to move away from the pain, but gradually as we developed sensitivity to our self, we practically experienced pain every day, if not physically then psychologically.

It were these existential pains that eventually led us to seek a spiritual solution to our pains, and thus we stopped fleeing from our pains at long last and instead we investigated them, before we released them and let them go.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to investigate a physical or psychological pain to find out what I need to do to release it and let go of it.

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April 04: The Twelve Traditions of AcAdAn

An AcAdAn Group’s fundamental purpose is of a spiritual nature, and the moment we begin to be preoccupied with money, property, power and prestige issues, we are diverted from our primary purpose.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 91

AcAdAn’s Twelve Traditions are an expression of those experiences we have had with our Fellowship as a whole both in our relationship with each other and in our relationship with the surrounding society and the World at large.

We have discovered that if we let our self get diverted from our basic purpose, which is to liberate our self from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, the Fellowship soon lost its healing power, and thus, once again, we lost our contentment.

We had achieved our contentment by the help of our Fellowship and our AcAdAn Program and when our AcAdAn Fellowship did not function in conformity with our Traditions, the Fellowship lost its coherence power.

When we no longer had our Traditions to hold together our World-wide Fellowship, we also did not have the support that we needed to maintain our recovery.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will respect the Traditions of AcAdAn and maintain my focus on my spiritual work in AcAdAn above everything else.

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April 05; Individuality

We know that no single person can speak for the group or for Active Addictions Anonymous as a whole in public discussions, and therefore, we do not speak on behalf of the group or on behalf of Active Addictions Anonymous as a whole.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 96

As members of AcAdAn it was important for us that no one spoke on our behalf by speaking on behalf of the Fellowship as a whole, because we are all unique, so we all have our completely unique way of understanding our Program and that only we our self could express.

However, sometimes we needed to give one of our members a mandate to speak about AcAdAn in a public context, and when one of us got this task, it was important that we remembered our Traditions,.

When we spoke about AcAdAn in public contexts without mandate we let nobody have any doubt that we spoke on our own behalf about our experiences with the Fellowship and with the Program in AcAdAn and not about AcAdAn or the Program as a whole.

If a member had got mandate to to put forward a group’s perception in front of our Area Service Committee, our group service representative saw to it that he/she exclusively expressed the perspective that he/she had been given the task to put forward.

Today's contemplation
Today, I accept that I cannot speak on the behalf of others, so I choose to be aware that I am speaking for myself and about myself when I express my thoughts.

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April 06: Decision making process

Beginning the day by making up our minds if our decision to surrender to our Higher Power’s care was also valid Today the decision could slowly grow and become wholehearted.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 28

In Step Three, we had a need to surrender the care for our will and our life to our chosen Higher Power’s unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention.

For most of us, this decision was not an event but a process, and while we worked with our Third Step, we reached to a desire to surrender our will and out life to our Higher Power's care.

We soon discovered that we felt like withdrawing our desire to surrender our will and our life to our Higher Power’s care for many different reasons that we felt were good reasons to no longer want to use Step Three.

By beginning the day with our Third Step Prayer, we could support our self in our desire to achieve that wholehearted surrender that we had experienced in short glimpses during our work with Step Three.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Third Step Prayer to support my desire to surrender my will and my life wholeheartedly to my Higher Power's care, one day at a time.

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April 07: Appreciation

The principle of Tradition Five is Gratitude.
Slogan: Mutual appreciation pleases the heart.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

Many of the actions that we carried out in the course of a day, were about our interaction with others, and in that context we carried out many actions that contributed to the lives of others and that empowerment that we contributed with could make many of us feel that we were entitled to receive the gratitude and joy from others.

To expect the gratitude and joy of others for our contribution entailed that we expected that they should be in the Ring of God-centeredness with its joy, empowerment, open-mindedness and gratitude regardless of where they were actually at in their psychological landscape.

Therefore, it was important for us to know that appreciation of our contribution was not necessarily possible for the one whose life we contributed to so instead, we could be grateful for that we had been given the capacity to contribute to the life of others and thereby give them an empowerment in their undertakings.

The highest joy for us as givers was to experience the appreciation and joy of others because of our contribution, but we were not entitled to the appreciation or gratitude of others, so instead we could choose to receive it with appreciation and gratitude, when it came to our lot.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will receive others’ appreciation of the empowerment I contribute with, with gratitude and joy.

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April 08: To give and receive life force

When we participate regularly in the meetings, we are part of that Power that keeps the group alive.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 86

Life holds so many opportunities that we are faced with choices many times in the course of a day.

Little by little, we discover that there are some areas of our lives that we value particularly much and therefore we support these areas by using our time and our energy on them.

For us as AcAdAn members our inner life is of great importance, and we give life force to our inner life, when we work our AcAdAn Program, and we give life force to our AcAdAn Fellowship, when we attend meetings.

At the same time we receive life force to our inner life, when the other members share their experiences with us about their inner life in the AcAdAn program.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will give life force to my inner life by doing Step work in AcAdAn and I will attend an AcAdAn meeting and receive life force to my inner life from what the other members share during the meeting.

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April 09:  Courage to be honest: Courage to be honest

We needed to be honest and brave to be able to do this work, and we initiated it by seeking strength from our Higher Power every time we sat down to write about our defects of character and our virtues, and how our use of them had affected our lives till this day.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 41

During our upbringing many of us experienced, that it could be difficult for us to be allowed to be honest.

Both our parents and other adults around us could get upset with what we had at heart, and sometimes they could even become violent and beat us, push us or show displeasure in other ways about our perception of Reality.

This had lead to us believe that it was not safe for us to be honest about our social interactions, our thoughts, our emotions and our actions, and therefore, it is no longer natural for us to be honest, but in our AcAdAn Program, we have a need to be honest, if not to others, then to our self, so already in Step One we begin to gather the courage to admit how our life expresses itself, and we discover that it is to our advantage to be honest.

When we come to Step Four, we have admitted so many things to our self and our sponsor or recovery buddy and to our AcAdAn Fellowship that now we have the courage to honestly take a look at our defects of character and our virtues..

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program, my sponsor or recovery buddy and my AcAdAn Fellowship to get the courage to become more and more honest.

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April 10: First meeting with the Big Ring of Joy via Step One to Four

The Program in Active Addictions Anonymous Step One to Four.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 10

In our AcAdAn Program the Steps themselves are a meeting with the Big Ring of Joy with its faith, hope, love and truth.

We carry out Step One, because we have faith in that it is to our advantage to begin to be honest with our self by admitting what pains us and makes our life unmanageable, and therefore we are willing to carry out the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous.

We carry out Step Two, because we hope that we can get a better life by opening our self to take a loving, caring, compassionate and merciful Higher Power into our life, and we carry out Step Three, because we want to surrender to our Higher Power's care by developing a loving relationship of trust in our Higher Power that makes it possible for us to surrender to our Higher Power’s care.

We carry out Step Four, because we want to find out the truth about those defects of character that prevent us from surrendering to our chosen Higher Power's care and the virtues that help us to surrender.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use Step One, Two, Three and Four in my AcAdAn Program to set the Big Ring of Joy into vibration in my psychological landscape.

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April 11: The Truth

The principle of Step One is Honesty.
Slogan: Truth always triumphs in the end!

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 83

In our AcAdAn Program, we need to be as honest as we are capable of, so as to become able to carry out the Program, but it is important for us however, not to demand too much of our self by expecting that our words and the Truth are identical, no matter how honest we are.

We accept that the word chair is a symbol that points to the truth, which is the chair, and whether we use one or the other word for chair, depending on the language we speak, the word however, will never become the chair.

As a result of this realization we realize that a dispute about words is a waste of our time, our energies and our interests, and this realization allows us to honestly acknowledge that our way of expressing our perception of Reality in merely one possible way among many.

That makes our Soul life, our social life much easier, because we no longer need to try to persuade others to accept our words about our truth as we see it right here and right now, but can let them use their own words to describe their own truth as they see it right here and right now.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will remember that words are not the Truth, but a pointer to how I and others perceive Reality right here and right now.

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April 12: Responsibility

We took responsibility for that part which we felt guilty about, and let go of their feelings of guilt or the lack of it as something which is between them and their Higher Power.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 66

In our Ninth Step, we make those amends that we had decided on in Step Eight, but sometimes it could happen that we suddenly lost the desire to make amends for our wrong, because we thought that the person we were about to make amends to had also done us wrong.

If this happens, we remember that there are four different types of tasks in life, which are our tasks, others’ tasks, our chosen Higher Power’s tasks and others’ Higher Power’s tasks

If we choose to perceive our AcAdAn Program as given to us by our chosen Higher Power, it is our task to work this Program, as best as we can, and it is other people's task to take care of the tasks given to them by their chosen Higher Power.

In other words, it is only our responsibility to carry out the tasks that our Higher Power has sent to us TODAY and not to use our resources to take responsibility for the tasks of others, because we think that their Higher Power ought to have given them tasks in relation to us that would suit us better.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will choose to take responsibility for the tasks my Higher Power has given to me, and I will let go of any attempt to take responsibility for the tasks that the Higher Power of others has given to them

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April 13: Cooperation with our Higher Power in Step Seven

With the first part of Step Seven, we had shown our Higher Power and our self that we were entirely ready to have all our defects of character transformed. Now, we began to cooperate with our Higher Power about having them transformed.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 54

The first time we read the headline of Step Seven, we imagined that we would be free from all of our defects of character, when we had finished Step Seven.

When we actually began working with Step Seven, we became aware that our Higher Power did not liberate us from all of our defects of character in one stroke, even though we prayed for it, because we would probably become so alien to our self that we would go mad from it, or we might even die from shock.

With the initial Seventh Step prayer we had shown our self and our Higher Power that we were willing to be liberated from all of our defects of character, and thus we had become ready to cooperate with our Higher Power about our liberation from them on a daily basis.

We cooperated by praying to our Higher Power to liberate us from those defects of character, that we observed as they began to rise to the surface in the course of our day, and in this way we showed our self and our Higher Power that we were entirely ready to be liberated from them.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will cooperate with my Higher Power by the help of Step Seven by praying to my Higher Power to liberate me from my defects of character, when I observe that they surface in the course of my day.

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April 14: Meditation

To be able to hear our Higher Power’s guidance, we had to empty our mind from all thoughts and turn silent.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 69

In Step Eleven, we learn how we can use prayer and meditation to expand our conscious contact with our chosen Higher Power, and with this purpose in mind, we need to learn to empty our mind of all thoughts by taking a step back from our thinking mind, our Ego to observe it.

We observe that our mind is full of thoughts, and we discover that we have a tendency to grab hold of various thoughts to investigate them more closely, but to be able to empty our mind from thoughts, we need to learn to let the flow of thoughts pass by us without holding on to anyone in particular at all, no matter how pleasant or painful it is.

Initially, many of us thought that when the mind became still, it was empty, but now we discovered that our mind was not empty, although it had become still.

There was an almost imperceptible sense of sacred presence in our mind, and we understood that now we had entered into meditation and were therefore able to sense our Higher Power's presence.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use meditation to expand my conscious contact with my Higher Power.

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April 15: Priorities

We place strong emphasis on this, for we know that when we use dissatisfaction in any form, we activate our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction all over again.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 11

For many years we had used dissatisfaction many times a day, because we imagined that our dissatisfaction would give us the power to change the areas we were dissatisfied with.

We observed however, that although we were dissatisfied with a particular area in our self, our lives, other people or the World at large, it didn’t mean that we got the power to change the area that we were dissatisfied with, but anyway we imagined that if only we continued to be dissatisfied with that area, eventually, it would give us the power to change that area.

Only when we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we became aware that we used our dissatisfaction to give our self a feeling of having done something, or that we hereby had made our self willing to do something in an fictional future about that, which we were dissatisfied with.

When we began working the Program in AcAdAn, we became aware of how our dissatisfaction harmed us, our lives, others and the World at large, and therefore our work with our recovery from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, became the central part of our lives.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will give my recovery from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction first priority in my life.

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April 16: The Ring of God-centeredness

We also investigated how our open-mindedness had brought about help from unexpected sources, how this had empowered us to solve our issues, and how this had brought about gratitude and joy in us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 31

Many of us imagined that the use of God-centeredness meant that we thought of God or was focused on the concept of God all the time during our day.

In Active Addictions Anonymous, we use the Ring of God-centeredness which is our way of liberating our self from the pain of the Ring of Self-centeredness with its euphoria, depression, self-criticism and self -praise.

The Ring of God-centeredness makes it possible for us to be grateful for everything that happens in the course of our day, whether it brings us pain and thereby the opportunity to grow in wisdom and compassion by the help of our Program or joy and thereby zest of living

Both sides of life bring us an empowerment, we can rejoice in, if we open our minds to the Ring of God-centeredness and in this way, it becomes possible for us to find contentment with our self, our lives, others and the World at large.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Ring of God-centeredness to find contentment with myself, my life, others and the World at large

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April 17: Anger

We had a tendency to live secret lives by hiding behind artificial masks, hoping we could fool others into loving us by the help of these masks. However, we discovered that the only one we fooled was our self.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 44

We had a tendency to hide behind artificial masks of friendly approachability, because we did not want to hurt others with our anger, and we did not want to experience the consequences of expressing our anger towards others either.

Before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we did not know what else to do with our anger other than trying to cover it up with friendly approachability, even though the reaction of others towards us indicated that they knew we were angry.

In AcAdAn we finally found a place where we could safely express our anger, because we were told that suppressed anger is hatred, and we needed to express our hatred to recover from it.

Therefore we needed to admit our suppressed anger to our self, another human being, our chosen Higher Power and our AcAdAn Fellowship, so our recovery from it could begin.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will liberate myself from one of my anger forms by the help of my AcAdAn Program.

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April 18: Respect and love for myself

Even if we would succeed in making others love and respect us, it would still not bring about our own love and respect for our self and thus we needed to develop respect and love for our self to be able to achieve contentment.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 16

Many of us thought that if we could make others love and respect us, we would be able to love and respect our self, and on this basis we had led many wars with other people in our attempts to force them to do what we wanted them to do, so that we might be able to believe that they loved and respected us.

No matter how many times others did what we wanted them to do to prove to us that they loved us, we discovered that it did not change anything in our perception of our self or in our belief that we were worthy of love .

Thereby, we understood that even if others did, what we wanted, we could not know whether it was an expression of that they loved us, but we could choose to believe it, when others expressed their love for us, but even if we chose to believe that others loved us it still does not change our ability to feel respect and love for our self.

We need to learn to love our self to become able to believe that we are worthy of love, and we can develop our love for our self by taking care of our self with unconditional love, care, compassion and mercy, whether we feel pain or joy.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to work on those thoughts in me that prevent me from respecting and loving myself.

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April 19: Trust

When we had made our choice, we moved ahead in confidence with our chosen person.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 43

In our Fifth Step, we had admitted to our self how our misunderstandings and use of pain had affected us and our life until now, by writing it down in our Fourth Step.

It had been a painful but also a liberating task to write it down in our Fourth Step, and in our Fifth Step, time was ripe to share it with our chosen Higher Power, and we did this by reading it to our higher Power.

Thereby, we made our self ready to share what we have written, with another human being, and it could be a scary thought for many of us to have to admit the mistakes of our life and our use of pain to another human being, and therefore we needed to choose to have trust in the person to whom we have decided to tell about our mistakes and our use of pain from our childhood till now.

By making this choice, we discovered that we were met with recognition and understanding by our chosen person, and we also discovered that our joy become twice as big and our pain half as big when we sincerely shared it with another human being, and furthermore it intensified our trust in the suggestions of the Program, so our capacity to trust grew.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will choose to trust that I can sincerely share my joy and my pain with another human being.

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April 20: Self-will and God's will

We began taking care of our pain and the changes that took place in our lives all the time with the help of our AcAdAn Program, and as a result, we discovered that both pain and change are advantageous parts of life.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 18

When we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, most of us never had imagined that we could come to look at our pains with contentment, not to mention to look at them as an advantageous part of life, because we thought that our pains were an unpleasant part of life that we would rather do without.

After working with our AcAdAn Program for some time, we became more and more content with that it actually IS an advantage to experience pain, for what would otherwise prevent us from being burned, if we accidentally sat down on a hot stove?

We had not imagined that we could be content with change unless it was our self, who had decided to change something in our lives, and therefore, it was profoundly satisfying for us to discover that as we developed our relationship with our chosen Higher Power, we could look at the changes that occurred in our lives, which we had not decided our self, as our Higher Power's influence in our life.

When then we investigated the loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention behind the changes that we experienced the greatest ill will towards, we discovered that they were to our advantage, and thereby it became obvious to us that we could be content in areas, we were dissatisfied with before we came to AcAdAn.

Today's contemplation
Today I will use my AcAdAn Program to find my chosen Higher Power's loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention behind the events in my day that I harbored he greatest ill will towards.

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April 21: Obsession

When we become overpowered by such obsessive thoughts, we end up acting on them, impulsively and at times against our will, and thus we are compulsive.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 7

We thought that we were in control of our thoughts, when we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, and we had spent much time criticizing our self, because we did not implement the decisions that we had made in the beginning of the day.

However, we discovered that we were not only powerless over our feeling of addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, but we were also powerless over the thoughts that led to our feeling of addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

We believed that our thoughts spoke the truth, when the thoughts that went through our mind, told us that we had good reasons to be dissatisfied with our self, others and the World at large.

It did not occur to us that we could suffer from a mental obsession that gave rise to our feeling of addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and that we needed help to recover from this obsession.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my membership of Active Addictions Anonymous to get the help I need to recover from my mental obsession by thoughts, which holds addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with me, others and the World at large.

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April 22: Tradition Five

TRADITION 5:
Each group has but one primary purpose – to carry the message of recovery to others suffering from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 12

Before we came to AcAdAn, we believed that we could recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by using willpower.

After we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we became aware that we suffered from a mental illness that we needed help to recover from, and we received that help from our AcAdAn Program, our personal work with our AcAdAn Program, from our Sponsor or recovery buddy and from our meetings.

In our meetings we heard how others handled their recovery from their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and that gave us much inspiration in our own recovery.

When we shared in meetings our self about how we worked on our recovery from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we deepened our understanding of our disease and at the same time we passed on the message that recovery from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction IS possible.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will share about my recovery from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in an AcAdAn meeting.

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April 23: Tolerance

The principle of Tradition Three is Tolerance.
Slogan: Tolerance furthers understanding.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

In Tradition Three we open our self both as individuals and as a group to the fact that we cannot judge other people's lives and motives by looking at them from the outside.

We are honest when we admit that we can never know if someone else has a desire to give up his/her dissatisfaction with himself/herself, his/her life, others and the World at large.

It is up to each one of us to decide for our self by the help of the Program in AcAdAn, our personal work with it, our Sponsor or recovery buddy, our Higher Power and our meetings, if we have a desire to give up our dissatisfaction with our self and our life and thereby with others and the World at large.

Therefore, we welcome anyone, who expresses a desire to give up his/her dissatisfaction with himself/herself, his/her life, others and the World at large, regardless of the reasons the state to be dissatisfied, and regardless of in what their active addiction consists.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to show tolerance towards others, who suffer from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and thereby give myself a chance to get a new perspective on my own addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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April 24: Detachment

We detached from others’ material, physical, time-space wise, emotional, mental, social and spiritual issues without detaching from our love, care, compassion and mercy for them, and thus, we maintained our detachment.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 48

Much of our dissatisfaction with others sprang from our belief that it was our job to solve their existential problems.

When therefore we used our time, our energy, our interest and our money in trying to solve their problems without succeeding, or without them showing gratitude for our help, we became dissatisfied yet another time.

Slowly, it dawned on us that our task is to use our time, our energy, our interest and our money on our own existential problems.

Furthermore, we became aware that it is other's task to spend their time, their energy, their interest and their money on solving their own problems, so we let go of the idea that their task is our task, and thus we stopped attaching our self to other people's problems, as if they were ours..

Today's contemplation
Today, I will listen respectfully to others' problems without taking them on as if they were my own.

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April 25: Changeability

In Active Addictions Anonymous, our recovery began only when we stopped using dissatisfaction, and that meant that we stopped finding reasons to be dissatisfied every day, even many times a day and found reasons to be content every day, many times a day instead.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 22

When we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, many of us believed that the impetus to createmanifest advantageous changes in our life sprang from our dissatisfaction with our self and our life.

We also believed that we could force others to change in accordance with our perception of what is right, if we voiced our dissatisfaction with their way of being in the World.

It never occurred to us that we could createmanifest advantageous changes in our lives without using dissatisfaction as a driving force, but as we progressed in the Program in AcAdAn it became clearer and clearer to us that the changeability of us, others and life elicited changes without us having to use dissatisfaction.

When we used our AcAdAn Program to take a closer look at the changeability in our self, others and our life, the changes always and without exception proved to be to our advantage, and thereby it became easier for us to be content.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to further my recovery from my compulsive use of dissatisfaction with the changeability of myself, others and life.

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April 26: To make amends

We made a decision as to how we could restore the damages we thought we had done, and thus, we became empowered to liberate our self from our feelings of guilt and shame.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 61

In the course of our life we had done extensive damages materially, physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally, socially and spiritually, and we wanted to make amends for the damages that we believed we had inflicted on our self or others to become able to liberate our self from guilt and shame.

In our Eighth Step, we brought those areas out into the open that we felt an urge to make amends for, and in Step Nine, we carried out our amends after having sought guidance from our chosen Higher Power and our Sponsor or recovery buddy about how best we could make amends.

We could make direct amends to our self by changing the type of behavior that had harmed us, and we could make direct amends to the others by admitting our mistake to them and then together, we could find out what we could do to restore the damage we had done, if they did not find our own suggestion for amends satisfactory

We could make indirect amends to others if it was not possible to make direct amends to them by carrying out our planned amends in relation to another human being, who needed what we had to offer, but most of our amends, however, consisted in a commitment we took on to change behavior without us having to contact anyone at all directly.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will make amends to myself and others in those areas I think I need to make amends for in order to become able to liberate myself from guilt and shame.

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April 27: Sponsorship

When we took on a commitment as Sponsor, we found yet another way of passing on this message.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 82

In our work with our AcAdAn Program we discovered that when we got the opportunity to express our self about our understanding of our Program, our understanding of the Program became deeper and clearer.

That inspired us to pass on the message of AcAdAn to others, who suffered from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

At the same time, we experienced the satisfaction of contributing to that another person's existential pains diminished, and this is the phenomenon we call a 'win win' situation, because we both win something valuable in our cooperation.

When we took on the commitment as Sponsor, we discovered the benefits of having a person in our life, who was deeply interested in what we thought about the Program in AcAdAn, and who therefore made it possible for us to confidently express what we had learned in AcAdAn..

Today's contemplation

Today, I will deepen my understanding of my AcAdAn Program by passing on my experiences with my Program to another human being, who is interested in my Program, and thus I will createmanifest a 'win win' situation for myself and the other human being.

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April 28: To carry out a full Twelve Step Recovery To carry through a full Twelve Step Recovery

Sometimes, we discovered that our Higher Power did not remove a particular defect of character in us, for example, our impatience, in a given situation even if we prayed for it.
From this, we realized that our Higher Power wanted us to take a closer look at what our impatience had to tell us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 58

Gradually, as we became accustomed to using our Seventh Step many times a day, when we observed that a character defect rose to the surface, we were also getting used to being in recovery under many different circumstances.

However, sometimes it happened, that we used our Seventh Step without a change happening in our painful perspective on the situation, and we know then that we need stronger measures to recover from our pain.

Therefore, we made use of the first given opportunity that arose to inventory the situation by the help of our Sixth Step, and if we were still not able to recover from the situation, we carried out a full Twelve Step recovery on it by taking the situation through all Twelve Steps.

A full Twelve Step Recovery is a powerful means to recover from most pains in life whether the pain is material, physical, energetic, emotional, mental, social or spiritual.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to take a painful situation through a full Twelve Step recovery, if my Sixth and Seventh Step do not work for me the situation.

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April 29: Self-createdself-manifested sufferings

When we had completed our list, we went through it point-by-point, and we wrote down how we wanted to make amends.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 63

We had many situations in our life from the past that we felt guilty about, because we did not like the way, in which we handled the situation in question, and we needed to recover from our feelings of guilt from the past in the course of our Step Work to be able to live a life of contentment.

We also needed to recover on a daily basis from our feeling of guilt about the way we handled situations in the present.

It is important for us to learn how to handle any situation that gives rise to guilt in us, whether it took place in the past or in the present, because guilt leads to shame of our self, and guilt and shame are the deadliest poisons for our spiritual life, where we otherwise find happiness.

Guilt and shame make us break off our contact with our chosen loving, caring, compassionate and merciful Higher Power, when we need this contact the most, and thereby our sufferings are prolonged unnecessarily, so we use Step Eight and Nine from our AcAdAn Program til liberate ourselves from our self-createdmanifested sufferings, which springs from out feelings of guilt and shame.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use Step Eight and Nine in my AcAdAn Program to recover from ways in which I handled a situation that I am ashamed of.

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April 30: A punishing Godhead A punishing Godhead

Therefore, we could approach our Higher Power in many different ways that could give us an experience of a loving, caring, compassionate and merciful Higher Power, such as our 12-Step Program, the earthly and spiritual principles, God, our Spirit, love that flows as the life energy between us and others, everything and everybody everywhere at all levels of existence or any other understanding and experience that we had of a loving, caring, compassionate and merciful Higher Power’s presence.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 73

Whether we grew up in the North, the South, the East or the West, our surrounding society had given us an impression of an invisible Higher Power together with all what our society thought about the invisible Higher Power.

An important detail for many of us was that we were told that the Higher Power, which our society perceived as the right one, was the only right one, and if we thought something else, we were doomed to hellfire and brimstone, if not now then once we died and the time of reckoning came.

This made our life far more difficult than it needed to be, so it was a great relief for us when we came to our Twelve Step Program in AcAdAn that we were told in Step Two that we had an absolute freedom without traps to choose a Higher Power.

The only stipulation was that our choice was consistent with our own perception of what it held to have a loving, caring, compassionate and merciful Higher Power in our life, and thus the punishing Godhead lost its power over us.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will to use my AcAdAn Program to let go completely of a punishing Godhead by the help of my Second Step.

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MAY

May 01 The principle of anonymity	May 02 The purpose of our lifeOur life's purpose	May 03 Our basic purpose in AcAdAn
May 04 To listenTo listen	May 05 Our choices	May 06 The five states of our thinking mind, our Ego
May 07 The function of pain	May 08 Forgiving our self	May 09 Us
May 10 To move from distrust to trustTo move from distrust to trust	May 11 Powerfulness	May 12 The driving force of pain
May 13 The Small Ring of Faith	May 14 The Tree of Hatred and the Tree of Love	May 15 The process of sorrow
May 16  To be ill from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction	May 17 Creationmanifestation of thought paths	May 18 Super human beings
May 19 The Step of Liberation	May 20 Comparison with others	May 21 Dissatisfaction with our four basic attributes
May 22 The third meeting with the Big Ring of Joy	May 23 Limitations	May 24 To serve principles
May 25 Shame	May 26 A wholehearted decision	May 27 Politics
May 28 Recovery in AcAdAn	May 29 Self-criticism	May 30 Accept
May 31 Anger

May 01: The principle of anonymity

When we interact with the outside world – both with the public as well as while carrying the message to others who suffer from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction – in the course of our AcAdAn services, we practice Tradition Ten by not expressing anything about outside issues such as religion, therapeutic communities, politics, treatment methodologies etc.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 96

As members of AcAdAn we tried to give everything its proper place, and our Traditions were one of the areas, we wanted to keep in mind, so we could do our best to respect them, because they hold everything in our Fellowship simple and in it right place both inside and outside our Fellowship

Therefore, we did our best to respect the Traditions in AcAdAn by respecting the Principle of Anonymity, and that implied that we were aware of being AcAdAn’s ambassadors instead of our personal self, when we expressed our self about AcAdAn in public contexts.

Therefore, we did not express our personal opinion on outside issues, but we readily expressed our knowledge about AcAdAn's capacity to contribute to our individual well-being and thus the well-being of our society without concealing the fact that it is our personal opinion, we express and not the AcAdAn Program as such.

So if others wanted to find out what AcAdAn has to offer them personally, we can only suggest that they read our literature and/or participate in a few AcAdAn meetings to find out if they think that they could benefit from what we have to offer.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will respect the Anonymity Principle of AcAdAn by accepting my role as AcAdAn's ambassador in public contexts if my participation in AcAdAn crops up in the conversation.

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May 02: The purpose of our life Our life's purpose

The principle of Tradition Six is Life-force.
Slogan:  I liberate myself from that which does not serve my purposes.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

Many of us felt guilty when we wanted to take care of our own purposes first and foremost, because we learned during our upbringing that we had the right to take care of our own purposes only, when we had spent our money, time, energy and interest on taking care of the purposes of others to their satisfaction.

Our parents taught us that their purposes were more important than ours, and our society taught us that their purposes were more important than ours, and some of us have even learned that we should serve the God’s needs instead of our own, as they were described by others, who thought they knew exactly what God needed.

When we came to AcAdAn we finally realized that our omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and immortal Higher Power who holds everything and everyone everywhere at all levels of existence desire does not need anything from us other than us following our hearts, and that meant that we served those purposes that were important for us!

When we discovered that it became clear to us that our life’s purpose is to improve our life on a daily basis in accordance with our perception of the right thing, so at long last, we understood that our true purpose in life is the same as everyone else's: namely to work on improving our own life, and thereby improve life on Earth.

Today's contemplation

Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to liberate myself from that which prevents me from using my resources on improving my own life and thereby on improving life on Earth.

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May 03: Our basic purpose in AcAdAn

Therefore, we don’t use AcAdAn resources to endorse, finance or lend the AcAdAn name to any related facility or outside enterprise, because such an affiliation of Active Addictions Anonymous with other facilities having a purpose similar to ours may easily createmanifest a situation where power, prestige, and debates over money and ownership might divert us from our primary purpose.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 91

In AcAdAn our basic purpose was to liberate our self from the existential pain that sprang from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction with our human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability.

Those results we achieved by working with our AcAdAn Program were of such a miraculous nature that many wanted to take AcAdAn’s credit for their work of a similar nature.

This could easily lead to controversy about which enterprise should be given the honor for these results, but in AcAdAn we were not interested in participating in a public debate about the honor.

Our basic and only purpose is to help each other to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and thus achieve contentment, so we do not participate in discussions about to whom belongs the honor for the improvement in another person's life situation

Today's contemplation
Today, I will stick to my basic purpose when I take part in conversations, whether they are about my membership of AcAdAn or other areas of my life.

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May 04: To listen

The principle of Step Two is Open-mindedness.
Slogan: To listen attentively and respectfully to another is the first expression of emotional sobriety.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 83

Most of us could become so eager about expressing our perception of a topic that we stopped listening to the other participant/s in the conversation, especially if it was a topic that we knew something about, and even more so if it was about our area of expertise.

It could even lead to us completely stopping listening to what others have to contribute with on the topic in question, because we became so consumed by thoughts of what we wanted to contribute with, when our turn to speak came.

As our entire focus was on our thoughts instead of on listening attentively and respectfully to what the other/others had to share, we lost the very purpose with conversation with others.

In that way, at the same time, we lost the enrichment of our own perspectives that we could have achieved, if we had chosen to listen attentively and respectfully to what the other/others had to contribute with to our perspectives.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will listen attentively and respectfully to others to draw nourishment from the perspectives they have to offer.

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May 05: Our choices

This way, by being thorough, meticulous and committed to do this work day after day, gradually, we became entirely ready to be liberated from all of our defects of character by allowing our Higher Power to transform them to their corresponding qualities in the Rings of Joy.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 53

In AcAdAn, little by little, we got to know our psychological landscape in Step Four, and thereby we got to know the emotional and mental energies that brought us and others pain and those that brought us and others joy.

In Step Six, we were given the power to choose between using the energies that pained us and others and the energies that gave joy to us and others and this strengthened our capacity to find contentment under all circumstances, no matter what they are.

At the same time we discovered how it affected our material life, our physical life, our energy life, our emotional life, our thought life, our social life and our spiritual life when we chose pain, and when we chose joy that both have theirs to give .

Thereby we achieved the capacity to appreciate the message of pain, because pain showed us what we could advantageously transform in our life, and furthermore the pain gave us an intensified drive to renew our self, and joy gave us the power to experience a life of contentment.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Sixth Step in my AcAdAn Program to transform an emotional pain to joy.

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May 06: The five states of our thinking mind, our Ego The five states in our thinking mind, our Ego

This meant that we wanted to know our Higher Power’s will for us, which is, in Reality, our own will for our self when we are not blinded by our thoughts and emotions.
When praying for the power to carry that out, we were actually praying for the capacity to overcome our thoughts and emotions that stood in our way.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 74

As our work with our AcAdAn Program evolved, we discovered that our minds basically contain five types of thoughts with the associated emotional feelings.

We found out that our painful emotions coincided with the fact that painful thoughts passed through our thinking mind, our Ego, and in the same way our joyful emotions coincided with joyful thoughts passing through our thinking mind, our Ego .

When neutral thoughts passed through our thinking mind, our Ego, we felt neutral and when habitual thoughts passed through we experienced emotional joy or pain depending on what thoughts passed through.

In addition, we discovered that when our thinking mind, our Ego became completely silent without thoughts, we entered into meditation, and thereby it became possible for us to pick up the vibration of our Higher Power passing through our minds, and that we used it in our Eleventh Step to come to  know our Higher Power’s will for us and to seek the power to carry it out, and thus we became better at discovering what we wanted innermost.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to study the five basic states of my thinking mind, my Ego in the course of the day, and I will use my silent mind to find out what I want innermost.

JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER

May 07: Pain's function

In Active Addictions Anonymous, we want to be led to contentment, and by investigating these patterns that revolves around and around in circles we clearly saw how our contentment was blocked by our self-centeredness and was achieved by help our God-centeredness.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 31

When we came to AcAdAn, we discovered that the pains of life were not meaningless or a punishment for known or unknown trespasses, because we found out that the function of pain is to be an action signal, which tells us that we must move away from what is going on, whether it is material, physical, energetic, emotional, mental, social or spiritual pain that we experience.

We also discovered that if we did not feel able to move away from the pain in our inner or outer World for various reasons, we could use our AcAdAn Program to inventory our pain, so we could find new ways in which to move away from the pain in a similar situation in the future.

By the help of our inventory, we developed new perspectives on Reality and at the same time we developed our capacity to become creativemanifestive, when we came face to face with our own or others’ existential pains.

We could furthermore develop our capacity for mercy towards our self and others and little by little we could expand our loving, caring, compassionate and merciful ways of being towards our self and others and thereby we brought ourselves on line with our true Self, our Spirit and that joy of living, which this leads to.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my existential pains to develop my wisdom and my capacity for mercy by the help of my Program in Active Addictions Anonymous.

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May 08: Forgiving of ourselves

We simply admitted our wrongs, made amends, and then let go of them, and if we were still not able to forgive our self, we applied Step Two to open our minds to the loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention of our Higher Power behind our pain.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 67

It was common knowledge in our Fellowship that the one we had the hardest forgiving was our self, and it was due to our relationship with the pain of life, because we imagined that if we did everything perfectly, we could escape the pain of life.

This could make us believe, we must have done something wrong, when we were paining, but as our work with our AcAdAn Program evolved, we realized that pain is a natural and advantageous part of the experience of life as a limited, ignorant powerless and mortal/changeable human being.

We realized that the pain came to us, because it was the pain’s task is to warn us about that we might come to harm, if we continued to do what we were into, and the warning meant that we needed to change something, like ex, when the pain warned us about that our hand would come to harm, if we did not move it out of the fire.

Similarly, we needed to act on our mental and emotional pains by changing something, when we pained, and we did that by using our AcAdAn Program to identify that, which was the cause of our mental and emotional pain, and then we changed that, which was the cause of the pain by the help of our Sixth Step and in the end, we moved on to forgive our self in Step Eight and Nine for our condemnation of the pain.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to forgive myself for my condemnation of today's material, physical, emotional, mental or social pains

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May 09: Us

For some of us, coming to believe was equivalent to opening our minds to the possibility that there might be more between heaven and earth than what we were able to perceive with our senses, and this helped us to begin approaching the concept of a Power greater than us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 24

In our AcAdAn Program, we worked with two concepts, which are ‘a Power greater than us’ and a ‘Higher Power’, and by the help of the concept 'a Power greater than us' we became able to receive guidance from everything and everyone around us that we could experience with out physical senses.

That made us realize that an interaction took place all the time between us and the World around us, and that in all these interaction was found ‘I’. ‘you/it’ and ‘us’, and that ‘us’ was a power greater than ‘I’.

By the help of the concept a 'Higher Power' we became able to receive guidance from the invisible, and thus from everything we could not perceive with our physical senses.

The invisible guidance could consist in that we let our self be guided by ‘us’, as ‘us’ came to expression in our interactions with the impulses that come to us from the thoughts and emotions that passed through our mind or from the impulses from our Higher Power that came to expression through the Silence in our thinking mind, our Ego.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the empowerment that I receive from 'us' whether it is in my interactions with the visible or the invisible.

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May 10: To move from distrust to trust

We talked with and listened to others in our Fellowship, and gradually, we discovered that there were one or more of the others in whom we had a special confidence, and thereby, we began trusting.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 26

When we came to AcAdAn many of us had lost trust in both God and humankind because of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction that made us see let downs and the possibility of let downs in all context, whether it was an actual possibility or not.

So when we came to AcAdAn we distrusted both to the Program, the other members and our chance of ever getting to live a content life.

Anyway, we hoped that we had finally found a way out of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, so we read the literature and listened to the other members so as to find out if we could find that piece of information that would confirm to us that AcAdAn did not intend our best.

As our investigations progressed, our confidence grew in that AcAdAn really intended our best and that we had found a path to resolution of our daily pains because of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will give myself permission to investigate all aspects of AcAdAn that I distrust before I surrender to the suggestions of the Program.

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May 11: Powerfulness Powerfulness

To escape our powerlessness, many of us tried to achieve power over various aspects of our lives, varying from the cleanliness of our homes to taking on high positions in society.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 15

It could be difficult for us to face the fact that we were powerless over many things, because we often had the impression that we were powerful, especially when our projects were a success and our desires were fulfilled.

When our projects succeeded and our desires were fulfilled, we have a tendency to forget that it did not happen solely by the help of our own efforts, and if we forgot that it could happen that we praised our self for the results instead of being grateful for the help we had received from others, who made our success or the fulfillment of our desires possible.

We discovered that if we overlooked that we did not achieve this success in our projects without the help from others, it also led to us criticizing our self for projects that failed or desires that were not being fulfilled, because all the energies in the Ring of Self-centeredness became activated, when we used self-praise.

When we activated the Ring of Self-centeredness with its euphoria, depression, self-criticism and self-praise, our life became one long painful struggle to prove to our self that we were powerful, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, for when we took the credit for our successes and the blame for our fiascos, our life became unmanageable.

Today's contemplation
Today I will use my AcAdAn Program to cultivate gratitude for the help and support that I receive from others.

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May 12: The driving force of pain

Most of us were scared of admitting that we needed the driving force of pain and involuntary change in our lives to achieve enlightenment, but we realized that not only we but any creaturemanifestation is Spirit exploring the information hidden underneath the pains and changes of life, each in our way.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 19

Pain is an action-signal, which tells us that we must move away from what is happening, whether the pain is material, physical, energetic, emotional, mental, social or spiritual, and most of us do this naturally to take care of the pain.

Most of us in AcAdAn, who had been working on the program for some time, did this quite naturally, but some of us were unable to move away from the pain, because we sought the driving power of action that lies in the pain.

Even though our various forms of anger gave us a temporary power of action, at the same time it incurred huge costs for our physical body, our energy level, our emotional life, our thought life, our social life and our spiritual life.

When we discovered that, most of us chose instead to use the Tenth Step in our AcAdAn Program to dive down to the root of the pain and find the wisdom and mercy that hides there, and in that way we transformed the emotional pain, we experienced in everyday life for joy.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to dive down to the root of one of those pains that I experienced today to find the wisdom and mercy that lies at the root of the pain.

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May 13: The Small Ring of Faith

We also discovered that when The Small Ring of Faith became active in us, we believed that our Higher Power gave us what we needed when we needed it (Trust), and we used our Higher Power’s gifts to the full or passed the surplus on to others if we did not have any use for it our self (Accountability).
Therefore we passed on our material, physical, time-space wise, emotional, mental, social or spiritual surplus to others who lacked what we had in excess (Generosity), and through these actions, we realized that we indeed had a surplus to give from (Abundance).

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 38

Despite the abundance that many of us lived in both materially, health wise, time and space wise, emotionally, mentally, socially and spiritually, it could be difficult for us to remember that it is so, because it was our habitual situation.

Therefore it was important for us to face that we were wealthy enough to have something to share in one or more of these areas for it to become easier for us to become able to be content with our self and our life.

By using the Small Ring of Faith, we could learn to trust that we could pass on our surplus without fearing to regret it later.

In that way we became able to experience the joy of experiencing the joy of others about receiving that, which we had in excess while at the same time we became more content by taking responsibility for that Mother that Mother Earth's resources did not go waste.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Small Ring of Faith to get the driving power to share my surplus with others, who lack what I have en excess.

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May 14: The Tree of Hatred and the Tree of Love

First, we needed to find out what our part of the work consisted of.
To find this out, we needed to have an overall idea of the nature of this part of our Seventh Step work.
We could achieve this by using the below illustration of The Tree of Hatred and The Tree of Love as a representation of our defects of character and our virtues.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 54

In our Seventh Step, we began co-operating with our Higher Power about having our defects of character transformed to virtues, and to illustrate the process many of us used the Tree of Hatred and the Tree of Love as shown in Step Seven.

We imagined that the soil the trees grew in was a situation that we experienced, and the cilia of the tree, the finest roots illustrated the most subtle energies we used to handle the situation.

These cilia led nutrition into the larger roots, which led nourishment into the stems of the trees and up into the crowns, which in the Tree of Hatred was the fully unfolded hatred, and in the Tree of Love it was the fully unfolded Love.

The situation was the same, whether we chose to nourish one or the other tree in context with the situation, but dependent on what energies we used, we developed the Tree of Hatred or the Tree of Love. 

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use those energies, which bring forth growth in the Tree of Love in my interactions with others.

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May 15: The Process of sorrow

The process of sorrow moves us through a sequence of emotions namely denial, anger, negotiation, grief and acceptance in several waves, one after the other, in varying order and intensity.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 40

Gradually, as our work with our AcAdAn Program developed, we had investigated our processes of sorrow and discovered the five stages of the process of sorrow.

At the same time, we had become aware that three of the characteristics that the process of sorrow brings forth belongs in the Rings of Pain, and two characteristics belong in the Rings of Joy.

Thereby, we discovered that we could transform the process of sorrow by the help of our AcAdAn Program.

When we used the Sixth Step of our AcAdAn Program for the transformation process, we recovered faster, because we merely needed a turning point, and the turning point took place when we stepped into that Ring of Joy we had chosen for the process.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to investigate the losses that still pains me and transform the pain to joy.

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May 16: To be ill from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction

Today many are found who suffer from a severe case of active addiction, and many more that have a mild or moderate form of this disease.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 7

During our growth, we studied our surroundings completely open-minded in order to get an impression of what were the norms of our surrounding society, and this gave us the impression that dissatisfaction was a useful energy, which could be used to get driving force to set projects into movement or do the needful to fulfill our desires.

We took this to heart without being aware that it was a disease of the mind of our surroundings, because this disease was so common that it was perceived to be a normal state of mind.

We did not discover either that this disease was chronic in our surroundings, because they were dissatisfied with their human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability, and the multitude of consequences they experienced because of the inescapability of their humanness.

As a result of their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction they put up impossible demands on themselves and us, and they also had expectations of themselves and us, which were impossible to live up to, and all of this contributed to createmanifest a serious addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in us, and we were so accustomed to our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction that it did not even occur to us that it was a disease until we came to Active Addictions Anonymous.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to recover from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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May 17: Creationmanifestation of thought paths Creation of strings of thoughts

Our mind consists of strings of thoughts that we have createdmanifested from a combination of our experiences with our material life, our physical life, our life in time and space, our emotional life, our thought life, our social life and our spiritual life.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 71

We were not aware that we had createdmanifested a long series of rows of thoughts that belonged together in sets before we came to AcAdAn and began to raise our awareness of these sets in Step Four by working with The Rings of Pain and Joy.

Thereby, we discovered that even if a single thought had no power by itself, it could belong to a pattern, and that pattern our use of the thought set into swing, had such immense power that it could dominate our thinking mind, our Ego as a obsession.

Therefore, it could be difficult for us to move out of a Painring and into a Joyring, but in Step Six we worked on creatingmanifesting thought paths between the various Painrings and Joyrings that made it possible for us to move quickly out of a Painring and into a Joyring.

The more thought paths we createdmanifested that supported our movement out of a Painring and into a Joyring the easier it became for us to experience contentment, so therefore we worked diligently with our Sixth Step.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to createmanifest thought paths that make it easy for me to move out of a Painring and into a Joyring.

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May 18: Super Human Beings

As a result of using our codependency, it became clear to us that arrogance was the natural consequence of our demand on our self that we must be able to save our self and others from the pains of life, because our desire to save our self and others from pain made us pretend that we were superhuman beings, who were not affected by our limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality, and as a result the Big Ring of Pain opened up to us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 33

Because we had grown up in a society that made impossible demands on us, we had got the impression that if we were not super human beings, we were not good enough, and this impression had led us to strive to be super human beings, and thus we had made impossible demands on our self.

We demanded from our self that we should be able to do more than we are able to, know more than we know, be in control of more than we can control, should not change even if constant change is the life condition for all creaturesmanifestations, and moreover we should not change things, until those, who had power over us had given their permission.

That had contributed to that our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction became severe in nature, and it had led to such existential pains that many of us had resorted to using alcohol, drugs, nicotine, sugar and other chemical substances to quiet our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and others of us killed themselves in despair over not feeling that they were good enough.

Yet others of us had used the people pleasing of codependency, hoping that others would accept that we were not super human beings, if only we used our resources to contribute to their lives instead of our own and thus our chance of finding contentment became even more impaired, but when we came to Active Addictions Anonymous we learned to move from our codependency to our emotional sobriety, and thus we became more content.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to learn to use my emotional sobriety to accept my human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability instead of trying to be a superhuman being.

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May 19: The Step of Liberation

Gradually, as we progressed in our Ninth Step, we experienced how relieved we felt about resolving all such situations from our Eighth Step list, one after another, and therefore, many call Step Nine The Step of Liberation.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 65

From our childhood to the present day, our parents and many other people in our life had explained to us that we should feel ashamed, because we were guilty of something or the other that was not good in their eyes, and they let us know that if they were to believe that we felt ashamed, we had to bend our neck and admit that we were bad people, who had deserved to feel bad, because of what they thought we ought to feel ashamed of.

We did not know as children that guilt and shame are weapons that our surroundings use to make us bend to their will, and we also did not know that even when it was our loving parents, who used these weapons against us, they did us great harm, because these weapons are the deadliest poisons to our spiritual life and thus a block for us to become one with our true Self, our Spirit.

We believed it, when others said that we were guilty and ought to be ashamed of our self, and even when nobody said it to us anymore, we continued to say it to our self, because innermost we trusted that our parents and other authorities had shamed us exclusively because they wanted to do something they believed were to our advantage, even if it was painful.

Therefore, we were deeply grateful for our Eighth Step, where we brought out in the open all the big and small things that we our self and others had shamed us of, and for our Ninth Step, where we both liberated our self of what we had been ashamed of our self and what others thought we should be ashamed of from childhood to now, and the relief this gave us enabled us to henceforth keep our path free of guilt and shame to our utmost relief.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Ninth Step to let go of my feelings of guilt and shame from a situation in the present

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May 20: Comparison with others

Before we came to AcAdAn, many of us perceived our demands, that we should be understood, admired, respected, perfect, healthy, beautiful, famous, rich and so on, and that others in our lives should be completely loving, caring, giving, understanding, tolerant, and so on, as fair and reasonable, but we cannot afford to be confused on this issue.
These demands createmanifest dissatisfaction.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 11

From our society, we received a lot of information about other people, whom we did not know, but who apparently were perfect, healthy, beautiful, rich, respected and admired, and we got the impression that if we did not possess all this, we were not as we should be.

We also received a lot of information about other people, whom we did not know that gave us the impression that they had a wonderful social life, full of admirers and suitors, good male friends and female friends and an ideal relationship with parents, siblings, spouses and their own and others’ children.

So when we looked at the outer image presented to us and looked at the Reality of our own personal and our own social life, we saw the true picture instead of the surface image, and we saw that our personal life and our social life held pain on a daily basis, and that we had issues with parents, siblings, spouses and our own and others’ children.

Thereby we discovered that when we compared the outer image of the Reality of others with our personal Reality, we could easily get an impression of not being as we ought to be, but at our AcAdAn meetings, we heard others share sincerely about how life was for them, and then we discovered to our delight that others were like us, when we and they let go of only showing the surface.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn meetings to learn to let go of comparing myself and my life with others and their life.

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May 21: Dissatisfaction with our four basic attributes

After having tried everything we could by our self to overcome our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction without success, we eventually sought help from each other in Active Addictions Anonymous.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 9

One would think that it was evident that our four basic attributes as human beings are that we are limited, ignorant, powerless and mortal/changeable, but before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous most of us were not aware of our four basic conditions as human beings.

After we came to AcAdAn, we discovered that we were limited by our form, and we were ignorant about everything that was outside our limited life space, because even if we in many ways possessed information about the World at large, we were still ignorant about them in the true sense of knowledge, which is information paired with experience.

We also realized that even when we paired information with experiences there would always be unimaginable amounts of information about life and places on Earth that we knew nothing about, and it became evident to us that we are powerless over what we knew nothing about, and even if we tried to be stable, we discovered that it was not possible because of our mortality/changeability.

Our resistance to our four basic attributes createdmanifested an addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in our mind, and because we wanted to recover from this disease, we became willing to carry out the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program and my AcAdAn Fellowship to get the help I need to recover from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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May 22: The third meeting with the Big Ring of Joy

The Program in Active Addictions Anonymous Step 9-12.
STEP 9:  We made amends to our self and others except when doing so would cause more harm to us or others.
STEP 10:  We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
STEP 11:  Through prayer and meditation, we sought to improve our conscious contact with our Higher Power, as we understood that Power, praying only for knowledge of our Higher Power’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
STEP 12:  Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these Steps, we practiced these principles in all our affairs, and carried the message of AcAdAn to others suffering from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 10

When we worked our Ninth Step by making amends to our self and others for the harm we believed we had done as compared to our goal in AcAdAn, which is to live with contentment, we did so because we had faith in that it would make it easier for us to be content with our self and thus with others, our lives and the World at large.

When we worked our Tenth Step by taking personal inventory and admitting our mistakes immediately when we discovered them, we hoped that this would reduce the harm that could come to our self, others and the World at large as a result of our mistakes.

When we worked our Eleventh Step by expanding our conscious contact with our chosen Higher Power by the help of prayer and meditation and by seeking knowledge about our Higher Power's will for us plus seeking the power to carry that out, we wanted to act on our knowledge that our Higher Power's will for us holds love for us and everything and everyone everywhere at all levels of existence.

When we worked our Twelfth Step by passing on to others, who suffer from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, our knowledge about the Program in AcAdAn, we stick to the truth about what we have received in AcAdAn, and we do this in order to keep what we has achieved, and also because we wanted to help suffering humankind to recover from their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will set the Big Ring of Joy with its faith, hope, love and truth into vibration in my own life by the help of Step 9-10-11-12, and thereby also help suffering humankind by the help of the information I have to share about these Steps.

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May 23: Limitations

Furthermore, many of us have realized that we are limited in many different ways, but it was hard for us to admit this even to our self, because we felt defiant when we encountered limitations of any kind whatsoever and that could make us wage war against any type of limitations.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 20

Many of us had difficulty accepting our emotional limitations, and thus we had a hard time saying no to a task that we did not feel like doing, and when we did not feel like performing the task, but did it anyway, we did not have our heart with us in the action, and thus it became a heartless action towards our self and others.

When we lacked the courage to say no, we could experience a feeling of defiance, while we carried out the task, and that meant that we now found our self in the Small Ring of Envy with its defiance, submission, disbelief and superstition.

Our submission consisted in that we performed an action, we did not want to perform, and our disbelief consisted in that we believed that such a heartless action did not have any consequences for our self and others, and our superstition consisted in that we imagined that others – our boss, our friends, our spouse, our Higher Power – should refrain from asking something from us that we needed to say no to.

When we found our self in the energies from the Small Ring of Envy, it also meant that all our tasks would be permeated by these energies, even if it was tasks we would otherwise love to perform, and thus we lost the joy of every action we performed.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Program to release my fear of saying no to tasks that I do not want to perform.

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May 24: To serve principles

The principle of Tradition Two is Service.
Slogan: I do not serve to elevate myself but to give life-force to the principles I wish to further.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

When we chose to serve AcAdAn by taking on a service post, it was important that we investigated our motives taking on the post in question, because if we sought the power and the glory associated with the post in question, we needed to work with our self, until we were able to take on the post to serve the principles, we wanted to further.

First and foremost however, we needed to investigate if we had our heart with us in our chosen service to the Fellowship, and that meant that we served the principles that we wished to further with joy and interest.

Sometimes, we realized that we had our heart with us in our service to begin with, but lost the desire do the service at a later date after we had discovered in all details what it entailed to do it.

As we do not want to perform heartless actions against our self or others by performing a task we do not have our heart into, we liberate our self from the service that we had undertaken at the earliest possible opportunity even if we had committed our self to do it longer, when we took it on.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will joyfully serve the principles that I want to further in my AcAdAn Fellowship and in my life as a whole, until I do not want to do it anymore.

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May 25: Shame

We looked at the harm we had inflicted on our self or others by destroying some of our possessions or that of others, whether the things were big or small, or whether we had done it on purpose or not.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 61

Before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, we maybe denied that we were ashamed of our self, when we destroyed our things, harmed our body, carried out actions that drained us of energy, cultivated painful emotions, thought hateful thoughts, harmed others in our social life or harmed our own spiritual life or that of others.

However, gradually as our work with our AcAdAn Program developed, we realized that in Reality, we could not harm our self or others without being ashamed of these actions.

When we admitted that we were ashamed of the harm we had done in our Eighth Step, we refrained from judging if we were ashamed of a little thing or a big thing, or if we were ashamed of something we did on purpose, or something we did not do on purpose.

The decisive factor was that we were ashamed of our action and therefore had a need to change our way of being in the World to be able to forgive our self by making amends to our self or others for that, which we were ashamed of by the help of Step Nine.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Eighth Step to decide how I will make amends to myself or others for a wrong I believe I have done, and I will use Step Nine to carry out my amends.

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May 26: A wholehearted decision

The more times we made this decision, the less frightening it became.
Every time we made it, we got new insights about our self in the form of our reluctance and fear that prevented us from making the decision wholeheartedly that day.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 28

When we wanted to change one of our decisions, we were met with resistance from that part of us that wanted to hold on to our old decision, and therefore it was extremely rare that we could move straight from discovering that we needed to change a particular pattern of action that harmed us to a new pattern of action that benefited us.

To reach a wholehearted decision about changing one of our patterns of action, we needed to change the mindset and its accompanying emotions that supported our old painful behavior, and replace the mindset in question and its accompanying emotions with the new mindset that we wanted to make use of instead.

Sometimes, the change in our thinking mind, our Ego might take a few years before we reached a wholehearted decision in a specific area, but mostly the changes in daily life could be digested within a few hours or at few days.

However, this did not make us loose courage, because we had our Program that we could use to work on replacing our old habitual painful mindsets with new mindsets that brought us joy.

Today’s contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to change an old habit that does not serve me any longer, even though I might have to work on it now and then over a longer time phase.

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May 27: Politics

Each member has one voice, which they can contribute when their turn comes, and that means, we proceed to take a collective conscience on the issue through a written vote when everybody has spoken once, even if some of us might feel that if we were allowed to speak more than once, we would have a better chance of explaining and convincing others that what we suggested could be the right action to follow for our group.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 87

In political debates, it is often the most eloquent, who can convince others that their point of view of the right thing should be the foundation for decisions on behalf of everyone, and therefore they should be given the power to implement their perception of the right thing, but in AcAdAn we have a different perception of what is politically correct.

When making decisions on behalf of the group, we do not want that the most eloquent of us speak again and again so in that way we give them the power to overpower the rest of the group with their view points.

Our politics in group settings is therefore that each member has one voice, and thus we only get the opportunity to speak once about our perception of the right mutual foundation for action for the group.

Furthermore, we want that all group members get the opportunity to express their perception of what could be the right foundation for action for the group, so that all members are being heard and taken into consideration, before we cast our vote on, what each of us think is the right action for our group.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will express my conscience in my AcAdAn group, if a decision has to be made about a mutual foundation for action for my entire group.

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May 28: Recovery in AcAdAn

Abstain from using your addiction to chronic dissatisfaction one day at a time.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 13

In AcAdAn we inventoried, how we used dissatisfaction in our daily life, and to our surprise we discovered that we were using dissatisfaction from we opened our eyes in the morning til we went to sleep at night.

Because we were content for few short moments in between the moments, where we made use of our dissatisfaction, we had not been aware that we were chronically dissatisfied, that we were in fact addicted to dissatisfaction.

When we investigated, why it was just as difficult for us to let go of our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, as it is for an addict to let go of his/her drug of choice, we discovered that we used dissatisfaction with our self or others hoping that the pain of our dissatisfaction would give our self or others the incentive that we and they needed to change our self or them for the better.

In AcAdAn, we also investigated if our use of dissatisfaction gave the desired result, and we discovered that our use of dissatisfaction did not createmanifest a change for the better neither for our self nor for others, and thus it became easier for us to let go of our addiction to dissatisfaction.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to investigate how I can use contentment instead of dissatisfaction in my daily life, one situation at a time.

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May 29: Self-criticism

Instead of criticizing our self for the mistakes we thought we had made in the course of a day, we chose to open our mind to ideas and ways to remedy those mistakes, whether those ideas sprang from within us or from outside us though others. This way, we were empowered to set right our mistakes instead of sinking into despondency and depression.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 47

Self-criticism createsmanifests depression in us and that we discover in AcAdAn, when we began to investigate the Ring of Self-centeredness with its euphoria, depression, self-criticism and self-praise in Step Four.

Until then, many of us had believed that depression was an unpleasant state of mind that we would suffer from now and then, but in AcAdAn we began to replace our self-criticism with openmindedness.

We did this in our Sixth Step by the help of the Ring of God-centeredness with its joy, empowerment, open-mindedness and gratitude.

The Ring of God-centeredness gave us the empowerment, we needed to leave our self-criticism with its accompanying depression behind us and gradually, as our work with these two Rings developed, we discovered that depression became a more and more rare state of mind for us.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Ring of God-centeredness with its joy, empowerment, open-mindedness and gratitude to recover from my use of the Ring of Self-centeredness with its euphoria, depression, self-criticism and self-praise.

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May 30: Accept

Before we came to the Fellowship of Active Addictions Anonymous, we could not accept our self, others and our lives.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 9

Because of our addiction to dissatisfaction we focused throughout our day on those areas we thought ought not to be the way they were, whether it were our spiritual life, our social interactions, our thoughts, our emotions, our actions, our appearance or material possessions.

 Always and without exception we found something to be dissatisfied with about our self and our lives, others and their way of being in the World, our society or the World at large.

Our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction went like a red thread through the days of our lives, and we felt pain, whether we looked into our self or out onto others, but when we came to AcAdAn and let go of our addiction to dissatisfaction, the miracle happened.

We became better and better at accepting our self, others, our society and the World at large as we and our lives are, and as they and their lives are, as our society and the World at large are, and thereby we began to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to learn to accept myself, others, my society and the World at large exactly the way we all are on all levels, whether it is materially, physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally, socially or spiritually.

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May 31: Anger

Thus, when we approached and healed our angry thoughts and emotions both mentally, emotionally and energetically, in loving and respectful ways, we could move beyond the anger, to the joy of feeling love for our self and others.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 49

Our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction led us to become angry again and again for all kinds of reasons, and over the years we had used a lot of our energy to deny, defend, justify and rationalize our anger.

We felt that our anger had its role to play in our understanding of life, because it told us that we needed to do something about the situation that gave rise to our anger, but because we used denial, defence, justification and rationalization, we became unable to listen to the message of our anger.

Instead we tried to find good and loving reasons for inflicting the suffering on our self and others that came in the wake of our anger, but when we began to work with all the Painrings in AcAdAn, we discovered that it became possible for for us to hear the message of our anger, so we could begin to take care of it.

After coming face to face with the many anger forms that is found in all the Painrings, at long last, we found a way, in which we did not only become able to hear the message of our anger, but we could also learn to transform our anger to joy about achieving the wisdom and mercy that was a result of our work with throwing light one our anger by the help of the Painrings and then transform it by help of the Joyrings.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Sixth Step in AcAdAn to transform my anger to joy about the wisdom and capacity for mercy that my anger makes it possible for me to achieve, because I used the Painrings and the Joyrings to take care of my anger.                     .

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JUNE

June 01 Courage	June 02 AcAdAn literature	June 03 To share experience, strength and hope
June 04 Letting go of the seducer role of codependency	June 05 The importance of Step Five	June 06 Perfect laziness
June 07 The importance of Step Five	June 08 Achievement of honor	June 09 Our mutual purpose
June 10 The Step of forgiveness	June 11 The Small Ring of Envy	June 12 Self-criticism and self-praise
June 13 To forgive our self	June 14 To open our self	June 15 Understanding
June 16 Wasting resources	June 17 To respect our emotions	June 18 The importance of meetings
June 19 The Ring of Fulfillment	June 20 Our psychological landscape	June 21 Success and failure
June 22 Dissatisfaction	June 23 The importance of our Fellowship with others	June 24 The Higher Power of the group
June 25 The message of AcAdAn	June 26 The First Tradition	June 27 The flow of information
June 28 To harm our earth connection	June 29 The process of meditation	June 30 To harm our self and others spiritually

June 01: Courage

The principle of Step Four is courage.
Slogan: I accept both my virtues and my defects of character.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 83

We had associated courage with physical actions, before we came to AcAdAn, but after we began our Step Work, we discovered that it took courage for us to use Step One to admit things that we thought, felt, said or did that made our life unmanageable.

Gradually, as we used Step Two to investigate the unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention of our chosen Higher Power with us being exactly the way we are, it began to become easier for us to admit those things that made our life unmanageable, so we could begin to change them.

When we surrendered to our chosen Higher Power's unconditionally loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention in Step Three, it became possible for us to carry out those actions that we found out in Step Two that we needed to do to make our life manageable.

By the help of this work, we became ready to show that courage, which is required in AcAdAn to be able to admit our exact nature in Step Four, even if it could still be hard for some of us to either admit our defects of character or our virtues, but in Step Four we muster our courage to stand by both sides of our self with the help of the Rings of Pain and the Rings of Joy.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will show courage in AcAdAn by admitting both my character defects and my virtues by the help of the Rings of Pain and Joy in Step Four.

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June 02: AcAdAn literature

At the founding time of Active Addictions Anonymous, our literature consisted of four books: Active Addictions Anonymous – The Wild Life, One Sponsor’s Suggestions for Working the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous – The Wild Life, Daily contemplations for members of Active Addictions Anonymous – The Wild Life and Six Step Analyses for members of Active Addictions Anonymous – The Wild Life.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 92

The purpose with the literature of AcAdAn is to slowly build up a library in which various members express their experience of their way through the AcAdAn Fellowship.

Some members might want to make an alternative sponsor suggestion that better suit their taste and others, who have the same taste as them.

We could also have various books of daily contemplations for members of Active Addictions Anonymous, written by members, who felt like contributing with their ideas on how they thought a set of daily contemplations should be.

We could also choose to write pamphlets about our Traditions and about Service in AcAdAn, because only imagination sets limits for how we can expand our literature in AcAdAn for the benefit of our members.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will read some of the books that are available to me as a member of AcAdAn, and if I also feel like writing something for the benefit of other AcAdAn members, I will do it.

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June 03: To share experience, strength and hope

We carry our AcAdAn message best when we simply share our recovery, express our experiences from our work with the AcAdAn Program and how the Program has helped us, because thereby, we give others hope that they too can achieve contentment; and also, this way, they get the strength to begin their journey of recovery towards contentment with self, others and their life.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 96

When we met our sponsor or recovery buddy in the beginning of our recovery from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we told him/her about our emotional pains, and how that made our life unmanageable.

Thereby we gave our sponsor or recovery buddy the opportunity to tell us, how he/she would have used our AcAdAn Program to recover from the emotional pains, we described, and in that way it became a win-win situation.

It became a win for our sponsor or recovery buddy, because we gave him/her an opportunity to deepen his/her understanding of the Program by telling us about his/her understanding of the Program, and it became a win for us, because we got new knowledge about how we could use the Program on our existential pains.

Gradually, as we developed our own understanding of the Program and how we could use it, we continued our win-win situation with out sponsor or recovery buddy by exchanging experiences with our unique and personal application of the Program on our existential pains, so we in that way had our understanding expanded on our self, our life and our Program.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will share my experiences with my AcAdAn Program with my sponsor or my recovery buddy and in an AcAdAn meeting and thereby contribute to give others hope that they too can recover from their existential pains and thus get the strength to do what is required to recover from their pains.

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June 04: Letting go of the seducer role of codependency

Instead of seducing others by hiding our own pain or by pretending that we were wiser than them and their Higher Power so as to make them change according to our perception of the right thing, we gave them time and space to express their thoughts, emotions and actions according to their own perception of the right thing.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 48

Many of us had the impression that it was our task to save others from their existential pains and that could make us seduce both our self and them to believe that we must not be subjected to the pains of life just like everybody else, because we could not see how it would be possible for us to save them, if we had the same pains as them.

By believing in this, we came to step into the role of the powerless helpers, who could not get the help we needed to recover from our existential pains, because that required us to admit the pains of our lives instead of pretending that we were above them, and it also required that we asked for the help, we needed.

When we were presented with the Ring of codependency with its savior role, seducer role, victim role and offender role, we discovered to our relief that it was not only us, who suffered from this misunderstanding, but that everyone in our Fellowship worked on letting go of the seducer role of codependency.

We used the Ring of Emotional Sobriety with its detachment to let go of others' problems, its integrity to let go of seducing our self and others to believe that it was our task to save them from the pains of their life, respect of our need to use our resources to solve our own problems and respect for the needs of others to use their resources to solve their own problems.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Ring of Emotional Sobriety with its detachment, integrity, respect for self and respect for others to let go of my codependency’s seducer role.

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June 05: The importance of Step Five

We discovered that no self-appraisal, however thorough it was, had a lasting effect unless followed up by just as thorough a Fifth Step, and with this knowledge we moved on to Step Five.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 41

In Step Four, we had made many discoveries about our self, and we thought that they were so big and so important that we would be able to remember them and benefit from them quite effortlessly, but they were lost anyway, like a dream in the night, if we did not reaffirm them.

We reaffirmed them by reading to our self, what we had written, because that gave us the opportunity to look at our self-realizations from our neutral point of view, and we wrote a synopsis at the same time about what we had discovered about our self.

Then we read our synopsis to our chosen Higher Power, because we needed to receive inspiration from our chosen Higher Power so we added those inspirations to our inventory that came to us while we read to our Higher Power.

In the end, we read our self-realizations to another human being and to our AcAdAn Fellowship, an thereby we also got the opportunity to hear what another human being and our AcAdAn Fellowship have realized that were related to our own realizations, and thus our understanding of our self-realizations got further deepened.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Fifth Step to share my self-realizations with myself, my Higher Power, another human being and my AcAdAn Fellowship.

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June 06: Perfect laziness

The principle of Tradition Seven is Simplicity.
Slogan: A place for everything and everything in its place.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

Many of us perceived laziness as failure in picking up our home, but that was a very superficial point of view on laziness, because laziness is in Reality a quality we could benefit from a lot, if we chose to look deeper at what perfect laziness is, because thereby we discovered that perfect laziness is perfect order on all levels of our existence.

When we had perfect order in our home, we knew where all things were down to the smallest pin, and that meant that we did not need to spend time, energy and interest on finding things that we needed just now.

When we had perfect order in our physical condition, it meant that our physical body was well rested, well exercised, well groomed and well nourished, and in this way, we were spared of having to spend money, time, energy and interest on taking care of various lifestyle illnesses.

When we had perfect order in our thoughts and emotions, it meant that we lived a principled life, where we took care of our thoughts and emotions to the extent that was necessary for us so to develop a social life, where we did not constantly clash with the thoughts and emotions of other human beings, so that did not have to use our time, energy and interest on resolving the conflicts that constantly arose, if we did not have order in our thoughts and emotions.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use time on cultivating my perfect laziness by creatingmanifesting a place for every thing, and I will put every thing in its place, whether it is my material things, my physical body, my energy, my emotions, my thoughts, my social life and my spiritual life.

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June 07: A content life

However, when we came to AcAdAn, we discovered we could learn to live a content life with the help of the Program of Active Addictions Anonymous whether our active addiction was mild, moderate or severe.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 7

People, who were not addicted to dissatisfaction, and who had thus not developed an addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, could easily feel that they lived a contented life, although sometimes they were dissatisfied, but this however, is not the case for members of AcAdAn, because we suffer under an addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Before we came to AcAdAn and began to face our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we found reason to be dissatisfied many times a day, seven days a week, so there was not one day, when we did not lose energy to our addiction to dissatisfaction.

Exactly because we suffer from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, we need to abstain from taking dissatisfaction into use, and to begin with, we do it five minutes at a time, later one hour at a time, and slowly we set up the time to abstain from using our dissatisfaction one day at a time.

Day by day, we become better and better at finding reasons to be content with our self, with other people, with things and situations that we previously were discontented with, and this meant that we slowly came to live a contented life.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to learn how to let go of my dissatisfaction so that I can get to live a contented life, one day at a time.

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June 08: Achievement of honor

Even when it did seem like we had succeeded in making others honor us, we discovered that this didn't bring us any closer to self-acceptance and contentment in any possible way.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 17

In our state of addiction to chronic dissatisfaction many of us imagined that if only others treated us better, were more loving, caring, compassionate and merciful, we would be more content.

Some of us hoped to achieve to be honored by others in such a way that we could feel valued and appreciated, not only by our family and our circle of people, but by a larger group outside our personal circle of people or even by all of our society at large.

Some of us succeeded in achieving special honors, either from our family, from our circle, from a larger group outside our circle or even from society at large, and we discovered that it was a short-lived joy that did not make us more content with our self, others, society at large or our life.

Thereby, we understood that honor from others in and of itself does not createmanifest contentment with our self, others, society at large or our lives, and therefore we became even more willing to work with our AcAdAn Program to become able to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will continue my work on recovering from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by the help of my AcAdAn Program, even if I receive honors from others.

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June 09: Our mutual purpose

In Active Addictions Anonymous, each of us needs a sense of Fellowship with our group.
This we attain, first of all, with the help of our mutual purpose, which is our work with our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, so that it becomes possible for us to be led to a state of contentment.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 85

It was not possible for us as members of AcAdAn to recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction on our own, and therefore we needed our group in AcAdAn so we could get the needed help with our Step Work, when we shared it with our sponsor or recovery buddy or others, who has the same purpose as us.

People, who did not suffer from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and even people, who suffered from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, could have difficulties understanding us if they were not members of AcAdAn or in other ways worked with their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

Therefore it was vital for us that our group stayed available to us and the other members of our group, and to achieve the necessary trust in our group, we needed to achieve a sense of fellowship with our group.

Our common purpose binds us together in love, care, compassion and mercy, and slowly, we began to get the courage to change our way of being in the World from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction to contentment.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will remember that we are all members of AcAdAn, because we have a mutual purpose, which is our work on recovering from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and therefore I will maintain that as my most important focus in my AcAdAn meetings.

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June 10: The Step of forgiveness

We used Step Eight to liberate our self from feelings of guilt, and thereby, from shame.
Therefore, many call this Step ‘the Step of Forgiveness’ as forgiving our self liberates us from guilt and shame.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 58

In Step Eight we became able to look at how we had harmed our self or others, seen with the eyes that our AcAdAn Program had given us to see with.

We brought out into the light, all of our guilt and shame and thus we discovered that we did not have nearly as much reason to feel guilty and ashamed as we thought we had.

We investigated the areas where we thought we needed to make amends to our self and others and decided which amends we wanted to implement when we had finished our Eighth Step list.

We ended our Eighth Step list by forgiving our self for having made the mistakes that we had made, and thus we could let go of our feelings of guilt and shame.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to correct my mistakes and forgive myself, so I can become able to let go of guilt and shame.

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June 11: The Small Ring of Envy

When The Small Ring of Envy became active in us, we imagined that we could get what others had without doing anything for it (Superstition), and that there was nothing or nobody who would help us get what we so desired if we worked at fulfilling our desires our self (Disbelief).
We got angry if someone suggested that we should participate and contribute with our interest, energy, time or money, like others did, to get the same as they had whether it was material, physical, time-space wise, emotional, mental, social or spiritual (Defiance), or we submitted to various demands that were contrary to our innermost desires, hoping that others e.g. God, our employer, spouse, friend, family etc. would fulfill our desires if only we threw our self on our knees and flattered them with sacrificial gifts or words of praise (Submission).

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 38

Before, we came to AcAdAn, many of us confused the Small Ring of Envy with its disbelief, superstition, submission and defiance the Small Ring of Avarice with its stinginess, greed, poverty and gluttony, because we thought that envy meant that we begrudged the person, we were envious of, what he or she had or were, which we wished we also had.

After, we came to AcAdAn we discovered that the Small Ring of Envy is about us seeing something we desired, but which we did not believe that we could get and therefore we gave up in advance doing the required to have our desire fulfilled.

Instead of working on getting our desire fulfilled, we might then end up using the Small Ring of Avarice, because we begrudged the other person, we were envious of, the things or qualities that we did not believe we could achieve.

By the help of our AcAdAn Program, we had many misunderstandings about these two concept cleared up and little by little we learned instead to use the Small Ring of Hope with its credence, information, discernment and serenity and the Small Ring of Faith with its generosity, trust, prosperity and accountability.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will learn to use the Small Ring of Hope instead of the Small Ring of Envy and the Small Ring of Faith instead of the Small Ring of Avarice.

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June 12: Self-criticism and self-praise

We investigated how our self-criticism had brought about depression and how our self-praise had brought about euphoria in us, and how this had impacted our life from childhood till today.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 31

When we investigated how self-criticism and self-praise had affected us and our life from childhood to the present day, we were surprised to discover that thoughts are not duty free, which we had otherwise heard many say that they are.

We discovered that when we praised our self for something it led to a feeling of euphoria, which is the companion of self-praise, but that was a short lived joy, which soon turned to depression, because euphoria belongs in the Ring of Self-centeredness with its self-praise, euphoria, self-criticism and depression.

In our work with Step Four and Six we discovered that when we found our self in a specific field of energy in our psychological landscape, we became permeated by the energies in the field, and thus we could not experience euphoria without experiencing self-criticism and depression too in fast succession after the self-praise and euphoria.

Thereby we became aware of that it is self-praise and self-criticism that leads to bipolar disorders, and we found out that we could recover from them by using the energies in the Ring of Godcenteredness with its joy, empowerment, openmindedness and gratitude.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to use the Ring of Godcenteredness in a situation where I used to use the Ring of Self-centeredness.

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June 13: To forgive our self

When we had made amends for the mistakes of our past, we let go of them and the harm done whether we achieved the forgiveness of others or not, remembering that we did not carry out our Ninth Step to achieve the forgiveness of others, but to take responsibility for our part of the harm so that we are able to forgive our self and let go of our guilt and shame.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 66

It is common knowledge in the Twelve Steps Fellowships that the one we have the hardest time forgiving is our self, and thus it was a great help for us to come to Step Eight, where we became ready to forgive our self for our mistakes from the past by planning how we would make amends to our self and others for the mistakes we felt we had made.

After that, we used our Ninth Step to make our planned amends towards our self and others, and when thus, we had achieved the capacity to forgive our self by making our planned amends, simultaneously we were liberated from feeling guilty and from feeling ashamed of our self.

As we got better and better at forgiving our self, we discovered that much of our self-criticism in Reality was due to the way we experienced our fellow human beings handling their relationship with us, and thus it had got nothing to do with us.

These discoveries made it easier and easier for us to accept our mistakes without feeling weighed down by shame, because we had made a mistake, and in that way we improved our capacity to forgive our self for the mistakes we made.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my Eighth and Ninth Step to forgive myself for the mistakes I have made today.

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June 14: To open our self

Step Five was the key to freedom, because it was only through bringing that out into the open which we had discovered in our Fourth Step that we were liberated from our feelings of being victimized by others and life.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 42

In the Fourth Step we discovered many things about our true nature, which we had not been aware of before, both concerning our virtues and our defects of character and we also discovered that use of our defects of character had made us wish that we had been able to act differently in various situations.

Our intention at the root of our defects of character was loving, caring, compassionate and merciful, and our innermost knowledge about that could make us deny that our loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention was not fulfilled, when we took our defects of character into use.

It is this deep knowledge about having acted contrary to our loving, caring, compassionate and merciful intention that pained us, but in Step Five however, we discovered that it was to our advantage to come out into the open with those sides of our self that we wanted to deny or hide in the past, because we pained due to our use of these sides of our self.

Gradually, as we became better and better at coming out in the open with the pain of our defects of character, it became possible for us to use Step Six to transform the pain of our defects of character to the joy of our virtues and thereby it became easier for us to be content with our self, exactly the way we are.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will open myself to use my Program to recover from my use of one of my defects of character.

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June 15: Understanding

Some of us chose to do our Fifth Step with a person who was not a member of Active Addictions Anonymous, although we felt that we would be better understood by one of the other members.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 43

We had often been told that we were not special, but when we came to AcAdAn we discovered that we are all unique in our individuality, and that the area where we could meet with and recognize each other was our our emotions even though we might have  different reasons til feel the way we did.

In our AcAdAn Fellowship our interaction with the other members was about sharing with them, how different thoughts gave rise to different emotions for us personally, even if others had different thoughts that gave them opportunity to have the same emotions that we shared about.

When we came to Step Five, we needed to find a person, we could share our Step Work with from our First Step to our Fourth Step, and it was important for us that we found a person, we felt, expressed his/her thoughts and emotions in a way that was understandable to us.

Sometimes, it could happen that we felt we had a better opportunity to be understood by a human being we knew, who was not a member of AcAdAn, and as the most important thing was that we had the courage to share our joyful and painful thoughts and emotions from Step One to Four with another human being we chose to trust our self to the person we found best suited.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will be careful when choosing the person that I am entrusting with my existential joys and pains.

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June 16: Wasting resources

So we let go of our attempts to achieve love and respect from others in this way, and instead, we began using our time, energy, interests and money to build up our own lives.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 16

When we worked with the pain in the Ring of Codependency with its savior-role seducer-role, victim-role and offender-role, we discovered that we had spent a lot of money, time, interest and energy in an attempt to save others from the pains of life without succeeding.

That had made us understand that it was a waste of our resources to spend it on something that did not lead to anything fruitful, neither for our self nor for the one/those, we tried to save from life's pain.

This realizations gave us the courage to begin using our resources on our self and our own life instead of using them on others and their life to no avail.

We achieved the courage to spend our money, time, energy and interest on our self and our lives by the help of the joy in the Ring of Emotional Sobriety with its detachment, integrity, respect for self and respect for others.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will spend my money, my time, my energy and my interest on myself and my life.

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June 17: To respect our emotions

We challenged our self emotionally by denying those emotions that we found to be limiting our freedom to do anything we wanted; for example, when we were scared, we defied our fear by doing what we feared instead of respecting our emotion and working with it until we were ready to perform the action in question with confidence instead of defiance.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 21

Many of us of us found it difficult to accept a no, when there was something that we wanted to do or to get, and it was even harder for us to accept a no, when it came from within our own being.

If we wanted to be together with specific people, and our emotions told us that it was not the right choice, because we had some tasks we had promised our self to carry out that required we gave up being with these people, even if they would like to be with us as well, it was a no coming from within.

We could feel an urge to go back on our promises to our self, and when we chose to do so, we discovered that our feeling of low self-esteem intensified and this expansion of emotional discomfort was our guidance that we needed to fulfill our promises to our self.

If we denied keeping our promises to our self in the NOW our integrity and our belief in our self diminished and therefore we chose to respect our own and life’s changeability by being very careful not to promise our self anything unless it was strictly necessary.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will respect my own and life’s changeability by not promising myself anything, which is not strictly needed from hour to hour, day to day.

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June 18: The importance of meetings

We meet regularly to help each other recover from our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction by sharing our experiences and drawing strength and hope from each other.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 8

Many of us had been or were members of another/other Twelve Step Fellowship/s before we came to Active Addictions Anonymous, and by working with the Twelve Steps in this/these Fellowship/s we had discovered how powerful it is to accept our powerlessness in a particular area.

In Active Addictions Anonymous we discovered that our powerlessness was only one of our humanness’ four basic characteristics and that it was even more powerful to work with all four of them by working with our limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability in our AcAdAn Program.

In addition to this, we realized already in Step One in our work with our AcAdAn Program that our lack of acceptance of our human limitation, ignorance, powerlessness and mortality/changeability led to addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, which takes away from us the joy of living.

Our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction hid under many masks, and therefore we needed to attend meetings to hear, what parts of addiction to chronic dissatisfaction others have spotted, so we can get help to unmask our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction in some of its many disguises and thus become better able to recover from it.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will attend a meeting in AcAdAn to listen to what others have to say about their addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and how they handle it and to share about my own perception of my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction and how I handle it.

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June 19: The Ring of Fulfillment

When we investigated our use of the Ring of Fulfillment, we discovered that if we found our self in the Ring of Fulfillment, when we had empty time ahead of us, our empty time was accompanied with a feeling of fulfillment, because we could fill it with something that had our interest and which therefore was meaningful for us and this sense of meaningfulness made us experience a sense of oneness with our self, others and our life, also if we were alone when we were busy with that which we were interested in.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 30

The Ring of Fulfillment is also called the God box, Sudarshan Chakra, the Sun Wheel and many other luminous names, because it lights up our inner World in the same way the sun lights up our outer World, and when we chose to use this Ring, we released all the joys of the World into our lives.

The Ring of Fulfillment is the antidote to the Ring of Emptiness with its emptiness, boredom, meaninglessness and loneliness, and the Ring of Emptiness is also called Pandora's Box in Greek mythology and is said to release all the miseries of the World into a person's life, if he/she chose to use it.

We learned to use the Ring of Fulfillment with it with its fulfillment, interest, meaningfulness and oneness in our AcAdAn Program, when we had empty time ahead of us, and thereby we could learn to transform the energies in the Ring of Emptiness to the Ring of Fulfillment, and in this way we elevated our self to a higher vibrational level in the NOW.

Many of us had tried to get out of the Ring of Emptiness in many ways right from numbing our self chemically to make our self so busy that we could not feel our emotional feelings, and therefor it was a great relief for us to begin using the Ring of Fulfillment so we no longer had to fear emptiness, boredom, meaninglessness and loneliness.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use the Ring of Fulfillment with its fulfillment, interest, meaningfulness and oneness and thus release all the joys of the World into my life, when I have empty time in front of me

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June 20: Our psychological landscape

Those of us, who chose to use the symbolic image of the trees for this purpose, imagined that the soil in which the tree grew was the situation that we inventoried, and the small cilia found on the finest roots of the tree that drew nourishment from the soil were various thoughts and emotions that we took into use in that situation.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 55

When we reached Step Seven in our AcAdAn Program, we had formed a picture of our thoughts and feelings by investigating how the mental-emotional patterns in the Rings of Pain and the Rings of Joy had played out in our life.

Furthermore, we had found out how we could move from a Painring to a Joyring, and this knowledge we call the knowledge about the transformation of our psychological landscape.

In our Seventh Step most of us preferred to use the symbolic picture of the Tree of Hatred and the Tree of Love to make clear to our self, how best we could make our Seventh work for us.

Thus we began to develop the capacity to move around in our psychological landscape in conformity with our free choice of mental-emotional energies, and this implies that we begin to find contentment under all circumstances, no matter what they are.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will to use the symbolic picture of the trees from the Seventh Step to develop my understanding of my psychological landscape.

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June 21: Success and failure

While working our Fifth Step with our chosen person, we realized that we had difficulties perceiving specific incidents that our chosen person shared from his or her life as successes or failures, and thus we discovered that we had considered some incidents in our life as successes or failures that others did not necessarily perceive in the same way; and in that way we found out that our perception of successes and failures was subjective.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 44

Until we came to AcAdAn, most of us thought that our perception of success and failure was objective and that everyone else had the same perception of success and failure that we had.

When we discovered in our Fifth Step that it was not the case, at first, we became uncertain and sad, because we felt that we lost our yardstick for whether we were on the right track in our life or not.

After having digested this fact and accepted that the perception of others was true for them just like our perception was true for us without it meaning that we were not on the right track, we began to experience a new freedom.

Our new freedom consisted in that we could choose to look at success and failure in a way that did not bring us pain by accepting that sometimes things worked out as we wanted them to and sometimes not, because our Higher Power had made it possible sometimes and sometimes not.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to liberate myself from praising myself, when I perceive something I did to be a success and to criticize myself when I perceive something I did to be a failure.

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June 22: Dissatisfaction

Dissatisfaction is an imbalance that affects all areas of our lives.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 22

When we came to AcAdAn, we began to investigate our addiction to chronic dissatisfaction, and we discovered that a sure sign that we are suffering from addiction to chronic dissatisfaction was that we found reasons to be dissatisfied, even when our desires were met, and that meant that we were dissatisfied under all circumstances, no matter what they were.

Maybe, we had a long standing materially desire fulfilled, and maybe we had not expected that we had to use time to get used to our new acquisition and the use of it, so this could be our reason for being dissatisfied.

Maybe we had long since wanted to have a coupleship or a friend come into our life, but when the coupleship or the friend came into our life, we maybe thought that he/she should be different than he/she is, so this could be our reason to be dissatisfied.

Our dissatisfaction in these situations made our life unmanageable, and we realized how important it was for us to use our First Step to admit our dissatisfaction and how our dissatisfaction made our life unmanageable, so we could begin to recover from it by the help of our Program.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my First Step in AcAdAn to admit my dissatisfaction with something or someone, for example with a gift life brought me, and how my dissatisfaction makes my life unmanageable, so that I can begin my recovery from my addiction to chronic dissatisfaction.

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June 23: The importance of our Fellowship with others

At long last, we had found a Fellowship with others who suffered from the same as us, and together we moved from our dissatisfaction with self, others and our life, towards contentment.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 9

Our Fellowship with the other members of AcAdAn showed us how important it was for our progress in a particular area to find Fellowship with others if we wanted to achieve a particular goal, because the Fellowship gave us many perspectives on our goals that could give us access to the most inspiring path to the goal.

When seeking Fellowship with others, who had the same goal as us, we were strengthening our capacity to fulfill our desire to achieve the goal in question, whether the goal was material, physical, energetical, emotional, mental, social or spiritual.

With the help of our Fellowship with others, at the same time we achieved access to a source of wisdom, which reinforces and further develops our own ideas about how we can achieve our goals, and furthermore our Fellowship with others gave us an empowerment, we would otherwise not have had access to.

Our goal in AcAdAn is to achieve contentment with our self and our life, and we needed a lot of inspiration to reach our goal, because our dissatisfaction comes to us under so many guises that it could be difficult for us to see through them all, so therefore we made use of all those tools that AcAdAn has to offer.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will let myself be inspired by my AcAdAn Fellowship to work with some of the types of dissatisfaction that my Fellowship has inspired me to inventory.

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June 24: The Higher Power of the group

We have chosen to trust that our will and our life is governed by our Higher Power, and in the same way, we choose to trust that our group’s will and life is governed by the Higher Power of the group that comes to expression through our Group-conscience.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 87

In the course of our service work in AcAdAn we came into contact with the Traditions, when various problems occurred in our group, our service group or in our Area Service Committee.

By the help of our Traditions, we found a principled solution to the problems, and little by little as we became acquainted with the Traditions, we learned to surrender to a Higher Power at group level.

This dis not only benefit us in AcAdAn, but also in all the groups we were a part of, whether the group consisted of two in our coupleship and our friendships or more people in our family, in our circle of friends, in our Fellowships, at our workplace, or wherever a decision cannot be made by us alone in various areas.

This knowledge helped us in our social life in many ways that we could not even imagine before we became familiar with the Traditions in our service work.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will work on becoming familiar with the Traditions, so I can learn to surrender to the Higher Power of a group as it comes to expression in the Group-conscience of the group.

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June 25: The message of AcAdAn

When we went to meetings in Active Addictions Anonymous, we shared our experiences with the AcAdAn Program with other members, and in this way, we passed on the message.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 82

Many of us in AcAdAn used dissatisfaction as a lever, because we imagined that the discomfort of our dissatisfaction would drive us to createmanifest the changes we wanted to createmanifest in our life.

When we came to AcAdAn and investigated if it worked, we discovered that it did not and instead it merely createdmanifested discomfort and existential pain.

Little by little, we discovered that we did not need to use dissatisfaction to bring about those changes in our life that we wanted to createmanifest.

Instead, we could use our creativitymanifestivity to make improvements of the benefits that already were there in our life, and to let go of or transform the areas which gave rise to us experiencing existential pain.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will take AcAdAn´s message to heart that I can use my AcAdAn Program to createmanifest the changes that I want, without taking my dissatisfaction into use.

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June 26: The First Tradition

The principle of Tradition One is Fellowship. Slogan: Together, we can accomplish what we cannot accomplish alone.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 99

Gradually, as our individuality became evident to us, we realized that we were unique in our way of thinking, but that we had a Fellowship with others emotionally, because we might have different reasons for being angry, but we are knew the feeling of anger.

We also knew the feeling of joy for various reasons, and we worked on admitting our anger and our joy by the help of The Rings of Pain and the Rings of Joy in our AcAdAn Program.

When we share about our work with the the Rings of Pain and the Rings of Joy with our sponsor or our recovery buddy and in an AcAdAn meeting and hear others share about their work, we discovered that although we thought that others felt the same as us under the same circumstances, it was not necessarily the case.

We realized that others recognize our emotions, but not necessarily our reasons for feeling like we did, and thus we gained a new freedom to change perception of many things that we had taken for granted, thanks to our AcAdAn Fellowship.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Fellowship to get the help that I need to change painful thoughts with joyful thoughts by the help of at movement from a Painring to a Joyring.

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June 27: The flow of information

When we began to seek our Higher Power’s guidance on a daily basis, we discovered that our ability to distinguish the voice of our Higher Power from our own began to develop, and thus Step Eleven began working for us.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 69

When we came to Step Eleven in AcAdAn, we began to develop our capacity to open our self to receive our Higher Power's guidance, both when it came form the inside and the outside, by the help of the flow of information that constantly came to us both from the inside and the outside.

It helped us a to navigate in our psychological landscape that we both listened inside and outside, and we listened inside by the help of prayer and meditation and outside by listening to that part of the flow of information that came to our lot.

The flow of information is the information that we receive from others, whether it is happens through other people, TV, radio, Internet or from our cat.

The point is that there is some of the information that comes to us that repeats and keep repeating itself, regardless of the source we listen to, and it is this repetition, we call our Higher Power’s personal flow of information to us from the outside.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will both listen to my inner life by the help of prayer and meditation and to my outer life by by listening to my personal flow of information so I can develop my capacity to ‘hear’ my Higher Power's guidance under all circumstances, no matter what they are.

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June 28: To harm our earth connection

First, we looked at how we have harmed our self physically in various ways, for example, by denying or ignoring our physical needs.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 61

Many of us in AcAdAn had been spiritual seekers long before we came to AcAdAn, and in our quest for a personal connection with our chosen Higher Power, we had neglected our physical body in many ways.

Some of us had even developed various dependencies to anesthetize our physical body with chemicals like white sugar, nicotine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine and many other chemicals that were harmful to our physical body in an attempt to escape taking responsibility for the needs of our physical body.

Our physical body has a need to be well-rested, well-groomed, well-nourished and well-exercised, and after we came to AcAdAn we began taking responsibility for fulfilling these needs, even if it demanded that we used energy, time, interest and money on this task.

When we began taking responsibility for the needs of our physical body, we used our AcAdAn Program to liberate our self from old habits of thought, which made it difficult for us to invest our resources in the well being of our physical body, but gradually as this work came to fruition, we became more content with our self and our life.

Today's contemplation
Today, I will use my AcAdAn Program to develop my capacity to take responsibility for my physical body being well rested, well groomed, well nourished and well exercised.

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June 29: The process of meditation

Thus, the process of meditation consisted of withdrawing our consciousness from being focused on the outer world into our inner point of concentration, and then letting go so that the expansion of our consciousness could take place.

Active Addictions Anonymous - The Wild Life, page 72

 Ordinary          Reflection       Contemplation        Concentration    Meditation

When we came to Step Eleven in our AcAdAn Program, we wanted to expand our conscious contact with our chosen Higher Power.

In Step Two, we chose our personal Higher Power, in Step Three, we began the process of surrendering to our chosen Higher Power's care, and in Step Seven we began to learn to cooperate with our Higher Power by the help of The short and The Long Seventh Step Prayer.

In Step Eleven, we united everything we have learned in Step Two, Three and Seven about surrendering to our Higher Power´s care by adding prayer and meditation as means to expand our conscious contact with our chosen Hi