Tag: Statement 8

“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”  ~~Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.”  ~~Chinese Proverb

“Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.”  ~~Bernice Johnson Reagon

#8 The fundamental object of life is emotional and spiritual growth.
Daily I put my life into a proper order, knowing which are the priorities.

My relationship with growth ebbs and flows but thanks in part to Statement #8, I do feel a sense of greater balance. In one instance, I feel excited for the shiny newness, or a different way of living, much like in early sobriety.  I felt so alive and open to possibility, ready to take on the world while also feeling full of wonder.

Then there are times that I can flip into frustration, knowing that there is an avenue in front of me which I can either embrace and reap the rewards or reject, (even partially) holding myself back from growth. Additionally, if I compare myself to what others are or are not doing, I end up with growing resentments instead of emotional or spiritual growth.  Finding that balance can be key to keeping healthy momentum.

When I realize that everything is in a constant state of growth or change, I am able to redirect action back towards Statement #8. Our founder, Jean Kirkpatrick, PhD, wrote in our WFS Reflections for Growth booklet, “From sunrise to sunset, the day experiences many changes.  In fact, the changes are constant, although most of us are not continually aware of them – only the drastic difference between dawn, midday, twilight and night.  This is the way it is with each of us. We are in constant change but we don’t notice it until after the fact. Today I will be aware of the changes in myself.” This week, notice day to day changes while looking for areas where you can embrace growth.

Hugzzz
Karen

Hi 4C Women,

I love the quotes and recall how I remained stuck in stagnation, not believing my life would ever change.  Statement #8 helped me realize that it was “me” who had to change if I wanted to experience emotional and spiritual growth. The beauty of WFS is that spiritual growth is a personal path.  No one is insisting that there is only one way to achieve it.  For me, it became my faith in both myself that I could do this and in my personal religious faith.  I learned that emotional growth was accepting where I was at and having the willingness to explore those feelings without numbing, running or ignoring.  That is how I changed from believing my life was stuck to learning coping skills to deal with the negative times of life and become aware of the positive ones.  It’s amazing how I began to recognize that there were positive moments once I opened my heart and mind to it.

I also realized how exhausting it was to deny myself the possibility of a more balanced life.  I had to open the door and walk through it with hope.  I am so grateful that I took that risk.  I think of how powerful words are and if I were to move forward, I had to keep the promise I made to myself.  It had to be real because I wanted my sober life to be different.  I was tired of lying to myself, breaking promises to myself and standing still so to speak.  I wanted to create a balanced life, not run to a substance that promised me nothing but pain and regret.  While I still experience pain and, yes, regrets, I work through them.  I can’t change my decisions made with the best of intentions, can’t undo mistakes but I do have the courage to learn from them and gratefully have a support team of women who will listen without judgment.  Not having that judgment is such a safe feeling.  Gaining insight helps me in my emotional growth.  Emotional and spiritual growth is not a sprint but a journey of willingness to make those inside changes.  Those changes stick.

Do you know what your priorities are?  Do they match how you spend your time?  How can you add more of what you love into your day, week, month, year?  We all have responsibilities in our daily life which may include work, volunteering, household tasks (laundry, bills, grocery shopping, cleaning), family, etc.  It’s creating balance and finding ways of putting more of what we love, enjoy, feel enthusiastic about into our daily lives and that definitely includes the priority of practicing self-care along with all of it.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about authentic priority.  I’d like to share it again as the past couple of years have certainly had an impact on our lives in general, yet alone knowing what we need today to create a balanced life.
Authentic priority is:
Consciously chosen
Gives your life purpose, direction and meaning
Gives you enthusiasm, energy and motivation
Frees you from the forces of circumstance, expectation and habit, giving you a way to stay on the course you’ve chosen
Is realistic and attainable as an unrealistic priority will lead to frustration and disappointment

I hope these points on authentic priorities guide you to uncover and create your personal priorities in your emotional and spiritual growth journey.

Most importantly, remember this is your personal path and comparing to where others are at can be self-defeating.  There is courage in accepting yourself for where you are right now, this moment.  You hold the key to unlock the door to emotional and spiritual growth.  Yes, we learn and can be inspired from others yet it is our responsibility to listen to our needs, consider input from those who have compassion for our journey and slowly start practicing those well-deserved, empowering inside changes that lead to a balanced New Life.

Bonded in creating our personal emotional and spiritual growth, Dee

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“If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.”  ~~Unknown

“You have done all you can on a physical level, and now must enter sacred waiting.  The hardest most integral step is turning all over to the grace of life and the coming transformative powers born from the steps you have already taken.”  ~~Sarah Blondin

“Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.”  ~~Gail Sheehy

#8 The fundamental object of life is emotional and spiritual growth.

Daily I put my life into a proper order, knowing which are the priorities.

Learning that sobriety is the beginning of New Life, and recovery is the discovery of New Life, keeps me focused on moving forward.  In the beginning, it took all of my energy to just stay sober and during this time I felt like a sponge; absorbing information from all around me.  As I began to feel more comfortable, growth became more focused and directed inwards. This is where Statement #8 in action opens a portal for exploration.

Beginning to practice this Statement, I felt like an adult and thought why do I need to grow?  Yet as I traveled down the road of recovery, I soon realized that even though I was physically mature, my thoughts and mind tilted towards immaturity.  Yet, there was something quite positive in that knowledge: I was starting with a clean slate and was in charge of the chalk.  A masterpiece was ready to be expressed and created.

For me, Statement #8 will always be in motion and it is not a destination.  It is a road to define, explore and discover.  The WFS Program offers the starting direction and it is up to each 4C woman to set out and chart her own path.  I absolutely love that Statement #8 simply opens the door, yet we get to build and design our New Life.  This week, reflect on where you started and note where you are right now. How does it feel?  Do you feel content or satisfied?  What do you need right now? Where do you see yourself in 5, 10 or 15 years?

Hugzzz

Karen

Hi 4C Women,

Karen has presented some thought-provoking questions.  Thinking about what I feel right now, I find myself fluctuating between contentment and uncertainty.  And these fluctuating feelings are why I am so grateful to know that Statement #8 is all about accepting where we are at the moment, being able to grow emotionally and spiritually as we discover and uncover our needs, creating our own individual path.  Most important to me has been my willingness to change, to step out of my comfort zone at my own pace.  In the past, change was a scary place for me to even consider.  Usually, my fear of change was like most, the unknown, not being able to control an outcome, unrealistic expectations and wondering if I was making choices that would actually support my personal growth.

In our meeting, we talk about our authentic feelings of that day, and it has been a great source of understanding and comfort. The comfort is accepting and acknowledging all of our feelings.  It is teaching me that, with Statement #8 guiding us, there is so much insight to gain.  We not only acknowledge what we’re feeling but also why.  What happened that we are feeling sad, angry, joyful, content?  If our goal is to gain emotional and spiritual growth, understanding the reason for those feelings is key to learning the direction we want to go and to fill our tool box with impactful resources and knowledge of our inner needs to do so.  It helps us to consider whether we need to dig deeper into our needs and find a way to move forward or celebrate and even repeat the action of that joyful and contented feeling.  It’s like a puzzle that needs to be solved putting the pieces together, creating the big picture.

The action part of Statement #8 can be daunting – daily putting your life into a proper order and knowing what those priorities are. For me, it depends on what is happening in my life on any given day.  Sometimes it’s survival and other days, it’s exploring new directions.  I used to think priorities were the tasks that needed to be accomplished.  While I am a list maker and love to just check off those tasks, I do understand that a priority needs to match the genuine purpose of my emotional and spiritual growth.  This is how it was explained at a workshop I attended: A priority is whatever has first claim on your time, energy, and resources.  That one sentence stopped me in my tracks.  How do I spend my time and energy and resources?  Does it truly match my core values, what I consider the essence of who I am and want to be?  If my answer was giving back for what I have received in this New Life, does my priority reflect that?  One way to know your core values is to think about what feeds your spirit, what emotional needs are left unattended to begin the practice of self-care so that your core values become clearer.

Bonded in creating a huge tool box of understanding our emotional and spiritual needs and ways to support them, Dee

Hear more about Statement #8 in this video!

“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”  ~~Zig Ziglar

“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”  ~~Harriet Beecher Stowe

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive.  You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over.  But one thing is certain.  When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.  That’s what this storm’s all about.”  ~~Haruki Murakami

#8 The fundamental object of life is emotional and spiritual growth.

Daily I put my life into a proper order, knowing which are the priorities.

Sobriety and the embracing of Statement #8 have been life-changing, and it drastically simplified what my view of life was all about.  This allowed a feeling of self-worth to increase and a continuing pattern of growth to take place.  The end result feels incredibly freeing, while moving through can feel incredibly difficult.

The difficulties faced in life can be our greatest teacher.  Like the old Rolling Stones song, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you find you get what you need” feels on point; in the past I ran away from life with alcohol, yet sobriety and recovery bring fullness and growth to life.

In our WFS Program booklet It states, “Growth is an essential aspect of our recovery.  It is the process of learning who we are and where to focus our efforts for personal change.  Our morning meditation time, during which we read the Statements, gives us the opportunity to center ourselves and set priorities for the day.”  In the past, alcohol directed the days but today, 4C women everywhere get to set priorities and live for today while growing into tomorrow.

Here are 4 tips to embrace growth:

1. Own your own power: Release the blame.  It is easy to blame others yet when we let go of that blame, we can create our own circumstance which empowers ourselves.  Reframing is a great tool to practice this.
2. Embrace/look for change:  The old adage of “nothing stays the same” is true.  Look for even the smallest of ways to embrace change.  Early in sobriety, I challenged myself by going to unfamiliar grocery stores, switching routines, moving furniture in rooms etc.  It does not have to be monumental change.  Start small and work into bigger changes or challenges.
3. Acknowledge your fears: What are you afraid of?  Dig deep and get to the core of a fear.  Maybe you do not like or are afraid of being alone.  Where did that originate?  What can you do today to overcome that fear?  Act, even the smallest of movements forward edge us into development and growth.
4. Change YOU, not the world:  It can feel overwhelming/impossible to change events out of our control.  The day may be filled with rain or snow, which none of us have control over but you can use an umbrella and enjoy the patter of the raindrops or dress warmly and walk outside taking in the silence of newly fallen snow.  You can change your response to create a positive or rewarding experience.

Hugzzz

Karen

Hi 4C Women,

I wasn’t sure where to start with my comments.  As I read each of Karen’s 4 points, I thought oh, wow, that’s fabulous and I relate to that and oh, yes, I relate to that as well.  So, after I calmed my thoughts, I decided to share how I learned to work on each point.

#1 – Power/Release Blame.  Many of you have heard me over the years share how I was the “Queen of Blame” and I wore that crown each and every day.  It took away all responsibility for my choices, my responses, my willingness to change.  I was fearful of change because that meant I had to actually “change!”  While in therapy and finding WFS, I realized that if I took responsibility for my role in choices I made, I was actually becoming empowered and confident, releasing the fear of what might happen if I retired my crown.  Retiring that crown brought about such positive changes that I began wearing a 4C crown more befitting of the woman that was always there but living in fear.  What I also realized is that there were people in my life that hurt me, harmed me and played into my insecurities.  What I also learned is that as long as I allowed that to continue, there was no room for emotional or spiritual growth and I was giving away my power to them.  No more!

#2 – Embrace Change.  At one time, I hated change.  I resisted it as though it would be the end of the world once I accepted it.  As one of the members of my WFS group says, it’s not the end of the world until it’s the end of the world.  So, when I start thinking in those terms, I quietly realize that, again, I have choices.  I can choose to live in the fear of change or embrace it as Karen says, no matter how small.  I have actually learned to like change as I see it as a challenge to uncovering the fear.  A quote from Janet Jacobsen defines it so well for me. – “Fear is a great motivator.  It is designed to be compelling so that we take survival action in the form of flight, fight or freeze…OR, take THRIVAL action by facing the fear, feeling it fully, learning from it, and, therefore, freeing up all that energy for creativity and fun!”

#3 – Fear. My greatest fear was rejection which kept me from accepting responsibility and letting people hurt me because if I became assertive, they might walk away.  It was easier to silently blame others for where I was and cope by drinking.  And in some ways, it was easier.  I had to acknowledge that because taking responsibility meant I had to learn to handle rejection, even perceived rejection, to make healthier choices.  How in the world would I even live a life of emotional and spiritual growth if alcohol was making the choices?  Yes, easier to run and hide but oh my goodness, the rewards from being sober, being in charge of my life, putting my priorities in order, was incredible.  It was worth the hard work and I finally learned to love myself enough that rejection was no longer my greatest fear.

#4 – Personal Change. This is the crux of the whole Statement, the WFS program.  Change, scary and exciting all at the same time.  I sometimes reflect on the sad, fearful woman I was when drinking and I put my arms around her and tell her she is loved, lovable and worth every ounce of work she put into becoming the 4C woman she is today.  I hope you are able to do the same.  Statement #8 provides a path to healing, growing and empowering change.

What is or was your greatest fear in changing?

What lessons have you learned or are learning in facing your fears?

What are your priorities that support your well-being, your emotional and spiritual growth?

Have you learned to trust yourself in knowing that your priorities are what you need them to be right now and not what others may be telling you?

Bonded in daily creating our priorities to live a life of emotional and spiritual growth, Dee

Click here to read Promising Young Woman

“There is comfort in acceptance.  There is unexpected growth of seedlings of life if we take the risk of opening ourselves up.”  ~~Jan Warner

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers simple.’~~ Dr. Seuss

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity.  It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.  If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”  ~~Brene Brown
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#8 The fundamental object of life is emotional and spiritual growth.

Daily I put my life into a proper order, knowing which are the priorities.
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Recently, winds of change blew through my New Life like never before. I have experienced a multitude of emotions and experiences over the last decade plus and the tools from the WFS New Life Program continue to help move me forward. Yet this was different. This time I felt helpless, but not hopeless, thanks to practicing Statement #8.

The threat of storms is a constant in life, but today I understand so much more that what I do before those storms even appear can make all the difference. In addition to the recent hurricane, I was hospitalized for COVID. While physically alone, I was connected emotionally which enabled me to focus my thoughts and priorities. Self-imaging became my go to tool as I envisioned my body fighting back and getting stronger. I pushed myself to make even the smallest of milestones and set goals for each day. Being connected to family and friends helped me cement attitudes and acts of healing. The years of growth from living the WFS New Life Program are a critical aspect of sobriety and recovery and helped my forward progress.

Gratefully, power is restored and a sense of healthy balance is settling in after this past uncertainty. Allow me to offer a huge thank you to Dee and the WFS office for the continuation of our Monday Thoughts. We are a great team of 4C women! Also, I wish to thank all health care workers for your care, dedication and commitment. You are our heroes as our world moves through this pandemic!

This week can be an excellent time to examine growth in your life. Where have you excelled? Where do you need more attention? Does your recovery need an update? Where do you see yourself next year? 5 years? 10 years?

Hugzzz

Karen

Hi 4C Women,
First, I would like to say that it was a privilege to write the Monday Thoughts while Karen was recovering from COVID. I am both thankful she is back home and that she was able to create the first part of this week’s Monday message. I really missed her inspiring, uplifting words.
I am repeating a message on Statement #8 from last year. I am doing so because it’s been an emotionally draining week and I realized my priorities needed a check-up! In addition to a family matter, my dear friend’s husband of over 54 years passed away on Saturday. She lost her son to cancer 6 years ago and her 17 year-old granddaughter 4 years ago in an accident. In addition, she has been in severe chronic pain for the last 25 years. My heart is breaking for her. We’ve been friends for 54 years, working together at the Redstone Arsenal in AL. She had a surprise baby shower for me and I for her. When her son was ill, one of my priorities was to visit her family every Wednesday and continued to do so after he passed away. With COVID I have not been able to visit and I think this is why this message has struck me so deeply.

As I read over the message, I began to realize what was missing for me this past week was my “authentic” priority. As I am expecting a similar situation this week, I really need to dig deep in determining how I will handle my feelings and my priorities. If we are to practice Statement #8 to its fullest, putting our priorities in a proper order requires serious reflection and understanding of our chosen authentic priorities, not what might have been chosen for us by the expectation of others, circumstances, convenience or culture. An authentic priority gives our life purpose, direction and meaning. It allows us to grow, to move toward wholeness and fulfillment. For me, sobriety was the first choice in setting priorities which led to clarity in my thinking. Over the years, my priorities have changed as I have changed. This is why emotional and spiritual growth needs to have direction and flexibility.

We have the freedom and ability to make decisions about our lives and the direction in which we wish them to go. In other words, we can establish our own priorities. We are not limited to reacting instinctively to our surroundings; we have the power to exercise control over our lives. This is an incredible power and if we want to make the most of our lives, to realize our potential, we need to use it consciously and wisely.

What is a priority?

Simply put, a priority is something of leading importance in your life.

A priority is what you live for, what gives focus to your life.

A priority is the shaping value around which the rest of your life tends to be ordered, for better or worse.

A priority is whatever has first claim on your time, energy and resources.

A priority is something you consistently prefer to (or feel you must) do, have, worked toward, think about or spend money on.

A priority can be consciously chosen or it can be set for us by outside circumstances.

Now think about your priorities in general. Which is your number one priority? After you answer that, determine if it is an authentic priority.

Authentic priority is:

Consciously chosen

Gives your life purpose, direction and meaning

Gives you enthusiasm, energy and motivation

Frees you from the forces of circumstance, expectation and habit, giving you a way to stay on the course you’ve chosen

Is realistic and attainable as an unrealistic priority will lead to frustration and disappointment

To determine if your priority is authentic but not quite sure, answer these last 3 questions:

Time: What do I spend my time thinking about?

Money: How do I spend my money?

Energy: How do I spend my energy?

I thought about my priorities and these questions helped me so much in thinking about how I spend my time, what causes or people I support financially and where I spend most of my energy. It all goes back, for me, to what an authentic priority is and answering those questions, was a real eye opener. I hope you are able to give serious consideration to the questions and most importantly, to your answers.

What I learned this week is that sometimes a priority is set by outside circumstances. The key for me is to accept it temporarily (that’s where flexibility comes in), reset my boundaries when the timing is right, take a deep breath and remind myself that this is a process, that I have made tremendous progress over the years and acknowledge the emotional and spiritual growth I have accomplished.

Bonded is setting priorities that support your life’s purpose and meaning, Dee