"Our Inventory"
"Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? Though a situation had not been entirely your fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man's. When we saw our faults we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight." ~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, How It Works, pg. 67~
This is where alcoholics have big problems. We want to blame others for our misfortunes. But where does the problem start? In our minds!!!!! We have to put out of our minds the wrongs that we believed others had done to us and start looking towards our own mistakes. An easy thing to do? Not really.
It seems to me that a lot of people including alcoholics suffer from trying to put the label of right or wrong on things. Not only labeling people, but other places and other things. Yet we have some type of mental block when it comes to labeling the same things that we are thinking and doing. We don?t take into consideration that it could be possible that the other person probably believes that whatever they are doing is right and whatever we are doing is wrong. When confronted with this idea huge problems arise.
What makes things right? What makes things wrong? Ahhh! It?s the way we think about things. Right? Wrong? Well probably there are certain people who will say one thing and a whole set of others will say another, but it is the group who say ?I really don?t know? that may have upper hand on answering the question. They are the ones who approach situations with an open mind.
Now back to taking our own inventory. We would love to be able to take other people?s inventory. In fact it happens all of the time. But if we stop and take a look at what we are doing and the way we are acting, if we are very honest with ourselves, we will see that we indeed have faults that need to be taken care of. Taking other people?s inventory should be one of them!
I contend that the only place right and wrong should be declared is when we take a look at our own inventory. In fact it may be better to look at the whole thing by not even labeling ourselves, but to come up with better solutions to what we believe we should be doing.
Just like taking inventory at a business it is proper to write down the stock. We check everything that is in the stock room and get rid of damaged and spoiled goods. That is why it is said that it is best to write it down. There we can look at our inventory and establish the things we need to get rid of. If there is something that seems damaged we ask ourselves if there is some way to fix it. This may seem strange as far as listing emotions, but that is exactly what we are doing. We are talking about a honest, emotional inventory, we have to treat these things as real (even though they are not real, only imaginary).
Are there good emotions? Sure there are, the problem exists with the way we fire these emotions off. This is what we are looking for when we take the inventory. It is not emotions that need attention, but the way we are making these emotions work.
Emotions like fear, sadness, depression, anxiety, and etc. are all emotions that are normal feelings that are built into human beings. It is normal to feel these things from time to time, but to feel them all of the time is a big problem. If one does an inventory and writes it down it is glaring what is causing these things. It is pictures of things we believe to be problems with other people, or even sometimes ourselves that keep on recurring in our minds. These are called resentments! Resentment is the number one offender in alcoholics.
"Resentment is the "number one" offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick?. "How It Works" Alcoholics Anonymous (fourth edition) pg.62.
So that is where we start to fix the problem. Spiritually! We don?t try to fix the mind, we fix the spirit. It is when we dispose of all the bad stuff with-in the spirit that the mental and the physical aspects of our alcoholism start to get better. This includes all of the bad relationships that we thought we had. We start to see where it actually was the way we were behaving that caused these problems.
How is it that we dispose of all of these bad, spiritually spoiled goods? We ask God to remove them. The only thing we have to do is find out what they are and ask God to take them away. Plain and simple.
This is a good quote I came across when was researching spiritual principles:
"The amount a person suffers in their life is directly related to how much they are resisting the fact that "things are the way they are." This has got to be one of the KEY pieces of wisdom about being human. If there is suffering or discomfort, there is resistance to the way things are. Period. ~ "Nine Principles for Happiness and Healing"
Series by Bill Harris
http://www.trans4mind.com/holosync/principle1.html
--Ed C.