Tian Dayton

Today I accept and understand that life is both pain and joy. Sometimes recovery creates the impression that one day I should be free of pain, and I feel “unrecovered” when I still have problems in my life. The goal is not to be free from pain, which is a given in life, but to live with pain differently. In recovery the real lesson is not how to avoid problems but how to work them through and let them go more quickly. Problems are a part of life, but are not all of life. There is as much happiness and beauty in life as ugliness. Recovery is about not avoiding either – it’s about eliminating old debris so I can experience life in the present and gain wisdom from a painful past.

I accept life on its own terms.

Man was made for joy and woe, And when this we rightly know Through the world we safely go.
William Blake

This will be my only lifetime as the person I am today. I will only pass through this day once. What I do with this day I will only be able to do once. If I waste the entire day, it will be a day wasted; if I walk blindly through it, it will be a day unseen; if I hate it, dread it or wish it away, it will be recorded in my brain as a terrible day. In any case, I will never have this day back to do over again. How I conduct myself in it will be all that I have to carry away with me; how the way that the moment transpires will be what is written into the diary of my personal experience, the diary contained within my mind.

This is my only opportunity to live this day.

Through this toilsome world, alas! Once and only once I pass; If a kindness I may show, If a good deed I may do To a suffering fellow man, Let me do it while I can. No delay, for it is plain I shall not pass this way again.
Author unknown

Today I accept my true nature as a free person – free to create my own life not based on the expectations of others, ideas in books or images in the media. I am here to explore the mysteries of the universe that are contained within my own being. When I take a spiritual path and study who I am and my own divine nature, I am exploring the universe. It
takes more courage for me to go inward than to traverse the world because my interior reality is the most profoundly unknown to me. Diving into my own unconscious is no less scary than diving into the depths of the sea. This is a terrible and frightening journey, the journey inward, but it is filled with more beauty than I have ever known. At the other end of the night sweats, the labyrinth, the terror, is space, peace and a divine sort of nothing.

I like my own freedom.

I am tired of ruling over slaves. Last words of Frederick the Great

I can deepen in my knowledge of God-in fact, I am meant to do just that. The sphere of God consciousness is part of the mystery of life, the mystery of me. One of the vehicles I have been given through which to learn is my mind and the way that my mind interprets my personal experience. My life is my experience of my life, my interpretation. My
life has meaning and beauty to the extent that I possess those qualities. I see from within. I am an heuristic study of soul. By studying myself, I study the mysteries of the All-Soul. Through rigorous self-honesty and an open attitude toward what is really going on inside me, I can study humankind. I am a piece of the mystery – in learning about me, I learn about the deeper layers of the universe.

I will study myself.

God is an intelligible sphere known to the mind-each of us is a part of that mystery.
Joseph Campbell

Today I accept myself as I am. When I live by a self-flattering set of images and deny my own negative qualities, I never truly know myself. Consequently I never truly know others. To only know what is flattering about myself keeps me forever on the surface of life and in bondage to my own unwillingness to see. Accepting what is the worst in me tends to
transform it in some way because I no longer feed it by keeping it in darkness. When I expose it to light, it changes. When I will only know a self-aggrandizing side of myself, that is all I can know in others. When I am able to live with all of it – to know myself fully – then I develop wisdom and acceptance and I can see who another person is.

I will live with all of me.

anyone lived in pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn’t he danced his did e. e. cummings