One of my most elusive defects in character is indignation. While many feel the more commonly talked character flaw of pride suffices to captures the failing, I would have to differ. From my experience, Pride is a rather easy bug to capture through the dragnet of a daily inventory, but indignation somehow always seeps through the cracks, and we label the uneasy feeling as anger.
The genius behind an inventory, whether it be a step four deep clean or a step ten touchup, the process covertly lifts you to a different vantage point on your struggles. With these fresh eyes, you are far more likely to arrive at a vantage point of forgiveness. A one time irrevocable act of injustice shifts to a pety crime that maybe you too have been guilty of. From this new ground, we unleash the most effective harmonizing tool in the spiritual toolkit – forgiveness.
Having personally worked with a varied cross-section of spiritually sick individuals, it has been made quite apparent that people are much more sensitive than they would let on. This is the unacknowledged achilles heel of personal relations, as far as I’m concerned, and a wonderful place for self-righteous indignation to hide.
The spirit of God and the continuity of His power flows between our brothers and sisters when harmony exists. When there is discord, there too is disconnection. That is the yin and the yang of it, we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the spirit and sanity when we aren’t in harmony with each other.
This spiritual truth has proved itself over the course of the few thousand of days I have been pursuing this life of recovery. I still regularly find myself in that bind of the mind from time to time. My mind’s ability to justify resentment is insidious, often to the point that I need to be completely emotionally wrecked before the willingness arises to take action. The mind is highly deceitful, persuading this alcoholic mind to believe that by holding inward or outward hostility toward the perceived wrong-doer it will serve to protect me, while at the same time punish the party for hurting my feelings. While I’ve found emotional hostility to be an effective disciplinary tactic, it is me who receives the punishing blows and not them.
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