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Source: Ellen C – Practicing These Principles – Part 3 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: ellen-c-practicing-these-principles-part-3-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:37:45
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Oh, I know where we are this time. Tradition 7, I strive to be self-supporting spiritually, emotionally, financially, and physically, declining others, offers from others to run my life. Tradition 7. Before I, before we do that, I just want to say, I am so impressed with how well this thing has been done. Candice and all the people who've been involved helping her get this thing done, I just, I think we owe you a round of applause.
The spirit in this tradition is the same as Step 7, which is a sense of humility. Because I know the truth about me, because I know that I'm God's child and so are you. That's the truth about both of us. I can strive to be self-supporting with God's support. This is how I stay autonomous and continue growing to be the best me I can be. This decision, this tradition reminds me that I must make my own decisions about my life.
You know, watching Al-Anon's make a decision can be a painful, painful experience. Where do you want to go for lunch? Oh, I don't care. Wherever you want to go. You know, thank God there's somebody, you know, often a double winner, who'll run up and say, you know, hamburgers, we're going for hamburgers, and we're like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's just what I wanted, hamburgers. Or else we do the other Al-Anon thing, it was, oh, no, I wouldn't want that.
I don't know what I want, but I know what I don't want. Other people's suggestions or directions or mandates. You know, there's a, the book talks about a difference between wanting and demanding, and that's how I get in trouble is with the demanding. I don't realize that that's what I'm doing, but I, and I demand things of God. I demand things be this way. People will say that to me. You've got to do this.
And their, those are just contributions, which I can adopt, redesign, or decline. I alone have to decide what my needs are and see that they are met. At least that's the plan. But sometimes it's really easy to abdicate my responsibility to myself and let somebody else's feelings or opinions or judgments take the lead. I take their advice, or I do what they want to do, and at some level want to give them the blame when it doesn't turn out so good.
Or I decide that I'm bound and determined I'm not going to have a good time, because it was their idea. I'll just show them, you know. And that's a whole thing we do about living our lives at other people. I base my life on what you want or what you don't want. That's a pretty crummy life. The truth remains that I am making the choice to give someone else power in my life. We can, we can only take offense.
People may mean what they do to offend us or hurt us, but it's totally up to us about how we take it. We are not under any obligation to take it the way they mean it. Their life stops right here. This is mine. Just like it was for me in real life in Al-Anon, I couldn't do live and let live. I couldn't do that, because I had no life to live. I had to do it the other way around. I had to do let live and live.
I had to let them alone long enough to develop some kind of vacuum over here that I could start to live my own life, because so much of my life was based on somebody else. And I've had to let them be responsible for themselves before I could focus on being responsible for me. Here's another B. Boundaries. I don't know about you, but I came into Al-Anon in the early 80s. And that was when treatment centers were coming into their own.
And we had people coming to meet and speak in treatment center. They were not speaking Al-Anon. They were speaking treatment center. And you could watch the old-timers' eyes roll back in their heads, you know, when somebody would say, I have an issue, you know, there they'd go. And boundaries was one of them. We hadn't used that word before. To my knowledge, we hadn't. And they'd say boundaries, and they'd start, you know, the old-timers, they'd start with this.
But the one that really got them was when they said, I'm just working on my inner child. Oh, they just went crazy over that. And I, so I really had sort of a negative bias on that word until Courage to Change came out. And there's a, there are wonderful pages in Courage to Change about boundaries.
[00:05:00]
And there's one of them in there that makes it very clear. Because, see, I kept thinking boundaries was, well, they'd always been for me is I'd draw the line in the sand. And I'd tell you, don't cross over. And then when you cross over, I have to draw a new line in the sand, you know. I'd be mad at you because you crossed my line. But that page in the Courage to Change makes it very clear that the boundaries are just for me.
They're not for you. They're for me. What I will accept and what I will deliver. Part of what I do for maintenance of my spiritual condition is live in my own boundaries. This is another, there's a combination of being self-supporting and independent. And it's like the trees, like the redwoods, the biggest trees we know about. And the reason they get to be so big is because they're, they have a pretty shallow root system as I understand it.
But they're intermingled. They hold each other up under the ground is what they do. And I can't be interdependent, which is not codependent. It's interdependent, which means we're both, both have our own self-supporting stuff going on. But we can be interdependent and work with each other. It's another tricky place, especially when, for those of us who feel like we depend on someone else's paycheck to meet the financial bills.
For a good number of years before this current husband, my last husband in every sense of the word, before we got married, oh gosh, my, this thing is vibrating because my phone's vibrating. Pretty weird. It's my granddaughter. She's sending me kisses and hugs. She is, she's ten. And she does not kiss me. She has never kissed me except by accident. And it just drives me wild. And she does it on purpose.
She loves me better in breath. I get these little messages all the time from her. So she sent me X's and O's, about three rows of them she texted to me a while ago. I texted her back and I said, are those real kisses? No. And there's all X's. That's what she's doing to me now. For a good number of years before Dick and I got married, for a good number of years, I raised two children on my own. Financially supporting me and them.
And then the opportunity came, like I told you before, for me to quit that job after Dick and I got married. For me to quit that job and come home and start my own business, Mom's Better Babies. Believe me, for those of you who have taken care of your grandchildren, you do not make money at that. It is a money-losing proposition. I don't care how much money you charge, you can never make up what it costs you.
But that's okay. I don't mind. I really don't mind. I have a whole budget entry that's GB, grandbabies, just par of the money in there. And he was scared to death to let me come home, because he thought we needed that little pittance of money I was making at that job. He made three times what I made, but he was scared. The year that I came home, the first year I came home to take care of the kids, he made twice as much money as he'd ever made in his life.
It was not a problem. It was not a problem. And I was grateful he had a good job, and I was grateful that he brought home enough bacon for us to do that, and that he was happy to have me out of a 9-to-5 job after a while. And I picked up other jobs at home, you know, that he would have been doing. I picked up other things, the cleaning and the blah, blah, and the blah, blah, that I'd never done before.
But if I was going to be home, that was something I could do. And I said, and this was back when I did this a while back, I know that if I had to, I could support myself financially. I believe today in a God of sufficiency. I've often wanted to believe in a God of abundance, and I do believe that God is abundant. Sometimes all I need is a God of sufficiency, a God of enough, because I come from the place of there's not enough.
There's not enough time. There's not enough money. There's not enough anything. I'm not enough. And a God of sufficiency is really all I need. Now, today, Dick is home from work, and he gets some consulting jobs, but those are drying up with the trouble the economy's in right now. Those are drying up. And I sponsored two women who are mid-70s, and I've sponsored them for a while. One of them's been retired for a while.
The other one's trying to get retired, and I've had to take the advice of the one who's been retired. She and her husband retired, had lots and lots and lots and lots of money, put it in a bad investment, whoosh, lost half of it right off the bat. And he said, well, I guess I'd better go to work, and he was all so nervous and nervous and nervous. And she said, you know what? There'll be enough. And that's what she keeps saying now, there'll be enough, there'll be enough.
[00:10:01]
And I think what happens is you adjust yourself. You know, you just adjust your life so there's enough. Well, what I did, because number one, I'm a human doing. Number two, I absolutely love little kids. I just love them. At night when I do my 10-step, I do a written inventory every night, and you can come talk to me about it, and I'll explain it all to you. It's very complicated. Of course it is. It didn't start out that way, but I have that effect.
You know, I can complicate just about anything. But I write down, one of the things I write down every night is my joy. Where did I find joy today? Because those are inevitably the place where I saw the face of God, where God touched me. And it is almost always a little kid. It's almost always a little kid. There's Alexander who comes to our class three days a week, and Alexander tries so hard to be a really big boy, to come in, pick up his stick, put it in the cup, walk in the room.
But he gets to the doorway and sees one of us, and he cannot contain himself. He is running pell-mell into that room, and he'll tackle you. He's just so glad to be there. How can you not? How can that not make you happy, you know? Somebody so glad to see you. How did we get there? It's pretty good. Anyway, that's why I have to have this book, because I'll go to, oh, La La Land over there. This is the preschool where I'm working, is the preschool where my little kids, my little grandchildren went.
Now, I told you that Madison was born in April, and she came to me in August, two weeks after I quit my job. Here came Madison. Tristan was born in December, the 23rd. He came to me three weeks later. Fourteen months later, Kennedy was born, and she came to me at four weeks. And seven months later, Sutton was born. And Sutton came to me when he was two months old. So my daughter had two sons, my son had two daughters, and they had since enough to do it in three years.
So they really do feel like siblings. They've been together almost every day when they were little kids, and they're together all the time now. Today, they are 12, 12, 10, and 10. But in two months, that changes, and they turn into 13, 12, 11, and 10, and boy, that 13. Woo-wee. Anyway, as they were leaving me, and as they were spending time at this preschool, and I was finding myself in the morning with nothing to do.
What do you do when you've always done? And I had nothing to do, so I volunteered at the preschool. Now I work there five days a week, and that's my job. But the reason I've kept the job, truly, is because there's enough money for Dick and me for our retirement. What there's not enough money for, I'm afraid, is to take the kids on the trips I want to go on, to do with them what I want to do with them.
But I can support that. That's what my little job is about. My 20 hours a week, that's what that's for. And I feel good about it. You know, the kids are great, there you go. That is our source, today more than ever. Do I take responsibility for my own physical needs, health, diet, exercise? Do I take the action required? If I don't take the action, why don't I take it? Taking the action is how I know I've taken the responsibility.
You know how we are. I need to do something about my teeth, I really do. So we just talk about it. Then we feel better after we say something. But have we done anything? No, no, no, we haven't done anything. And that's, this is not a place I enjoy, but this is a job, this is part of my job, I think. Do I pretend to agree with others to keep things smooth and peaceful? Am I taking responsibility for their feelings, or mine, or neither, or both?
How much do I still ask or expect others to fill my emotional needs? Would I take care of myself financially if I had to? Is that important? Can I allow people to enhance my life without depending on them to be my whole life? Can I offer support for others and still take care of myself? How am I making sure my spiritual needs are met? For a long time, I don't do it so much these days, but I love it when I come to this place, I wrote, I would do one little piece of writing every morning after I did my quiet time, and it would say, I am, and then I'd wrote down what came to my mind that I am.
That's a very powerful statement to make about myself, that I am. And then the next line was, the truth is. And I'd write down whatever seemed like the truth. And then the last part was, Spirit said, And then the last part was, Spirit Says.
[00:15:02]
And I often walked away with that, with a direction for the day. Bless you. That was one way I had of making sure my spiritual needs were met. Yes, ma'am. I will be happy to repeat it. Number one, I am. Number two, the truth is. And number three, spirit says. Back last year when I got into all this misery, I added a line to my nighttime inventory that I call my Tom Eye. I absolutely adore Tom Eye. I love him.
He's a fabulous, fabulous recovering alcoholic with over 50 years of sobriety. A dear, sweet man. And this is actually supposed to be tomorrow's intention. But I'm not going to write all that. So it's my Tom Eye. I'll write down at night, and I'll try to get still with myself. And I just say, God, if you have an intention for me tomorrow, tell me, and I'll write it down. I can't guarantee I'm going to do it, but I'm going to write it down.
A few weeks after, I probably hadn't been doing it two weeks, and it could be the whole reason I started doing it, Tom Eye. Visit Babs in the hospital. One of our founders of my Al-Anon group was dying. She was in the hospital dying. And it was a painful, miserable, for everybody to watch her and for her to do that. She's the funniest human I know. But she was dying. I do not like hospitals. I do not like going to them to see people I love.
I particularly don't like to go there when I know they're not coming home. That was my Tom Eye that night. The next morning, the next day, what happened? By 2.30 the next day, I was standing at Babs' bedside. A friend of mine called and said, You know what I was thinking? I was thinking we ought to go see Babs today. Well, there I went, and I knew that was where I was supposed to be. I didn't try to find an excuse to not go.
I knew that was where I was supposed to be. And Babs had been telling us she hadn't let us come visit her for a while because she had COPD and emphysema, and she was smoking, and she didn't want us to know she was smoking still. So she hadn't let us bring her a meeting, wouldn't let us come to the house. And her daughter had called me and said, I know we're close to the end because she says call you.
She needs a meeting. So we went to the hospital, and I told her, I said, We're going to bring you a meeting today. And she was, And I said, How about a gratitude meeting? And she just melted. That's what she wanted. She wanted a gratitude meeting. But now just to give you an idea, she died the next day. To give you an idea about Babs, I think this was the very same day I had gone to see her. Her daughters were in there with her, and the hospice nurse came in, and the hospice nurse said, Ms. Black, is there anything we can do for you to make your transition more comfortable?
She said, Yeah. I want a cigarette and a whiskey and a sailor. And her daughter said, Mom, you better ask for a condom too. You wouldn't want to be getting AIDS at this late date. And the hospice nurse goes, Oh, well, it's really nice that you all can joke about some things like that at this time. And Babs goes, Who's joking? She was hysterical right to the end, just hysterical. But that time I, a lot of times the next day, I don't even remember what I wrote.
But I go back, when I go to bed that next night, I go back to look and see if that thing indeed happened. It didn't, it didn't, it's no big deal. It's just a practice place. No, it's a practice place. What do I do, say, when I receive unwanted, unneeded advice? Now, here's the thing. Other people absolutely have the right to tell me what to do and what not to do. And it is absolutely up to me to accept it or decline it.
Now, I'll tell people, Don't say that. Don't you tell me. Don't you be talking to me like that. Here's the deal. I'm afraid I'm going to give in because I've done it before. If they put enough pressure on me, I gave up what I wanted and I did what they wanted. And so when I feel myself with a big reaction to that because someone has said, You know, I think you'd look better with pink hair. And I'm like, Well, that's your opinion.
They have a great thing on Crayola. If you buy a certain box of Crayolas, you can go put this little code on their website and you get to upload any photograph you want to and they will turn it into a coloring page. So I will put myself up there and you can color me with pink hair if that's what you'd like. Just like in the steps at Step 7, this tradition, Tradition 7, marks the completion of ourselves.
You know, 1 through 7, we are working on ourselves and that's what we're doing in the traditions.
[00:20:00]
We're working on ourselves, our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves. Now that I've established who's in charge, what's my purpose, what's mine to do, I go to 8. Tradition 8, just like Step 8, is where we begin giving to others. Tradition 8 says, Healthy relationships are for the most part free in giving but may sometimes require special workers. Special workers, don't you love them?
Step 8 is about being responsible for my part in relationships. It's relationship responsibility. And this one right here is talking about being responsible for my part and then asking for help in the places that aren't mine. If I focus on being the best child of God I can be using the steps and the traditions, my relationships have a good chance of remaining free and giving. I am gladly willing to accept responsibility for my part in relationships.
But it gets harder when there's more than just me in the relationship and there are no guarantees and stuff happens. More risk, more risk. The book says right contact with the world has to be maintained. Right contact with the world. Sometimes we just can't work it out ourselves. Sometimes we have to talk to someone, a healthy, safe, objective third party or sponsors or even a professional to help us through stuff.
Not hiring special workers, not asking for and accepting help, only listening to dire predictions, mine and others, because I don't know about you, but I will start making up the stories in my head. And when I make up stories in my head there is no happy ending. They are bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. And taking the counsel of fear. Sometimes we have to talk to these people alone and sometimes together. Some years back I decided that I'd talk to my sponsor about it and I said, I really think I need to go talk to a counselor.
And she said, I think you do too. This issue that's going on, I think you need intensive care. And she said, I think you need to go to the counselor. So I go to the counselor. We work for a while and she says, she sees what my problem is, it's him of course, she says, what would you be thinking about if you weren't thinking about what he needs to do all the time to be okay with you? I had no answer.
I couldn't think of what would I be thinking about. If I wasn't obsessing about that. And she asked me what I wanted and I told her and before a month was out my husband had turned himself into counseling and so we've both gone to the counselor off and on. He has to go more than I do. Just reporting. But I tell you, that has, and we go together to her sometimes, and that has made a huge difference.
He said to me one time when we were dating, he said if we don't, something had happened and I wouldn't talk about it and he said, if we can talk about it, we can work out anything. Nobody had ever said that to me before. And this is a way to help, you know, because it's like another, we were talking about it last night, I have a good friend and she was sitting in the room when I came into Al-Anon and she and her husband had been married better than 50 years now and when they had their 50th wedding anniversary somebody said to him, oh my God, you've been married to the same woman for 50 years?
And he said, oh no, she is not the same woman. And it gets, you know, there's tricky places in there. My sponsor is, I do that with them. You know, these places where they get, where they hurt each other's feelings but these, you know, a lot of places where sometimes they'll come to me and talk with me in the room. They talk to each other but I'm in the room. It's like, you know, this kind of, I'm like a safe base over here and I won't let anything get out of hand.
And I don't have to decide their answers but it's always, and it's always better to hire a travel agent than let one partner assume all the responsibility. It is always, always better to have somebody to clean your house. The same way I have to employ special workers like counselors and doctors to help me with Tradition 7. This is reinforcement that I can't be all things and everything. Reinforcement that I can't be all things in a relationship.
I don't have to and I'm not supposed to be. And neither is anybody else. Do I try to sound like an expert on things? Sometimes that's automatic and I just make stuff up. I don't know about you but I do and I sound like such an authority when I say it, they believe me. Worse, I believe me.
[00:25:00]
Is my security at risk? Is fear triggered? Actually, I think I do it to get your attention. That's why I think I do it. Are there problems in my relationship we aren't talking about? Why? You know, we make the rules for our relationships with each other. We let each other know this is a place we're not going to talk about. And we aren't going to talk about this over here. And we do that with different people in our lives.
And if you need to do that, you need to do that. But I think you need to do it with your eyes open. Do I charge others a price for being in a relationship with me? What is it? Do I allow myself the joy of being in relationships for no other reason than to further my spiritual growth? Now, that's kind of risky. That's kind of risky. Do I ask for and gratefully accept help when I need it? How do I feel when a partner tells me he or she needs help with our relationship?
Do I try to be super fill-in-the-blank by taking on too much? Why? I don't do that anymore. When I came to Allenon, there was a sign on my desk that said, Wonder Woman works here. You know, we are deadly in the workforce before Allenon. You know, we will go places. We'll work through lunch. We'll only meet lunch. You know, we'll take it home, do it on the weekend. We'll do our job and somebody else's.
They don't have to ask us. If they're not doing it right, we'll just slip over there and do that job too. You know, when I left, it took five people to replace me. I don't think they're doing it very good either, but it's not mine. Tradition nine, a healthy relationship should be flexible in its organization. It's like step nine where the principle is connecting, communication. In my first year or so in the program, I heard an alcoholic talk, Boy, if you're new in this program, I cannot encourage you strongly enough to go to open AA meetings.
We are blessed that we are so welcome at those. Because when the people I love who have alcoholism talk, all I can hear is my own pain. When another alcoholic talks that I'm not emotionally involved with, and there are very few of those, but I start to be able to see where the disease starts and the man stops. And I start to be able to get some real perspective on that. And I was at an open AA meeting and I heard an AA speaker say that she thought the first time she read the third step that it said, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God when we understood him.
What it says is as we understood him. But she said when. And it was a huge revelation for me. When she said that, it was one of those times, Cliff and I were talking about it, where you go, ah, yes. It's not like they weren't telling me something I didn't know. It was way in the back of the cabinet. That's the way I was in every relationship. I wanted to know what you were going to do, and then I'd do everything else to make the relationship look the way I thought it ought to look.
I was married to a darling, precious man that you would love who was very alcoholic. He wasn't home most days to take the trash out. But that was a husband's job, and I decided, well, I'll take the trash out. It'll look like he's home. I'll take the trash out. I mean, that was just the kind of thing. I will do all the things in the relationship that I need to do to make it look the way I think it ought to look.
And I was doing the same thing with God. God, just tell me what part you're going to control, and I'll do all the rest. It's a little bit of a control issue. As well as an inability to hold other people accountable for their actions or their interactions. A reaction ship again. In my dis-easiness, it's easier for things to be black and white. You do this, I'll do that. An added benefit to this approach is that it makes it easier to assign blame when things go amiss.
This is what it sounds like in my head. I would like for us, that is me, to make the rules about how things are going to be and who's going to do what, and we, that is me, don't have to think about that again. And we, that is you, do what you're supposed to and it all comes out even and fair. That's what it sounds like in my head. Well, turns out even is relative and fair is a corny dog event. At least it is in Dallas.
They don't have anything to do with life. The rules are made to be broken apparently, especially in alcoholism. That's how we get the twitch. Because just when we get things figured out, they change the rules. because just when we get things figured out, they change the rules. People never get where they're going to be and stay there.
[00:30:03]
One of my big angers with life. They keep moving around and stuff happens. It all comes to pass. A healthy relationship for me today is animated only by the spirit of service. How can I be helpful to you? I just need to do my part, whatever we've agreed to or whatever I've been doing, and sometimes stuff happens and sometimes my part means doing something different. This is the flexible part where I may have to do some stuff I'm not used to doing or some stuff you used to do.
Sometimes, more often than not, it means letting go of something I think I ought to be doing. Learning what and when to do is a process and it requires communication. The best discipline for me has come through great love and great suffering. It's risky, but maybe what I discovered that maybe by the time I get to this place, by the time I get to, if I've done what I need to do to get to Tradition 9, by the time I get here, it's still risky, it's still scary, but now it's starting to feel more like excitement than fear.
One time, a guy, we were, I don't know, it was years and years ago and he was a, you know, he was a guy who went out every weekend talking someplace and we were talking at a conference and I asked him, I said, do you get scared when you talk? He said, oh, man, I'm so nervous right now I could throw up. And he said, don't you get nervous? I said, no, I get excited. And he said, I think it's just semantics.
I said, well, I'll tell you something, I like my word a whole lot better than yours. And the difference is who I believe is responsible for the outcome. It's not up to me whether you enjoyed today or didn't enjoy today. I did my deal. I bought the ticket, I got on the plane, I put on my dress and I showed up. And I gave you the best I had to give. And if that worked for you, yes. If it didn't work for you, talk to God.
Because God is really responsible for the outcome and not me. And that is good news. And I tell him, lots of times I get up to talk and I go, okay, bud. If you don't do this today, we are seriously screwed, both of us. Seriously. The other thing I know about that is when I'm asked to talk someplace, and I'll tell you this because it works for everybody. If by the time I get behind the microphone, the thought in my head is thank you, God.
Thank you, God, for allowing me this chance to be your mouth. Thank you, God, for putting me in this place and loving me enough to trust me to do this. If I can get to thank you, the rest of it's a piece of cake. Here's where I welcome others' efforts in our relationships without trying to discipline them or enforce their obedience to my ideas. Now, that's my grown children and my grandchildren. The 12 going on 21 darling girl who told me just last weekend she was looking for hot boys.
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. I don't want to hear it. We had a, we were, I don't know how exactly it happened except she did something and I didn't think she should do it and I said something and she went, you know, there's a lot of drama when you're 12 going into, oh, there's a lot of drama. And she went, and I went, right after her. And, you know, then I got the twitch and I'm thinking to myself, I don't like the way this feels.
You know, I'm trying to enforce her obedience to my ideas. I do not like the way this feels and I sure didn't like the way it sounded. And I thought, what is it about you that caused such a big reaction? And I thought to myself, you sounded just like your mother. I did. I sounded exactly like my mother. It was her same words. And that was, you know, 50 years ago that I'm hearing that stuff. And I thought, I said, Ellen, you don't have to do that again.
You can let her do what she needs to do. We started from another place the next day. She and I started from another place and it'll be good. It'll be good, but the deal is she's past the idea of my having to enforce her obedience to my ideas. She's past that. If you're going to run in front of a truck, chances are really good. You know, it used to be the rules I had for them was stop at the sidewalk and come when I call you.
Those are my two rules. Well, they are going to stop at the sidewalk. They are not going to come when I call them. Am I flexible in my relationships? Can I keep my focus on my principles and not the shoulds? Shoulds. Called my sponsor one day.
[00:35:00]
She wasn't home. Had talked to her husband. That's the penalty you pay when you're married to my sponsor. And God love him. He always would talk to me, you know, because I couldn't wait any longer. And I told him what was going on and he said, Ellen, he said, when you say should, what I know is you're playing by somebody else's rules. And who's going to punish you when you break the rules? Now, I might agree with that idea, but the minute I call it a should, I've given, it's an old idea.
And I am pretty flexible in my relationships most of the time. Of course, the more emotionally involved I am, the harder it is. Except if I'm stuck in halts. Which, you know, there's halt, which is hungry, angry, lonely, tired. But I have always thought it was halts, period. Which is hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sick, or having your period. In which case, your perspective is just flat off. And it's going to be off.
And I have a hard time being flexible in those periods because I am really focused on myself, you know. Why are acceptance and freedom vital to this tradition? How important is the awareness of my own abilities and limitations in relationships? Are responsibilities clearly defined in my relationships? Who decided them and is that necessary? Where am I in the process of learning how and when to step aside gracefully when I overstep my bounds?
What do I do when others' actions are repeatedly unacceptable? And I wish I could tell you there was a flat answer to that. This is what I do, period. What I've come to understand is when somebody has a disease that makes their actions unacceptable, sometimes I have to accept it. It's not in their control. I don't have to be around it, but that's the way that's going to be. How open is the communication in my relationships?
Better in some than others? Why? Now, we be done. About 20 minutes or so to talk these over amongst yourselves. And I'm loving that you're coming up and asking me for questions or clarifications or stuff that you didn't get. Please feel free to do that. I'm more than happy to do whatever I can to help you. And then about two, there's something going on. I don't know what, but something's going on. And then we'll swing to the close.
There you go.