Two States of Being – At Ease or Disturbed

At any given time we are in one of two states of being – at ease (peace) or disturbed (in conflict).

When I am at ease (peace), my accounts are settled.  My accounts are my life needs.  I am filling my life needs as they appear so I keep my life moving n good orderly direction.

When I am disturbed (dis-ease or in conflict), some aspect of my life is unsettled and I am not at ease.  I am not filling some need I have.

I  create disturbance when I  do not take the necessary actions to fill a need.  I create disturbance when I transfer what I should be doing to someone else.  I also create disturbance when I assume responsibility and do for someone else things they are responsible for doing for themselves.

I settle my accounts when I own my part in interactions to fill a common need or delegate my part with conscious awareness and agreement.

Page 417 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes “disturbed”.

“When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.”

When I am disturbed, I am the one that has to engage my presence, power, and energy to find the answer to my problem not rely on an external solution to be the answer over and over again.  Others can guide me in finding the solution, but I have to find my own answer.

When I am disturbed and expect fulfillment externally, I am displacing ownership of my presence, power and energy.  When someone else does something for me that I should do for myself, I allow power and energy to leave me and express externally.  That is the nature of addiction when the displacement to an external source occurs over and over again.

Healing in Recovery occurs when placement of presence, power, and energy activates from the source where it originates from the beginning to the end of a transaction.  The exception is when fulfillment is externally delegated with conscious awareness and agreement by both parties.

If I am disturbed, that is a signal that I need to own how I activate my presence to engage my power to direct my energy to fill my life needs.

I experience peace when I fill my life needs or join with others to fill common needs with conscious awareness and agreement.

If I am disturbed, I can examine how I showed up in an interaction.  Did I give up my power to someone else to take care of something I should do for myself?  Did I discount someone by taking power from them?

If someone retaliates, it is likely that I did something or failed to do something that disrespected the other person.  What others do or don’t do is up to them.  If I am disturbed, what” I do” is the action that needs to be changed, not theirs.  Blaming others for my unmet need keeps me in the cycle of addiction.

At-ease or Disturbed – If I am disturbed, it is a signal to own my part in filling my own needs.  That means identifying, defining, forming, and activating what I do to bring my need into fulfillment.  If I am expecting someone else to do my work for me to fill my need, I need to change what I am doing.

My life needs are mine.  It is up to me to engage my presence, power, and energy to fill them not unconsciously try to force someone else to fill them for me.  When I fill my life needs in good orderly direction, I feel peace.

We experience difficulties along the way.  But I have the creative capacity within me to move through any difficulty I encounter.

If I am disturbed, the disturbance is an opportunity to see what is out of balance in how I create my life.  Change means I own my part in filling my own life needs rather than expecting someone else to do it for me.