Again, this High Holiday Season as with each year, my greatest gift continues to be my many years of sobriety (celebrated 31 years on October 21, 2012). What is your greatest gift beyond the material? Are you finding a friend within yourself that you never recognized before? Are you working to develop that friendship through gathering more understanding of your self? What can you make a part of your daily sustenance that will build on the work of making you more healthy and sober a day at a time (you don’t have to be recovering from substance addiction to follow principles in your life, so I hope all people who see this blog will do the exercises and find out the deepest pieces of who you are and garner the gifts of consistent growth into maturity.

ASSIGNMENT: Pause to Refresh With 7-Ups: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall – Am I* fooling myself at all? Some ways to contact your inner being and build a place of security within and without.

1. Wrap Up – All distressing messages from the past and discard them.

– What messages come to mind from way back when?

– How can you discard them from usage today?

2. Look Up – Find out what causes old tapes to play and old scripts to be played out.

– How are they influencing you in relationships with anyone today?

– Give examples of these tapes and old scripts at work in your life still?

– How will you discharge them from your reactions and replace with new ways of existence?

3. Stand Up – Decide to take ones destiny in hand with help from a Higher Source of Empowerment (call it what you will-believe me it isn’t you alone).

– How will you turn to a new chapter in your life? What must you release in order to “turn your book of life pages”?

4. Think Up – Develop new thought patterns to live by.

– Find what your personal belief system has grown into. Have you relinquished old patterns of thinking for a different set? What to what? Make a list of changes

you are working toward?

5. Step Up – Chart your own course toward renewing yourself by postively re-inventing your life. What must change in order for you to start a new way of being and living?

– What no longer works for you to comfortably exist today? Are you fearing making changes that open a new door into more positive ways of walking through life? Why?

6. Wake Up – Come out of denial about ones attitudes and behavior.

– Still believing old subconscious programming from past messages all the way back to childhood?

– Are you willing to begin a new pattern of thinking that works better for you than the old stuff?

– How will you begin this re-structuring of your thought process?

– How will you begin/continue to leave your scary nightmare state that’s kept you separated from the true you?

– What will you do to help insure NOT falling back into old behaviors?

7. Give Up – Old patterns of believing and replace with new objectives in life.

– What are some of your old belief patterns?

– How will you re-create these patterns to work more HARMONIOUSLY in your life?

– What simply will not work for you today?

– Are you willing to give them up and try something different?

**Now that you have done further emotional/mental housecleaning, how will your Holiday Season will be better? It becomes a more personal Holiday with every anniversary that you achieve promoting your spirituality which simply means esploring that higher consciousness that you can call on to help you find deeper serenity. This is my holiday wish for each of you.

I’m taking a break to be with family and friends until January 7, 2013 when I will send more sober writings your way, REMEMBER TO BE GOOD TO YOURSELF AND FOR YOURSELF DURING THE HOLIDAYS! I hope you will begin the year with me as we continue looking at childhood and woes one possibly can still suffer from in adulthood. You will be asked to do a “Self Report on Growing up”. HAPPY NEW YEAR AND MORE IMPORTANT – A HAPPY NEW YOU!