The 12th step of AA says, “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice principles in all our affairs.” In the 4th step it says “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” In step 11 it says “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and power to carry that out."
Well, I pray every day. St. Paul said ‘pray unceasingly’ and when I’m not applying my mind to some task then I’m quite commonly praying. My prayers are the “our father’, ‘All shall be well’, ‘Be still and know that I am God’, the 3rd prayer, “God I offer myself to thee’, “Holy Spirit Come”, the Dessert Father Prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God have mercy on me.” Sometimes I recite the rosary, “Hail May, Full of Grace.” Other times I just talk to God. I cry out to Jesus, “What do you want me to do?”
I consider prayer to be ‘talking to God’ and ‘meditation, listening to God’. So I also ‘meditate’, that is ‘still my mind’, focus on my breathing, sometimes repeat a prayer or name, like Holy Spirit Come.
I believe God is all. Intellectually I’m a subset of the greater program. I’m a part of the whole. God is the whole. That’s intellectually. Emotionally I feel God is ‘daddy’ , or father/mother. Jesus called God Abba, like papa. There is this potential then for a ‘feeling’ of ‘security’. That sense of comfort I felt as a child in the presence of my family and home. I’ve had a lot of injuries, psychologically and some physically, and I’m not so trusting anymore. I prefer my own space. I’m a bit paranoid after the betrayals and abuse. I loved the Travelling Wilbury’s song, “I’ve beat up and battered round, I’ve been stood up and I’ve been shot down, Baby you’re the best thing I’ve found, Handle me with care.”
I tend to wallow in self pity. The more intelligent one is the more prone to depression. Gratitude is the attitude and I’m often daily writing out gratitude lists and journalling gratitude. Thank you God for this day. Thank you for for this life. Thank you God for the sleep. Thank you for the money to afford this conference and this lovely elegant Peppermill Casino and Spa room. Thank you for the friends I will meet here. Thank you for the meetings. Thank you for sobriety. Thank you for freedom from addiction. Thank you for choice. Thank you for all the people here who smile at me and laugh with me and hug me and welcome me back. Thank you for belonging. Thank you for my men’s meeting wednesday night in Burnaby. Thank you for my family. Thank you for my friends. Thank you for my pets. Thank you for my vehicles. Thank you for my home. Thank you for my colleagues in the clinics I work in. Thank you for my patients. Thank you for my work. Thank you for my knowledge and learning.
But God I want to improve my conscious contact with you. Paramahansa Yogananda described seeing Jesus at the foot of his bed. I have had many spiritual experiences. I’ve been blessed or cursed with the white light experiences. I’ve felt your presence and I’ve seen your action in my life, up real and close. I’ve experienced your saving my life. I fear talking crazy like this in my work where there is this terrible sterility and hostility. I want to know you more, love you more. I know you work through others and that this life is a dance. I know that anxiety is a measure of my distance from God. Too often I’m anxious about change, fear of financial insecurity, fear of loss of work and then the projected fears of moving, changing location and friends and searching work where there is less cost and less hostility and corruption and criminality in the city. I long for the sense of ‘home town’ , ‘laid back’, less sense of political criminality, less the big city, gangland, illegality and lawyer protected injustice. I fear the thieves and the gangs and the government attacking the little guy and protecting the corporate and gang and bureaucratic theft and negligence. I fear my aging and my inability to work and being dependent, and nursing homes, and being tortured in institutions. I’ve seen too many horrors and made too many enemies fighting for my patients and fearing that I will experience the nightmares that I’ve rescued them from. I fear that no one will help me. I fear I’ll be alone with a callous satanic, uncaring hospital administrator, only concerned for his own hedonism and profit while I’ll be suffering, going without an answer to my ‘call button’. I fear I’ll be invalided. I fear I’ll be lying in my shit and piss and no one will come. I’ve found patients in hospital dying alone. I’ve found staff walking out of operating rooms in the middle of operations because they had a date. I’ve seen things I wish I didn’t see. These are in the health care profession. The goodness of the people there is incredible. I remember my first hospital though with the corrupt administrator and how it took me years to confront his greed , theft and deceit. He was removed and I learned that he’d been transferred from another hospital where he’d done the exact same thing, stealing, manipulating, mismanaging funds, playing one staff against another, having sex with the staff, favouring one over the other, and not caring when my patients were not getting what they needed. I saw that and changed that but fear that no one will protect me from these monsters. Yet the board at that hospital had overall been good old boys and women, duped by this slick sociopaths. They were well meaning. The staff , well there were 30 nurses and 28 were a god send and a half dozen were truly saints, especially that sweet older nurse who like a sergeant guided me in surgery with her breathing and tension. She handed me tools before I asked for them, assuring me by her behaviour I was on or off course. I loved her and the administrator hated her, called her dementing and she was so sweet and wise and loved the patients as only a mother could. And that administrator with his mistress were bullying her. And I couldn’t protect everyone and now I don’t think I can protect myself. I pray to you God protect me.
I don’t fear death. I long to be on the other side. I have dreams of family and friends and meetings in the air. I know the good die young and I’ve not been that good. Mostly it’s the sexual indiscretion, the monogamous contracts in which the woman acts out her aggression with negligence, withholding and covert and passive aggression. The promise of the food in the cupboard is inevitably faced with a bare cupboard. Then I’m the adulterer in the adulterous marriage, paying back and war of the roses. And as the man I’m always at fault. The abortion in which I had no say. The condoms with the tips cut off. The lies upon lies upon lies. the threats and her cocaine. God I hated her cocaine and all night long rages and me trying to go to work each day after she’d tried to kill herself or me and all the lies….I’m afraid of relationships in Canada. Women have all the money and power and the courts have jailed thousands of falsely accused men and every man I know has faced extortion. Now it’s the sexual harassment lies and it was only yesterday women were claiming every man was a rapist and the courts were taking the children from men because the women said all ex husbands were pedophiles’. And now all white men are rapists. And I afraid to fight back because the bullies say that resistance is attack. The courts support the criminals, their customers and every day I learn of some new patient who has experienced a break down in the system. Waitlists and perception.
Because it’s perception. It’s all perception. I walk down this road with roses on one side and shit on the other and forever am watching the shit. I read a Stephen King novel rather than an uplifting spiritual book. I am like St. Paul who says “I do that which I don’t want to do and don’t do that which I want to do.” These days I’m just getting over a binge of overeating and sloth. My girth is no longer expanding and I feel so much better with exercise and activity. Yet there I was in winter hardly able to go to work given the bullying administration and their deceit and the support of lies and corruption and malingering psychopaths. I lived in fear for a year with my dogs life threatened in constant emails, I’d block one and another would appear. And my last dog was killed and I failed him. I feel I ‘ve failed too many times.
I feel like Picard and the Borg.
Islam and the communists have taken over the government and freedoms are being taken daily and hourly and I live never knowing what new law has been made to outlaw me. I can’t keep up with the constant encroachment and everything costs more and more and everyone is angry and afraid and each day I spend it talking with drug addicts, trying to bring them back from the abyss. I’m with so many people who have given up and I’m wondering why I keep screaming in the night.
I beg you God. Help me. I really want to know you. I really want to be less afraid, less angry, less negative. I want to sing and dance and love and be the man I have been at times in my life. Must I give up being a doctor to get away from the stench of evil that permeates the field. Can I spend more time with ‘like minded doctors’. Can I believe in the vision of loving caring medicine. Can I focus on doing the best for my patient not constantly looking over my shoulder for some bureaucrat or media person to stab me in the back. I feel completely vulnerable. The administration constantly tells us to treat patients as the enemy. I’m afraid because of the lies. I’m afraid of people pulling guns and knifes on me alone in the office. I’m most afraid of the women who lie. I’ve walked in and out of waiting rooms when women have been waiting seductive and naked stroking themselves saying they’re ready. I’ve literally run repeatedly for another woman to protect me from these sex attacks. I’m just trying to do my job. I don’t need this shit. I”m so tired of the arrogance and superiority of women who think all men ‘want’ them and that they can ‘seduce’ all men. I’ve said no a thousand times. I’ve run out of rooms. I’ve repeatedly thrown women out of my bed when all I wanted to do was sleep. I thought it was funny and a compliment when I was young but then i learned that old adage about a woman scorned. They were lying angry women who denied their own assaults. I’ve been hit by women and never hit women. I’m been repeatedly robbed by women and never robbed . And they have no ethics, supporting Eva Brawn and condemning Hitler. Yet the first time I was surrounded by a group of men with tire irons was when I refused to dance with a skank, just said, no. You don’t say ‘no’ to women in Canada. They have the courts and police and military and parliament to back up their ‘lies’. The stories they tell are fiction and I’ve lost faith in my society.
Why don’t you protect me God from lies and false allegations. Why do you reward the bullies and the thugs that cower in the back ground and won’t work at the front where the anger is palpable.
I’m asking you God to still my soul. I am helping patiences. I’m seeing them. I”m at the office every day. More and more of my colleagues are afraid to see a new patients. Fewer and fewer want to work for the little I work for. They have seen the shift and now are demanding higher pay positions and seeing fewer and fewer and becoming increasingly selective. I’ve spent years focusing on borderlines, addicts and sociopaths and psychopaths and now I’m without back up. “The customer is always right’ he told me with a smirk on his face.
I am here facing my ‘resentments’, ‘addressing my fears’. Invariably someone here makes me laugh. My concerns are ‘petty’. Really I’m blessed beyond comparison. God is so good. It’s my mind that’s prone to catastrophising and whining and focussing on the negatives. Right now I’m here in paradise. There’s no bully. I’m not actually doctoring. I’m on vacation. My mind won’t ‘get in the same room as my ass is.’ It’s keeps flipping back to Canada and the terrifying communist governments and the destruction of Canadian values. I have a kink in my psyche. I need a spiritual chiropractor to get me turned around. I am here to again be inspired because that’s what happens here. I’m with all these people who are doing really admirable things. They struggling with health and caring for sick and dying loved ones and going to work and not complaining. I’m a constant complainer.It’s so unbecoming. And I’m here with these others who are so much better at doing life. I’ve access to this ‘design for living’ and I want to be a ‘channel of peace’. Yet at the same time I fear that my bellying up just encourages them. But it’s the BORG. What can I do.
Time to go out and see who I meet. I’m afraid of this. I’m afraid to leave my room. I’m here among the best people and my shame and sense of defeat , the horror of false accusations and working under those who believe that doctors are contemptible as a lot, that all men are rapists and that all white men are racists. I’m missing my sailboat. I’m wanting to be alone at sea far from the maddening crowd. I don’t want to hear another story of Trudeau giving billions of our pension money to Muslim or Communist countries. I don’t want to hear the news and I don’t have to listen. I’m here and I don’t have to play the old tapes. This is a new day.
Be hopeful. Be joyful. Think of the god kids. They’re growing. Think of Gilbert, blind but still alive and loving. George the cat is puking less. The world is a good place. I so enjoyed the riding my motorcycle for a day in the back trails not enncountering another. There’s the Salt Spring Round Up to look for ward to. More camping. More outdoors.
Get out of this hotel room and see people. These are your people and they care for you. You care for them. They won’t care if you cry as you hug them. It’s like this each year. I miss Bryce. Every year someone different appears in your life and is added as a friend. There’s so many here you’ve come to know and love and now you just have to get out and face the day.
Thank you God. Thank you Jesus. Thank you Bill and Bob. Thank you. Thank you . Thank you. Thank you.
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