JACS Library - Our Stories

JACS: Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons, and Significant Others

JACS LIBRARY - OUR STORIES

My name is Golda...(I hear the echo response) and I've been sober 8 months.

I am a writer, (not yet professional) and trying to send my stuff out, as well as a recovering alcoholic, so this sharing through writing appeals to me.

I want to share that I found, in the book Fiftieth Gate (Reb Nosson's prayers based on the teachings of Reb Nachman of Breslov) a paragraph that has become a very good third step prayer for me. It reads:

"Grant me inner peace,...Let my body be completely subordinate to my soul and have no other will or desire but to follow the desire of the holy soul, which is to do Your will.
Let peace reign between my soul and my body. Let my body be sanctified and purified until it becomes united with the holy soul, and I carry out all Your commandments and do everything You want of me, body and soul, willingly and with great joy.
Let my body and soul unite in love and peace to do Your will sincerely, until I attain complete inner harmony and am ready to order my prayer before You perfectly. Let my prayer rise before You like the incense and perfect sacrifices offered by those who are whole and perfect."

A bit spiritually ambitious, but for me saying it in Hebrew (I can look up the page # if anyone wants it) really really does something special for me. Especially when I am experiencing a physical craving of ANY kind, usually because even a small fear or resentment has set in. Afterwards I TRY to do something for someone.

I am looking now for a woman who is Torah observant to work the steps with me. But I want to do it very very thoroughly, using the Big Book quite literally. Exhaustively. I am ready to write out 500 resentments if I have them and whatever else I have to do, but I am definitely chronically foggy and sloppy when left on my own.

It's been hard to find a woman who has done the kind of work I want to do. I am probably being somewhat obsessive and perfectionist about this, but I think at least some of this is a good and healthy desire to be closer to Hashem, to really clean house. (I also need someone who understands internally why observing the mitzvos is for me fulfilling G-d's will, so that won't come up as a problem during the sponsorship.

I am starting a monthly Brooklyn JACS group; G-d willing I will be making calls this week from the retreat phone #'s. Please let me know if you are interested. (It was supposed to get off the ground a few months ago, but, well, you know how these things happen....). Do you think it should be AA only? AA/NA? or just JACS? I would like to make it a Big Book meeting. What do you think?