For Members
“We have never seen a person who lives the Narcotics Anonymous Program relapse.” – Basic Text, p. 79
Get involved in your recovery!
September 06, 2026 |
Regular meeting attendance |
| Page 260 |
| "We have learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean." |
| Basic Text, p. 9 |
| The NA program gives us a new pattern of living. One of the basic elements of that new pattern is regular meeting attendance. For the newcomer, living clean is a brand new experience. All that once was familiar is changed. The old people, places, and things that served as props on the stage of our lives are gone. New stresses appear, no longer masked or deadened by drugs. That's why we often suggest that newcomers attend a meeting every day. No matter what comes up, no matter how crazy the day gets, we know that our daily meeting awaits us. There, we can renew contact with other recovering addicts, people who know what we're going through because they've been through it themselves. No day needs to go by without the relief we get only from such fellowship. As we mature in recovery, we get the same kinds of benefits from regular meeting attendance. Regardless of how long we've been clean, we never stop being addicts. True, we probably won't immediately start using mass quantities of drugs if we miss our meetings for a few days. But the more regularly we attend NA meetings, the more we reinforce our identity as recovering addicts. And each meeting helps put us that much further from becoming using addicts again. |
| Just for Today: I will make a commitment to include regular meeting attendance as a part of my new pattern of living. |
| Copyright (c) 2007-2026, NA World Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
September 07, 2026 |
Patience and the Process of Healing |
| Page 259 |
| "Healing takes time, but it does happen. We must be patient with ourselves." |
| Living Clean, Chapter 4, "Sex" |
| Some of us came into NA hoping for a speedy recovery, like the way we'd bounced back after that accident and got over the flu right quick. We wanted to put addiction behind us, and then we could get on with life. A mixture of hope and denial convinced us that detoxing would fix us. Our experience told a different story. We'd been able to stop using on occasion, but we could never seem to stay stopped. At some point, we realized we needed more than a spin-dry, and we rallied the patience to persevere on a just-for-today basis. We face our lives and ourselves in everyday living, as the Basic Text suggests. We strive for progress while taking care not to expect perfection. Sticking with it calls on us to be patient with the process and ourselves. Recovery is ongoing for folks like us, not something we can look at in the rearview mirror. We consider ourselves recovering, not recovered, addicts. Practicing patience requires us to be more gentle with ourselves. We attempt to nurture kind and encouraging thoughts, shutting down the harsh self-talk that says, "I should be better than this by now." When we measure our progress against some unrealistic benchmark, or worse, compare our insides to others' outsides, it's no wonder we come up short. We focus on finding satisfaction with the pace of our progress. Patience serves as a bridge to some much-needed hope, faith, and humility as we learn to trust the process. We'll need all of these spiritual principles and more as we navigate the minefields of our past with the Twelve Steps and a sponsor's guidance. Trauma and abuse cast a long shadow on many of our lives; we learn to be patient with ourselves as an expression of love. We come to understand our past without allowing it to define us. All of this takes time--time that's available to us because we're learning to practice patience. |
| I invite patience to help me find satisfaction with my progress and access the resources I need for continued recovery and healing. |
| Copyright (c) 2007-2026, NA World Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
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