Narcotics Anonymous

Just For Today - Daily Email Service

   June 11                                                       Living clean

      "As we recover, we gain a new outlook on being clean....  Life can
                       become a new adventure for us."

                                                            Basic Text, p. 91

                           ----=----

   The using life is not a clean one-no one knows this better than we do.
   Some of us lived in physical squalor, caring neither for our surroundings
   nor ourselves.  Worse, though, than any external filth was the way most of
   us felt inside.  The things we did to get our drugs, the way we treated
   other people, and the way we treated ourselves had us feeling dirty.  Many
   of us recall waking too many mornings just wishing that, for once, we
   could feel clean about ourselves and our lives.

   Today, we have a chance to feel clean by living clean.  For us addicts,
   living clean starts with not using-after all, that's our primary use
   for the word "clean" in Narcotics Anonymous.    But as we stay
   "clean" and work the Twelve Steps, we discover another kind of clean.
   It's the clean that comes from admitting the truth about our addiction
   rather than hiding or denying our disease.   It's the freshness that
   comes from owning up to our wrongs and making amends for them.  It's the
   vitality that comes from the new set of values we develop as we seek a
   Higher Power's will for us.   When we practice the principles of our
   program in all our affairs, we have no reason to feel dirty about our
   lives or our lifestyles-we're living clean, and are grateful to be
   doing so at last.

   "Clean living" used to be just for the "squares." Today, living
   clean is the only way we'd have it.

                           ----=----

   Just for today:   I feel clean because I'm living clean-and that's
   the way I want to keep it.