Daily Reflections · November 4
A Daily Discipline
Looking at yourself, meditation and prayer, kept up every day: a discipline, the title calls it, in a fellowship that says it disciplines nobody.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 4 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 98, early in Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven, where yesterday’s reading leaves off.
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Themes and asks
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Joined, not separate
The passage finishes a thought that yesterday’s reading began, in Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven: what the three practices, looking at yourself, quiet and prayer, can do for one another.
- In your day, do the three ever meet, or does each keep to its own corner?
- When did a hard look at yourself last lead you straight into a prayer?
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What the evenings add up to
For the member who wrote the reflection, the look back at the end of a day isn’t only about that day. Kept up, the evenings start to show what one evening can’t: what keeps coming back, and whether anything is changing.
- If you could read back over a month of your evenings, what would keep turning up?
- What’s changed in you that you’d only see by looking further back than yesterday?
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The working day
The member who wrote the reflection carries the practice out of the quiet hour and into the working day, dull stretches included.
- What ordinary job did you do well today, and did it count for anything with you?
- When things get loud around you, what brings your attention back?
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Nobody checks
Read beside today’s title, AA’s own books describe a discipline no group enforces. AA, Bill wrote in 1947, suggests but doesn’t discipline. Keeping it up is left to each member.
- What keeps your practice going on the days nobody would know if you skipped it?
- Have pain or love ever done the disciplining for you, when nothing else could?
Behind the words
Who does the disciplining
Today’s sentence follows straight on from yesterday’s, two pages into Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. The reading’s title calls the practice it describes a discipline. That’s a word AA’s books handle with care, because AA, as Bill kept saying, can’t make a member do anything.
The Big Book used it in 1939, at the end of its pages on Step Eleven. Having laid out a day (a review at bedtime, a plan and a prayer on waking, a pause whenever agitated or doubtful), it summed up: “We alcoholics are undisciplined.” Its answer was to let God do the disciplining, through that same simple routine. In the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early that year, the sentence told the reader to “let God discipline you”; the printed book says “us.”
As for AA itself, Bill wrote in the Grapevine in December 1947, explaining the First Tradition: “We do suggest, but we don’t discipline.” What kept a member in line instead, he went on, was his own conscience, the group’s opinion and, if he pushed too far, Barleycorn, the old nickname for drink. By 1953, in the Twelve and Twelve’s essay on Tradition Nine, he had it down to one sentence: “Great suffering and great love are A.A.’s disciplinarians; we need no others.”
In 1955, at AA’s second International Convention, in St. Louis, the psychiatrist Dr. Harry M. Tiebout told the members why one surrender wasn’t enough. It cuts the ego down, he said, but the ego comes back unless a person learns “to accept a disciplined way of life.” He pointed to what AA already asked: the Steps, inventories taken again and again rather than once, and Twelfth Step work.
More on how Tradition Nine was first worded: Twelve Points, in Rule 62. On the convention at St. Louis in 1955: Legacy, in the same piece. On the draft and its “you”: Loan copy, in By the Carload.
Five answers
AA has no rules to enforce. Here is who AA’s books, and one doctor who knew AA well, said keeps an alcoholic in line instead, in the order they said it.
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1939The Big Book, on Step Eleven
God
Through the routine its pages have just laid out, from the review at bedtime to the pause when upset.
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1947Bill W., in the Grapevine, on Tradition One
Conscience, the group, the bottle
No musts, and few penalties. The group reminds a member, his own conscience complains, and drinking again does the rest. So, he wrote, “we have disciplined ourselves.”
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1953The Twelve and TwelveToday’s book
Suffering and love
So says its essay on Tradition Nine. Its essay on Step Ten adds that the day’s restraint, honest analysis, admitting fault and forgiving come hard: “these disciplines are not easy.”
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1955Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, at St. Louis
Surrender, kept up
One surrender doesn’t hold. The Steps, repeated inventories and Twelfth Step work keep the ego in check.
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1962Bill W., in the Grapevine, “Where Willpower Comes In”
Your own will
Asked to try meditation and prayer, an atheist or agnostic usually finds it “takes a lot of discipline to do, even as an experiment.”
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essays on Steps Ten and Eleven (the reading cites page 98) and Tradition Nine.
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. “Into Action,” on Step Eleven.
- The pre-publication manuscript of early 1939 (a loan copy), from a transcription. “Into Action.”
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Tradition One,” December 1947, and “Where Willpower Comes In,” May 1962.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Medicine Looks at Alcoholics Anonymous” (Dr. Harry M. Tiebout at St. Louis, 1955).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 4 · aa.org
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Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.