NA Daily Meditations

NA Meitations

Feel free to read one of our 2 daily meditations.

Just For Today
Spiritual Principle A Day

Just For Today

December 14, 2025

Addiction, drugs, and recovery

Page 364

“Addiction is a physical, mental, and spiritual disease that affects every area of our lives.“

Basic Text, p. 20

Before we started using, most of us had a stereotype, a mental image of what addicts were supposed to look like. Some of us pictured a junkie robbing convenience markets for drug money. Others imagined a paranoid recluse peering at life from behind perpetually drawn drapes and locked doors. As long as we didn’t fit any of the stereotypes, we thought, we couldn’t be addicts.

As our using progressed, we discarded those misconceptions about addiction, only to come up with another: the idea that addiction was about drugs. We may have thought addiction meant a physical habit, believing any drug that didn’t produce physical habituation was not “addictive.” Or we thought the drugs we took were causing all our problems. We thought that merely getting rid of the drugs would restore sanity to our lives.

One of the most important lessons we learn in Narcotics Anonymous is that addiction is much more than the drugs we used. Addiction is a part of us; it’s an illness that involves every area of our lives, with or without drugs. We can see its effects on our thoughts, our feelings, and our behavior, even after we stop using. Because of this, we need a solution that works to repair every area of our lives: the Twelve Steps.

Just for Today: Addiction is not a simple disease, but it has a simple solution. Today, I will live in that solution: the Twelve Steps of recovery.

Spiritual Principal A Day

December 14, 2025

Imperfection, Humanity, and Humility

Page 360

“Beyond our addiction, we are human beings: members of society who have gifts and flaws like everyone else.”

Living Clean, Chapter 5, “Friendship”

We are recovering addicts with the disease of addiction. This is not news.

We have pasts (do we ever!), the present (especially when we can be in it), and futures (hopefully). We have attractions, virtues, and abilities, and yet we have limitations, vices, and liabilities. We do good in the world–sometimes a lot of it. We also make mistakes– sometimes horrendous ones.

We’ve been shaped by our cultures, societies, and environments. We have religious beliefs or nonreligious ones. We have relationships, jobs, interests, causes, ailments. We have multiples of any and all of these. None of these elements completely defines us. Instead, they make us human.

As addicts, we tend to focus more on what’s wrong with us than what’s right. But we are no more flawed than other people, even nonaddicts. We are not pathological, nor are we deserving of stigma because of our addiction.

Being an addict is only one aspect of our humanity. Through working the Twelve Steps, we learn that the story of our drug use isn’t as important as the one we create in our recovery. We have the opportunity to identify our gifts as well as our flaws, and we come to understand that our flaws do not negate those gifts. This concept is the core of humility.

Some of us really grapple with perfectionism as one of our character defects. But we are all imperfect because we are human. Recovery won’t make us perfect because perfection doesn’t exist. It can, however, help us humbly embrace our humanity.

Today I will honestly assess where I fall short and accept that I’m imperfect, like everybody else. My aim is to lead with my assets–with humility.