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

September 13, 2025

Something different

Page 267

“We had to have something different, and we thought we had found it in drugs.“

Basic Text, p. 13

Many of us have always felt different from other people. We know we’re not unique in feeling that way; we hear many addicts share the same thing. We searched all our lives for something to make us all right, to fix that “different” place inside us, to make us whole and acceptable. Drugs seemed to fill that need.

When we were high, at least we no longer felt the emptiness or the need. There was one drawback: The drugs, which were our solution, quickly became our problem.

Once we gave up the drugs, the sense of emptiness returned. At first we felt despair because we didn’t have any solution of our own to that miserable longing. But we were willing to take direction and began to work the steps. As we did, we found what we’d been looking for, that “something different.” Today, we believe that our lifelong yearning was primarily for knowledge of a Higher Power; the “something different” we needed was a relationship with a loving God. The steps tell us how to begin that relationship.

Just for Today: My Higher Power is the “something different” that’s always been missing in my life. I will use the steps to restore that missing ingredient to my spirit.

Spiritual Principal A Day

September 13, 2025

Sincerity and Keeping It Real

Page 265

“We listen to one another with an open mind and an open heart, and we share our experience with the understanding that it won’t necessarily be shared by everyone else.”

Living Clean, Chapter 3, “A Spiritual Journey”

Among the first things many of us notice about NA is how recovering addicts get very real with each other when sharing in meetings. Sincerity is sometimes mistaken for weakness, especially among using addicts. Showing up to recovery meetings for the first time and seeing people willingly exposing vulnerabilities the way we do can be both shocking and refreshing. We start to listen and to open up.

Being present and showing up wholeheartedly would mean a 180-degree change from our old approach. We were accustomed to wearing masks, deflecting attention, or adapting to whatever was happening around us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we played along. Not making any waves was key to our survival before we got clean.

Early in recovery, we may find ourselves listening to others and then trying to match how they share. Not wanting to call attention to ourselves, we might string together slogans or pretend to be something we’re not. One addict wrote, “I would tailor my shares to try to appeal to the listeners, and the harder I tried to make people relate, the phonier I felt (and sounded). When I just tell my own story my own way, people seem to connect so much more.”

Something within us shifts as we do the work of staying clean. We prioritize honesty and authenticity over ease, empathy over shallow connection, from-the-heart sincerity over fitting in. When we share, we allow ourselves and each other the dignity of our own understanding and experience. We each take on the responsibility of expressing what’s going on with us. It’s harder to talk the talk when we don’t walk the walk. We share what we’ve found, what we think, and where our uncertainties lie. The truer we are in what we share with others, the better the odds that they will be able to relate.

As a recovering addict, sincerity makes it possible for me to connect with others wholeheartedly. I will keep it real today.