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“Bottom is the point at which your life is falling apart faster than you can lower your standards.”
The Hebrew word for Jew (Yehudi) does not just mean one who comes from Judah, but also “one who is modeh”—one who acknowledges,
It is from this acceptance and admission that all growth ensues and all healing takes place. We cannot begin our journey, in life or in each day, until we have first submitted to truth.
It’s interesting because, viewed in this light, the Great Flood was not so much a punishment as a purification, a giant mikveh for the entire world, so to speak. Humanity hit bottom, was cleansed, and began anew.
The addict’s problem is not a lack of control but an obsession with it.
The more the addict feels frustration with other people and his or her environment, the more the compulsion there is to exert control over his or her own perceptions and feelings by self-medicating.
Evil is really just the way that selfishness expresses itself once it has given itself permission to do so.
the power of all evil—that, in essence, it is nothing more than the misappropriation of the power of God.
is not the outright rejection of God but the audacious delusion that God’s power is one’s own—in plain Yiddish, chutzpah.
That is the essence of Pharaoh, the self-worshiping ego that will endure any abuse, any loss, as long as it does not have to surrender control.
The miraculous personal transformation that is effected by recovery is actually the result of a courageous surrender of self-concept, a willingness to be the person that God intended us to be.
God told Abraham to surrender his own desires and leave self-will behind.
God did not reveal to Abraham where he was heading, but only told him to leave where he was. He would be shown where to settle when he got there. This, in itself, is a great act of surrender.
is not that God just shows us the land; if we only let Him, God takes us to the place where He can show us who we really are.
In order to change a little, one can build on what one has already become, but in order to change drastically, one has to completely let go of what one was.
This is the paradox of all growth—that through surrender we become strong, and that by facing our own lack of power we come to know and feel what real Power is.
It’s black and white. God controls reality, every bit of it. We control our attitude, every bit of it. In other words, everything that happens to us is up to God, but the way we feel about it is up to us.
all we can change is our opinion about God and the job that He is doing running the world, but we cannot run the world.
If we are in awe of God, then we are not overwhelmed by the world.
don’t have power over the conditions God puts me in, but I do have the power to make moral decisions regardless of those conditions.
Perfection means that one is vigilant never to allow these impulses to manifest as actual behaviors.
It is our choices that define us, our choices for which we take responsibility, not our identities.
