28 Oct Step 10 and Mindfulness

This blog post was written by Recovery Help Now’s, Cindy Weathers, MA.

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted 
it

The fundamental component in working the Tenth Step is Mindfulness.  In order to continue to achieve a healthy sobriety you can’t stop being mindful of your thoughts and actions.  By now you have cleaned up a lot of baggage from the past and made amends and apologized to people that you may have hurt in the process.  It’s important to continue to be honest with yourself every day and to pay attention to actions and behaviors.

Being mindful and having an awareness of your past dishonesty and selfish behaviors will help you to notice if you are about to repeat them.  If you see yourself repeating unhealthy behaviors, admit them to yourself and then you can work on taking responsibility and apologizing.  You now understand that in the past, many of your character defects like anger, jealousy, control, and dishonesty led you to drink and hurt others at the same time. Unless you continue to stay mindful of your actions and behaviors, it might be easy to slip back into old habits and you’ve worked too hard for that.

It’s good practice to take moral inventory at the end of each day making sure past behaviors aren’t being repeated.  You can make this part of your mindfulness meditation practice.  We all make mistakes but when we own up to them and take responsibility for our actions we stop hurting others as well as ourselves.