The Bay Cities Area of Narcotics Anonymous serves as a vital resource for individuals and families affected by addiction throughout the coastal South Bay region of Los Angeles County. By coordinating local NA groups, maintaining accurate meeting information, and supporting area-wide service efforts, the Bay Cities Area helps ensure that anyone seeking recovery can easily find help. The area supports meetings in these communities Carson, Gardena, Hermosa Beach, Lomita, Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, San Pedro, Signal Hill, Torrance, Torrrance, Wilmington, strengthening connections between members, promoting unity, and fostering a safe, consistent message of recovery for the broader community.
Until we experience the healing that happens when we work the Twelve Steps, it is doubtful that we can find a statement more true than the quote above. Most of us come to NA hanging our heads in shame, thinking about the past and wishing we could go back and change it. Our fantasies and expectations about the future may be so extreme that, on our first date with someone, we find ourselves wondering which lawyer we'll use for the divorce. Almost every experience causes us to remember something from the past or begin projecting into the future.
At first, it's difficult to stay in the moment. It seems as though our minds won't stop. We have a hard time just enjoying ourselves. Each time we realize that our thoughts are not focused on what's happening right now, we can pray and ask a loving God to help us get out of ourselves. If we regret the past, we make amends by living differently today; if we dread the future, we work on living responsibly today.
When we work the steps and pray each time we discover we're not living in the present, we'll notice that those times aren't occurring as often as they used to. Our faith will help us live just for today. We'll have hours, even days, when our full attention is focused on the current moment in time, not the regrettable past or fearful future.
When we heard the Twelve Traditions read aloud the first several times--maybe even the first 1,000 times--the First Tradition sounded like some sort of recovery jargon to our newcomer ears. Am I supposed to put NA's common welfare ahead of my own? Really? To many of us, "common welfare" was a new concept. Because we'd consistently been self-obsessed in our disease, we hadn't thought of ourselves as part of any whole, and that was fine with us.
During our first days clean, the NA Fellowship's collective whole wasn't something we imagined being a part of or even caring about. In time, we began to surrender to the truth that we need each other to stay clean. We got a glimpse of the reciprocal relationship between personal recovery and NA unity. We realized that we're part of a worldwide Fellowship, made up of tens of thousands of groups, with literature available in scores of languages. Wow, all I wanted to do was quit using drugs!
"I can't, but we can" underpins the First Tradition. As our recovery deepens, our capacity to surrender to the principle of unity evolves and becomes more fluid. Surrendering to the needs of the group takes precedence over our desire to get our way at whatever cost. Many of us who struggle with the idea of a "god" working in our lives can surrender to the idea that the power of the group supports us. We begin to understand how our investment in something greater than ourselves through service improves our own lives and increases our feelings of self-worth. And something as basic as seeing a keytag with its "clean and serene" message etched in an unfamiliar language becomes awe-inspiring to us.
