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.
Some days just aren't the way we wish they would be. Our problems may be as simple as a broken shoelace or having to stand in line at the supermarket. Or we may experience something far more serious, such as the loss of a job, a home, or a loved one. Either way, we often end up looking for a way to avoid our feelings instead of simply acknowledging that those feelings are painful.
No one promises us that everything will go our way when we stop using. In fact, we can be sure that life will go on whether we're using or not. We will face good days and bad days, comfortable feelings and painful feelings. But we don't have to run from any of them any longer.
We can experience pain, grief, sadness, anger, frustration--all those feelings we once avoided with drugs. We find that we can get through those emotions clean. We won't die and the world won't come to an end just because we have uncomfortable feelings. We learn to trust that we can survive what each day brings.
Of all the spiritual principles in this book, service may be the most directly related to action. Sure, service has a place in our hearts, minds, and souls, but we aren't practicing this principle unless we are doing something.
Our primary purpose in Narcotics Anonymous is service. Essentially, that means carrying the message of recovery to the still-suffering addict who can be any of us at any moment. Participating in service to other addicts, both on an individual level and within the Fellowship, helps us to keep each other and NA alive and thriving.
We often say there are no "musts" in NA, but the Basic Text says otherwise in one of its earliest passages. Depending on who we are, where we are in our recovery, or even what we ate for breakfast that morning, we may find this direction--that all of NA service must be motivated by our primary purpose--either inspirational or distressing. Some of us may be more driven than ever to carry the message. Others may start to second-guess our motivations for service. We may get defensive at the absoluteness of the statement that "everything" we're doing "must" be motivated by the purest, most fundamental "desire" to help another. Really? All the time?
Truthfully, the framework of NA--the Steps, Traditions, Concepts, and principles--are indeed oriented toward our singular purpose. Because of the simplicity of service as a principle and its reliance on action to practice it, showing up is all we have to do, really: go to a meeting and share what's going on, answer the phone when our sponsee calls, pitch in for the Seventh Tradition, fill the teakettle. We come early and stay late.
Our purely motivated desire to carry the message won't always be there, but we take the action anyway. That's service in a nutshell.
