Regular meeting attendance
“We have learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our
meetings regularly stay clean.”
Basic Text p.9
The NA program gives us a new pattern of living. One of the basic elements of that
new pattern is regular meeting attendance. For the newcomer, living clean is a brand
new experience. All that once was familiar is changed. The old people, places, and
things that served as props on the stage of our lives are gone. New stresses appear,
no longer masked or deadened by drugs. That’s why we often suggest that
newcomers attend a meeting every day. No matter what comes up, no matter how
crazy the day gets, we know that our daily meeting awaits us. There, we can renew
contact with other recovering addicts, people who know what we’re going through
because they’ve been through it themselves. No day needs to go by without the
relief we get only from such fellowship.
As we mature in recovery, we get the same kinds of benefits from regular meeting
attendance. Regardless of how long we’ve been clean, we never stop being addicts.
True, we probably won’t immediately start using mass quantities of drugs if we miss
our meetings for a few days. But the more regularly we attend NA meetings, the
more we reinforce our identity as recovering addicts. And each meeting helps put us
that much further from becoming using addicts again.
Just for today: I will make a commitment to include regular meeting attendance as a
part of my new pattern of living.