Bill Pittman > Quotes

“If we are humble, we are open to new ideas and new ways of seeing things. Open-mindedness is a very important part of humility. We don’t know it all. There is still more we can learn. And maybe even more important, some we need to unlearn.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Sloth is the thief of time. The character defect of putting off actions “until things get better” is one of the most destructive detours we can make. Delays never make problems “go away;” they only make success harder to attain.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Devects - Steps 6 and Seven

“Prayer is of no use when it is not used. Prayer is not only a matter of belief, it is a matter of practice. We can’t get caught in the trap of dogma or method. Prayer is not about right or wrong or “should” or “only.” It is about a personal or individualized way to talk with God or our Higher Power or Universal Energy or the collective unconscious or whatever we want to call it. Prayer is not about someone else telling us how to pray or what to say. It is about communication.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Devects - Steps 6 and Seven

“fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Some of us come from families where we were not taught healthy emotional language and habits. We did not get a balanced perspective of the world and relationships, and some of us got a distorted view of where we stood in relation to the rest of the world. We felt (and many of us still do) less than. In order to make up for that, we learned to exaggerate and lie and blow our accomplishments way out of proportion in order to feel of some value. To succeed, we have to stop thinking we are less than other people. We tell ourselves we are not unworthy, inadequate, or unable to cope fully with life’s problems. We begin to see the glass as half full instead of half empty. We have to get rid of feelings of inability before we can make progress. As we learn more about how false pride has held us back from our full potential, we remember, “If we change our thoughts, we can change ourselves.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Devects - Steps 6 and Seven

“As we’re taught in the Twelve Steps, the chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear. Mainly fear that we would lose something we already possessed or that we would fail to get something we demanded. Living on the basis of unsatisfied demands, we obviously were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, we are taught, there will be no peace unless we are able to reduce these demands.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“In the arena of human life, the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Courage is what makes us do the right thing even when nobody else is doing it.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop The Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“of our prayer and meditation.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“To become the person we can become, we must drop the rock—all the grasping and holding on to old patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling that are harmful to ourselves and to others.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Many of us still think our value as a human being is in what we do or what we don’t do, rather than who we are.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“God give me the courage and strength to know who I really am, to act accordingly in my life, and to refrain from diverting my time, energy, and interest into my character defects.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“I don’t get to choose which defects God will remove.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Without emotional and spiritual recovery, you don’t have much. You have abstinence, and you may not even have that for very long. If you don’t follow the “clear-cut” directions of our Program, you can’t move into receiving God’s directions.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“We all know individuals in recovery who have given up the booze or another addiction, yet they are staying dry or abstinent only by redirecting their intense inner misery into the lives of others.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Prayer is seeing answers and direction in life. Meditation is listening for answers from a Higher Power and developing the ability within ourselves to accept the answers.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Devects - Steps 6 and Seven

“Armed with humility, we who once dreaded change as much as death can learn to face real life with a new courage and hope.”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“definition of sarcasm is “a cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound,”
― Bill P., Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“I cannot open a flower with a sledgehammer—”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“but to fight my greatest enemy—myself.”
― Bill Pittman, The 12 Step Prayer Book: A Collection of Inspirational Daily Readings

“Use prayer to ask for awareness and willingness to receive. Use prayer to ask for depth and clarity. Use prayer to ask to become a better channel for our Higher Power. Use prayer to ask for ease and grace in surrender. Use prayer to ask how to pray. Use prayer to ask how to think and act. Use prayer to say thank you. Use prayer. Prayer can be considered cheating because of how much easier it makes the process go.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Another way we can gain some knowledge of our fear and anger is by noticing our habitual holding spots, or where in our body we hold our stress. We each hold emotions in different places of our bodies. “It was like being kicked in the guts!” “It knocked the wind right out of me.” “I feel rubber kneed.” “I’m stiff as a board.” “My stomach is on fire.” “My neck is so stiff that I can’t turn my head.” All these statements are about physical symptoms of emotional states. Not too many of us take the time to make the connections and to correct the underlying causes.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“The principles of Twelve Step recovery are the opposite of our character defects.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“Many of us still think our value as a human being is in what we do or what we don’t do, rather than who we are. We think our value is about results—the car we drive, the person we marry, the house we live in, the job we have, the vacation we take, the clothes we wear. We’ve shifted the emphasis from who to what. Taking a look at pride means gaining a new perspective and looking again at who we are, not exclusively at what we have or do.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“What exactly is humility? The dictionary defines humility as “the state or quality of being humble of mind or spirit; absence of pride or self-assertion” or “acts of self-abasement.” Humble is defined as “having or showing a consciousness of one’s defects or shortcomings; not proud; not self-assertive; modest.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“In this ongoing process, the Program is asking us to go where none of us has ever been before—into lives of lessened fear, diminished anger, fewer resentments, and genuine self-esteem instead of self-pity. There is a price, however: the willingness to challenge and change patterns of thought, speech, and behavior that may have gone unchallenged for ten, twenty, thirty years or more.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“195 For Guidance Father of light, Give us wisdom to know You, Intelligence to understand You, Courage to seek You, Patience to wait for You, Eyes to see You, A heart to meditate on You, And a life to proclaim You. by St. Benedict”
― Bill Pittman, The 12 Step Prayer Book Volume 2: More Twelve Step Prayers and Inspirational Readings Prayers 184-366

“I gathered that, instead of fighting mightily against a defect, I also had to let go of it. Just simply open my hands, my heart, and my mind and say to my Higher Power, “Here it is, this defect. I give it to You. Please remove it from me.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“If you’re a real alcoholic or addict, you will stop using some day; it’s better to be alive when it happens.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

“The principles of Twelve Step recovery are the opposite of our character defects.” In recovery, we try to take the opposite of our character defects and shortcomings and turn them into principles. For example, we work to change fear into faith, hate into love, egoism into humility, anxiety and worry into serenity, complacency into action, denial into acceptance, jealousy into trust, fantasy into reality, selfishness into service, resentment into forgiveness, judgmentalism into tolerance, despair into hope, self-hate into self-respect, and loneliness into fellowship.”
― Bill Pittman, Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven