Welcome to the County Line Area
of Narcotics Anonymous
Serving: Agoura Hills, Moorpark, Newbury Park, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, and Westlake Village in Ventura County, California
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Serving: Agoura Hills, Moorpark, Newbury Park, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, and Westlake Village in Ventura County, California
NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We are recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean. This is a program of complete abstinence from all drugs. There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop using. We suggest that you keep an open mind and give yourself a break. Our program is a set of principles written so simply that we can follow them in our daily lives. The most important thing about them is that they work.
There are no strings attached to NA. We are not affiliated with any other organizations. We have no initiation fees or dues, no pledges to sign, no promises to make to anyone. We are not connected with any political, religious, or law enforcement groups, and are under no surveillance at any time. Anyone may join us regardless of age, race, sexual identity, creed, religion, or lack of religion.
We are not interested in what or how much you used or who your connections were, what you have done in the past, how much or how little you have, but only in what you want to do about your problem and how we can help. The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting, because we can only keep what we have by giving it away. We have learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean.
For more information on Narcotics Anonymous,
please go to the: Narcotics Anonymous World Services Website
May 11, 2026 |
Balancing the scales |
| Page 137 |
| "A lot of our chief concerns and major difficulties come from our inexperience with living without drugs. Often when we ask an old timer what to do, we are amazed at the simplicity of the answer." |
| Basic Text, p. 43 |
| Finding balance in recovery is quite a bit like sitting down with a set of scales and a pile of sand. The goal is to have an equal amount of sand on each side of the scales, achieving a balance of weight. We do the same thing in recovery. We sit down with the foundation of our clean time and the Twelve Steps, then attempt to add employment, household responsibilities, friends, sponsees, relationships, meetings, and service in equal weights so that the scales balance. Our first try may throw our personal scales out of kilter. We may find that, because of our over-involvement in service, we have upset our employer or our family. But when we try to correct this problem by resigning from NA service altogether, the other side of the scales go out of balance. We can ask for help from members who have stabilized their scales. These people are easy to recognize. They appear serene, composed, and self-assured. They'll smile in recognition at our dilemma and share how they slowed down, added only a few grains of sand at a time to either side of the scales, and were rewarded with balance in recovery. |
| Just for Today: I seek balance in my life. Today, I will ask others to share their experience in finding that balance. |
To say that honesty wasn't a top priority when we were using may be an understatement. We gain a new awareness of honesty's value once we clean up. With a clear head and a restored conscience, we find that dishonesty comes at a price. Regret is no joke, so we try to avoid it. Practicing honesty with ourselves can be a little more complicated. Self-deception creates some major blind spots that have a nasty habit of reemerging. Fortunately, our ability to be honest with ourselves deepens as we work the Twelve Steps.
We admit our powerlessness and begin to reckon with our unmanageability. We come to recognize that we're, frankly, screwed on our own and decide to accept some help. Taking action that's aligned with that decision begins with an honest evaluation of how we've lived our lives so far. Sometimes we get as many insights in sharing our inventories as we do in writing them. We go on to dig a bit deeper, examining how aspects of our character had become disproportionate to their intended purpose. We turn this bag of dirty tricks over to a Higher Power--and over and over and over again as we strive to be better people with help from that Power, whatever we conceive that to be. Taking another look at the harm we caused, we make an earnest effort to right our past wrongs.
Continuing on this path takes daily commitment and, honestly, we all slack off from time to time. Our experience with the Steps means we're quicker to notice when old patterns of thinking and behavior creep back up on us. Oh, I'm doing that again. We may find that we've shut down emotionally, become disconnected from our spiritual lives, resumed a hurtful interior monologue, or taken up some other outmoded approach to life. We put in the work to restore wholehearted honesty to our lives and in our relationships, including those with ourselves and with a Higher Power. We tune in to reality, to the truth, to our higher selves. And we help others to do the same--to live and to thrive through the daily application of spiritual principles.