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
January 18, 2026 |
The simple inventory |
| Page 18 |
| "Continuing to take a personal inventory means that we form a habit of looking at ourselves, our actions, our attitudes, and our relationships on a regular basis." |
| Basic Text, p. 42 |
| The daily inventory is a tool we can use to simplify our lives. The most complicated part of taking a regular inventory is deciding how to start. Should we write it out? What should we examine? In how much detail? And how do we know when we've finished? In no time, we've turned a simple exercise into a major project. Here's one simple approach to the daily inventory. We set aside a few minutes at the close of each day to sit quietly and check out our feelings. Is there a knot, big or small, in our gut? Do we feel uncomfortable about the day we've just finished? What happened? What was our part in the affair? Do we owe any amends? If we could do it over again, what would we do differently? We also want to monitor the positive aspects of our lives in our daily inventory. What has given us satisfaction today? Were we productive? Responsible? Kind? Loving? Did we give unselfishly of ourselves? Did we fully experience the love and beauty the day offered us? What did we do today that we would want to do again? Our daily inventory doesn't have to be complicated to be effective. It is a very simple tool we can use to keep in daily touch with ourselves. |
| Just for Today: I want to keep in touch with the way I feel in living this life I've been given. At the end of this day, I will take a brief, simple inventory. |
Change has a terrible reputation. It's scary and might make our lives less predictable. Many of us arrive in NA knowing for sure that we want to change the outside aspects of ourselves: improve our health and our finances, further our education, get a career. Common wisdom has it that "Change is an inside job," and that makes sense to us, too. We want to change our state of mind and stop bouncing between disturbing thoughts and complete numbness. We'd love to turn the volume way down on the negative chatter in our heads.
Then we learn the inside job is more than mental: NA is a spiritual program. For many of us addicts, that realization makes us feel like we've finally come home. For some of us, that's the moment many of us want to bolt out the door and never come back.
But we stay. We are told that living by spiritual principles means, at its core, being honest, open-minded, and willing. Even though we haven't been living that way, we see the value of those principles, and most of us want to be like that. When working a program, we ultimately default to telling the truth, rather than being avoidant or keeping secrets. We become open-minded to others' perspectives rather than relying on the outlook and behaviors that got us here. Being willing to get a sponsor, attend meetings, write some stepwork, and take a commitment is surrendering to the program's spiritual aspects. Gradually, we gain some freedom.
For those of us with more cleantime, it's no different. Being open-minded and surrendering to change continues to be a necessity if we want any level of serenity. We can become rigid or completely lax in our program. Staying connected to NA reminds us to apply what we've learned and to remain open to learning more.