11th Step

“Life will take on new meaning. To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends—this is an experience you must not miss. We know you will not want to miss it. Frequent contact with newcomers and with each other is the bright spot of our lives.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 89~

“Showing others who suffer how we were given help is the very thing which makes life seem so worth while to us now. Cling to the thought that, in God’s hands, the dark past is the greatest possession you have—the key to life and happiness for others. With it you can avert death and misery for them.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 124~

“The member talks to the newcomer not in a spirit of power but in a spirit of humility and weakness.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS COMES OF AGE, p. 279~

“As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 87~

“Faith has to work twenty-four hours a day in and through us, or we perish.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 16~

“By going back in our own drinking histories, we could show that years before we realized it we were out of control, that our drinking even then was no mere habit, that it was indeed the beginning of a fatal progression.”

~TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 23~

“With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, pp. 567-68~

“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 83~

“We are not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.”

~ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 85~

“Our very first problem is to accept our present circumstances as they are, ourselves as we are, and the people about us as they are. This is to adopt a realistic humility without which no genuine advance can even begin. Again and again, we shall need to return to that unflattering point of departure. This is an exercise in acceptance that we can profitably practice every day of our lives.”

~AS BILL SEES IT, p. 44~