In her book Fearless Relationships: Simple Rules for Lifelong Contentment, Karen Casey offers a guide for living with more serenity and creating a world that will nurture us and our relationships. In this excerpt, Casey discusses how she starts her day with God. We see how doing this helps her have a positive attitude for the day ahead.

In his book Practicing the Here and Now, Herb K. offers a framework for understanding and accessing the powerful gifts of prayer and meditation found in the Twelve Step journey of recovery. In this excerpt, Herb describes the practice of meditation, defining it as an intentional process that allows us to receive guidance that both informs and transforms our lives and relationships.

In her book Mindfulness and the 12 Steps, Thérèse Jacobs-Stewart offers support for recovery, drawing on her personal experience and an impressive range of knowledge in psychology, spirituality, and the Twelve Steps. In this excerpt, we hear the author's own story of working with a spiritual advisor and how the invitation to prayer and meditation at the heart of Step Eleven helped her face a life-changing choice.

In Undrunk: A Skeptic's Guide to AA, recovering alcoholic A.J. Adams shares insights and wisdom from his own story of skeptic spirituality, and the gifts of acceptance and willingness that he found along the path of recovery. In this excerpt, the author shares his two-step method for working Step Ten in the moments when it's most needed.

In their book Rein in Your Brain: From Impulsivity to Thoughtful Living in Recovery, Cynthia Moreno Tuohy and Victoria Costello offer brain training techniques for breaking the cycle of compulsive thoughts and behaviors. In this excerpt, we are given a real-life scenario that shows how not communicating feelings can affect our relationships and daily life.

In his book, Drop the Rock: The Ripple Effect, Fred H. helps us explore Step Ten, and how the habits and practices that we build in a program of recovery create positive effects in us that ripple outward into our relationships and beyond. This excerpt discusses the importance of paying attention to our feelings as we practice Step Ten.

For decades, the book A Program for You: A Guide to the Big Book's Design for Living has helped millions of people understand and apply the Twelve Steps to their lives and find an authentic path to recovery. In this excerpt, the authors offer Step Ten as a pattern for growing into the promises Alcoholics Anonymous makes about how we will feel and what we will experience in recovery.

In Finding your Moral Compass: Transformative Principles to Guide You in Recovery and Life, Craig Nakken offers forty-one universal principles, paired as positive and negative counterparts, that guide behavior. In this excerpt, we see the emotional toll of holding on to resentment compared with allowing ourselves to forgive.

In his book Twelve Step Sponsorship: How It Works, author and sponsor Hamilton B. writes for both sponsors and sponsees, helping people at any stage of recovery understand and apply the guidance of the Twelve Steps and make the most of the sponsor relationship. In this excerpt, he explores the hard but rewarding practice of face-to-face relationship repair that is the focus of the Ninth Step, "Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others."

In A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps, Dr. Patrick Carnes offers the Steps as a pattern of practices and habits that make lasting recovery possible. We can use these principles as a guide to a new way of living--letting go of our old ways of thinking and acting and accepting that change in our lives is both ongoing and inevitable.