TOPICS 7 / 17 / 2025
1.SURRENDER AND SELF-EXAMINATION
My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.
Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God’s help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART, p. 238
2.LOVE
“For me, A.A. is a synthesis of all the philosophy I’ve ever read, all of the positive, good philosophy, all of it based on love. I have seen that there is only one law, the law of love, and there are only two sins; the first is to interfere with the growth of another human being, and the second is to interfere with one’s own growth.”
Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 542
When we love, we see in others what we wish to have in ourselves.
3.EGO
AA can never be just a single act of surrender: “That ego will return unless the individual learns to accept a disciplined way of life, which means that a tendency for ego comeback is permanently checked.” Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God’s will into all of our activities. When we do this the ego is cut down to size and we can enjoy the miracle of being sober.
DR H TIEBOUT
4.ALL OR NOTHING
Many of us used to be “all or nothing” people. That made us afraid to take the big projects. But now we can get things done, if we take one step at a time. We’re not “all or nothing” people anymore. We’re people who are changing and growing a little every day. And each day our deeds match our words a little better. What we do can be much more important than what we say. We tend to talk about things we want to do. We need to also be people who do things we talk about. We are not spiritual people unless our actions are spiritual.