TOPICS – 5/21/2025
1 A LIST OF BLESSINGS
One exercise that I practice is to try for a full inventory of my blessings…
What did I have to be grateful for? I shut myself up and started listing the blessings for which I was in no way responsible, beginning with having been born of sound mind and body. I went through seventy-four years of living right up to the present moment. The list ran to two pages, and took two hours to compile; I included health, family, money, A.A. – the whole gamut.
AS BILL SEES IT, p. 37
2 H.A.L.T
So there it is: HALT–Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. This rule, when coupled with meetings and living our day-by-day lives according to AA principles, will make things much easier, not only for the newcomer, but for the old-timer as well. Once we recognize that these four conditions are dangerous if succumbed to, we should avoid them as carefully as we would that first drink, for any one of them could be the first step to a drunk.
DR JOHN – CALIFORNIA
3 SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
The Big Book describes a spiritual experience as a “personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism.” It also says that it “manifests itself in many different forms.” This means that the experience looks different for different people.
These are not usually single, dramatic moments in which everything changes. Rather, spirituality in recovery frequently takes the form of the “educational variety.” In other words, the spiritual change takes place gradually over time. Eventually, this gradual change results in “a profound alteration in the persons reaction to life.”
ANONYMOUS
4 SELF RIGHTEOUS ANGER
“Self-righteous anger also can be very enjoyable. In a perverse way we can actually take satisfaction from the fact that many people annoy us, for it brings a comfortable feeling of superiority. Gossip barbed with our anger, a polite form of murder by character assassination, has its satisfactions for us, too. Here we are not trying to help those we criticize; we are trying to proclaim our own righteousness.”
Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions