( Light Individual Edit)

The Twelve Principles of Narcotics Anonymous

In keeping with our growth as a Fellowship and the spiritual nature of our program of recovery, it must be noted that we cannot serve two masters. We are spiritual first and everything else second. We cannot allow the forces of worldly concerns to erode our spiritual love and caring. We want to maintain our sensitivity and sincerity as our worldwide Fellowship grows. If we are to survive the incredible and emotional strains of our growth, we will always have to look to our roots to remain on sound spiritual ground. These roots have to do with the memories we each have of the excitement and happiness we felt when we finally realized that NA could indeed grant us a new life. There experiences put us all on equal ground in service as well as in recovery. They are our reference point for understanding what and why we do what we do the way we do it. The seeds of the miracles in NA are found in the following principles.

1. Hope gives us something positive to look for and move towards. We can admit our need for help as we begin to share in our common welfare.
2. Surrender to the things we cannot change through our own power is a way to get on with our lives. We seek a Higher Power of our own understanding and that becomes our ultimate guide and source of strength.
3. Acceptance allows evasion and denial give way to reality and peace. With the care of God, we are granted the power to welcome new people and new ideas into our lives.
4. Honesty is the ability to match up our insides with our outsides. It allows what we don't care about to go away and what we really want to appear and develop in our lives.
5. Openmindedness is our bridge to the experience of others. It is the passage way out of loneliness into the life of the Spirit.
6. Willingness to try is the beginning of doing our part. However grand or humble that might be, it is a state of readiness replacing depression and anxiety.
7. Faith is the evidence of our trust in God. True faith is the result of surrender coupled with experience that God can and will do for us if we ask for help.
8. Tolerance is knowing the other person has the same spirit in them as us and being curious about what that spirit is trying to do.
9. Patience is taking time for things to move into place without force or breakage.
10. Humility is knowing the importance of doing our part well and being open to the many forms of help required for a full and abundant life.
11. Unconditional love is given where we sense our spirit in another human being.
12. Sharing and caring is the active and passive forms of love that keeps us alive and allowing God to use us as instruments.

Spiritual growth is finding our way to principled action. It requires surrender, learning and practice. We have found that maintaining our spiritual condition is the best safe guard against relapse. We know it is our spiritual condition that determines the quality of our life regardless of our station in life. Many of our members spend a great deal of time in our meetings and functioning as part of our active service structure. Others go about their business in good faith and show their gratitude for recovery through personal service.

Through time, it becomes apparent that unanticipated differences of viewpoint come into being which need to be reconciled. Pretending that these differences don't exist will ensure that they are allowed to play the dominant role. We see this happen in any area of our lives where we are not free to openly discuss our feelings. While it may be a basically simple matter to resolve in open discussion, when we won't even admit something is wrong it takes on the enduring quality of stone. Until we found recovery, the inability to come out into the open with their living problems has kept addicts in prisons of their own making. Just the fact that there are others who share our concerns, sets us free from feeling that we are alone.

The Twelve Principles listed in the Fourth Chapter of the Basic Text, Narcotics Anonymous, are the keys to joining the Steps with the Traditions. It is easier to avoid the pitfalls that come with practicing a spiritual way of life against the strains of everyday reality. Too often good members have been pitted against one another where they have common cause in staying clean and helping others. Many times, simple misunderstandings have grown into grave conflicts entirely disproportionate to the original issues.

There is one thing more than anything else that will doom us to stagnation in recovery and then relapse. This is an attitude of indifference or intolerance towards spiritual principles. When we are young in recovery, the world is full of uncertainty and discovery. We are forced to summon our inner reserves to learn about getting clean and staying clean. We are really trying and really listen to what others have to say. We read spiritual literature and expect to find new answers to help us reorient ourselves to the clean life. When we think we know the answers, we float into indifference. We know we don't really know all the answers, but we have been clean a while and there is no one to tell us to get real anymore. Intolerance is when we do the same thing to other people. We discount the fact that they are clean and trying, even in difficulty, to make sense of their lives and find their way out of their traps.

Instead of floating in a sea of uncertainty, we begin to move forward in directions we get to choose. Many lost dreams have only waited in the darkness of our memories. Many times, we will find ourselves waking up to forgotten feelings and lost goals made impossible by our active addiction. Principles are what guide us around the pitfalls and away from the thin ice where reality cannot support us. We get on an honest footing with reality and it supports us. If there were really something terrible out there, waiting to get us, it has surely had its chance. We find that we have to act on the opportunity in front of us on a daily or a moment by moment basis to be able to see ahead to the next opportunity. If we do not act in good conscience, we feel ourselves falling behind. If this happens, all we have to do is ask the God of our understanding for help to get back on the recovery road. Principles give us words to describe functional parts of our new reality yet they all come from a spiritual focus inside our being. Without this focus, the principles fall back into being mere words without the force the spirit brings. It is scary to experience this. We all find we need help. This is what we do in our meetings when we get beyond withdrawal and the obsession to use is lifted from us.

Enrichment is a term for the fact that we carry our program with us into any area of our new lives. What we discover is brought back and shared with other members and may become part of the spoken or written body of the material we all draw in recovery. This way any experience any of us has that encourages or enhances an addicts chance of staying clean or living a better life gets taken into our meetings and shared out to those who may find it useful. This does not mean that we tell members to go to our therapist, our church or another support group. We can share what we learned there and how it interested us or helped us in our recovery. The process of twelve step recovery is amazingly resilient and absorptive of this sort of input.

From the computer field we hear, "Information overload equals pattern perception." A member might share some pain and anger from childhood that came out in a group therapy session. It is absurd that this member wouldn't say where the event took place. We can share these things without endorsing outside enterprises or expressing opinions on outside issues. The world is our preserve in recovery. No door is closed to us, why then would we shut ourselves in unless we were fearful, once again, of losing control.

The principles we explore in this chapter relate both to the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. There was an old idea that behind each step and tradition was a common principle. The idea is that the individual expression of the principle is in the step and the collective expression is in the Tradition. Admission of our addiction and the foundation of our common welfare both rest on our hope. . .

Many of our members spend a great deal of time in our meetings and functioning as part of our active service structure. Others go about their business in good faith and show their gratitude for recovery through personal service.

Through time, it has become apparent that an unanticipated difference of viewpoint has come into being which needs to be reconciled. Pretending that these differences don't exist will ensure that they are allowed to play the dominant role we see assigned to any area of our lives where we are not free to openly discuss our feelings. While it may be a basically simple matter to resolve as the alterable subject of open discussion, unadmitted, it takes on the enduring quality of stone that can only be eroded by time. The inability to come out into the open has kept addicts in prisons of their own making, until we found recovery. Just the fact that there are others who share our concerns, sets us free from feeling that we are alone.

Principles are the language of miracles. We have to increase our language ability to learn to make the right choices. Our minds often play tricks on us, due to our disease, and we use spiritual principles as guidelines our of the tricks. In NA we have our own spiritual awakening and this gives us our own evidence of the reality of the God of our Understanding. We have to have our own miracles for spirituality to be real to us. Without principles, it is easy to fall back into our comfortable rationales where most of the world is wrong and we, poor isolated victims, are lost in a world of fools. We have to have words to describe what is going on in there so others can help us and so we can help ourselves.

In the following drafts, the twelve principles listed in the Fourth Chapter of Narcotics Anonymous are elaborated on from definitions found in an unabridged dictionary. Extra attention was given to synonyms and antonyms for additional clarity.