Spiritual achievement has a plain side. We have all experienced at one time or another the simplicity of spirituality in action and wondered why it couldn't always be that way. Recovery may be similar to just growing up. Principles can seem irrelevant. When we are in pain, principles can seem intellectual and irrelevant. One who has absorbed spiritual honesty or comprehended hope can use principles to avoid painful traps or deal with unanticipated problems. As recovering addicts, we learn that each of us has a grace period in which we can learn about spiritual principles through working our Twelve Steps. This is where we get our strength. We need to take seriously all that we have learned especially when there is no crisis. Spiritual principles will always help us in unexpected ways far beyond the energy and time it takes to learn them.

Honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness are the basis of other principles that affect our spirit or sense of connection with our Higher Power. We may need to practice contrition and supplication rather than our strong, domineering personalities. A great many of us are absolute wimps and need to counter-balance this side of our nature with more aggressive abilities so we can access courage or the ability to take up for ourselves. Where we find ourselves lacking in the ability to be tolerant, we should look at it as a real disability. We're hurting and missing out on something if we are not complete characters with the usual array of traits and potentials other people have at their disposal. These characteristics are things that we can change. We can practice applying principles as if we were lifting emotional weights. We can work out to develop our emotional muscles. Selfless service can be being the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone.

Helping others sets us free. While we accumulate the beneficial effects within us that only helping others can bring, we are also meeting our indebtedness to others in a way for which there seems to be no alternative. Now, all this is a polite way of saying that the help we've received from others shouldn't enslave us and the help we give to others shouldn't enslave them. Sorrow and embarrassment require respect from someone who would help without adding insult to injury. It's essential for us to remember that unsolicited help is most frequently mistaken for insult by the person receiving the help. The individual feels, "They think they are so smart or they think they're so hot! Their help is making me feel bad so I'm going to get them back!" This is one reason we wait until someone really asks us for help! Is it any wonder that often they retaliate and feel totally justified in doing so. This is true especially if their belief system and the values which they live by tell them that a perceived deficiency in themselves gives them the right to move themselves upward by bringing the other person downward. This is reasonable in a certain primitive sense. Most people notice that this approach leads to various troubles that reduce not only the quality of their lives but also the doors open to them. This, unfortunately, is the big stumbling block for a certain number of professionals, religious people, and some addicts early in the recovery process. We remain alert to the watchfulness in our newcomers. They have been many places and most often are underestimated and mistreated. Helping them requires demonstrating a certain good sense and exercising proper caution. Don't let the drowning swimmer pull you down. Hand them a life jacket, let them realize they are not going to drown and them help them to shore. We don't discourage our members from helping others, that would be absurd. We do admonish and hesitate to send our newcomers on Twelve-step calls. We acknowledge that some benefits of recovery require time, effort, and practice on our part. We utilize a system of procedures and policies within our Twelve Traditions to avoid all but the most insidious problems.

We must learn to distinguish between pain-motivated changes and the desire for recovery so that we can more effectively carry the message. Many addicts come to us in pain, start to feel better, and then, wander off. Only those with desire will find recovery. This is not our choice but others will try to make it seem so. All addicts have moved towards a lifestyle that exploits personal pain as one strategy to get an edge or leverage on others. Recovering addicts are different simply because we admit and gradually come to terms with our pain in the course of our recovery. Helping others discover this method, we have to look unceasingly for those with desire and clear minds and hearts. The disease will find a way to hurt us and make us suffer, even if we're ‘in the right!’ If addiction played fair, recovery would be a far different process and addicts might have begun to get clean a long time ago. We know this is not the case and have had to deal at close quarters with the worse sort of backbiting, ingratitude, and wrongdoing in others. It can feel strange to be the exploited instead of the exploiter. With practice, we can take up for ourselves without having to attack our attackers.

Prayer and meditation might be like sending and receiving. We ask for knowledge of God's will and the ability to know that will. Also, and more importantly, prayer might be a way to get in the mood to meditate, express gratitude, or process what we learn after meditation. Meditation might be a state ‘in the middle’ between us and God. It might be like looking through a porthole into our interior to see the dominant themes and stare at our internal life. Then, we might be able to move our focal point into the midst of what we have otherwise been looking at so that we are inside and can reach out and make changes. One of the most astounding notions to surface in the last few years is going back to explore and re-experience our childhoods or earlier lives and to take the full power, love, courage, and understanding we presently have with us. By vividly experiencing memories of past pain, we may draw different conclusions and effect different outcomes, especially in the life we are yet to live in the future. This may take the sting our of past pain and eliminate the event as an injury from our futures. All this and with God's help, we can pray for extra strength and guidance to make our inward journey and if necessary go back in with friends to deal with problem areas we have trouble resolving by ourselves. This kind of intense reality alteration with the help of an all-loving, all-powerful creator can take personality change to a new level of importance in our recovery.

In our personal experiences, honesty is a process of seeking the truth about our self-destructive thinking patterns. Our disease knows it works and sometimes we do not want what works until we hurt bad enough. Pain is a motivator and is responsible for much of our growth as we go through this process moving towards self-acceptance. Honesty is probably one of the most deep-rooted and personal tools in recovery. Without basic honesty, all of the structure of our personal growth is not taking a firm hold on a good foundation. Some of us feel that honesty is deep change from the very beginning. We have a desire to change and as time passes, the desire to change seems to be not quite enough. Then the ‘honest’ desire to change takes hold. Then, we realize that we have to be honest in every aspect of our lives. Our lying, cheating, and stealing kept us looking over our shoulder. In recovery, lying, cheating, and stealing would still keep me looking our my shoulder. We have no growth or no real recovery if I am not being honest. I am only a junkie without drugs.

Gratitude stems from the fact that today there is nothing that guarantees recovery like helping another addict. At those times when nothing else really seems to work, and we are ready to give up again, a suffering addict comes to us for help. It is like magic, as we give of ourselves, we get out of ourselves. We become a conduit for the healing power of God working through us and as this happens, we heal too. Carrying a message of recovery may teach us objectivity. We are not the authors of the principles of recovery, just the couriers. We take a gift from God and translate it into language that a hurting newcomer can relate to from the start. The newcomer might not know how to pray or what to pray for, but he or she seeks our help. We are the answer to their unuttered prayer. If he or she but knew what to ask for, they would ask for someone who knew exactly how they felt, to explain how we had managed to deal with the problem, survive, and prevail. Carrying the message implies the egoless willingness to let God use us as a tool. We see God's will live in all things through carrying the message.