The healing of social and spiritual relationships gives us more people that we can get along with because it lessens our fear and reduces the number of people that we try to avoid. Through working the Steps we invite God as a spiritual force or being to move in and exert a force in the direction of our personal betterment and health. A surgeon may sew an open wound together but only the spirit of life we call God and actually make the separated skin, muscle, and tissue grow together again. For some of us, amends are like stitching the wound together so that the healing can take place. We know it is getting better when old wound starts itching as the new skin begins its function. The word heal is an important focus to our recovery process. There is so much out there in the world to discouraging us and forcing us to pay prices for stuff that we did when we were out of our minds. We discontinue our errors and replace them with positive alternatives thus accomplishing a healing. How we earn our living, how we look at other people, and how we provide for those who depend on us must all change in time. Helping others to heal gives us a steady flow of unforeseen breakthroughs and self-awareness. Areas in which we need help, which might have been invisible to us for the rest of our lives, will often snap into focus if we see someone else making a similar mistake. We may say, "Oh, my!" but our whole lives change. Perhaps we should say, "Oh, mine." Many times these are the little lessons that were missing while we were in active addiction. While other people were experiencing life, we were out to lunch. Healing for us is filling those areas we missed out on and moving into those areas where we've never been before. It is the increase of our life on a solid footing.

Practical spirituality emphasizes our spiritual experiences. As our experience grows, we increase our capacity to share. On the Ninth Step, we only put people on our list when we gain the awareness of our need for freedom from those ‘bad feelings’ that we cannot otherwise resolve. We aren't looking to complicate matters so we don’t go looking for trouble. We simply need to wipe out some more of the leftover pain from our active addiction. The Twelve Steps deal with these internal issues and help us establish a solid spiritual foundation. In Eighth and Ninth Steps, we move out into the world around us and begin to clean up some leftover messes. Some of these may be relatively minor problems that are more felt and imagined than potential hazards to our health or threats to our life. Where a serious problem actually exists, common sense generates a prudence that cautions us to go slowly and ask others for help. We should consult our sponsors instead of plunging wildly ahead. Many have made the decisions to go ahead alone and some have paid a dear price. Remembering the slogan, "Easy Does It" is most appropriate in this Step. Some of us use the concept, "When in doubt – Don’t" and call our sponsors or get to a meeting to get a reality check.