STEP TWELVE OF THE DEPRESSED ANONYMOUS PROGRAM OF RECOVERY

“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry the message to the depressed, and to practice these principles in all of our affairs.”

“Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. But certainly each genuine  one has something in common with all the others. And these things which they have in common are not too hard to understand. When  a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that  he or she has now become able to do, feel, and believe that which he or she could not do before on their unaided strength and resources alone.  He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of conscious and being.  He has been set on a path which tells him that he is really going somewhere, that life is not a dead end, not something to be endured or mastered.  In a very real sense he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he has hitherto denied himself. He finds himself in possession of a degree of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love of which he had thought himself quite incapable. What he has received is a free gift, and yet usually, at least in some small part, he has made himself ready to receive it.

A.A.,s (D.A’s)   manner of making ready to receive this gift lies in the practice of the Twelve Steps in our program.”

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Copyright (c) Twelve and Twelve. Pages 106-107. Alcoholics Anonymous World Service, New York. 29th printing.  1998. (Quoted in Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.)