Narcotics Anonymous Way of Life ~ 2012 Form ~ When It Works: 12 Basics The Twelve Principles of Narcotics Anonymous 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 to 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 dont care about to go away and what we really want to appear and develop in our lives. 5. Open mindedness is our bridge to the experience of others. It is the passageway 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. Principles are the language of miracles. Increasing our language ability helps us make the right choices. Our minds often play tricks on us, due to our disease, and we use spiritual principles as guidelines to escape our old ways. These principles can be mimicked but unspiritual people lack certain characteristics associated with spiritual growth. Love, caring, patience, peace of mind are hard attributes to fake! We each have to reach a point of surrender to enter the state we call recovery. 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 learn or create words to describe what is going on in our hearts so others can help us and so we can help ourselves. Recovery is getting back with humanity. Spiritual growth is discovering ways to put principles into action. To grow spiritually requires three things: surrender, learning and practice. We have found that maintaining our spiritual condition is the best safe guard against relapse. Our spiritual condition determines the quality of our life. Regardless of our station in life, it is possible to achieve a great state of mind and spirit. 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. Personal service is helping addicts seeking recovery. As we grow in recovery, unanticipated differences of viewpoint develop from our newly acquired information. When we begin to apply it, we discover ways to reconcile what we have learned with what we have known before and the situations around us. Pretending that these differences dont exist will ensure that they dominate us. Secrets have great power. 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 simple matter to resolve in open discussion, when we wont 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 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 under Step 12 in the Fourth Chapter of the Basic Text, Narcotics Anonymous. They 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. Stubbornness and close-mindedness prolong the conflict. Communicators must intervene lest nature take its course
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 16:09:42 +0000
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