The Twelve Steps
The path AHA walks — read slowly, one Step at a time. They are suggestions born of experience, not commandments.
We admitted we had been disconnected from our roots and ourselves, and that our lives had become unmanageable.
We came to believe that there are spiritual powers greater than ourselves that could restore us to unity.
We made a decision to turn our life and will to our higher powers, as we understood them.
We made peace with the swing of things — the departure and the return, the loss and the recovery — and learned to breathe steady while the tide moves us.
We accepted that the world we experience is shaped by the mind, and that to change our life we had to learn journeying through it.
We learned to read the world around us and the world within us by journeying into our lower world as well as into the upper world. We found there a reflection of what is here.
We finally faced the opposites we had sometimes refused — fear and courage, femininity and masculinity, ancestor and self — and learned that they are one thing scaling in degrees.
We took honest and fearless inventory of our lives, owned our part without excuse, admitted to our spirits and to another human being the nature of our dis-ease, then made amends when compassionately possible.
We accepted that we are not fixed things but moving energy, and began the daily practice of raising and sustaining our state — through breath, drum, stillness, and ritual — turning, a little more each day, toward who we were becoming.
We experience the last breath of the past and welcome the first of the new. The sacred time is a circle, our horizon is a circle, we are a circle. We are reborn.
We honestly assessed ourselves daily and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. We try to deepen our contact with our higher spiritual powers, praying only for knowledge of their will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we carry the message to other human beings and we practice these principles in every part of our lives.
Adapted for AHA from the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which A.A. neither endorses nor is affiliated with this adaptation.