We try to gain self-esteem and security by making demands of ourselves and others that neither they nor we can meet. With failure come anger and resentment and concomitant emotions like depression and self-pity. These diseased emotions lose their power over us when we consistently practice the virtues of faith and humility through a trusting

Motivated by a desire to do God’s will, to be of service and of help, we ask “each morning in meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness and love” (ibid., p. 83), for when we practice these and the other virtues as reflections of a spiritually transformed character, anger loses its triggers and resentment its

Honestly seeing our defects for what they are instead of trying to rationalize them, we can then focus on letting them go and practicing their virtuous counterparts, rather than responding to wrong with wrong.

As we take inventory and examine our resentments, issuing from hurts real or imagined, we begin to see the exact nature of these resentments in the character defects that lie behind and account for them.

Said differently, character defects will tend to show up in warped emotions that are out of line with the true nature of a given situation, while character virtues will tend to manifest in emotions that are appropriate to a particular circumstance. By practicing the virtues, we cultivate the soil from which healthy emotions sprout; by letting go of

Gradually, I come to understand God as “the Great Reality” (ibid., p. 55), the ultimate source of all that is true and all that is good. A desire grows in me to see things the way he wants me to see them, to live the way he wants me to live. In the fullness of time, doing his will and growing into the person he wants me to be becomes my

This is the basic paradigm. I bring the desire and the willingness and AA gives me the blueprint and the tools to build a whole new spiritual and emotional foundation to my life. How far I get in this project depends on the lengths to which I am willing to go to practice the principles that will result in a spiritual awakening that revolutionizes

I feel a little grateful here, a little hopeful there. Without realizing it, I have started on the road to recovery.

What a spiritual awakening does is to reconstruct my “concerns” and my “construals,” to give me a new perspective on what really matters and a new way of looking at the big picture of life, and within that larger context, at the little picture in the circumstances of my everyday experience. With this, my emotions are laid on a new, spiritual