All progress can be boiled down and measured by just two words: humility and responsibility. It’s said that our entire spiritual development can be precisely measured by our degree of adherence to those standards. Only by abandoning my self-centeredness and maintaining contact with a Higher Power can I achieve true humility. Only by regaining contact …
There are few absolutes in the Gamblers Anonymous Twelve Steps of Recovery. We’re free to start at any point we can, or will. God, as we understand Him, may be defined as simply a Power greater; for many of us in the Program, the group itself was the first Power greater. And this acknowledgment is relatively easy to make if …
What, exactly, is humility? Does it mean that we are to be submissive, accepting everything that comes our way, no matter how humiliating? Does it mean surrender to ugliness and a destructive way of life? On the contrary. The basic ingredient of all humility is simply a desire to seek and do God’s will. Am …
When I first came to Gamblers Anonymous, I thought humility was just another word for weakness. But gradually I learned that there’s nothing incompatible between humility and intellect, just as long as I place humility first. As soon as I began to do that, I was told, I would receive the gift of faith—a faith …
As time passes, daily communion with God is becoming as essential to me as breathing in and out. I don’t need a special place to pray, because God always hears my call. I don’t need special words with which to pray, because God already knows my thoughts and my needs. I have only to turn …
My conscious contact with God depends entirely on me and on my desire for it. God’s power is available for me to use at all times; whether I decide to use it or not is my choice. It has been said that God is present in all His creatures, but all are not equally aware of His presence. I’ll …
There are those in the Gamblers Anonymous Program who, at the beginning, shun meditation and prayer as they would avoid a pit filled with rattlesnakes. When they do finally take the first tentative and experimental step, however, and unexpected things begin to take place, they begin to feel different. Invariably, such tentative beginnings lead to …
There are no boundaries to meditation. It has neither width, depth, nor height, which means that it can always be further developed without limitation of any sort. Meditation is an individual matter; few of us meditate in the same way, and in that sense, it is truly a personal adventure. For all of us who practice meditation …
For many months after I came to Gamblers Anonymous, I paid little attention to the Eleventh Step, to the practice of serious meditation and prayer. I felt that it might help me meet an emergency—such as a sudden craving to return to gambling—but it remained among the lowest levels on my list of priorities. In …
In the words of Teilhard de Chardin, We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Even though we acknowledge in theory that we are spiritual beings, most compulsive gamblers had to experience some sort of spiritual awakening before we were willing to turn our lives over to a …