[{"content":"Many people arrive at recovery angry at a God they were handed as children, or empty of any God at all. Both conditions are workable. What does not work is the demand that you feel certain before you ask for help.\n\u0026ldquo;God as we understood Him\u0026rdquo; is a mercy in the program, not a loophole. It means you are not required to borrow someone else\u0026rsquo;s certainty. It also means you are not permitted to call your own craving God. A Higher Power has to be higher than the thing that keeps wrecking you.\nBegin with contact, not a system You do not need a theory of the universe today. You need a direction to face when you tell the truth. Face it. Say what you did, what you fear, and what you want to be kept from. If the only honest name you have is Help, use that name until a truer one is given.\nPeople of deep faith sometimes fear this openness. They think it dilutes God. In practice it does the opposite. It removes the fake god you have been negotiating with: the one who only exists to approve of you, or the one you use as a reason to despise yourself. The God who can restore a person is not fragile around your confusion.\nA test that is not a trick Live for a day as if you are not the final authority on your own life. When you are about to lie, pause. When you are about to take the first drink or follow the old compulsion, ask for a stay and then move your body toward a person or a meeting. Watch what happens to the next right action, not to your feelings about theology.\nIf you want a next page, read Honesty before eloquence.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/guide/a-god-of-your-understanding/","summary":"Faith, at the start, is willingness to be helped by something that is not your addiction.","title":"A God of your understanding"},{"content":"You found a quiet room. It will not ask you to perform a conversion, and it will not pretend that reading is the same as getting well.\nIf you want enlightenment, take the smaller word first: light. Light enough to see the next hour. Wisdom here means a sentence you can obey. Knowledge means learning what this illness does, and what people who have walked out of it actually did. Salvation, in this room, means rescue from a life that has become unlivable. It is not a slogan. It is the slow return of a person who can tell the truth.\nWhat to do in the next hour If you might hurt yourself, stop and open When you are suffering. If you are physically withdrawing from alcohol or another drug, contact a doctor or emergency care. Stopping suddenly can be dangerous. This page cannot manage that. If you are safe enough to read, drink water, and tell one person where you are. A text is enough. Then read the Guide to God from the first page, or sit with a single essay from the writings. What this path assumes You are allowed to want God before you understand God. You are allowed to be mentally ill and spiritually sincere at the same time. You are allowed to need a meeting, a medicine, and a prayer on the same day. None of those cancel the others.\nThe fellowship that has carried this path longest is Alcoholics Anonymous. This site is not AA. Go to a meeting when you can. The find a meeting page only points you there.\nWhen you are ready for a shape to the day, continue to a daily practice.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/portal/start-here/","summary":"You do not need an account, a perfect belief, or a sober résumé. You need a next true thing.","title":"Start here"},{"content":"Addiction trains a person to speak well and live sideways. The story gets smoother as the facts get worse. A spiritual search that keeps that habit will only produce religious language wrapped around the same secrecy.\nHonesty, here, is not self-hatred. It is alignment. The sentence and the life point the same direction. You can say, \u0026ldquo;I drank. I hid it. I am frightened.\u0026rdquo; You do not have to say, \u0026ldquo;I am garbage.\u0026rdquo; The first is useful to God and to another person. The second is a speech that avoids the facts.\nWhat to tell Tell the concrete thing: the amount, the lie, the cruelty, the money, the night you do not want in a paragraph. Tell it to God without cleaning it. Then tell it to one safe human being. Confession that stays inside your own head is still a private performance.\nLeave other people\u0026rsquo;s secrets alone. Your inventory is about your side of the street. Theirs belongs to them, and to whatever help they choose.\nWhat eloquence is for Beautiful words are welcome after they are true. The writings in this room are an attempt at that order: truth first, then a sentence careful enough to keep. If you find yourself admiring a phrase and skipping the admission underneath it, go back. Read the inventory and the light when you want a longer sit with this.\nNext in the guide: Prayer and listening.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/guide/honesty-before-eloquence/","summary":"The spiritual life in recovery begins when the account you give matches the life you lived.","title":"Honesty before eloquence"},{"content":" If you are thinking about suicide, or you might hurt yourself or someone else, call or text 988 in the United States, or contact local emergency services. You can also reach the 988 Lifeline. For substance use and mental health referrals, call 1-800-662-4357.\nStay with that paragraph until you have used it, or until you know you are not in that kind of danger.\nIf the body is in withdrawal Alcohol and some other drugs can be medically dangerous to stop alone. If you are shaking, confused, seeing things, having a seizure, or you are not sure you can stop safely, seek medical care now. Spiritual reading comes after you are safe.\nIf the mind is loud and you are still here Do one small sequence. Do not try to fix your life inside it.\nSit where your back is supported. Put both feet on the floor. Name five things you can see, without judging them. Unclench your hands. Breathe out longer than you breathe in, four times.\nThen say, aloud if you can: I am suffering, and I am asking for help. You do not have to feel religious for the sentence to be honest. If you have a name for God, use it. If you do not, ask reality itself for the next right help.\nAfter the hour loosens Tell another person what the hour was. Then, only then, read. A fitting page is When the mind will not be quiet or the guide page on staying when the mind is ill.\nWhen you can leave the house or open a phone, go to a meeting. Suffering gets heavier when it is only witnessed by you.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/portal/when-you-are-suffering/","summary":"If you are in danger, call or text 988 before you read any further.","title":"When you are suffering"},{"content":"Recovery fails when the day is asked to carry a whole life. This practice is small on purpose. Do it in the morning if you can. If the morning is already ruined, do it when you notice you are awake.\nQuiet Ten minutes without a screen. Sit. You are not required to feel peaceful. You are required to stop adding noise. If the mind runs, let it run, and return to the feeling of sitting.\nOne inventory Ask two questions, and answer them on paper:\nWhere was I dishonest, cruel, afraid, or selfish since yesterday? Where was I given something I did not earn: patience, food, a kind word, another day? Write the answers in sentences, not in a mood. If you owe an apology that would not injure anyone, plan the apology. Do not send it in the heat of the inventory.\nPrayer Speak to God as you understand God. If that phrase is still empty, read A God of your understanding once, then return.\nA usable prayer is plain: ask to be kept from the first drink or the first compulsive act today. Ask for knowledge of the next right thing, and the willingness to do it. Thank God for one concrete mercy, even if the only mercy is that you are still reading.\nMore on this is in Prayer and listening.\nOne reading Read a single essay, or a single page of the guide. Stop at the end of it. Rereading a true paragraph is better than collecting five.\nOne person Send a message or make a call. Say something true about the day. Ask how the other person is, and listen. If you have no such person yet, find a meeting and say your name.\nWhen you want the longer spiritual shape under this practice, continue to the Steps and a Higher Power.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/portal/daily-practice/","summary":"Quiet, one inventory, prayer, one reading, and one human contact.","title":"A daily practice"},{"content":"Prayer in recovery is not a performance for a congregation. It is speech, in the direction of God, about the life you actually have. You may use prayers you already love. You may also use unbeautiful sentences. Both are prayer if they are aimed and honest.\nA shape that fits a day In the morning, ask to be kept from the first drink and from the first old bargain. Ask to know the next right thing, and to be given willingness, not just agreement. Name one person you might help, or at least not harm.\nAt night, tell the truth about the day in a few lines. Thank God for one specific thing. If you harmed someone, write the amends you will consider when you are not exhausted. Then sleep. Exhaustion is not the same as holiness.\nListening Listening is the part people skip because it does not feel like progress. Sit after you speak. Do not fill the silence with a new request. The answer is often not a voice. It is a cleared next action: call this person, leave this room, tell this truth, do not send this message.\nIf your mind is ill, silence can frighten you or fill with noise that is not God. In that case, shorten the quiet, keep your body in an ordinary room, and do not obey sudden cruel instructions that arrive in your own head. Read Staying when the mind is ill before you try to build a long meditation practice.\nThe next page looks at the path as a whole: The path in plain language.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/guide/prayer-and-listening/","summary":"Ask for the next right thing. Then be quiet long enough to hear a smaller answer than you wanted.","title":"Prayer and listening"},{"content":"There is a path, and then there is the text of the path. The text of the Twelve Steps should be read from Alcoholics Anonymous, in the words AA keeps. What follows is only the shape of the walk, so you can recognize it.\nYou admit that your life has become unmanageable under the power of addiction, and that your own will has not been a reliable god. You come to believe that a Power greater than you can restore you to sanity, and you decide to turn your will and your life toward that Power. You look at yourself without theater. You admit what you find, to God, to yourself, and to another person. You become willing to be changed, and you ask for that change. You face the harm you have done and repair it wherever repair will not cause new injury. You keep examining the day. You pray. You try to carry what you have been given to someone else.\nHow not to counterfeit it Do not turn the path into a personality. You are not more spiritual because you can explain it. You are further along when you are harder to lie to, easier to live with, and quicker to help.\nDo not rush amends to relieve your own guilt if the apology would injure the person you hurt. Wisdom is sometimes delay, made with counsel, not avoidance made with shame.\nDo not skip the other person. A purely private enlightenment is a familiar hiding place for people who drink, use, or disappear into their own minds. The path ends in service because a saved life that never turns outward curdles.\nIf you want this in the form of a day rather than a map, use a daily practice. The last page of the guide is for the mind that will not cooperate: Staying when the mind is ill.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/guide/the-path-in-plain-language/","summary":"Defeat, faith, inventory, confession, amends, and a life turned toward other people.","title":"The path in plain language"},{"content":"Alcoholics Anonymous offers a spiritual path that has been walked by people who could not stop by willpower. The path moves from an honest admission of defeat, toward faith in a Power greater than oneself, through a fearless look at one\u0026rsquo;s own life, through confession and amends, and into a daily life of prayer and of helping others.\nThat is a description of the movement. It is not the Steps. The Steps have exact wording, and that wording is copyrighted by Alcoholics Anonymous. Read them here, in full, from the people who hold them:\nThe Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous\nDo not use a paraphrase on this site as your working text. If you are going to stake your life on a set of suggestions, use the real ones, preferably with a sponsor or with someone who has taken them.\nA Higher Power, before you are sure You do not have to settle the universe before you begin. You do have to stop pretending that you are the highest power in your own life. The drink, the drug, the obsession, and the untreated mind have already proved they can outvote you. A Higher Power is the name for a help that is not your appetite and not your panic.\nSome people mean the God of a scripture they already love. Some people mean the God they abandoned. Some people can only mean the care they feel in a meeting of strangers who want them to live. Start where your honesty is, and let the guide walk further than this page will.\nHow to take a step without performing it Read one Step. Write what it asks, in your own situation, without decorating it. Tell another person what you wrote. Do the action the Step implies, if there is one you can do today without harming someone. Then stop. The next Step can wait until this one has been lived, not merely admired.\nWhen you are ready to sit with other people who are doing this, go to find a meeting.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/portal/steps-and-a-higher-power/","summary":"The Steps are a movement toward God and toward other people. Read them in AA\u0026rsquo;s own words.","title":"The Steps and a Higher Power"},{"content":"A reading room cannot hear your voice. Recovery asks for that.\nFind an A.A. meeting through Alcoholics Anonymous, or install the Meeting Guide app published for that purpose. Local intergroups listed there will know which meetings are open, which welcome newcomers, and which are online.\nHow to enter You do not need to speak. You do not need to believe every word you hear. Arrive a few minutes early if you can. Say that you are new if someone greets you. If you want a phone number, ask for one before you leave. If the first meeting feels wrong, go to another. The fellowship is wider than one room.\nIf your suffering is about someone else\u0026rsquo;s drinking, look at Al-Anon and Alateen.\nThis site does not list meetings, because lists go stale and because AA already keeps them. Use the official tools, then come back here when you want to read.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/portal/find-a-meeting/","summary":"This site does not keep a meeting list. AA does. Go to the official finder.","title":"Find a meeting"},{"content":"Some people in this room are not only addicted. They are depressed, panicked, obsessional, traumatized, or living with an illness that changes what the mind can believe in a given week. Spiritual advice that ignores this becomes cruel. It tells a person to pray harder while their brain is in a storm.\nGod is not offended by a prescription. God is not proven by your refusal of care. If a clinician is part of how you stay alive, keep the clinician. Tell them the truth about substances. Do not stop a medicine because a stranger, or a meeting, shamed you for needing it.\nWhat spiritual practice can still be When the mind is ill, choose practices that do not depend on a clear emotion.\nOne true sentence, written down. One meeting, even if you say nothing. One meal, one sleep, one glass of water. One prayer the length of a breath: Keep me. Show me the next right thing. One person who knows the illness and the addiction, so neither can hide inside the other. If voices, visions, or sudden certainty tell you to harm yourself or someone else, that is not guidance. Treat it as an emergency. Use When you are suffering.\nA mercy worth trusting Sanity, in the spiritual sense used in recovery, is not a permanent mood of brightness. It is the return of a person who can tell the difference between the illness, the craving, and the next loving action. You can ask God for that distinction every day you do not feel it. Asking is already a kind of faith.\nThis is the end of the guide. The portal will still be there tomorrow, and so will the writings.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/guide/staying-when-the-mind-is-ill/","summary":"Prayer does not cancel medicine, and illness does not cancel God.","title":"Staying when the mind is ill"},{"content":"A mood is a weather system. It passes through the mind and convinces you it is the climate. In addiction, and in many mental illnesses, the weather is violent and persuasive. A spiritual life that has to feel inspired will collapse the first week the inspiration leaves.\nPeople sometimes say they have lost God when what they have lost is a feeling of God. The difference matters. A feeling can be withdrawn by grief, by chemistry, by exhaustion, by a week of white-knuckle sobriety that does not yet feel like a gift. God, if God is God, is not withdrawn by your mood.\nWhat remains when the feeling leaves What remains is a direction. You can still refuse the first drink. You can still tell the truth to one person. You can still pray a sentence you do not feel. You can still show up where help is, even if the room seems made of cardboard.\nThis is not a command to ignore despair. Despair is information. It may mean you need sleep, food, medicine, a meeting, or a doctor. It is not information about the nonexistence of God, and it is not permission to put your life back in the hands of the substance.\nA practice for flat days In the morning, do not ask to feel spiritual. Ask to be kept, and ask what the day requires. Write the answer in verbs. Call. Walk. Eat. Apologize. Leave. Stay. Then do the first verb before you consult the mood again.\nAt night, do not grade the day by intensity. Grade it by whether you remained honest. A dull, honest day is a spiritual day. A glittering, secretive day is not.\nIf you want a longer sit with illness and faith together, the guide ends on that subject: Staying when the mind is ill.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/a-god-who-is-not-a-mood/","summary":"God is not the feeling of certainty. Ask for the next right action when the feeling is gone.","title":"A God who is not a mood"},{"content":"There is a kind of advice that says: quiet your mind, then come to God. It is useless to the person whose mind has not been quiet in years. Rumination, craving, panic, and intrusive pictures do not step aside because you have become sincere.\nStillness, for most of us, is not an empty room. It is a decision about authority. The thoughts may continue. They do not get to drive.\nA way to sit Set a short time, five minutes, not a heroic hour. Sit in a chair you do not use for hiding. Feel the weight of your body. When a thought arrives with a plan — drink, scroll, rehearse an old injury, despise yourself — notice that it is a thought. You do not have to refute it. Refutation is how the thought recruits you for another twenty minutes.\nReturn to the weight of the body, or to a single repeated asking: Keep me here. If the thoughts become commands to harm, end the sit and use help. Stillness is not a place where you take orders from panic. The page When you are suffering is the right door for that.\nWhat prayer is on a loud day Prayer is not something you earn by achieving silence. Speak into the noise. God is not waiting for a better acoustic. Say the fear in one sentence. Ask for the next right thing. Then stand up and do a small ordinary act so the mind has a body to inhabit: wash a cup, walk to the end of the block, text a person who is safe.\nThe point is not to become someone who never spins. The point is to stop confusing the spin with the truth, and to keep choosing a life while the spin continues.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/when-the-mind-will-not-be-quiet/","summary":"You can sit with a loud mind. You do not have to win an argument with it before you are allowed to pray.","title":"When the mind will not be quiet"},{"content":"People hear surrender and picture collapse: a person on the floor, done with effort, proud of being done. That picture has nothing to do with the spiritual act. Collapse is what addiction already did. Surrender is the moment you stop helping it.\nYou have been managing God, the drink, other people, and your own reputation, often in the same hour. Management is exhausting because it is a lie about scale. You are not large enough to be the author of your rescue. Admitting that is not humiliation for its own sake. It is the end of a useless war.\nWhat you hand over You hand over the outcome you were white-knuckling. You hand over the plan to stop tomorrow, which has been a way of drinking today. You hand over the belief that if you arrange the right mood, the craving will negotiate.\nYou do not hand over responsibility for the next loving action. Surrender without an action curdles into fatalism, and fatalism is one of addiction\u0026rsquo;s favorite costumes. You ask for help, and then you pour out the bottle, or you leave the room, or you make the call. The help and the action are the same event seen from two sides.\nA sentence you can use I cannot do this alone, and I am willing to be helped. Say it before you feel it. Willingness is often a decision that arrives ahead of emotion. If you wait for the emotion, you will wait inside the old life.\nThen tell a person. Surrender that is only announced to yourself is still under your management. The daily practice is a way to repeat this without turning it into a speech.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/surrender-is-not-collapse/","summary":"Surrender hands the battle to God. It does not ask you to go limp, disappear, or call defeat a personality.","title":"Surrender is not collapse"},{"content":"Shame says: if they knew this, you would be finished. Addiction agrees, because secrecy is where it eats. The spiritual life disagrees, carefully. It does not say that every fact belongs to every audience. It says that a life with no witness becomes a fiction, and a fiction cannot be healed.\nThere is a difference between being known and being exposed. Exposure is someone taking your story for their use. Being known is handing the story to a person who will not use it, and letting it be true in their presence. Meetings, sponsors, clinicians, and a few friends exist for the second thing. The internet, at random, is a poor place for the first draft of your worst night.\nHow to be known without throwing yourself away Choose one person who has earned a portion of the truth. Tell one fact you have been managing. Stop before you turn the confession into a performance of how awful you are. Ask them to hear it, not to absolve you on the spot.\nIf you have harmed people, being known includes amends, in the way the Steps describe, and not as a public spectacle. Read the path in plain language, then the real Steps, before you confess in a way that injures someone else for your relief.\nWhat God does with the knowing The fear of being known is often a fear that God is the ultimate gossip: that being seen will mean being discarded. The witness of people who stay, after they know, is a small contradiction of that fear. It is not proof of a doctrine. It is evidence you can live on while the doctrine is still forming.\nYou are allowed to be fully seen and still be in the middle of changing. Knowing is not a verdict. It is the condition under which change can be real.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/the-fear-of-being-known/","summary":"Being known is not the same as being exposed. Recovery asks for the first, and protects you from the second.","title":"The fear of being known"},{"content":"Some of us learned to treat depletion as proof of seriousness. If we were tired enough, raw enough, busy enough with meetings and self-improvement, we must be doing it right. Then the body collected the bill, and the mind reached for the old relief.\nRest is not the opposite of devotion. A person who will not sleep is often still trying to be the power in the room. They do not trust the night to continue without their management. That is a spiritual problem wearing the mask of discipline.\nWhat rest is for Rest returns you to scale. After sleep, hunger is clearer, and so is honesty. You can tell a craving from a loneliness. You can hear another person. You can pray without using prayer as a whip.\nThis is not an excuse to disappear. There is a kind of \u0026ldquo;rest\u0026rdquo; that is only isolation with the curtains drawn and the old habits waiting. Real rest has a shape: a time it ends, a meal, a person who knows where you are. If you cannot tell the difference, ask someone outside your head.\nA modest rule Protect one block of sleep as you would protect a meeting. Eat before you make a large decision about your soul. If you are too tired to be kind, do not send the message and do not start the inventory argument. Write the fact down, and return to it when you have eaten.\nOne day of recovery includes the night. The essay One day, not a lifetime is about that size of life. Rest is how the size stays human.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/rest-is-part-of-the-work/","summary":"Sleep, food, and a quiet hour are not distractions from recovery. They are how a person remains available to God.","title":"Rest is part of the work"},{"content":"An inventory is a list of what is in the house. You open the cupboard. You write down what is there, including what has spoiled. You do not set the kitchen on fire to prove you are serious about cooking.\nPeople in recovery sometimes confuse inventory with prosecution. They write pages whose only aim is a verdict: guilty, worthless, beyond repair. That verdict feels like honesty because it hurts. It is often the opposite. A verdict ends the inquiry. A fact keeps the inquiry honest and useful.\nWhat to write Write what you did, what you wanted, what you feared, and whom it affected. Use names and dates when you have them. Include the good you have tried to disown, because a false darkness is still a falsehood. If you only record your failures, you are curating a myth of unique damnation, and myths are where the illness hides.\nThen stop writing and read it to someone who will not collapse and will not clap. The light is not the brilliance of your prose. The light is another pair of eyes on a thing you no longer have to carry alone.\nAfter the list Facts ask for responses, not for a mood. Some facts ask for an amends. Some ask for a new boundary. Some ask for you to accept a consequence you cannot decorate. Sort them with help. Do not publish the list. Do not use it as a weapon the next time you are ashamed.\nThe guide page Honesty before eloquence sits beside this essay. Read that one if you notice yourself becoming impressive while you confess.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/the-inventory-and-the-light/","summary":"An inventory names facts so they can be met. It is not a literary exercise in self-contempt.","title":"The inventory and the light"},{"content":"It is possible to attend many meetings and never join the fellowship. You sit where you can be seen. You speak in a way that lands. You leave before anyone can ask how you actually are. The room functioned as an audience. Audiences do not keep people sober for long, because an audience goes home.\nFellowship is plainer and less flattering. It is the person who texts you on an ordinary Tuesday. It is the chair you stack. It is listening to a story that does not resemble yours and refusing to correct it. It is letting someone know you well enough to notice when your voice goes bright and false.\nWhat you owe the room You owe it the truth in proportion, not a performance and not a disappearance. New people especially need to hear that the first days are survivable. They do not need your theory of everything. If you have been here longer, offer your number and mean it. Service is how gratitude stays specific.\nYou also owe the room your absence from anything that would harm it. Do not solicit. Do not romance someone who is shaking. Do not turn a share into an advertisement for your particular church, your particular grievance, or your particular brand of being the most damaged person present.\nIf people frighten you Many of us came in unable to trust a room. That is a reason to go gently, not a reason to stay theoretical. Sit near the door. Speak one sentence. Leave when you must. Come back. The fear of people is often the same fear as the fear of God: that need will be punished. Fellowship is a long argument against that fear, conducted mostly in coffee and repetition.\nWhen you are ready to be known by one person rather than glimpsed by a room, read The fear of being known.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/fellowship-is-not-an-audience/","summary":"Other people are not there to watch you recover. They are there because they need the same mercy.","title":"Fellowship is not an audience"},{"content":"A lifetime of sobriety, imagined from the middle of craving, looks like a corridor with no door. The mind refuses it, reasonably. No one can consent to an infinite task while their hands are shaking. The old wisdom is smaller than that, and therefore possible: do not drink today. Do not pick up today. Tell the truth today. Sleep, and let tomorrow be another asking.\nThis is not a trick to hide the length of the road. It is a true description of how a life is actually lived. You have never lived a decade in an afternoon. You have only ever lived the day you were in. Addiction lies about this. It says the only choices are total control forever, or oblivion tonight. Both are fantasies of scale.\nHow to make the day small enough Name the day you are in, including the date. Decide the next right thing before lunch, not before retirement. If a fear about next year arrives, write it down and decline to solve it before the meeting, the meal, or the phone call. Fears about the future are often cravings that have learned a more respectable vocabulary.\nHope, in this size, is modest. It is the suspicion that God can keep you through an evening you do not know how to decorate. You do not have to feel hopeful to act as if the evening matters. Put a plate on the table. Tell someone you will be there. Read one page, not the shelf.\nIf the day is already broken, it is still the day. Return at the hour you notice, not next Monday. The portal is built for that kind of return.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/writings/one-day-not-a-lifetime/","summary":"You are not asked to feel resolved about the rest of your life. You are asked to stay honest until tonight.","title":"One day, not a lifetime"},{"content":"This is a reading room for people who want God, and who are tired of managing addiction and mental suffering alone.\nThe writing here is original. It is shaped by the spiritual ideas that Alcoholics Anonymous has carried for decades: honesty, a Power greater than oneself, confession, amends, prayer, and the willingness to help another person. Those ideas are not owned by this site. The Steps, the Traditions, and the Big Book belong to Alcoholics Anonymous. Read them from AA itself.\nWhat this is not This site is not an AA group, not an official AA website, and not affiliated with AA World Services or the General Service Office. It does not speak for any meeting, club, or treatment center.\nIt is not therapy, medicine, or pastoral care given to you personally. Nothing here diagnoses a condition or tells you to stop a prescribed medicine. If you are in danger, use the page for suffering and the resources.\nHow to use it There is no account. The portal is a path you can walk by yourself: a place to start, a page for the worst hour, a daily practice, and a guide toward God. The writings are shorter essays, filed by tag, for the days when you need one true paragraph more than a program.\nRead slowly. If a sentence helps, sit with it. If it does not, leave it. Take what is living to a meeting, a sponsor, a friend, or a clinician, and let another human being hear it.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/about/","summary":"An independent reading room for spiritual wisdom in recovery. Not an AA group, and not medical care.","title":"About"},{"content":"These are doors out of this room. This page does not endorse treatment centers, and it does not sell anything.\nIf you are in crisis If you are thinking about suicide, or you might hurt yourself or someone else, contact help before you keep reading.\nIn the United States, call or text 988, or chat at the 988 Suicide \u0026amp; Crisis Lifeline. For substance use and mental health referrals, call SAMHSA at 1-800-662-4357, or visit the SAMHSA National Helpline. NAMI can help you find mental health support and education. If you are outside the United States, use your local emergency number.\nMeetings and the program Alcoholics Anonymous is the official site. Find a meeting, or use the Meeting Guide app from AA. Read the Twelve Steps in AA\u0026rsquo;s own words. This site does not reprint them. The Big Book and other conference-approved literature are available through AA. Buy or borrow them rather than using unofficial copies. Families and friends Al-Anon and Alateen are for people affected by someone else\u0026rsquo;s drinking. How to read this list A meeting is for fellowship. A crisis line is for danger. A clinician is for illness that prayer does not replace. This site is for spiritual reading between those helps, not instead of them.\n","permalink":"https://example.org/resources/","summary":"A short list of places to go for meetings, crisis help, family support, and the official text of the Steps.","title":"Resources"}]