Q. Please advise us the best method of freeing oneself from intoxication. Besides chanting and proper association are there any other specific recomendations?
A. One of the most successful organisations in the field of deaddiction is ‘Alcoholc annonymus’. Their principles to deal with de-addiction are very much based on spirituality. The main focus is to avoid persons and situations which will help intoxication.
THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS ARE AS FOLLOWS:
- We admit that we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable.
- We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- We made a decision to turn our will and our lives to the care of God as we understood Him.
- We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- We had admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrong doings.
- We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to all of them.
- We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except while doing so would injure them or others.
- We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
- We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- After having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.