What is a Spiritual Awakening or Spiritual Experience ?

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous states that “A.A.’s Twelve Steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole.” They promise the persistent follower that a spiritual awakening will bring about“the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism” So what is a spiritual awakening or a spiritual experience?

 A world famous expert in psychology once described this vital spiritual experience as follows:

 “They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.”

Spiritual awakenings and spiritual experiences manifest themselves in many different forms. At their core, the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are a process designed to make a person ready to receive the free gifts of a spiritual awakening and a spiritual experience through the practice of the principles embodied in the twelve steps.

By definition a process is “a series of actions which, when followed in sequence, bring about a desired result”. The practice of the principles employed in twelve step process of recovery first takes place as the result of  “working” the steps. Each of the 12 steps are designed to help the practitioner make meaningful changes to their personal thinking and acting behaviors. When followed in sequence, the authors of the process promise the practitioner that thoroughly following these steps will result in a “spiritual awakening”. 

Bill Wilson, one of the two founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, artfully describes the gift of a spiritual awakening in his book “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”. He states:

“When a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and being. He has been set on a path which tells him he is really going somewhere, that life is not a dead end, not something to be endured or mastered. In a very real sense he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he had hitherto denied himself. He finds himself in possession of a degree of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love of which he had thought himself quite incapable. What he has received is a free gift, and yet usually, at least in some small part, he has made himself ready to receive it. A.A.’s manner of making ready to receive this gift lies in the practice of the Twelve Steps in our program.”

Most people who make the practice of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous an integral part of their lives agree that accepting spiritual help is essential to their recovery from alcoholism or drug addiction. Once they accept this help they find they undergo “a profound alteration” in their reaction to life. This phenomenal personality change, which is essential for recovery from alcoholic addiction, is often termed a “spiritual experience”.

The quotations above are taken from the books “Alcoholics Anonymous” and “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”. At Discovery Place, experienced guides, who are in recovery, employ these books as their primary teaching texts.