Take responsibility
Recognise that the world, other people, the past, the projected future, so-called 'intrusive thoughts', temptations to fear, resentment, and suchlike, and even the body and the physical brain are not the reason for my unhappiness: they are the occasion for it. It is I who am responsible for my experience of my life.
Guard the gate
As soon as fear, resentment, selfishness, or dishonesty land on the roof or shout through the letterbox, repudiate them and turn to God.
Seek God
This means practising the presence of God through prayer, listening for God's will (= the attitudes + actions = AA of the day), and, if one must meditate beyond this, meditate on the presence, love, power, and other attributes of God or listen to elevating or edifying podcasts or listen to or read elevating or edifying books. George Eliot better than something about trauma in your tissues. No transcendental meditation or similar unless one has already solved the problem of selfishness or unhappiness. Nothing that leaves me with me and my thoughts and body. Sartre said, in a manner of speaking, that hell is other people. Quite wrong. Hell is self. Don't listen to the ego's temptation to use 'spiritual' methods to block out God, other people, ordinary life, responsibility, and engagement with the world. Instead, seek God in order, at this stage of our development, to engage actively, constructively, and joyfully in the world.
Get busy
- Perform the basic personal necessities of keeping the show on the road.
- Perform whatever administrivia are required to keep the show on the road: do the worst, the most frightening, the hardest things first, then shelve the rest for tomorrow.
- Fulfil family obligations.
- Fulfil service obligations.
- Fulfil work obligations.
- Carry the message at every available opportunity.
- If novel situations requiring attention arise, deal with them maximally efficiently to avoid getting bogged down in self; call someone practical, not someone who might be mesmerised by one's happiness and insist on peeling the layers of one's onion.
- If familiar difficulties arise, apply the usual measures but do not stop to fondle or mourn the difficulty.
- If one has been through the Twelve Steps once, the following are familiar not new difficulties and should be dealt with as such:
- Fear: disavow the fear, turn to God, and engage in doing God's will
- Resentment: disavow the resentment, turn to God, ask for love to replace contempt and surrender to replace imperiousness, and then engage in doing God's will
- Shame: disavow the shame, turn to God, and recognise one's status as loved child
- Dishonesty: drop plots and schemes and return to innocent work
- Guilt: apologise for wrongdoing, mend what is broken, then adjust the course to correct action.
- Take a minimal interest in self and a maximal interest in God, others, and the world.
- Appreciate nature, animals, and what is true, good, and beautiful in culture and in others.
Live in the problem, and the problem gets bigger; live in the solution, and the problem goes away.