The Step Five Promises

One of the things that I love about twelve-step recovery is that the learning never stops. There is a just layer after layer of personal growth of course, but there is also layer after layer of understanding the program and how our healing happens.

Consider this: I attended that great Big Book Step Study a few weeks ago and learned a new way to work steps six and seven. It turns out they are not passive—not the “wish and go” steps as I’d treated them before.

Then too, at that same workshop, I learned about The Step 5 Promises. Yes, I always knew—and heard read—The Promises that we can read after Step Nine –we read them at one of my regular meetings. But did you know there are changes promised to us after Step 5 as well? Well, maybe you did.

But take a look at page 75 in your Big Book. On that page, right after a description of how to do a fifth step comes this promising paragraph:

“Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall away from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have spiritual experience. The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly. We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.”

Those are eight more promises that we can start to experience even before we get to Step Nine. Isn’t that great incentive to work the steps. It is inspiring me. I especially want those “fears to fall away”. So I’m digging deeper.