Monday Step Study Meeting Opening:
The Opening reading used to start our Monday Step Study Meeting.
Hello, I’m _____________, and I’m grateful to be your Al-Anon chair today.
This is the opening for the Monday Step Study meeting at A Serenity Place.
May we all please observe a moment of silence to reflect on why we are here.
Would all those who care to please join me in opening with the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
We welcome you to A Serenity Place online Al-Anon meeting and hope you will
find in this fellowship the help and friendship we have been privileged to
enjoy.
We who live, or have lived, with the problem of alcoholism understand as
perhaps few others can. We, too, were lonely and frustrated, but in Al-Anon
we discover that no situation is really hopeless, and that it is possible
for us to find contentment, and even happiness, whether the alcoholic is
still drinking or not.
We urge you to try our program. It has helped many of us find solutions that
lead to serenity. So much depends on our own attitudes, and as we learn to
place our problem in its true perspective, we find it loses its power to
dominate our thoughts and our lives.
The family situation is bound to improve as we apply the Al-Anon ideas.
Without such spiritual help, living with an alcoholic is too much for most
of us. Our thinking becomes distorted by trying to force solutions, and we
become irritable and unreasonable without knowing it.
The Al-Anon program is based on the suggested Twelve Steps of Alcoholics
Anonymous, which we try, little by little, one day at a time, to apply to
our lives along with our slogans and the Serenity Prayer. The loving
interchange of help among members and daily reading of Al-Anon literature
thus make us ready to receive the priceless gift of serenity.
Al-Anon is an anonymous fellowship. Everything that is said here, in the
group meeting and member-to-member, must be held in confidence. Only in this
way can we feel free to say what is on our minds and in our hearts, for this
is how we help one another in Al-Anon.
THE TWELVE STEPS
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Study of these Steps is essential to progress in the Al-Anon program. The
principles they embody are universal, applicable to everyone, whatever his
or her personal creed. In Al-Anon, we strive for an ever-deeper
understanding of these Steps, and pray for the wisdom to apply them to our
lives.
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become
unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to
sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as
we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature
of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make
amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so
would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly
admitted it.
11. 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.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried
to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our
affairs.
Revised: 5/15/96
Posted: 7/22/96