The 10 steps of stoic sobreity

We were unsparingly honest to ourselves about the overpowering nature of our addiction and came to believe that a better life was possible once we overcame its physical and psychological components.

We came to believe that, once freed from the physical components of our addiction, we could lead peaceful, productive lives by accepting our nature as humans and the role a human should play among others and the world as a whole. 

We took steps safely and thoroughly to eliminate our physical dependency on our substance or substances of choice.

We accepted that human beings live best when they live in accordance with their nature and determined to understand that nature. The nature of being human and the benefit of living in the world as a more fully developed human is as close as we come to accepting a higher power.

We committed to creating a vision for our recovered selves that would be useful to our friends, our family and others.

We made a list of our personal character strengths and weakness and committed to enhancing our strengths and mitigating our weaknesses, and continued to do this routinely.

As thoroughly as possible without creating harm to others, we cleaned up the wreckage of our past by identifying people and institutions to whom we owed amends and then made them to the best of our ability.

We resolved to being rigorously honest with ourselves and with others and to keeping appropriate commitments whenever possible. When we fell short, we promptly admitted it to ourselves and the other party, and resolved to learn from the shortcoming and improve our performance in future situations.

To realize the vision of our best obtainable selves, we resolved to build our new character in terms of:

a.  Courage

b.  Temperance

c.  Justice

d.  Wisdom

To deal with life on life’s terms and develop a personal peace that would not tempt us to relapse, we committed to live according to certain principles and apply them to any circumstance that would jeopardize that peace and therefor our utility to our friends, family and the world.

a.  Summum Bonum. We contemplate the greatest good and work toward realizing it.

b.  Amor Fati. We accept and embrace our fate.

c.  Premeditatio Malorum. We contemplate the possibility of future troubles in order not to be surprised by them and unprepared for them.

d.  The Obstacle Is the Way. We accepted and embraced that people and circumstances will impede our progress, and that overcoming them is an essential part of our journey to peace and our residence in it.

e.  Ego Is the Enemy. We understood that a disproportionate focus on self and the elevation of our needs over those of others is lethal to living a life of peace and utility. We should think neither inaccurately highly nor lowly of ourselves.

f.  Sympatheia. We accepted that the best way to serve ourselves is to serve others, what’s good for the hive is good for the bee, and what’s good for the bee is good for the hive.

g.  Memento Mori. We resolved to accept the fact of our mortality and to act in constant awareness of it, believing further that we owe it to ourselves and others to make the best, most productive use of our time we can.