Our lives as practicing and then recovering addicts generally pass through three phases with respect to our relationship with God as we understand God.

While we were practicing addicts, we ran the show on our own. Even if we claimed to have some kind of religious or spiritual faith, the very fact that we were addicts gave the lie to such claims. The addict is, as the AA Big Book suggests, an example of self-will run riot. There's no meaningful place for God in such a life.

Our entry into recovery was marked by a change in this area. Now we readily, reluctantly, grudgingly, quickly, slowly admitted God into the business of running our lives. Many of us started to regard our lives as being handled by a partnership between God and ourselves. Quite how this partnership was supposed to be constituted was something that we didn't tend to explore in much detail -- hardly surprising, since the notion of a partnership with God is completely at variance with any genuine practice of the Third Step of our respective programs.

The admission of God into our lives is a necessary step in recovery, but it's only a step. There must inevitably come a time when we begin to understand and accept that our lives in recovery are all about God and not at all about us. This is one of the hardest things to do in Program, and its very difficulty is attested to by countless members in 12-Step meetings around the world who are unwilling or unable to accept the fact that Steps 10, 11 and 12 are about the dissolution of self. In fact, it's in that dissolution that the problem entirely resides. The recovering addict typically has little problem with the authority of God in her life. It's the idea that she herself has no role in her own life that causes her to balk.

Once more, this is where meditation comes in. The idea of the insignificance of self can never be accepted intellectually, because it's not an intellectual concept. It can only be experienced, and meditation is one of the prime ways of experiencing it.