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Step Twelve 
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
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Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics. It works when other activities fail. This is our twelfth suggestion: Carry this message to other alcoholics! You can help when no one else can. You can secure their confidence when other fail. Remember they are very ill.
Life will take on new meaning. To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends - this is an experience you must not miss. We know you will not want to miss it. Frequent contact with newcomers and with each other is the bright spot of our lives.
-A.A. Big Book p.89
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Although we enter recovery to heal a particular affliction, we find that, in the end, we have received far more than a specific healing of an addiction; we have received the gift of a profound spiritual awakening...
The second phrase in Step 12 reads: "we tried to carry this message to others." Twelve Step programs place great emphasis on outreach to those who still suffer. Another oral tradition says, "You can't keep it unless you give it away." Having received healing and spiritual renewal, we can retain them only as we offer them to others...
On a practical level, psychologists have long believed that there is a special capacity for empathy between persons who have shared the same addictions. That is why Bill Wilson encouraged alcoholics to help other alcoholics, and it is also why we now have such a proliferation of recovery support groups for different dependencies. Again, the premise is that people who have suffered from an addiction and have found spiritual healing from it are in better positions to understand and help others with similar problems.
- Serenity, A Companion for Twelve Step Recovery, p. 76,77
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The joy of living is the theme of A.A.'s Twelfth Step, and action is its key word. Here we turn outward toward our fellow alcoholics who are still in distress. Here we experience the kind of giving that asks no rewards. Here we begin to practice all Twelve Steps of the program in our daily lives so that we and those about us may find emotional sobriety. When the Twelfth Step is seen in all its full implication, it is really talking about the kind of love that has no price tag on it.
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 106
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