Introduction to My Spiritual Toolkit – Your Daily Reprieve from Alcoholism

My name is Nathan and I’m the creator of MySpiritualToolkit.com.  I’m also a grateful recovering member of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) with over 16 years years of sobriety.

The Big Book says we are given a daily reprieve from alcohol based on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.  The goal of this application is to use technology to make it easier for us to maintain our spiritual condition on a daily basis and not relapse back into alcoholism.  It also says that alcohol is a subtle foe!  source: http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_bigbook_chapt6.pdf

So I’m creating this to help you get your daily reprieve from alcoholism by working the 10th step on a daily basis.

Thanks to the program of A.A. I was able to go back to college after I got sober and studied computer information systems and have been a Software Engineer for over 10 years now.

About 6 months into my sobriety I was so afraid that someone would find my first written fourth step that I cut it up into tiny pieces and threw it away in a public dumpster out of fear that someone would find it.  Unfortunately I hadn’t started to work on my 8th step Amends List yet and my sponsor pointed out that normally people use the fourth column of their fourth step list to create this list…  We both got a good laugh out of it.  🙂

I’m not as paranoid as I was back then but my personal inventories still need to be private unless I share them with a sponsor.

The past 10 years or so I’ve been creating inventories in spread sheets and writing my nightly journal entries using google docs.  Basically I had things spread out all over the place and no secure way to quickly access them when on the go.  I also wanted my entries to be automatically time stamped so that I could view previous journal entries and resentments.

I also wanted to be able to do a tailored step study guide in an online interactive format with guidance from the best step study guides available for example I’m a big fan of the Joe and Charlie tapes and I’ve enjoyed doing some of the other step study guides available.  My problem is that everything is in paper format and I wanted an interactive way to complete the step study guides.

I also wanted a secure forum to communicate with other alcoholics not one that is freely open to anyone that can register.  This would help ensure that only people serious about their recovery are in the forums.

I’d like to be able to build and provide all these features for free but that’s simply not possible.  I will however be donating 100% of all net profits to charity and I offer hardship discounts to anyone in need of a free membership.

I met my wife in the program 12 years ago and we have been married the last 10 years.  We have two wonderful children ages seven and four.  I’ve received so many gifts from the program of A.A. and the 12 Steps that as I’ve heard in the rooms I wouldn’t trade my worst day in recovery for my best day of drinking.

And finally I wanted something to help me gauge when I was slipping in my program and resting on my laurels which the longer I’ve been sober the easier it is to do.  The big book describes it as your daily reprieve from alcoholism because we will never be cured of alcoholism what we get is a daily reprieve on the basis of our spiritual condition.

My next step is to create the mobile version of the application which I think will really help people work the program when they are on the go!

Thanks! and more later….