Experience is not what happens to you. It's what you do with what happens to you.

--Aldous Huxley

After you've gotten off what you've been on and incorporated some of the changes we've talked about so far, you may be tempted to think that you've taken recovery about as far as it can be taken.

Don't believe it. Because recovery is a process of self-mastery that expands out forever and stops only when we do.

What all the processes and activities that we've talked about are designed to do is to expand awareness: awareness of chemical dependency as an opportunity rather than an obstacle; awareness of the relationship between body and mind, thought and action; awareness that our intentions can override our feelings as the primary factor in determining the quality of our lives.

But that's not as far as you can take recovery -- not at all. Because the ultimate challenge is to make personal transformation what we're about all the time. And that's more than the ultimate challenge in recovery -- that's the ultimate challenge in life.

Because if we can begin to see the truth in the proposition that we're not our minds and our opinions and our limitations, we begin to glimpse the deeper reality that no one else is, either.

And when we see that, we begin to see that relating to people from inside the shell of reaction and fear and anger and pain that we usually operate inside in our interactions with each other is as ultimately false and unsatisfying as relating to ourselves from the web of perfectionism, stress, and depression that we lived inside as addicts.

Want to step outside those walls? It's easy.

Look for opportunities to expand yourself beyond yourself. Do things that, before you got yourself straight, you wouldn't have even wanted to do.

If you're still not sure what that means, just look around.

See what needs doing and do that. Pick up a broken bottle or a candy wrapper on the sidewalk in front of your home. Make it your responsibility to make life easier for the people you see every day and to make the world a better place for people you don't even know. Find opportunities to share who you really are -- and not just what you think or how you feel about whatever was on television last night.

Just pull your attention off yourself and your thoughts and feelings and start focusing in on others -- and making a difference in their lives.

Because the final lesson in recovery is the ultimate lesson in life: We get closest to our true selves when we most give ourselves away.

Maybe that means that we're really here for each other.Or we're not really here at all.