For a long time, I thought Step 12 was the reward lap. The part of the story where you get to stand up, say you’re healed, and take a bow. I pictured it like the last chapter of a book: the tidy ending where everything finally makes sense.
It isn’t that. Not even close.
Step 12 reads, in essence, that having had a spiritual awakening, we try to carry that message to others and practice these principles in everything we do. Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say having arrived. It doesn’t say having been fixed. It says having had an awakening, and then it hands you a job.
I know something about that job, because it found me before I ever asked for it. I buried my father, my brother, my grandmother, my horse, and our family dogs, all in the span of a few devastating 18 months. I’ve sat in a hospital chair with my daughter on my lap, watching a man who used to feel like a giant gasp for air. I’ve stood in a Kroger meat aisle and physically could not make myself walk down it anymore, because my soul had finally caught up with my body. Every one of those cracks let something in. And on the other side of the cracks, I didn’t just get better. I got called.
A Spiritual Awakening isn’t a Feeling. It’s a Reorientation.
We tend to picture spiritual awakening as a lightning-bolt moment: a burning bush, a voice from heaven, a single dramatic turning point. Sometimes it looks like that. More often, it looks like slow, humiliating, holy attrition: a biopsy result, a diagnosis, a grief you can’t outrun, a body that finally says no more.
What actually marks an awakening isn’t how it arrives. It’s what changes afterward. Before, you consumed your life—your food, your relationships, your days—without much thought or feeling, the way most of us are trained to. After, you can’t unsee what you’ve seen. You can’t unfeel what you’ve felt. Author Rob Bell puts it simply: once you taste, you can’t untaste. That’s not a metaphor about flavor. It’s a description of consciousness itself, waking up.
This is the same reorientation at the center of any real recovery from addiction, from disordered eating, from workaholism, from the low-grade numbing so many of us mistake for a normal life. You stop asking, “How do I get through today?” and start asking, “Who am I becoming, and does my life reflect that?” That question doesn’t let you go back to sleep.
Why “Carrying the Message” is not Optional for the Truly Awake
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: once your eyes are open, staying silent starts to cost you something. Not because anyone is forcing you to speak up, but because a genuine awakening reorders your loyalties. You can no longer walk past someone drowning in the same water you nearly drowned in without at least reaching out a hand.
This is what separates a Next Level Human from someone who simply got their own life together and moved on. A Next Level Human doesn’t hoard their healing. They don’t treat their transformation like a private achievement to protect. They understand—often the hard way—that the whole point of being pulled out of the pit was never just to stand safely at the rim. It was so they could turn around and help the next person climb.
I didn’t plan to become a health coach, a homesteader, or a guide for other women rebuilding their relationship to food, their bodies, and their faith. I planned to survive cancer. I planned to stop grieving so hard I couldn’t get off the couch. I planned to figure out why my body kept betraying me. But every hard-won answer I found turned into something I couldn’t keep to myself. That’s the nature of real transformation. It’s contagious, and it wants to spread.
From Survival to Stewardship: The Natural Evolution of the Awakened
There’s a pattern I’ve watched play out in my own life and in the lives of every woman I’ve coached since. It goes something like this:
Stage 1: Survival. You’re in the fire. Every day is about getting through: managing the crisis, numbing the pain, performing competence while you’re falling apart on the inside. This is the Superwoman stage: driven by urgency, running on adrenaline, proving your worth one task, one meal, one managed catastrophe at a time.
Stage 2: Awakening. Something cracks. A diagnosis. A death. A body that won’t cooperate anymore. A quiet, persistent voice that says this isn’t working, and you know it. You start asking why instead of just pushing through.
Stage 3: Stewardship. You stop white-knuckling your way through life and start tending it—your body, your table, your relationships, your calling—the way a steward tends land that was never fully yours to begin with. You’re not performing wellness anymore. You’re living from a rebuilt foundation, and from that ground, you naturally start to notice who else is still stuck in Stage 1.
That third stage is Step 12. It’s not a victory lap; it’s a vocation. The Steward doesn’t need an audience or a title to start guiding others. She just can’t help but notice the woman two tables over who’s still eating standing up at the counter, still apologizing for taking up space, still running on fumes and calling it fine.
Every Table is an Altar and Every Awakened Life is a Classroom
In the early Jewish tradition, every table was considered an altar. I didn’t grow up understanding that, but I live it now. Every meal I prepare, every plate I set, every moment I choose presence over hurry has become a small act of teaching, whether or not anyone else is in the room. Our children, our friends, our coaching clients, our communities… They don’t learn from our lecture notes. They learn from watching what we do with our own plate, our own pain, our own second chances.
This is what it means to carry the message today. It rarely looks like preaching. It usually looks like:
- Cooking a meal with intention instead of resentment, and letting someone watch you do it.
- Telling the truth about your own healing, including the parts that are still messy and unfinished.
- Sitting with someone in their crisis without trying to fix them, because you remember what it felt like when someone did that for you.
- Building a life—a body, a home, a table—so visibly different from where you started that people start asking, “What happened to you?”
You don’t have to have it all figured out to carry the message. You just have to be far enough along the road to point behind you and say, it gets better, and here’s how I know.
You Were Never Meant to Heal Alone or Stop There
If you’re reading this and something in you is stirring—a recognition that your own awakening has been quietly asking you to become more than a survivor—that stirring is worth listening to. It’s the same stirring that turned my own broken table into an altar, and it’s the same one I now help other women recognize in themselves through The Steward Within, a 13-week guided journey from Superwoman burnout to grounded, embodied self-stewardship.
The program doesn’t ask you to hustle harder or white-knuckle a new set of rules. It works at the level where your patterns actually live—rewriting the story, rewiring the nervous system, and retraining the behavior—so the transformation holds under real pressure, not just in a journal. By Week 12, the work isn’t about you anymore. It’s about mission: stepping into the world as the person your healing has already made you, because your transformed life will speak louder than anything you could say.
Step 12 was never the end of the story. It’s the moment the story stops being only yours.
If this resonated with you, Start with our free 7-Day Micro-Course or Explore The Steward Within program to keep building your practice of conscious stewardship.
