Carrying the Real Message – Emotional Sobriety – Part 6 of 6 – Sandy B.

um i gotta say this has been an amazing experience for me i've met a lot of great people and um i think i've never blown out so much message from my heart in one fell swoop in my whole life and uh it's just been an incredible experience all around the people have been so gracious so nice Kyle and Diane and Bridget and Doug and so many of the others, just thank you for the hospitality and the kindness and the friendship. It's AA in all of its glory. Anyway, I thought I'd just weave a little 12-step stuff together and where AA is going in the future and some of the hopes that Bill Wilson had for AA in the feature. And like I've said throughout this whole thing, I don't know if you realize, I know that I feel I'm realizing more and more the magnitude of something that we've tapped into and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and that it need never be totally organized and that remain an anonymous fellowship and that we're like this underground drunks, you know, helping one alky, helping another. and it's you know most people especially people that are not alcoholic they still don't understand it because there's not a lot of stuff out there we've really maintained a tremendous amount of anonymity and yet grown a tremendously strong fellowship now worldwide and i just i mean it's cutting edge stuff it's just something really powerful and beautiful and who knows where this thing will be two three four hundred years ago when we're gone but it's in its baby infancy and um some of the most important factors for me is just to continue to carry the real message of aa and of course allow it to evolve but not to let things get diluted and watered down so the print is really important to me and sticking with the print and not straying too far away and understanding the structure of the steps and the principles and the application and the traditions. We don't have much. I mean, we really have 12 steps and 12 traditions. It's very small and concise. It is not this big, vast, vast thing. We do not even have a whole lot of literature to draw from. We have very few things that are even conference approved. So I want to be familiar with what we do have here, and I want learn how to grow from what we have and continue to drink from this well you know i'm looking at the um the 12 and 12 in step 12 and it says that practically every aa member declares that no satisfaction has deeper and no joy and no joy greater than a 12th step job well done to watch the eyes of men and women open with wonder as they move from darkness into light to see their lives quickly fill with new purpose and meaning to see whole families reassembled, to see the alcoholic outcast received back into his community in full citizenship, and above all, to watch these people awaken to the presence of a loving God in their lives. These things are the substance of what we receive as we carry AA's message to the next alcoholic. Nor is this the only kind of 12-step work. We sit in AA meetings and we listen, not only to receive something ourselves, but to give the reassurance and support which our presence can bring. If our turn comes to speak at a meeting, we again try to carry AA's message. Whether our audience is one or many, it is still 12th step work. And again, the drama and talking about yesterday's problems and the blaming and the untreated alcoholism, I think for the old timer and for people that are really trying to travel this road, that can be saved for sponsorship. If there's a meeting with a three to five minute share and a timer, I feel that it's my job to bring something of some substance to the table. Even if I was just hit from behind earlier that day and my car is totaled, whatever, then I can still bring some experience and some strength. And certainly if I'm in a depression, not to wallow and to spew it out to the group. Those, for me, are personal things, and it's not that I hide my untreated alcoholism to my fellows. I'm very candid to the people around me when I have a conversation at dinner or on the telephone, but I feel that as a whole in the group that I want to stand with something that has some experience and some depth and some weight so that I can raise the consciousness of the room because I can tell you, and I'm sure that you have experience with this yourself that if one or two people in a row get up and share back-to-back with untreated alcoholism the whole vibration of the room goes down and then the next person says oh i had that i got a restraining order against my husband too and then he broke my arm and my collarbone and all of a sudden we're talking about domestic violence and we're not talking about the solution you know and there are lots of people with lots of problems out there But if a solution is being interjected more often than the problem, the meeting gets to grow. The people get to grow, you know, the newcomer in any meeting can only grow as high as the emotional sobriety of any old timer in that room. So if we have a tremendous amount of untreated alcoholism in the room, how is the newcomor ever going to drink from a well or a Dixie cup and get any real spiritual solution? So these are things to consider all the time. You know, in my home group, I'm always out in front and I'm talking about the structure of the meeting. And one application that I give continuously to the people that help hold the structure of the room is if there is an untreated share from the podium, it's one of our people's job to raise their hand next and to get up there and to interject a message. Don't let two untreated people back-to-back share, and certainly not three or four. and i really watch this carefully and in my women's meeting because we can share two or three times we can double dip i have no problem coming right back in again and boom hitting it from behind to reassure that the message in the room is strong and we're holding the room together and not allowing the people to turn into sheeple and just scatter all over the place and you know holding a room in alcoholics anonymous and holding a meeting there's an art form to it there's a real god consciousness that has to come in i have to start feeling what's going on in here are the people focused is there chattering in the background and there's a lot to be considered in a meeting and i do feel that that's our job and i think that bill and bob that's exactly what they would want to hear in a meeting like this where we're talking about emotional sobriety and going further so it says nor is that the only kind of 12-step work. We sit in AA meetings and we listen not only to receive something for ourselves but to give reassurance and support. There are many opportunities even for those of us who feel unable to speak at meetings or who are so situated that we cannot do so much face-to-face 12- step work.We can be the ones who take on the tasks that make good 12-stepped work possible perhaps arranging for coffee and cake after the meeting or before the meeting where so many skeptical suspicious newcomers have found confidence and comfort in the laughter and talk you know making coffee and bringing a cake is 12-step work being the literature commitment is 12 step work recording the cds is 12 set work picking up a newcomer is 12 that work folding the chairs up it's all part of carrying that message and creating a space where people can open their minds and their hearts and really hear something creating a room where there's something comfortable with some substance that can unfold, dry with 20 years. This is not about physical sobriety. Physical sobrietry is great, don't get me wrong. I always get choked up. When I see cakes for 30 years and more, I cannot hold back the tears. Somewhere in the 40s and the 50s, I'm like, how? If this thing's only 76 years old, how the heck? It's just so mind-boggling and beautiful to me and I have a tremendous amount of respect for physical sobrietty, but more so for people that are going into this inward journey and finding the great reality of god deep down inside and searching for more and raising their consciousness and getting rid of their defects and getting self-honest so let's see where was i here um the central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous he has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves and so being a demonstration for sure that i've overcome things you know i can tell you probably one of the hardest things is to have been a prostitute in the street and then come back to my daughter who's still a virgin i mean she's just barely started her period and she knows that her mom has had all this bizarre six sexual encounters She knows her mother's been arrested repeatedly for this stuff. How do I face that? I mean, here's this pure, virginous child. You know, how do I meet that? How do i have a healthy discussion about that without sweeping it under the rug and pretending it's not there? How doI open a space where this information can be readily available anytime she wants to ask a question? And how doI handle the situation where she might look at me completely cockeyed? She might throw me away. She might be shameful of me. only a God of my own understanding can help me transcend a pain that big. And, you know, we've definitely come out of the other end of it. And interestingly enough, it wasn't nearly what I ever thought it would be. You know, the kinds of things that she says to me, probably the biggest compliment that I've ever heard from any human being is from my daughter. And she says it all the time. She says, Mom, you give me so much hope for people to change in the world because I've never seen anyone change more than my own mother. I believe people can change, you know, and I'll see people from my past past and they'll say things like, God, you don't even speak the same. You don't Even walk the same there's something so different what happened and I didn't go to behavior modification school. I went to a linoleum floors and fold-up chairs and funky coffee and crazy people with gowns that are open in the back with testicles and tampon strings hanging down the loony bin is where i grew i grew in the looney bin and what an amazing place to be it is so alcoholics anonymous is so so beautiful so we talk about this this um this uh spiritual experience they appear in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements interesting everything inside gets all turned around it's different my glasses are different i have a new pair of glasses and it starts in my subconscious mind which is really my heart you know and even neuroscientists will tell you the heart knows something it's fascinating the work that they're doing out there in in research where the heart moves out and then pulls energy back around i think in an 80 foot radius and it has this energy to know something in a way that the mind doesn't and so sometimes you'll see someone walk in a room and you'll just think god i have such a good feeling about them or i just feel so toxic i don't know i just need to get away and we used to just think oh that's some psychic thing but it comes from here and there's a whole lot going on down here that the nature of the alcoholic has shut down and the disease allows us to shut down because we cannot tap into that when we've poured so much liquor on ourselves that we come completely unconscious. This can only be truly tapped into when the physical mind is completely cleared of any kind of substance. And believe me, I have no outside issue on psych meds. Some people are so bent that they need medication and I've seen them have deep meaningful spiritual experiences when their chemistry is balanced out. You know, I would never tell somebody to throw medication away. I don't take medication, but I work with a lot of people that do and I've seen them have as just a deep spiritual experience as somebody not on meds. And I feel that that's a very unfair outside issue that I don'T have a lot of opinions on. I do think that it's unfortunate sometimes when people have just chattering untreated alcoholism and a psychiatrist wants to give them a med because they say, oh, I just have nervous condition. Well, duh, don't we all, you know, get a bigger God. And sometimes I can see that the medication is cockeyed and it's not right. I can See in their eyes, they're completely disconnected and that's not my job. I'm not their therapist. I'M NOT THEIR PSYCHIATRIST. It's just something that shows up on the radar screen and I can have discernment about that and I don't have to say anything about it. You know, in the soul of sponsorship, um, Bill talks about discernment. He gives this little, he gives this Little, uh, excerpt here without ever knowing the word many in a practice discernment, they prefer to talk about keeping on the path or keeping on the beam. Even without the correct words, they find themselves part of an age old tradition of discerning people. These people have an inner awareness of centeredness and not-centeredness. This awareness comes from an accumulated awareness of who they really are. They know where their center is, and they know where it is not, their true self and their false self. They know how to flow with their life center. So Bill was very aware. I'm not talking out the side of my neck. This isn't stuff that I made up. I didn't go to an ashram and pick something else out and try to interject it. It's the true AA message, but often it gets diluted and lost. Was there a question back here? I was reading out of the soul of sponsorship. A lot of it is letters between Father Dowling and Bill Wilson, who Father Downing was Bill Wilson's sponsor in the last years of his life yes that was that's okay no it's great oh my gosh page 75 is discernment in the soul of sponsorship you know this is such great the soulofsponsorship so Bill talks a lot about his relationship with Father Dowling and they wrote a lot of letters to each other back and forth. And a lot of these letters have been preserved. And so we really get to see what kind of stuff these guys were struggling with. You know, Bill had depression and Father Dowling could not stop eating. He just could not. He got bigger and bigger and larger. He was in and out of the hospital with all kinds of food problems and food-related problems and blood sugar problems and circulatory problems. Poor guy. I don't think Father Dowling was an alcoholic, but I haven't read all of his history. But I know that he was an incredible source of comfort to Bill and Bill definitely leaned over to the Christian mystic side, which is not burning Jesus on the cross and going to hell or any of that stuff. It's that indwelling Christ thing. So when he found God inside of him, he called it the Christ. And that's probably really the only difference is that when he, when he was able to tap into the truth, he called the Christ and he called all his baggage was to carry that cross, you know, but he wasn't a religious fanatic. It was really a spiritual experience. And he was very clear about leaving that outside of AA literature because it's none of our business. It's an outside issue. And like I've said before, please don't name your God from this podium. That's not what we do here, and it can really turn people off so badly when people get up here and do the holier-than-thou thing. I don't have an opinion on religions. It doesn't matter what you do on Sunday, but in an AA room, we have got to keep to the singleness of purpose. There's so much to consider and talk about in the AA literature. Why would we start drawing from outside things? We could go for hours and hours on what we have right here, so tapping into this stuff is you know what i really really um what i really want to talk about does anybody else have a question or something that they wanted to share no you know i go ahead hi i'm mary an alcoholic there is also a study going on that i read about a scientific study that says that our hearts and our guts have incredible amounts of nerve endings and that they're like our brains. So we don't just have the head, we also have the heart and the gut. So I thought that was just amazing that there's parts of us that we don'T even tap into that here, you know, even in the United States that we're mostly head people falling with our heads to learning how to lead with my intuition, you know? And my heart, the love of my heart. that's my goal here today. It's amazing. It's so beautiful, and I know for me that my heart was so shut off for so long when I first got sober. God, it was just so hardened. It was very difficult for me to cry. Anger was definitely more the theme for me. And then the floodgates slowly started to open, and there was a lot of grieving off and on. The type of crying that I'd never done in my life, I wasn't much of a crier, and then I just would have these waves, like sometimes days of just weeping and weeping. And it was the kind of weeping that something deep inside was purging. You know, and I've seen scientific studies that talk about the tears from somebody that has an allergy and they look at it under a microscope and the tears form someone that's grieving, the molecular structure is completely different. Totally, totally different. So this grief work of these sad, broken, damaged lives in Alcoholics Anonymous, the things that we've done and the things we've been through and the bridges that we've burned and the pain that we have created for ourselves. And then having to take total responsibility and taking ourselves out of the victim's chair so that we can stand and be somebody in AA that can carry a message of depth and weight. This is not for sissies. The real work in Alcoholics Anonymous takes a tremendous amount of willingness, a tremendous amounts of petitioning to God and a tremendous amout of prayer. And, you know, like I said before, it's not behavior modification. I mean, I really have to get down to causes and conditions with God. I have to Get Right with my Creator. I have To Get Right With My Maker or All Bets Are Off. I can look at the harms and I can Look at the Hurts and I Can Cry Over and Over About Them, but how can I overcome? How can I really be done in a healthy way with some of these things? How can i speak about these problems with equanimity? How can I talk about a past laden with prostitution and arrests and, you know, drugs and alcohol and pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization? Today I can talk about this because I'm not that person at all. There is no way you could get me to turn a trick ever. God cares for me so much I don't even care how broke I'd be. I couldn't and I wouldn't. That was all alcohol and drug-related side effects of a bad, bad, bad throw in the middle of a diseased state of consciousness. My moral fiber has been restored. I do have soundness of mind today. I can claim that. You couldn't get me to steal. I don't care if you found somebody's credit card and it had $10,000 worth of credit. I don'T even need anything. I DON'T want anything. You know, what would I do? I'LL go buy my own thing if I need it. I'll get my own shoes, my own car. You know, the path gets so narrow for me in a healthy way, I just don't get tempted. I don't want that for my life. I want to be a good AA person and I want to follow what God's will for me is. And as time goes on, you know, it gets easier and easier to have discernment inside and to feel that feeling of this isn't right or this is right. you know and that's not to be used as a weapon to other people most people being in their presence i can handle it doesn't matter how toxic they are i gotta hang out with a lot of toxic people on a daily on a weekly very sick toxic people that people don't want to be around people that get continuously fired people that have been married and divorced a million times people whose children hate them it's painful how can i have more empathy how can I have more sympathy sympathy men who are so twisted and perverted with pornography and all of those problems i mean the internet has just damaged men to such an incredible degree you know it's bad enough that some of these drugs charge you highly sexually but then to be bombarded with all those images and for what it does for the male is it really disconnects him even more and more from the human race and to be bombarded with pornography over and over and ever just yanks the heart out and energizes this lower chakra so that the mind and that are just blossoming all over the place and everybody just looks like some kind of hole, some kind OF thing to use and throw away. And the heart gets shut down. And I feel that one of the greatest remedies for somebody that's addicted to porn is a tremendous amount of love and compassion and service that they should be going out to dinner every night and getting the hell away from their computer, that they should be interacting with other people and creating new relationships and moving back into the human race to the best of their ability because that whole porn thing, just like the cake and just like the shopping and justlike anything else is filling a hole and a void most of us are so disconnected, the fellowship aspect of Alcoholics Anonymous I cannot stress that fact enough you know, and if you feel that your home group is kind of wobbly then take charge a little more. Be the one that says, hey, let's go out to coffee. Let's go Out to Dinner. I go out for dinner with my home group four nights a week. It's unbelievable. My daughter says, Mom, I do not know any 51-year-old woman that has a social life like you. And it's all AA, you know? She always says to me, you have more people that you can talk to about personal problems than anyone I know, and I do. I have a whole hotline of people that I can say, God, I'm just a little bit kooky today. i've built a real life for myself in alcoholics anonymous i rely and lean on and love the craziest lunatics in the world are my best best friends these are the people we sit at the dinner table and we talk about that we're going to build a retirement community because so many of us don't live with anybody and we're alone and we'll sell a bit and we dream about our piece of property with like 10 or 15 tiny houses and everyone gets their own space because god forbid we couldn't live in the same space with each other we'd kill each other but we talk about it all the time and i believe that it's totally possible to pull something like that off you know when we talk about there's no way we're going to bring wet ones up here this isn't a detox they don't get to come on our property they can go somewhere else or we'll meet them out at starbucks but no major, no major untreated psychoness on this property. It'll be sacred, you know, dinner once a week, a big barbecue and a grill, you Know, and one of my friends is a gardener and he's like, I'll do all the gardening. And people get so excited as we daydream at the dinner table that I can see it brings life because one of the thoughts that the untreated alcoholism can create is what's going to happen in the future. I'm going to be alone. I're going to die. And most of us probably aren't ever going to get married again. So what? Most of us might not ever even get laid again so what there's many other ways to be in relationship with people it's not just penis and vagina it's the language of the heart it's having best friends it's heavy lots of male and female people young old crazy not crazy whatever you know there's a lot of decent people that have a tremendous amount of willingness inside of them and they have defects just like me or anybody else you know we have our issues and we have our problems but i feel that the fellowship and the strength of the fellowship is very important i'm grateful to prime time in my home group i'm thankful to the amount of phone calls i'm grateful to the friendship there i'm faithful that i have dinner with those people and we talk about everything and we actually eat and talk about each other amongst each other that doesn't mean severe gossip or telling someone's fifth step but it means that you know talk about you know so-and-so's acting a little funny these days he's kind of sideways what do you think you know you know his share was so out there i could see the disconnectedness we take each other's temperature i do not feel bad about that i think that's a really healthy thing in our inner group we're accountable to each other and we keep our eye on each other And we interact and we talk in a general way about what's going on in the structure of our group. It keeps our herd very, very tight and there's a real great camaraderie in my home group and I hope it continues to grow that way. Primetime Men's DAG has been going for 20 years very, Very strongly. It's a really solid Monday night meeting down in Sherman Oaks and the women's meeting which I started five years ago really is starting to have an inner structure of the same rotation of speakers. You know we all speak the same type of message where we talk about alcoholism and we don't talk about yesterday's problems and drama and blaming other people. So we carry in my home group, a real message of depth and weight. And if the speaker doesn't have a message yet, he just doesn't get allowed to lead a meeting yet. And that's all there is to it, you know? And in some ways what that does is that gives the newcomer the desire to go further because some people really have a willingness to want to carry a message. And I think it's a good mile mark. That doesn't mean I can't share in the meeting, but to be a leader and to take a podium for 30 minutes, you really have to have something going on, something with a real message. And our, most of our meetings are recorded. We sell CDs. So it's, it's not a really big deal down there. And I think it raises the bar for everybody. You know, there's no cussing from the podium. There's just a lot of things we do to keep it clean and to keep it high and to keep it going in a heartbeat if somebody gets off of topic any one of us in the group will say get to the point or you can't do that we voted on our committee to ask people to sit down you're gonna have to stop stop stop stop you know if they cuss somebody will yell out language it's very normal that's the way we roll there's no energy or you know I'm not carrying a hammer or anything it just comes out very naturally there's nothing big ego behind it you're wrong. I would never pull somebody aside after the meeting and say, don't ever do that again. They get it once they've been reprimanded in the middle of the group, in the middle of a meeting. But the parameters and the way we keep our meeting clean and theway we transmit a message and the way we run our group, there's a lot of tightness to it and it works very very, very well. And you know, the people that are in my home group they all sponsor in a different way because we're all unique divine expressions of god there's no exact way to do this my sponsor right now is straight up big book from that group as outlined in the big book that is it it is the ultimate authority and that's it and i got so much from it i went line by line i had to underline and write all this stuff and he gave me everything he had he gaveme a whole freaking aa coleman set of tools in here alone and then you know for me I love the language of the heart, the 12 and 12, you know, the sermon on the Mount by Emmett Fox. I love The Other Literature. And I feel fine pulling from that. Some of it they say is not even conference approved, you Know, okay, now what's conference approved? And what's conference, not conference approved. For me, it's AA literature. If it says AA in grapevine, I'm feeling pretty safe with it. You know, so I pull from other things. But and when I sit with somebody, I always talk about the ego in the TiVo papers first. That's just the way I roll. Some people in my home group don't, you know? I feel that it lays out a great structure for self-reflection and I can see right away if the sponsee is even willing to self- reflect or not. And self-reflection is a huge part of this thing. If we're not willing to Self-Reflect, to look at self, to see selfish and self-centeredness, which is the root of our trouble, not alcohol, then all bets are off and how do we get rid of this self how do we offer the self to the power you know how do we allow the God consciousness to come in if we're not willing to look at the self so I want to see the willingness in a newcomer really you know and sometimes they'll come up and go God everything you said was so good I'm so sick I've got that stuff and I think that's great and then other people try to shine a flashlight and I can see that the blinders are on and they're not willing to look. And sometimes I don't go much further with that prospect. I do have discernment where I think this person may need to drink again or maybe go to just some regular old AA where they're talking about the drama for a while and continue to talk about the trauma until they're sick of talking about the genre and then go for the solution. But I'm only willing to talk about the solution when I'm self-reflective because I'm going to see that the solution is what's going to switch me from the inside, from the old character to the new character. But if I want to hold on to my defects and I want to remain sick, God can't do anything for me. And I can't doing anything for another sponsee. All I can do is demonstrate what I have. I can share my experience, strength, and hope. You can't get this through contagion. I cannot sneeze this on anybody. They're never going to catch it from me. If I say something that gives them an aha moment, I have to give all the credit to God. The God in me sneezed on them and the God in them caught the moment and woke up and went, aha. You know, and all of a sudden they look out the window and they go, wow, those trees are so green out there. And I think, yeah, here we go. You know? Somebody's waking up. But I've also seen that go back to sleep again and there they go the other way. I don't know what anybody's life path is. I know that for me, I just continue to spin my straw into gold day and night, day and night. And I'm sure there are things that I am still not willing to look at, you know, in my own inner journey. The stuff that I'm watching now are like fluctuations in my voice and immediate reactions of any subtle type. when I look at someone, hair, eyes, the way they walk, like even a subtle, almost a whisper where my mind wants to tell me anything about who I think they are. Like that's how quickly I'm catching the mouse now. Like, uh-uh, I don't know anything. I don'T KNOW ANYTHING. I DON'T KNOW ANYthing. Like I'm going deeper and deeper into that moment by moment application because I want to have every experience be a brand new experience with no reference to the old. So I'm trying to the best of my ability not to bring any yesterday's ideas or concepts into the moment. Even if I've had conflict with this person before, which can get tricky, I still want to stand as clear as possible and just ask for power. This is a new moment. Help me have a brand-new experience with this Person. And because God really knows that I want this, God's going to give me the grace. And, you know, like I said before and I'll say again, And grace, it's a free and an undeserved gift. I do not know how to control grace. If I did, I would be floating away somewhere in an orange robe walking on water. It comes and goes. It knows something, and it comes in and awakens the spirit, and then it leaves again, and my wings are broken, and I'm in the third-dimensional world. But what I do is I continue to back down and stay in a surrendered state. I just don't go into the boxing ring and put on my gloves. I try to stay away from conflict to the best of my ability. So I can, with healthy self-will, produce a surrender, but the subconscious grace surrender only in the end is produced by God. When I really have the new pair of glasses and things look amazingly sparkly, it's God working in my life. Self could never, ever do that. And sometimes I've had a lot of grace. I've had whole weeks and months of grace and I've had whole week and months where I can't seem to get the cord back into the wall socket but I wait patiently and I don't leave because there's no place left for me to go I'm going to look at a couple of things in uh does anybody have a question or something that they wanted to say no I'm gonna look at it I'm looking at a couple of things in the language of the heart this is page 307. Okay. Has the era of coffee and cake and fast friendships vanished from the AA scene because we're going modern? I think that we have to keep the faith as I see it. This is how we have made AA truly simple. Are we moving away from our early tradition that AA as such ought never be organized? Not a bit of it. We can never be organised. We can Never Be a Government. Or shall we be members who shall not ever authorise boards and service committees to mete out penalties for non-conformity, for nonpayment of money, and for misbehavior. I know that every AA's heart shares in the conviction that none of these things can ever happen. We merely organize our principles. Really interesting that Bill would say that we organize our principals. So again, it's my behavior. It's this language of the heart. It's that I live by spiritual principles and then like I said before, even the principles of the structure of the meeting that we don't talk about a lot of drunkologues and a lot of drama. Our format in my meeting says we don' t talk about drunkologs, yesterday's problems or blaming other people. We talk only about looking inwardly describing how self behaves in the day we're in. I'm not saying you have to take my format and do that but I'm saying that for us our format keeps it so tight and I know that the five primetime meetings that we have are just growing and growing and going and growing Three years ago, we had a few people at our Saturday night meeting. Now there's no seats left in the place. And I can see that a big part of that is because we're continuing to talk about the principles, the principles. And there are many principles. What are the principles behind every tradition? What arethe principles behind everything? What are they behind every step? What are their principles behind admitting and accepting? What arethey principles behind forgiveness? So when Bill talks about the principles to me, it's like, what's the doing thing? What's the application thing? How am I supposed to behave here? So I know that every AA's heart shares in the conviction that none of these things can ever happen. We merely organize our principles so that they can be better understood and we continue so to organize our services that AA's lifeblood can be transfused into those who must otherwise die. that is the all in all of AA's organization there can never be any more than this wow so I know that builds really had this picture when they set this thing out and it's our job to remember oh yeah what is the picture let's keep the picture in mind these are things that aren't discussed enough and they're really important for people like us I mean I feel that if you showed up here you really have a desire to go further and be an AA man or a woman. And sometimes we're just not equipped with all the facts. And the more that we know, the more we can bring to the table. So I do believe that getting deeper into all of the steps, all ofthe traditions, the structure of AA, what it's really all about, and being armed with the facts about the disease, about Alcoholics Anonymous is going to be so helpful to hundreds to maybe thousands to maybe millions of people. And like I said, we're pioneers in something that's less than 100 years old. I guarantee these CDs are going to be heard somewhere 200 years from now. There is no doubt in my mind. I am 100% sure of it that something that Doug and Bridget recorded is going to go on and on. There's no doubt in my mine. I'm sure of it. I absolutely sure of that. That's how big this thing is going to grow into because alcoholism is not going away. And it's the one thing wholeheartedly over and over that's treating alcoholism, is Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, these places that do it without the steps have such poor recovery rate, where our recovery rate often is bad enough as it is. But these people that say there's no reason to have a God and there's No Reason to Do the Steps and you don't need to do an inner house cleaning or we'll teach you how to drink moderately if you have a physical allergy there's no moderately you know gosh you know i smell mouthwash and i get thirsty it doesn't it doesn'T happen that way not for somebody like me and being armed with the facts is a really important aspect of this program um let's see here now comes the question where do we go from here and what is our responsibility for today and tomorrow clearly our first duty to aa's future is to maintain in full strength what we have now only the most vigilant caretaking can assure this never should we be lulled into complacent self-satisfaction by the wide acclaim and success that is now everywhere so Bill's saying don't get all cozy on your chair because you think you know AA's running I don't need to do so much don't Get All Complacent just because you see it being widespread oh yeah man people are in the program all over the place there's no laurel to rest on here this is the subtle temptation which could stagnate us he says oh my god because everyone just sort of stops well there's lots of A meeting, other people are going to take the commitment, whatever. You go to the panel, you know. Everyone has to have a part in it. We're all growing this garden. We'RE all cultivating this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous. We have always rallied to meet and transcend failure and crisis. Problems have been our stimulants. Nice going, Bill. There are stimulants problems. we don't get easy smooth sailing here we're forging a path for other alcoholics we're leaving something we're living something healthy for so many other people we're creating a structure of a fellowship that can go on we're supporting people we're helping people we're passing something on we're handing a baton over and over to the next person and it all starts with here and being armed with the facts it's this language of the heart and it's loving aa and it's being armed mit the facts of what the heck is going on and what are we supposed to be doing and what's being asked of us how well though shall we be able to meet the problems of success we continue to search out the ever-present flaws and gaps in our communications so like i was saying before the communication of transmitting a message is a really important one where are the flaws with enough imagination courage and dedication we will resolutely address ourselves to those many tasks of repair and improvement which even now the future is calling upon us to undertake so tasks of repairing improvement i want to look at the inner structure of my home group. I want to look at the inner structure of how I'm transmitting a message. I want to see where I've gotten my success and my failure, what's worked for me and what hasn't. I can tell you for me getting mad at people and condemnation, believe me, I've been just as guilty as anyone else in here. I get so P-O'd sometimes when people like almost get it and then they're, they're gone, you know? And it serves me no good purpose. And I personally, I don't want people to witness that in me. I don'T think it's healthy for the group. I would prefer to be the demonstration of the woman that says, you know what, man, live and let live. You come back tadpole anytime you're ready and we'll be here. Do I always think that way? No, I get just as upset as anyone else. God, you moron come on. ain't never going to get it. That one's going to die. Well, we'll be at your funeral. You know, I can be just as guilty of that as anyone else, but it serves no good purpose. I'm not demonstrating the AA way of life. So I know that that's not the healthy way for me. And I want to go for more. I want To be that one person that the newcomer comes back in and 10 years, they come 10 years later, they Come back in this time, they have gray hair and a bunch of wrinkles all over their face and it's like wow you know so glad you made it back and that i can still continue to have an open receptive place for all alcoholics no matter how far down the road they've come because that's the whole thing that alcoholics anonymous is is really standing for here so the sense that let's see we still still clearer vision and an ever mounting sense of responsibility can be the only answers to these questions so a clearer vision and an ever mounting sense of responsibility that's for us guys we're in you know 76 years of recovery over here that's for us clearer vision and ever sense of mounting responsibility there's nothing to rest on now there's a lot of work to be done our next great area for future responsibility may be this one I'm thinking about the total problem of alcohol and about all those who still must suffer the appalling consequences of alcoholism. Their number is astronomical. It runs into hundreds of millions, and I just feel that it's so beautiful that he still really thought about the hundreds of billions of alcoholics out there. You know, lucky for us today, even just, you know, less than 100 years, 50 years after bill passes away that alcoholics anonymous is so worldwide it's everywhere i mean people really have a tremendous amount of um more hope than they ever did before i went to i went to nepal in in april and i went like all the way up to the foot of tibet and i stayed in this little guest house there was this tiny wooden plaque that someone had burned and made by hand and two little A's in the middle of it. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. And they have one meeting a month because there's nobody up there. And they come from all over that valley. And I don't know, there was like eight people at the meeting once a month. But I thought, I couldn't believe I go to a guest house in the mountains and rice paddies and God knows where. I mean, we had to walk into this village and there was a triangle with A's. Did you have a question? My name's Teresa. Hi, Teresa. It's not really a question, but you know what? We're losing the old-timers, and I don't know how to get them to come back to meetings. There's a lot of stuff going on in my home groups. There's all kinds of things going on. A lot of that discord, and I've been where you have about coming in and pounding on the thing and saying you've got to do it this way. But we're losing The Old Timers, And I don't know what it is that's going to bring them back and how we're going to get old AA back because that's what was there when I got there. And now it's so diluted, and there's so many people talking the disease more than the recovery, and it's kind of sad. I hear what you're saying, Teresa, and so that's the job that God's goingto put in your heart to do. I just believe somebody's got to do it. if you every single week speak from that place what are we going to do we're losing our life blood we've had a bad transfusion too much old blood has leaked out and we have too much new blood what are WE going to DO here we need some people that are going to hold down the fort and button down the hatches and straighten up and fly right when you speak from THAT place of healthy spiritual authority i tell you you can really transmit a message and people are going TO be attracted and the people that want to join with you in that are going to gravitate towards you and you know for me i know that sponsoring like finding two or three women or god putting two or three woman in my life that have are really starting to carry a message and then carry on lineage of sponsorship the way i do has made a huge difference you know even though i've had sponsors come and go and sponsors come ago i've got like three real good heavy hitters now those girls are doing a lot of the other work out there now they have sponsees now people are taking their numbers and i started this meeting which basically started in my house and then went to a mental health clinic and then going to an office i mean this meeting's been all over the place in five years i'm the only original player in there but i can tell you on any monday night now as opposed to two people five years ago there's about 35 people in there and i know that it's god and God speaking through me and me being diligent about a message of depth and weight. Absolutely diligent. We are not doing that in here. Say the drama for your mama. You're not going to do that in here, not in here there's 4,000 AA meetings in Los Angeles. You go somewhere else. And I say it just like that. You Go somewhere else and do that. We're not doingthat. We have a format format. Could you stick to the format format? I'll say all kinds of crazy things like that you'll hear me, yell that stuff out. I'm not messing around here. I take this so seriously and I don't want to go into a meeting where there's all that drama. So reeling an old timer back in is very difficult to make people do anything. The demonstration that I suit up and show up with is going to leak out into the meeting. And there have been times where there has been nobody in that Monday night. I have walked in and sat there with a coffee pot by myself at least five times in this past five years. And I have put my hands in my head and said, what have I done? Oh my God. And that's even happened like three years into that meeting. Nobody but me was in there several times. And like, wow, what's going on? That meeting is very on track now. Meetings take on a mind of their own too it's very difficult to completely um hold the parameters in i can only do what i can but all of a sudden some strange peculiar little group will show up that's disruptive and then the next thing you know five or six heavy hitters come in i don't know every three or four months it has a wave and an ocean of washing out and bringing in um nurturing the relationships theresa is so important if you see a heavy hitter come in and you're really grateful that they're at the meeting call them the next day and say you know what what you said and your presence in our meeting means so much to me thank you for coming it was really great having you there i felt the difference i say things like that to people all the time and i mean it you know two or three old timers heavy hitters in a meeting with 25 people can hold a room it's no joke that spiritual strength and that real a anus i love that word the real aanus can hold the room together isn't that great? I swear I made that up. I never heard anyone else say it. It's mine. In all of their A-A-ness, they hold the room together. So get your A-a-ness and let's go. Okay, let's see. Let me see what else here. I think this is the last paragraph, that graph that I really want to end up with. And this is on 331 in the Language of the Heart. Did somebody have a question or want to go right ahead, please? I just wanted to say that you know, being around for a while and I see so many rules. My fellowship seems to make a rule every week. Every time they meet, every month they got a new rule for the fellowship. There's not a lot of new and young blood. And so I'm constantly telling the new young blood we only have one rule here at 62. Try not to take yourself too seriously and try really hard to do what your sponsor asks you to do, work these steps. And so because of those kind of things, I've been here a little while since 86, and I'll start a meeting, literally. When it's getting too far out there in the field, I'll started a meeting. Let's get back to old AA. We're going to read this book, and we're going to read Living Sober and really look at it and share this with the new people. And then I tell myself, no matter what, Kath, you have to go to those business meetings. I've hated business meetings my entire life, and it's my defect, you know? But I go in and say, you now, after all the talk, I'll say, I don't think we need that role. I think we've got enough roles. That's just kind of a little too petty. Maybe we won't want to put that in the format. We're reading to them every morning, you known, that kind of thing. Right. But I can see that trend, and I agree with you so much that we have to more and more tell the people that have a lot of time that have kind of faded away how glad we are to see them when they come and greet them right away and say, oh, where have you been? Because I too have seen a few hold a whole meeting together. Yeah. And I really appreciate you coming. Thanks so much. I really appreciated it. You know, there's this funny coincidence because yesterday Teresa had this weird, strange coincidence where she was talking about somebody snubbing her and not saying hello. And then the next person that shared said, I'm the snubber and I ignore people. And now she just said, there's too much young blood in my meeting and not enough old timers. And you said there's too many old timERS and there's no young people in our meeting. It's really interesting. I don't know, you know, but it is the next share is the opposite side of the coin. And how peculiar is that very interesting i want to read this from the language of the heart nearly all of us when we think about it agree that we are a long way from being anywhere near grown up from almost any point of view we can clearly see that our job as individuals and as a fellowship is to keep right on growing by the constant use of our 12 steps of course we may be certain that this will be a slow business, but we also know we can never take our plotting progress as the slightest alibi for setting ourselves second-rate goals. Our high aim can be emotional sobriety, full emotional maturity, and that's good. However, I think most of us may prefer a still larger definition, one with a still broader and higher reach perhaps there can be no relative in the universe unless somewhere there is an absolute to most of us this absolute is god as we understand him we feel that we are born to this life to grow if only a little towards the likeness in god's image however small and prudent our next immediate step on the path of progress may be we of aa can never set any hampering limitation upon the ultimate destiny of ourselves and our fellowship nor any whatever upon god's love for us all individually and collectively structurally and spiritually we shall need to build for the future we are we are still laying down the foundation on which all coming generations of aas will have to stand perhaps for centuries and I'm going to read that sentence one more time. We're still laying down the foundation on which all coming generations of AAs will have to stand perhaps for centuries. It's really serious. I take this thing so seriously. For centuries, we're babies. We're the pioneers. We are the pioneers? We're not the people that have started meetings in home groups all over the United States that will be there for centuries to come. your home group you have no idea today may be around for 50 100 200 years and we were in its infancy stage what we do here today could manifest in a beautiful spiritual way for generations to come we keep a clean format and then they say you know this lady Teresa actually wrote down this format 150 years ago and it hasn't changed a bit because it works so damn well wow what an amazing thing that we could leave here for Alcoholics Anonymous and for so many Alkies to come. This world is so sick and full of generations of dope fiends coming up right now. There's so much medication, you know, every three or four kids is on Ritalin or something, which I believe is another setup for alcoholism because they're taught to seek pain relieving and pain relievin receptors earlier and earlier and disconnecting and disconnection from their feelings So being blind and being a sheeple and being unconscious is the name of the game at a really, really early age. Being in touch with their feelings and feeling their heart and crying and weeping with their emotions and allowing their emotions to come out. Oh no, never did that in our household. And they're starting younger and younger and young. So we open up and we create a nest in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous for generations to come. And it starts individually with each one of us. We all have a very important task here. This is not about alcohol in a liquid. It's about so much more. I'm so grateful to be such a part of all of this that's happening, and I loved coming here and meeting all of you. It was such a beautiful experience. I'll never forget this. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you very much.