Prayer and Conscious Contact – FOTS Step 11 Workshop – Part 25 of 25 – Mildred F.

And I'm very happy to be here with you, believe it or not, and I'm glad my computer is working even better. So, I see familiar faces, so welcome everybody and I am glad to see you. And I feel honoured to be talking about this subject because it means everything to me. And as I prepared for this, I realised how very much it means to me . i'm a bit reluctant about this because to do this properly the way i feel i should do it i really have to reveal who i really am and i need to let you know more about myself then maybe i'm comfortable revealing uh but i'm ready to do that i want you to know also that when i speak of god i am not speaking of god as a religious concept i cannot define that being i cannot understand that being but i have had an experience of that being and that experience changed me and supports me as the core of my life today that's really what I'm talking about this is not a lecture um what I plan to do is share my experience strength and hope not regarding alcohol but regarding my the development of my relationship with God I'm not here to tell you how to live I'm Not suggesting that you do it the way I do it, but I'm here to tell you as people have shared with me and it is that sharing that has allowed me to change. I really love what Emerson said about prayer. He said it is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. Consider something. We've got the COVID-19 crisis. Think about if you are considering that the facts of life from the highest point of view, the fourth dimension, God's world, or if you're considering it from the third dimension, our point of anguish. And that's why it seems to me this is really so important. um i'm going to start at the end because when ali and i decided that the topic would be the power of prayer in everyday life i thought what is that has been the power of prayer in my life i've made a list of changes uh and understand when i say these i'm not saying that do not get the idea i think i'm perfect but i have been dramatically changed from the kind of person i was for a great deal of my life through the power of prayer number one i have given up the idea of a god who can be manipulated that anthropomorphic image of a God who would do for me what i wanted number two i no longer believe in separation me here god there to believing in oneness and the results of that are dramatic number three i believe now in a power that listens to us all the time not to the words we say but to the attitudes to the way i live to the way i incorporate truth into my life number four i know who i am i believe today that i'm a spiritual being living in this body as mildred and i know you are number five i love myself i didn't use to and through that love for myself i've become kind number six i love you i may not like you but i love you which is quite different number seven many of my dreams have come true number eight i know this sounds like some airy fairy but this is real i have been changed i like people number nine i very rarely struggle either i believe there's a power in my life or i believe i'm the power number 10 i know today how to get rid of fear number 11 i have dedicated my life to being right with god as it says on page 164 see to it that your relationship with him is right and then great things will come to pass number 12 i make big effort to not live by the collective consciousness but what the consciousness that i have learned about in aa number 13 i care about a lot of things today i care about the planet i care about you i care about the health of aa and the last thing i wrote was i've become a giver rather than somebody who's always trying to get something from somebody so as i said do i practice that perfectly no but that's kind of the way i am now i believe that there is something in the human heart And that's why step 11 is written the way it is. We're seeking to develop that conscious contact. You look in history, you'll see there was Isaiah 4,000 years ago who said, man wake up bernard of clairvaux 800 years uh 1700 years ago who said thou hast made us for thyself o god and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee and then there was mr meister eckhart 800 years ago he said the soul grows by subtraction and then there was Francis about 400 years ago who said let me be an instrument and closer to our time Peggy Lee most of you are probably too young to know who Peggy Lee was but she was a singer and one of the songs that she sang ended like this if this is all there is let's keep on dancing think about that if this is all there is let's keep on dancing and then there's chris christopherson who you may know and he said in one of his songs poor wayfaring stranger taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home and then their beautiful carl jung who said two things which have really registered with me one he said he always knew that the alcoholics were seeking um the spirit with a capital s in every bottle of spirits and the one that really got to me was he said there's a secret nine at the roots of our being and i have had that secret nine and i tried to stop the nine as you will see talk a little bit about that my journey into the mystery that we call God began as a very young child. I had a retarded sister, she cried and I wanted the world to be different. I demanded that the world get fixed the way I decided I wanted it. My brothers and sisters didn't respond as I wanted and in that experience i developed my feelings my attitudes about life and then also about god because i gave god his instructions and i became really confused because that god who could make sunsets he should have been able to fix my sister and he didn't well he did eventually but then at five i got my solution i took a drink and the way i can describe that is if you drink alcohol and you get the result that i got who needs god we went to church uh despite that attitude however I went to a convent when I was 17. Drunk, stayed drunk for 15 years and from there I went to the bars, to the men, to psych wards, to jail, to marrying a psychiatrist and eventually to a park bench. People like me should not wind up on a park bench i had every opportunity alcohol however was the big player in my life that's the voice i listened to and it finally beat me into a state of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization all opportunities that i had useless i wound up on the park bench did i ever pray you've got to be kidding as far as i was concerned god was a useless twit and after i left the convent i also left the church you know people have an idea about me they know that i was in a convent they have an ideia they don't know this part of my life and i can't explain it except to tell you the truth i lived on that park bench as a tramp and then came the wake-up call you see bill says now where did i put my notes bill says this he says i sense the deep meaning of the phenomenon of alcoholics anonymous and i cannot begin to fathom it i can't begin to fathом my life either where i came how i developed and he says why for instance at this particular point in history has god chosen to communicate his healing grace to so many of us. Who can say what this communication actually is? He wrote this in 1960, so mysterious and yet so practical. And that's why the power of prayer in everyday life is so evident in my life. He said, the final sentence of that little piece, we can only partly realize what we have received and what it has meant to each of us i say why how did this life of mine go well on may the 18th everything changed on may 18th i realized you know the book says we have to concede to our innermost selves i mean it's fine to say i'm going to pray but who is the person praying something had to change something had to be dramatically changed this is what the spiritual life is about i think and that's why we can get to step 11 where it says we do the work so we can continue to develop our conscious contact and if we don't have it we can start together and for me it came in a concession that i don't know how to live and in that moment i had a dramatic spiritual experience it was one moment i'm the person i've described the next moment i've changed i have no compulsion i have no obsession next yeah in may i will be sober 47 years and in that 47 years i have never had a compulsion and i've never had the obsession this to me is what this whole spiritual journey is about it's the journey to god it's a journey to that unchanging reality that one day we'll see in a different fashion but that morning that's what happened i like to think of it in the terms that ramdas used he called it fierce grace it's not that grace is fierce but i think what is fierce is that to get to the point where you allow grace in you have a fierce experience i have gone over this in five minutes it was a fierce experience so um after that i went to skid row and while i was clean and sober about six months through a series of circumstances i got into aa now life changed life changed dramatically and this is how i've learned something else about this power this power takes us where we are it didn't say well you know you're a loser look what you've done the last 40 years it took me where i was and i had a series of god shots in that 20 years the first 20 years sober it shocks me to realize i did not pray in that time i had no relationship with god i wasn't ready for that i was busy organizing my third dimension world making money being successful and all of that grace is not asleep and at the end of that period i was a good member of aa and some of you would are you around here long enough to know that I was a good member of AA. Always amazing to me how this power works but it's the same power that makes the beautiful sunsets. It's the same power that gives us the grace we need when we can accept it. When I was about 18 years sober, I heard something that shocked me read it many times it's right in the book says the day will come when faced by a self-imposed crisis you will have to make a decision either god is everything or god is nothing i was in my car and i damn near drove the car into the ditch i thought wow if that is the truth what's my choice there's no third door am i going to say god is nothing or god is everything and at that point i said well i guess god is everything and but i had no understanding of that it was words and prayer is not about words there has to be a change in the attitude in the soul in the consciousness and i wasn't there yet and then i started to pay attention to that statement we've been rocketed into the fourth dimension and then there was the other one that i couldn't make sense of there's one who has all power that one is god i can tell you i didn't know what to make of that but you know it's really interesting to me and one of the things I'm going to recommend to you if if you if you want an interesting perspective take a look at your life and see where see what were the defining times the the activities, maybe the insights. For me, at 21 years I became suicidal. I had fixed the outside. The outside looked good, the inside not so much. Nothing as a matter of fact. And I knew that I was on suicide alley if I kept it up. suicide alley if I kept it up. I knew that I had to change and I did not know how. And I'm going to just list a few of the really defining moments because that's what put me on this path of prayer toward a step 11 experience. It was that statement, either God is everything or nothing like figure it if god is everything how do you answer the corona the coronavirus thing i had a whole lot of questions then i met tom i and tom i introduced me to the power of good as his belief that i could accept and then somewhere along the way i read what william james said the most convincing evidence of god lies in our inner personal experience my inner personal experience of may the 20th 1973 came to the fore how did that happen how is it possible that at one minute i was waiting to leave to go commit suicide and the next minute i knew i was clean and it was god's truth as i said i've never had the compulsion and obsession again the inner personal experience look at you know in bill's story where he says ebby came to see him and he said choose your own conception of god if i had that's why i can see it was necessary for me to leave behind my old ideas the things i had learned in theology the things i had learned in church i'm not against church it wasn't for me and then i took a look at page 55 deep down in every man woman and child is the fundamental idea of god it was earth shattering to me when i realized if that is in me and it says it's in every nan woman and child, it's also in you. Now what? I didn't like people. Something had to change. And then I really got into page 164 where he says, see to it that your relationship with him is right and great things will come to pass for you and countless others you know that's when i started the process of a relationship with god i understand god always had one with me but there was no response from me look at the wording of step 11. i had that all wrong as a child god was the being up in the heavens and i was going to ask and if i was a good girl god would give to me what i wanted look at what step 11 says sought how how do we seek through prayer and meditation subjects i knew very little about to do what to improve our conscious contact with god as we understood him and i had very little understanding of god praying for what not for stuff not to change people not even to change myself for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out and that's where i began no relationship with god as i saw it no conscious contact no understanding of god no i had to get to the point where i could experience and i like what saint paul says about the will of god he says pray without ceasing rejoice always and in all things give thanks see it's not situational and it's a job it's again about my relationship with god that's to me everything today but at that point in my life i did not want to get involved in this spiritual business But I can tell you, I was driven by the fact that I knew Suicide Alley awaited me because that's the way I felt. The power of good has been present in my life because that power of goods sent me a mentor. And this man was not in the program, knows the program but I had a sponsor. But as my sponsor said, I don't think I can carry you through this piece of your growth. And what this mentor did, he helped me to understand when people say practice, meditate, uh practice the presence of god uh do do for others all these things that was greek to me and so he he taught me he was perfect one of the first things i did was take a course in relaxation and from that i started to consider meditation and in at that time transcendental meditation was all the rage and um so i took that course and that that wasn't right see i think each of us is unique that's the beauty of it god grows us as we can we develop the kind where where we can and i was directed to a form of meditation which i have been faithful to to this day i have to tell you another spiritual practice that really helped me a great deal has been spiritual reading you know to me it's like being on the titanic or on the queen mary with no handrails if i don't do spiritual reading i know a lot of spiritual truth but when i do the spiritual reading it brings it kind of to the fore in a way that i can see and in a ways that is real to me and that i can apply so that was another thing the thing about this was it was entirely practical i think that i had some idea in my head of that spirituality wasn't for me this was practical because people came into my life and I started asking questions like this who are you God why am I here I'm not going to stay here but I'm here now what am I doing here and I began to understand people like Sandy Beach came into my life and he said you know you came in a two-in-one package you've got the soul the spirit but you also came in the body and i began to see what i had done in my life i had spent my life trying to make the third dimension uh beautiful the way i wanted it i wanted people to be the way i want it i want things i wanted lots of stuff i wanted to be be famous i wanted to be important and i began to see that's not why i'm here i am here if this power is within me it wants you know saint francis had it he said let me be an instrument so where there's hatred i can bring love i had a lot of questions and today a lot of people come to me with these questions because i i decided that if i was going to keep some of these ideas about god in my life in the forefront i had to do what brother lawrence wrote the book about practice the presence of god which in simply means that instead of just paying attention to what's outside the third dimension stuff that i remember that god is here and i have to tell you it shocked me when i tried to practice the presence of god i don't know i think i expected to feel a certain way maybe expect it i don t know No. But life, you know, I had to, that's when I started to say, God, who are you? How do you show up in my life? What has this, my pursuit of this spiritual way of living, what has that got to do with the work I'm doing? and i have to tell you that i think that the pursuit of the spiritual life that's what we're here for that's why he says you know we seek um that relationship with god not so i can sit and say oh look at me i'm spiritual now i don't think that's it it's saint francis let me be an instrument so that where there is hatred i can bring love that god can express through me and um somebody said to me not too long ago do you think about god all day no i don't think about God all day not consciously but God is the player in my life all day long you know I said to a man one day because he asked me this question he said do you think about god all day long and i said let me ask you something do you love your wife and he said yes and i say do you think about her all day long and he says no i said does she influence how you live your life he said absolutely and I said to him, do you like cute chickies? And he said, yes. I said, what if a cute chicky came into your office? Would you flirt with her? And He said, no. I say, what if she had a good pair of knockers? And said, he just laughed. And he said, No. He said I love my wife. And what I began to see through that conversation was i am dedicated to my god that doesn't mean that i ignore what's in my life or that i sit in the corner singing om all day but it influences how i practice the principles how i dedicate my life of prayer prayer isn't just about saying prayers it's not about prayer by rote i like what greg braden said when he's a scientist who has become a spiritual i follow what he says and um he said he was in tibet in one of the ancient monasteries and there they saw how the monks got up early in the morning they lived poorly they had poor food they worked etc etc and when he got to talk to the the chief monk he said to him what's going on when we see your prayers the monk looked at him and he said you don't see our prayers he said that that you see us getting up early in the morning us chanting us working the things that we do that's not our prayer that's what we do to develop the feeling it's the feeling that is the prayer and i got it i always thought it was the words this the that and you know think about this i'm sure we've all had this happen to us where somebody has given us a gift and we knew there was no love behind it right keep the gift i don't want the damn thing what about when we go to god and that's what he said these these these uh these behaviors this way of living that they had undertaken were what they did to develop the feeling and today i think the things that i do for example i take page 55 very seriously deep within you when i meet you is the fundamental mental idea of god it determines then how i see you judgment has to go criticism has to go unforgiveness has to and uh and that's why in the 12 and 12 bill says meditation is entirely practical very practical meaning it takes us into life and that's why that's where i see the power of prayer in my life it's the way i feel about the world it's the way I feel about you it's The Way I treat people it's attitudes that I have and the secret of that is when that changes inside the scientists tell us this the spiritual teachers tell us when that change is inside the outside changes and that's why my life is transformed not perfect i'm not perfect I have to do the work and as long as I'm alive I'll have because we need to keep growing because it's a spiritual life and life is with us two other things that I had to take care of one was forgiveness and I don't have time really to go too much into that but I have to say I got over blame When I came here, I was full of blame. I was hospitalized 32 times, had lots of psychiatrists in my circle. And we used to do a lot of analysis of what was wrong with the world and how the world had done me in. and now i believe that's all a waste that's that's not the way i want to see the world i was drawing that stuff to myself and um i i'll be careful about what i say because i i don't want anybody to misunderstand what i'm saying but i have been able to put that aside and i'm clean inside now the other thing i think that has helped me a great deal is gratitude gratitude not just for the things i like but gratitude for the things i've experienced gratitude for the tough things because there are tough days you know I'm not going to tell you that I'm dancing in the streets every day, but I'm going to tell you how to handle life today. I'm getting close to my time. I put aside because a lot of people ask me what should I do? Can you give me some tips to developing a spiritual life i love page 86 87 88 but if those are the actions we take but what it's really all about is developing the relationship with god and getting to the point where you realize i'm not here about the third dimension one day i'm going to be done with this body and they're going to put it in a grave or they'll cremate it and i'm going elsewhere and what will i have given to the world in that time so how do we develop a life of prayer what i have is prayer practices i have just like i have a practice for how i eat the vitamins i take the exercise i do i now have a prayer practice i find that if i don't have that the day comes oh i think i'm just too tired uh-uh i have a prior practice i've decided this is how it is roll out of bed onto the knees give the day to god and then get on with the day and it's just amazing and i meditate morning and night i do a lot of spiritual reading because i find that spiritual reading strengthens me it strengthens my result not just to live in the third dimension so i'm going to read these quickly and then i'll close with this They're just thoughts. Number one, set aside a time and a place. I have a meditation chair and I have it in the morning and in the evening. Number two, meditation practice. And if you don't have one, I'm going to suggest to you just try sitting still for one minute and i i had the idea that meditation was about quieting my thoughts you'll never achieve it what we do is some people use a mantra some people look at their breath i tell people when they're starting out like this if they if they have no practice count because what count does it's innocuous but it keeps you from this getting out of the present moment because that's where we need to be three be still you know people often call me and say well you know i know you're so busy i have quiet times i have times where i am still and i need to watch god at work i need to watch the sunset number four take a look at spiritual reading and if any of you want some ideas i can certainly give you some number five ask god who are you what do you want from me what am i supposed to be doing here number six practice the presence number seven wash your actions you know i try to make sure that my actions reflect the spiritual truth that i say i believe be grateful forgive and these are some of my mantras many times each day i know you are here god i don't see you i can't get you with my five senses but i know you're here god you are everything and the last thing i would say is become a giver give kindness give a smile give a thought think about other people and with that i'm very grateful to be a member of the program i'm very grateful to be with you and I'm very grateful that my computer worked and I am very grateful for Kevin for helping me to get things going so I could do this talk. God bless.