Step 12 and Carrying the Message – Spiritual Maintenance Workshop – Part 1 of 5 – Billy N.

Sure. My name is Shayla June, alcoholic from Houston, Texas. Welcome to the Spiritual Maintenance Workshop. Let us open the meeting with a moment of silence in the serenity prayer. All together. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Okay, I'm going to read something out of 12 Step. And this is on page 89 of the fourth edition, Working With Others. This is explained to me as a 12-step promises. Life will take on new meaning. To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends. This is an experience you must not miss. And so with that, I would like to introduce our 12-step speaker, Billy N. Sorry. My support. Thank you. My home group is the Alpharetta Unity Group in Alphretta, Georgia. Thank you for asking me to be here today. For anyone that's new, I want to welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous, even during these times of very interesting times for Alcoholics Anonymous. I just said this morning if I have to hear one more person say that they now know what it's like to be incarcerated, I'm going to want to jump out my window. I say that as my coffee beans and my coffee bean grinder and my pour-over coffee maker are 10 feet away from me, which is unlike any correctional facility I've ever been in in my life. But I am grateful for this silver lining of Alcoholics Anonymous is going to have as a result of all this um i've already met new people who came in to aa during these days um so people are getting sober and i am super excited about all the people we've been missing that we're now going to be able to reach as we go forward and use technology not to get rid of in-person meetings not to get rid of in-person conventions you know the fourth uh let me just the step is basically blown is divided into three things um having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps we could call that number one we tried to carry this message to alcoholics we could Call That Number Two and to practice these principles in all our affairs we could call number three. And if I just quickly divide my time, I have 20 minutes for each of the three, which just because I'm naturally wired to not practice these principles in all my affairs, I could do a three-day workshop on number three alone, right? But I want to make sure I cover all three, but I do want to skip to number two quickly because I am so excited about all the things we can do with technology. I mean, just think about this for a second. Just go back to January 1st, New Year's Day of this year. It's only four months ago. and if you had had surgery over the holidays and was stuck at home if you were in a hospice if you were homebound if for some reason you couldn't leave your house you couldn'T go to your local intergroup or your local district and get on their website and find the zoom or webex meeting for people who can't get outside in fact if somebody probably tried to do that they probably would have been lynched in the a by the aa lynch mob that they were somehow trying to interfere with you know at home with in-person meetings and i'm super excited that we can now take care of all these people and properly harness the colossus of communication and those are bill w's words not mine that he commanded us he left it as a command for us it's on page 255 as bill sees it nothing could further help us as i paraphrase i don't have it in front of me than the modern of the colossus communication um i also think about how many prisoners in the united states and canada i don'T HAVE A LOT OF EXPERIENCE I'VE BEEN TO MANY OTHER COUNTRIES in AA, but in the United States and Canada, how many prisons today are on lockdown? Meaning that there was probably some type of security breach. And when a prison is on lockdown, visiting hours are curtailed to almost nothing. And most volunteers are not allowed in the facility, teachers, GED teachers, ministers, AA, other 12-step fellowships. I think about, I mean, we have facilities in the U.S. and Canada that have been on lockdown for over three months, some for over six months. We're going to be able to get this message into them in an amazing way if we take the time to practically work with some common sense with corrections officials so that even Even when their facility is locked down, we can bring the message in. So I'm excited about the future of Step 12 Part 2, I'll call it, as far as technology. So I want to say a couple of things. Right under where it says Step 12 and the 12 and 12 and then lists out the step, it does say the joy of living is the theme of AA's 12th step. and if you look up the word theme in the dictionary, it will tell you the subject. That the joy of living is the subject of A's 12-step. I also want to define practice. It's to perform an activity or skill repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one's proficiency. For most alcoholics, and for definitely this alcoholic, that means you're probably going to do the same thing wrong like 2 000 times before you finally realize you either shouldn't be doing it or maybe you should ask for help to do it better um uh that uh practice and asking for help just don't come natural to alcoholics but i do want to not uh forget to talk about having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps because i think um for me this is maybe one of the most important parts of my a story that i don't get to talk about a lot or rarely talk about because i'm not ashamed or embarrassed to tell you that i'm a die-hard atheist for a long time both when I was drinking and for the first five or six years of my sobriety. I'm not embarrassed by that. I'm Not Ashamed of It. But I think it's an important part of my story as to how my conversion came to believe in a higher power, which it's very hard to practice step 12 if I were to read it and say, having not had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps like uh what do you do if you haven't had a spirituality awakening and my story is that you can have a spiritual awakening it might not look the same as other people's um but let's remember uh not everybody gets to be like bill on the third floor of a hospital and the windows blowing open and the wind blowing in and him feeling like he was on the top of a mountain. That doesn't happen for a lot of us. Otherwise, they wouldn't have put the appendix in the big book. I'm a big fan, just so anybody knows, and if anybody is new, I love the chapter to The Agnostics, but I particularly really really love pages 10, 11, and 12 in Bill's story. For me, those pages are, for this alcoholic, more important to my agnostic story than even we agnostics. If you go to the bottom of page 10 in the big book, it's talking about me. It says with ministers in the world's religions, I parted right there. I can ask myself the question, with ministers and the world religions, did I part right there? And that is a resounding yes. when they talked of a god personal to me who has loved superhuman strength and direction i became irritated and my mind snapped shut that's me that is absolutely me um i say all that because my brain has been my enemy since i've been born my enemy and it doesn't make me better or smarter or anything else but i did know from a young age that i had certain abilities no different than running track or throwing a football that i knew at a young edge that i remembered everything i read i knew at a young age that i pretty much heard remembered everything i heard i knew At a young Age that i could do complicated math in my head and very complicated math on a small piece of paper i took all that information and have been making bad decisions with that for all of my life all of My life convinced that i was smarter than the average person convinced that, you know, and I have total respect for religious people and everybody. And today I believe in God. Um, but I want to be honest about back then, back then if you believed in God, I just thought you weren't as smart as me. It's that simple. I mean, I wish I could, it sounds so arrogant today when I say that I just want to stab myself in the eye. Like how could i think that but i didn't think that um i think there is so much um for a person like me and if there's anybody else out there the spiritual experience appendix is amazing you know it says the term spiritual experience and spiritual awakening are used many times in this book which upon careful reading shows the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself in many different forms. Joe and Charlie used to say that for many people, their spiritual awakening is simply to awaken spiritually. That made a lot of sense to me, so much sense to me. But what I really love for a person who came here so arrogant is there's even a little part here that helps those of us who are arrogant, like myself. On the second page of the spiritual experience, it says most emphatically, we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of facing his problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual concepts. I love that line in the big book. And you know why? Because it gives me permission to close my mind to almost 99% of spiritual concepts mean look at what it really says, into all spiritual concepts. All. So even it gave an arrogant person like myself a little room to open up my mind that maybe I'm only opposed to 99% of the spiritual concepts in the world. And then it tells me right there, he can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial use the dictionary unwilling to accept beliefs or behaviors that differ from ones that's me so my middle name might might as well be intolerant you know and then it doesn't just say denial it says belligerence denial belligerent means hostile or angry angry denial that's me um and the other thing that i've had to learn about spiritual experiences is no matter how good anyone thinks myself included have taken someone through the big book god has given the members of alcoholics anonymous some great gifts but there's one gift he has not given any of us yet. And that is that I do not have the power to schedule someone else's spiritual experience. I can't do it. I don't have that power. I cannot tell you it is going to come after step three. I cant tell you its going to come at the step four. I dont have that power but i have the faith that it will happen which to me is just as good as that power that my faith is that strong you know in the in the front of the 12 and 12 in the forward and mind you you're hearing from someone who's so arrogant that i used to hate the 12th and 12th right? Um, in my early big book thumping days. But the third paragraph of the forward to the 12 and 12 is maybe one of the most powerful descriptions of Alcoholics Anonymous that's out there. AA's 12 steps are a group of principles spiritual in their nature which if practiced as a way of life can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become completely to become happily and usefully whole. That is an amazing statement. The problem with it, it talks about a way of life. And when I was a teenager in Alcoholics Anonymous, I thought you were a bunch of tambourine-banging, church-going freaks who came to AA on the side. That was my view. I had a much different life planned. It included a lot of trips to spring break, a lot of heavy metal music festivals, a lot of living. And guess what? You can do all of that sober. But I thought AA's plan was to rob me of the life that I want to see. I've seen Metallica over 50 times sober. I'd been in Yankee Stadium when the Yankees won the World series. The great Tom I used to always say, you know, the problem with the alcoholic ego is we can do anything except for one thing. We can't take one drink. we can recover we can change our entire lives by the power of the 12 steps but we can't take one drink so I want to tell you as I look at step 12 here part 1 having a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps I want to tell you my spiritual awakening because it didn't happen in one day but it culminated in a series of events i met joe and charlie in july in march of 1993 i walked into that room and every person i hated in alcoholics anonymous was at this joe-and-charlie big book workshop every passionate over-the-top aa lunatic in the new york area was there and they had their highlighters and their dictionaries and their workbooks um and you know the kind of person i'm talking about you know when i was a teenager in alcoholics anonymous if i saw you get out of your car with a big book i thought you were a lunatic like who brings their own big book to a meeting it's just insane um those are the kind of passionate people I'm talking about, but that weekend changed my life. And it changed my life a couple of ways. Um, I found out what alcoholism was really. I learned that I have this allergy that I cannot safely drink alcohol at all. I also learned that I have a mental obsession. My mental obsession is particularly strong in the way it shows up because what it does is when I am completely physically sober, it tells me I don't have the allergy, which is very dangerous if you're a drinker like me. If you have the algae as bad as me and your mental obsession tells you when you're physically sober that you don't have the allergy. It's a horrible, horrible combination. Joe and Charlie opened up my eyes. I went there and I got a big book group after that. After that, I became the person that you can't stand in Alcoholics Anonymous, the person who goes to his big book study one or two nights a week, And the other five nights a week goes and tells the rest of AA that they're doing it wrong. And they should come to his home group. And, you know, sorry, they're getting AA light or only half of AA. But if they really want all of AA, they can come. And,you know, I'm grateful for a man I met named George. George changed my life. He used to sit in the diner in New York City with me. and I'd tell him certain things. And he'd look at me and he'd say these few words. He would say, Billy, were they there? And I would say where? And he would say I don't know, Akron, New York City, sometime between 1940 and 1950. Were the people who are telling you this stuff there? And I'd be like no, they're like four years sober. and he introduced me to books like A.A. Comes of Age and Not God and Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers and opened my eyes to A.H.'s history, which is built on A.K.'s mistakes, you know, that our great 12 traditions come from all the mistakes we made. But here's the problem for me when it comes to Step 12, Part 1. I thought I did everything right. I thought I made all my amends. I thought I did every thing the big book told me to do and I did not believe in God in 1995. And I don't know if I was depressed I don'T know what you would call it but I had this feeling inside of me, that hurt. And I think it hurt because I had this feeling that AA was not going to work for me. That all these other people I had met, AA worked. They got what was promised. And that's why I stress that you can't schedule someone's spiritual experience. You don't know when it's gonna come or how gradually it's going to come so what happened for me is as follows and again i don't get to tell this story a lot but um i went to the san diego 1995 international convention now i probably went there with like july 1996's rent money that's how uh well economically i was doing at the time but like every new person in aa you know we'd rather go to the next convention than pay next month's rent so um you know practice these principles and all of this but i made it to san diego and in san diega my ego is out of control because i was going to speak there on the young people's panel which I thought would be the highlight of my trip to San Diego there was a meeting that was going to go on there for corrections three people were going to be in the same room at the same time that had become kinds of heroes of mine Tom I Don P and Jim Estelle and not out this board who was the head of the texas prison system they were all going to be there i went to that meeting and there was a line out the door because the fire marshal was counting the people going into the room because they didn't want it overcrowded and there was a guy next to me and a little bit of quick history lesson, a couple of months before the San Diego convention. In fact, like a week ago right now, there was a bombing in Oklahoma in 1995. The guy next To me had just been released from prison like six months before in Oklahoma. He was sober like 11 years And he told me that He kept asking his parole officer If he could leave Oklahoma And go to the international convention in California And He told me his parole Officer told him no And then after the bombing happened Things were really tough in Oklahoma And he said And he Told me that his probation officer Or his parole office sir cursed him out threw him out of his office and told him only two people could get you to that convention god or the governor and i'll never forget being on that line in the san diego convention center and this gentleman reaching into his back pocket and taking out a folded up letter and he handed it to me and in the bottom right hand corner was the raised seal of the governor of oklahoma and it basically said to whom it may concern his name his parolee his parole number his date of birth that he had permission to attend the international conference of alcoholics anonymous over july 4th weekend in san diego california and could leave oklahota i left that convention center that day with the hardest hit to my agnostic armor, atheist armor that it had ever received. I was talking to a God that I didn't believe in because I was almost mad that this happened. I flew home on Sunday and three nights later on Wednesday night on 84th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam in New York City, I went to the Oxford group meeting about Ballard's Anonymous. that was the old gso archivist frank m's home group and i went to that meeting and there was an old woman sitting at the speaker's table um she was old i was young at the time but she was still very old she was dressed very dignified um there was something about her and when she started to tell her story um she was in a concentration camp as a young girl in Europe and still had a tattoo with a number on her forearm and she talked about that she was behind Jack Murphy Stadium as the flag bearer for Israel last Friday night at the international convention where I was and she talked about being behind that stage in line with all the other flag bearers and being close to the men from Iran and Iraq and Jordan and them hugging and crying and i remember leaving that night that that night in this another huge hit to my atheist armor that i couldn't explain what i had just heard in a real world type of setting about six months later i went to the 11 a.m friday meeting at the general service office in New York City. If you're ever there, go every Friday, 11 o'clock. It's a great meeting. There's always people from around the world. The speaker that day was the corrections chair for Ireland. Now, I want to give a little disclaimer. I feel the older I get, the more disclaimers and asterisks I need to give before I say something. AA has no opinions on politics. AA members should have no opinion on politics when they're in an AA member role, which I am right now. So what I'm going to do for you is describe my family, not as a political statement. My grandfather went to prison in Ireland for a very violent crime that my family raised me and was taught was a war crime. He was sent to a place called Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight off the English coast and later was allowed to come to America. When Princess Diana and Prince Charles got married, when I woke up in my house that day, my dad had taped a cardboard sign around the TV with a big note that said, this wedding will not be watched in my house. So I just want to stress that my family has a definitive opinion on what goes on in Ireland. So here was the corrections chair for Ireland And he was talking about certain facilities that I knew well of because of family members in Northern Ireland. The prison for the prisoners of the Troubles, Protestant and Catholic. And I'll never forget him saying that even a lot of outside relief organizations aren't allowed in those prisons, and the Protestant and Catholic prisoners never are in the same location. But one night a week for one hour, Protestant and catholic prisoners come together in the sameroom for a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. i tell you about those three events because here is my experience about my spiritual awakening i believe in god because i have witnessed miracles in other people's lives with my own eyes if i hadn't stayed sober long enough i would have never witnessed those miracles ever. I would have never seen them. And even today in Alcoholics Anonymous, I love the pamphlet A Member's Eye View. I love that gentleman in California who wrote that pamphelet. At the end of it, he says, you know, in AA we see the blind see and the deaf hear. That's why I believe in God. That is why I started to believe in a higher power way back when because I started to see things that in the regular human world are not possible but yet in alcoholics anonymous now the trick there is i think god does play a trick on us for people like myself i have a very hard time seeing those miracles in my own life and because i'm so self-obsessed i want all these miracles to happen in my life but i think that's a gift of the steps of opening up and watching and caring about other people and you witness these miracles and you can't help but believe in god and today if there are any non-believers here i have total respect i i don't think that my way is the only way but i do think that the way aa led me to believe in god is an important part of my story. And I wouldn't have had this spiritual awakening as a result of these steps if I was not active in Alcoholics Anonymous and in the right place at the right time to witness things that only God could have done that are not possible, that are non-man made possible. So the next portion is we tried to carry this message to alcoholics. sometimes i think you know um i will give you this because i'll use myself as an experience as an example whenever an aa somebody tells you a definition of something my experience is look it up in our literature um because chances are it could be someone who is as arrogant as me telling you that definition and often not that is not but in the 12 and 12 12 step work is not just going over someone's house and 12 stepping them that's that's not what it is there's a line in the twelve and twelve that says nor is this the only kind of 12-step work we sit in a meetings and listen not only to receive something ourselves but to give reassurance and support which only our presence can bring if our turn comes to speak at a meeting we again try to carry a's message and i love this next line did bill know that someday we would have all these celebrity speaker conferences and everything His next line is, whether our audience is one, it doesn't matter how big your audience is. It is still 12-step work. There are many opportunities for those of us who feel unable to speak at meetings or are so situated that we cannot do too much face-to-face 12- step work. We can be the ones who take on the unspectacular but important tasks that make good 12-stepped work possible. perhaps arranging for the coffee and cake after the meeting where so many skeptical nervous newcomers have found confidence and comfort in laughter and talk this is this is 12 step work in the very best sense of the world word freely have received freely give is the core part of step 12 this reminds me of one of my favorite speaker stories i'm a big chuck c fan huge chuck c fan a great thing about listening to a lot of speaker tapes like and you if you listen to the same speakers some people would say well haven't you already heard him 150 times and i would say yes i have but here's what i've learned speakers including myself who are speaking there is usually something personal going on in their life at the time where even if they tell 95 of the same story you heard the last time there will be something in that talk that they've never talked about before or they never mentioned before. I heard of Chuck C. Tate, and he talked about going to speak at this meeting in California. And, you know, it's California in the 60s, but still California's had traffic for a long time. So he said he was going on an hour drive, which an hour ride in certain parts of Georgia, you can go 60 miles. he might have only been going five miles in california i have no idea but he was on an hour drive and when he got to the meeting he said that someone pointed out to him in the back of the room that there was a man at his first meeting and chuck on this tape embraces his own ego and and and talks about it and fesses up because he says he said to himself i need to give the greatest talk ever i need to i need to hit it out of the park tonight and so chuck said he spoke and when he drove home that hour he said to himself that was the greatest talk i've ever given i really did hit it out of the park and he says about a year and a half later he goes back to that home group to speak again and who's there but the guy who had one day a year and a half ago and Chuck again gives up his ego he says that he said to himself I knew I gave the greatest talk of all time that night I knew I hit it out of the park and then he admits this he says but you know what i need to find out exactly what sentence it was what part of what i said really saved his life and reeled him in so after the meeting he goes up to the guy and he says hey i was at your first meeting so glad to see you are still here um really glad you're here and the guy looks at him and says two things the first thing he says is this wow i was so out of it that night i don't even remember who spoke that's the first think he says the second thing he says is maybe more important chuck asked him i'm curious what brought you to your second meeting and the guy said you know i was sitting back in the back of the room i ran out of cigarettes and there was a lady sitting across from me at the table and she rolled over a cigarette to me and pushed over her matches he said in the way I had been living that was the first nice thing another human being had done for me since I could remember because I was living on the streets and I was tearing down and burning apart every relationship and so I love Bill's writing because sometimes we get so fascinated we want to dissect every word in the big book. But here's a woman who simply rolled a cigarette over to somebody who is obviously new and that random compassionate act of kindness brought him to his second meeting. So grateful that Chuck told that story. Another Californian that we don't hear from a lot anymore unless you listen to CDs, God rest his soul, but Cliff R. spoke all the time. He was from Oceanside, California. And he used to talk about something in regards to the 12-step that I really find important when it goes to part B of the 12 step. We tried to carry this message to alcoholics. not everybody's a great speaker and being a great speaker doesn't make you a great member of AA not everybody is a great trustee not everybody even wants to be a trustee not everybody wants to be a GSR some people don't like chairing meetings but there are people who can answer the phone at an intergroup hotline and talk an alcoholic off a ledge and get them to their first meeting like they were born to do it. There are people who can drive newcomers to meetings and in the 15 or 20 minutes to or from the meeting work miracles in the seat of that car. There are people who stand at the front door at every clubhouse clubhouse, and want to welcome every person coming in the door. There are people who are great treasurers, and God knows we need them. And the point of Cliff's talk was that everyone has a gift to give in Alcoholics Anonymous. And really, we only have one sin here, Cliff would say. And that's not finding out what your gift is and giving back a hundred percent with it to Alcoholics Anonymous. Don't compare what your gifted gift is to other people's gifts. AA is made up by the collective masses of the whole. There are great um long-term i'll call them very emotional loving type sponsors i'm sure you all know some there are other people in alcoholics anonymous who are like train wreck specialists like mash doctors like they work with people that might as well be flown on a helicopter with a red cross on the side of it to the front of your clubhouse that's how bad the people they work with the shape they're in and maybe they're not the most loving and most emotional but somehow another god has given this group of people the ability to give a newcomer one day of sobriety and then another day of sobriety it's almost like if you travel a lot and i do for work we love to make fun of clubhouses or we love the talk about the crazy meeting down the street where they never talked about the solution i think we've all heard people talk about that we all to hear people throw out comments like solution-based meetings or contemporary AA is no good or all this stuff. What I find interesting is when I go to big, pretty, perfect solution- based AA, if I take the time to talk to the people who are there, most of them came in the door through that crazy clubhouse uh around the corner that was their entry to alcoholics anonymous you know and i feel that alcoholics unanimous is no different than hospitals the most spiritual place on earth for me is not dr bob's house don'ts is not the general service office is not riverside church um it's not even box 459 um the mailbox uh in the actual post office box the most spiritual place on earth for me is a steel door at the corner of barrack and houston street in lower manhattan that door leads up a sharp steep staircase to an old after-hours club that is now home of the Midnight Madness Alcoholics Anonymous group. The Midnight Badness group of AlcoholicsAnonymous is a mash unit for AA. The very broken wind up there at midnight and on weekends at 2 a.m. And I say that because I wish we could all embrace that we need all parts of AA. There's nothing long with being proud of the AA that you love, but I don't need to be proud of the AA I love by tearing down someone else's AA. I can still love my AA just fine, and if their AA is not working for them, I can offer mine to them, but maybe their AA is working fine. i'll give you a tip if you go to new york city there's a really nice hospital on the upper east side of manhattan in a very rich area called lenox hill hospital but here's my next tip if you happen to get hurt or shot or stabbed do not let the ambulance to take you to lenox Hill. Have them take you right away to Bellevue, because Bellevues deals with people who are in significant trauma. And then after you're in BellevUE for a couple of days and they save your life, go up to Lenox Hill. That's how I look at Midnight and a whole bunch of other places in AA. AA is a constant moving target. Tomorrow will be different from today. um and so i think celebrating all of aa that provides all 12-step activity so you know practicing these principles in all our affairs i want to read something out of the 12 and 12. i love it it's on page 110 when a man or woman has a spiritual awakening The most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. That is a pretty strong statement. He now able to doing, feeling, and believing that which could not be done before on its unaided strengths. Now, the other thing I just want to mention is working with others. I love working with Others. I love it because it gives clear instructions of what to do and not do with a newcomer. And I love that it's a matching set with the doctor's opinion. Bill had a meeting with Dr. Silkworth before he went to Akron. Dr. Silkworth let him know you have to talk about the medical estimate of alcoholism You have to meet them on the same level They have to understand that you are an alcoholic and have the same symptoms they have That worked with dr. Bob and it's been working with millions ever since That's what Working with others tells people to do um I love working with others because I love I just want to go to it works when other activities fail number one how important is that when you discover a prospect for Outlawics Anonymous find out all you can about him if he does not want to stop drinking don't waste your time get an idea of his behavior, his background, the seriousness of his condition you need this information to put yourself in his place then let his family or friend ask him if he wants to quit for good if he would go to any extreme to do so that's who we work with people are willing to go to any extreme see your man alone engage in general conversation after a while tell him about a phase of your drinking if he wishes to talk let him do so if he is not communicative give him a sketch of your drinking career then it says when he sees you know about the drinking game compends to describe yourself as an alcoholic tell him how baffled you were give him an account of the struggles you had to stop show him the mental strength he will match your mental inconsistency with some of his own here's what it doesn't say there don't tell him they have to believe in God. Don't hit them over the head with the big book. Meet them on their own level. I just want to read that definition because I'm sure there's a lot of people here who are much better at the steps than I am and a lot smarter than me, but I have the word practice defined and written down for a reason. And I'm going to read it again. Perform an activity or skill repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one's proficiency. There's a feeling I get in my stomach that I sometimes talk about. I can describe it as the feeling when you go to court. If there are other people here who have been to court a lot like i have in my years back court is always the same way it's like a rigged system when you're an alcoholic offender you know you walk in with your lawyer your lawyer talks to the prosecutor and looks like he's friends with him and that's your enemy then your lawyer and the prosecutor go in a back room with the judge and have a conversation about me and decide what I'm going to agree to, it's amazing when I think about that because what I know when I'm in trouble with practicing these principles in all my affairs in sobriety is that feeling I have when my lawyer is back with the judge and prosecutor colluding about my future, I know how that feels in my stomach, not knowing what's going to happen. The consequences of my own actions are going to come back to haunt me. There's going to be a price to pay for my actions of the past, which leads me to maybe one of my pet peeves, which is the comment of living amends in relation to the ninth step. In the big book, The ninth step is for harms we have caused in our past. It is not about living amends. Step 12 is our living amens, practicing these principles in all our affairs with our family and our work and everything else. i'm so grateful i'm in a very different place i'll end with this than i was when i came into aa in fact on like day four of lacking i made a package of ramen noodles just to like feel back in the day of early sobriety you know i identify with people that can like live for a month on ramen noodles and know a different recipe every day those are my kind of people but i was making those ramen noodles because I'll tell you what AA has done for me in my life today. When I get up in the morning, I think about the families of my employees. I think About the people who work for me. I think about that. My number one responsibility is that we find a way to carry on our work and we find A way to take care of each other and make sure each other is healthy and our families are healthy and that um everybody has enough so they can eat and everything else like there's a line in bill's story um that i'm going to share with you for if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others he could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead it does not say some of us have trials and low spots ahead it does not say a few of us have trials and low spots ahead it says the certain trials and low spots ahead but the problem is in larger spiritual life through work and self sacrifice that is not my natural wired DNA I did not come up to AA on my first day saying oh I'm looking for the program For work and self-sacrifice No, I avoided work like The plague Self-sackrifice sounds horrible But that's what AA's taught me That's what the steps have taught me And so instead of getting up in the morning And complaining about life I've been taught to think about others Including Others in AA Maybe others are struggling and need a little help. I don't have to do a public broadcast here. I've done during the pandemic because those things no one needs to know about, but I can tell you that I only learned about that as sad as it sounds in Alcoholics Anonymous. So for anyone new here today, just want to remind you if you hate Alcoholics Anonymous and don't believe in God you belong here and uh and you and I have a lot in common or um that if you're new I hope you put a message in the chat so that the moderator can have a man or a woman call you and speak to you offline and invite you to another meeting of AlcoholicsAnonymous thank you for having me Thank you.