The Internal Condition – Workshop – Wilson House – VT – Part 1 of 7 – Raymer W.

If you'd like meeting schedules, they're in the front sitting room on a buffet. There are meeting schedules. There are newsletters. There are maps if you wanted to go to the gravesite where Bill Wilson and Lois Wilson are buried. That's kind of a cool thing to see because people leave medallions and different mementos, and it's kindof neat. There's morning prayer and meditation in the meditation room at 730 AM. Right. And that's listed on the meeting list as well. Any questions? Meditation room is great. Right down the stairs to your right. Thank you. Sure. Enjoy. All right. Good evening, everybody. My name is Chris and I'm an alcoholic. Chris, I want to thank you all for coming here. I wantto thank Myers for coming. Myers flew all the way up from Texas. That's about a three-and-a-half-hour flight. and then it was about five hours in the car driving up from New Jersey. So I'm very grateful that he would come up and join us here. How many people here just came just to be at the Wilson House and didn't specifically sign up for our workshop to specifically see us? Okay. How many People knew a little bit about Myers and myself and decided to come because of that. Okay, I appreciate that. All right. What I want to talk about here tonight for a few minutes is a little bit about my personal experience with alcoholism, my personal experiences with alcohol, my personal experiments with powerlessness, and my personal experiment discovering that there is a solution for alcoholism and what that looked like in my earlier days. I used to believe that I was an alcoholic because I drank too much. I believe today that I drank too much because I'm an alcoholic and that really is a different thing. There was always something not right about me from my earliest memories I always seemed to be uncomfortable with myself and my environment. I never quite fit. I never quite felt like I am in the exact right place with the exact right people doing the exact thing. I've never had that feeling. There was always something a little bit off. I was born court low is really what it was and I didn't realize that until I started drinking. A lot A lot of my memories had to do with stuffing things and avoiding things because of bizarre belief systems that I had. I remember one time, I'll give you a couple of these, and this isn't what normal kids do. I had joined the wrestling club. I was maybe nine years old, a wrestling team. And I went to my first wrestling practice and I landed. A guy took me down, came down on top of me, and I ended on my ankle wrong and I snapped my ankle. It broke. And I was way too embarrassed to tell the coaches, to tell anybody there that I had been hurt. So I sucked up the pain. And as soon as I could, I headed for the exit and I hopped three miles home to my house. Now why would somebody hide something like that or be ashamed or be embarrassed about something like that? It was, you know, I was always worried about what you thought about me. I was always really attached to looking bad or not looking cool. And where these belief systems came from, I really, really don't know. But I could give you a number of these experiences. I'll give you one story about the last time I detoxed. I went into the DTs in such a terrible way between Christmas and New Year's of 1989 that I had experienced the DTs before. And I knew enough about them to know that your heart rate goes up to like 200, your blood pressure goes out the roof. And a lot of times people that have the DTS stroke out. They literally pop a gasket and die in these DTs. And I knew that there was a good chance I was not going to survive these DTS, but I was not going call for an ambulance and have the ambulance driver come there and say look at this loser. He's an alcoholic. So it's okay to die, but I just don't want to look bad. and I can give you a number of these examples now what that is is that's a damaged spirit that's an damaged soul there's something really wrong with somebody that has those type of belief systems but I didn't know any better the book Alcoholics Anonymous basically says we won't know the truth from the false we just won't we won't know right from wrong, our life will be the way it is and we'll think this is the only way life can be because this has been our experience for a number of years. Alcoholism, you know, the chronic effects of alcoholism come over you pretty slowly sometimes. And by the time you're really, really sick, you've been sick for a long time. So I didn't know how sick I was. I didn'T know I had a soul sickness, a spiritual malady. I didn't know it. I did know, though, that if I drank alcohol or did certain combinations of drugs, if I got it just right, there's a very small window where I feel a little bit of euphoria. I feel the connection with the world, a little connection to the divine. really and i saw it because a couple of early experiences i had with drugs and alcohol i felt on top of the world i remember i remember the first time ever did speed i thought i had met god and gone to heaven and i remember that first time you know i drank i drank rum and cokes and it was at a high school party and all the all of a sudden i could talk to all the girls you Everybody thought I was cool. At least I thought that for the first time in my life. And I became incredibly attached to alcohol and for a long time incredibly attached to drugs because of their ability at certain times to change my perception, to change the way I feel, to make me feel right with everything. and I believe that I drank because I was an alcoholic and that alcoholism, the more you read Bill Wilson's early writings the more your read the big book in the 12 and 12 and some of the early writings the more understand that he got it right he understood that you don't fight alcoholism with sobriety they'd all tried that and it was always something that only worked for a period of time, it was never a permanent solution he realized that you don't fight alcoholism with sobriety you fight it with spirituality and spiritual living that was the great contribution I believe of the early AA's that there is a spiritual solution because there is this spiritual problem I have a disconnection between the world and my head my belief systems, the way I perceive everything. I feel like I'm in a hostile universe. I feel Like everybody's looking at me or could look at me and make me feel, you know, insult me or make me Feel small or, you Know, this will happen or that will happen. All this stuff is going on up in my head. And I'm not comfortable. I'm Not, I don't feel right. So I went after all this alcohol. I went After all these drugs. But they're a solution for the spiritual malady. They are. They're a Solution for that disconnection with everything, but they're A bad Solution for the disconnection. It'll turn on you. You'll become addicted to the Solution. And I became addicted to alcohol and for the most part, off and on, I became Addicted to different drugs. And these drugs never... I could never control them. I could never get to that perfect window where everything is right. I would always allow myself to be over-served. It's just something that would always happen, and especially with alcohol. I would end up, the last four years or so, I would ended up in a blackout nearly every time I drank. So when I first showed up in Alcoholics Anonymous, this. I was convinced, and there were people that were trying to convince me that my problem was alcohol, that my problems was drinking alcohol, and they were offering one-liners to me, hopefully to encourage me to seek the solution to my problem, which was to don't drink. And there was a whole lot of encouragement, you know, keep coming back. You know, here's my phone number, give me a call if you feel like taking a drink. Just show up at the meeting tomorrow. And there was all this encouragement, and all that encouragement led me to believe that my problem was putting alcohol in my body. But the fact of the matter is, folks, if you're working on the wrong problem, you've probably got the wrong solution. So what my solution was, was abstinence. Simple. All I was trying to do was trying to maintain absence. I was trying to not drink in between meetings and what happened specifically with me was this was not a very good solution. Did it help to not poison myself every single night with alcohol and just wake up half dead the next day? Absolutely, that's a very very positive thing physically but that kid who's afraid to call the ambulance who's scared to tell the coach that he's broken his ankle that kid was still all over me and I was still completely uncomfortable with myself and my environment I would walk into an AA meeting because I knew I had to go to AA I just knew that had to have something to do with the solution and the solution was not drinking so I'm going to AA to help myself not drink I had an incredibly hard time walking down the basement stairs and going into these AA meetings because of the amount of people and what they were thinking about me. And if they were looking at me, they were going to be thinking at me. And I was just really uncomfortable with all this stuff. Now, my relationship skill set was really bad at that period of time. I mean, the only people I would hang out socially with the last five years of my using were basically drug addicts or drop-dead alcoholics. So the only person I could hang out with and the only other people I could relate to, everybody else was weird or they were trying to convince me to stop doing something that I knew I had to keep doing. so i had a really bad set of skills as far as relationship was was concerned but i had i had a head that was really trying to sabotage any of the positive things that i was doing i had uh a lot of self-centered fear my self-centred fear would present like this you don't really want it you don'T REALLY HAVE TO GO TO THAT MEETING TONIGHT oh man look look at that you know if you could walk down those stairs you know there's going to be all these people, and there's going to be a couple of the guys there that you don't like, and it's not going to go good. If you just go home, everything will be alright. I mean, that's what my head is telling me. I get a sponsor. My head is saying, what are you going to call him for? You're not really going to called him, are you? What are you going to say to him if you call him? Oh, hey Phil, this is Chris. My life just totally sucks. Do you mind if I share some of that with you? You know, what am I going to say to him? I mean, all of this stuff is going on in my head and it's all incredibly dangerous because it's basically designed to separate me once again from any type of help. Now, Now, I maintained a sobriety for about, I don't know, three or four or five months just hanging on and going to a lot of meetings and just crazy, just sitting in the meeting. And I can't even hear what anybody's saying because my head is talking to me so loud. I can hear what the people are sharing. It just looks like they're happy jerks up there, like, you know, I couldn't hear anything. and what am I doing here and I made it about six months and I was I had made a friend it took me about six months to make a friend Radio Shack Mike was my friend and the only reason he was friendly with me because he was completely out of his mind too he saw somebody that looked worse than he did so he started hanging out with me to make himself feel better I guess and we became friends And he was one of these guys that would go to all the New Age bookstores, and he was very pious. If there was a book that he read on affirmations, you know, he'd come back and say, Chris, the secret! The secret is affirmations! And, you know、 one day he came back, He coursed in miracles! I'm in the middle of this book to course in miracles. It's unbelievable! You know, none of us are reading a big book. We're reading a... Oh, the road less traveled. You've got to read this. Oh, it's got all the answers. And he was very pious like that. And one day he came by my house and he handed me a stack of cassette tapes. And it was eight 90-minute cassette tapes and these cassette tapes were supposedly done by a couple of guys from Arkansas. And I'm like, well, what is it? And he goes, it's a workshop on the big book. You know, the book Alcoholics Anonymous. It's a work shop by these guys from Arkansas. I'm like, why would I care about something like that? Why would I carry what somebody in Arkansas thinks? You know? I'm going to meetings here in New Jersey. And he says, I know. They were hardcore. I didn't really like them. I just thought there might be something in here that you might like. So I go, okay. So I take him. I go all listen to him. I made kind of a promise. I was commuting about 40 minutes each way back and forth from work, and I had a cassette deck in my car. So I started to put these tapes in, and they were one of the earlier workshops by Joe and Charlie. And I startedto listen to this stuff. Now you've got to understand, I was going to discussion meetings, I was go into speaker meetings, and I was gong to step meetings. And I found out later that at step meetings, These people share about the steps, they talk about the steps, read about the step, think about the steps, learn about the steps. They just really rarely do they actually do them. And I found that out later. But I was going to all of these meetings and once I started listening to these tapes a single solid message started to hit me pretty heavily right off the bat, and it got me pretty resentful. The message in, like, tape one was, Chris, if you're not working the exercises out of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, you don't have an AA program, because an AA program is following the instructions in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous. That's what an AA problem is. program is. Nothing else is an AA program. Going to a lot of meetings and sharing and making coffee is not a program. The program is the actual taking of the 12 steps. So if you are not doing that, you do not have a program, if you do Not have a programming, you're an alcoholic, you are going to drink. So when you drink, please don't tell everybody that AA didn't work. Because you didn't work AA and this is basically the mess. Now, now sometimes it's the transmitter that's damaged or the receiver that's damage, not the transmitter. That's not what Joe and Charlie would say, but that's what I heard, you know? Uh, so I took offense and, uh, I did get through all these tapes cause I promised that I would, but I put them off to the side saying, you Know, yeah, maybe that's how they do it down in Little Rock. But in Jersey, we share. You know, that's how we stay sober. We share. And I went on for about another couple of months and then, has anybody ever been in like, had like a sober bottom? Had like a series of really tough things happen to you that are just demoralizing and just, you feel like you don't even know if you're going to be able to stay sober through them. Well, I had a breakup with a girlfriend. I had problems with motor vehicle. I lost my job, like three or four things all at one time. And I remember going over to my sponsor's house and I could barely talk. I could barely talk and he gave me some instructions. I went home. But what haunted me after I listened to these joe and charlie tapes the message in those tapes haunted me uh i could i could discount them uh i Could marginalize their message but i i couldn't get rid of it because the truth will really haunt you if you're an alcoholic so um uh it says in the book alcoholics anonymous if we've disturbed you about uh your alcoholism this is all for the good And I was good and disturbed by these Joe and Charlie tapes. And it was all to the good because in the middle of this sober bottom, you know, where six things went wrong in two days, what happened was I pulled these tapes back off the shelf. I stuck them in the tape player. I brushed the dust off of the big book that I got in treatment a year earlier. And I opened it up. I started playing the tapes. I got a notebook and a pen, and as I was going through the tapes and Joe and Charlie were saying, okay, here is where we do this, I would actually do that. And I'm going through, and I did a bastardized, you know, not a very good run through the steps, but that's what I did. I tried my best to follow the examples from Joe and Shirley in the big book. So I did A Fourth Step, and A Fifth Step. And, you know, I did all the prayers. I put together an eight-step list. You know, I started making some amends. I learned as much as I could about 10 and 11 and practiced a little bit of those. And, you know I was sponsoring people by this time so I was actually bringing them over to my house and we were going through the big book a line at a time. I didn't know any better. You know? I didn' t know how else to do it. And what was going on with me was my spirit was healing. I was having what is known as a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. Now, I think that there's two kinds that you can have in the spiritual experience appendix. It talks about having a spiritual awaking of the educational variety slowly over the course of time. That's the way mine was because slowly over Over the course of time, I was doing the steps. I believe that you can have sudden and profound experiences with this step work if you attack it in a vigorous way, in a fearless, thorough, and vigorous way, I believe, that you could have these sudden and profound spiritual awakenings. Mine took time because I took a lot of time to go through the steps, but what I learned from hindsight, and so often looking back on our lives is when we when we really have some clarity looking back on what I had done was I hadn't done the steps out of any sense of virtue. I just didn't want to feel bad anymore. And it seemed like a better solution than what I was doing, which was just going to meetings. So so really what happened was I learned I learned a little bit about what recovery is. I understood what sobriety was. I understood what abstinence from alcohol was. I got that, but the spiritual and emotional characteristics that were inside of me that were causing me all kinds of problems had remained untreated just because I was not drinking and going to meetings. I needed a recovery process and program. so um so in my experience going through the steps with joe and charlie and a tape player and then bringing some of my sponsees over to my house uh to take them through the steps through that process um i i started to i started to recover and um and my spirit started to heal and if i if i uh if i bring anything here this weekend you know i want it to be a message of hope that this is possible. I believe that any of us can recover if we follow the path that the early AAs laid out for us. The big book answers specifically what we need to do to recover from alcoholism. I'll end here and turn it over to Myers with a couple of sayings. In the book, The Twelve and Twelve, on page 174, it basically says unless each AA to the best of their ability practices the twelve steps in their life, they are almost surely to sign their own death warrant. The drunkenness and disillusionment that follow are not penalties inflicted by AA. They're the results of disobedience to spiritual principles. Bill Wilson also stated in the pamphlet, Problems Other Than Alcohol, that the sole purpose of an AA group is the teaching and practice of the 12 steps. I think in the last five decades we've been allowed to get away from that primary purpose for one reason or another. I don't even know if in specific cases it's a bad idea. But the teaching and the practice of the 12 Steps should be the sole purpose of ANA group. And there's another piece of writing in Language of the Heart where Bill says that a sponsor's primary responsibility is an adequate presentation of the 12 steps to the people that they sponsor. I think that this is incredibly important. I think it's in our nature to overlook something so fundamental as the solution, believe it or not, you know? Oh, you're in AA. Yeah. That's a 12-step fellowship, isn't it? Yeah. Do you do the 12 steps? Oh, no. Only in AA. I mean, if the Rotary Club had 12 processes and you were a Rody Club member, would you join the Rotory Club and not do the processing? I mean only in AA do we miss the obvious so unbelievably. But anyway, what are these workshops about? A lot of times these workshops, unfortunately, Myers and I preach to the choir much too often. You know, the people that understand this a lot of time are the people that come, and the people who really need this, that are dying from alcoholism don't come to these things, and that's unfortunate. But there's also a bad habit of coming to these to get more information and to learn a little bit more, and to bring some of this back and give better share at the home group. That's not really the real purpose of this either. I think for this particular workshop to really, really be successful, what we do is we encourage you, we show you some tools, and we encourage you to take those tools and actually utilize them in your life. Utilize them in YOUR program in practicing THE program in your life to get some of these unbelievable promises that we've experienced. We've experienced incredible promises. Our lives are unbelievable today, some of the stuff that's going on. You could not have told me 20 years ago what my life would be like today. I would not have believed you. Anyway, that's that's all I have. I'm going to turn it over to my friend Myers. Howdy y'all. My name is Myers Raymer and I'm an alcoholic. What are y'All doing still up? I mean at 10 o'clock in Texas you're supposed to be asleep and I just like it's 102 degrees. I was talking to Londa just a minute ago 30 minutes ago it was 102 in Dallas still and it's I'm real glad to be here but it's late. I don't know how you guys are keeping away maybe it's just old guy disease as I get older I have less and less desire to stay up late but I'm grateful that you're here riding for five hours in the car with Schroeder getting to talk about great music and coming up through this stuff I mean no disrespect but I've got to tell you as a guy that was raised south of the Mason-Dixon in Dallas I think of New York and I think everything looking just like New York I don't ever remember how pretty it is up here until in the few instances that I've been up here like this. Usually, it's to an airport, though, and to a conference hall. I mean, I've talked all over up here, but it's to a confidence hall and then back to the airport. And then I don never get a chance to see anything. And so driving up through, every turn is just more breathtaking than the last turn and these grain fields and this stuff. And I'm just freaking out going, man. I kind of understand why you guys would live here. It's just the pretty coolest. It's also at 26 years, almost 26 years of being sober. It's the first time I've ever been to the Wilson House and the first time I'm – I've missed everything. Guys, I've never been to an international conference. I've had an AA speaking deal every time they've had one. I've been someplace else. And I've Never Been. There's just worlds of stuff that I've got to see. I feel kind of like I've just missed the deal. I just – a lot of the stuff that Chris was talking about, it's just kind of a funny sort of a deal. I'm always a little caught off guard by how often we will have an experience when we come here, and then we try to live the rest of our AA experience based on an experience we had when we first got here. And we never stop to think, we never stopped to investigate, is it possible to have another experience? Is it possible to have something deeper happening to us? Or am I on a spiritual plane? Am I where I'm going to be for the rest OF my life? Or what? I just think, I know it seems a little slower here, but maybe it's just because I'm tired and I haven't caught up yet like this. But I've got to tell you in Dallas, everything runs 100 miles an hour. And I don't think that people really think about. I mean, we're the mecca of middle-of-the-road solution in AA. It's some of the craziest AA you've seen in your life. We won't have time to talk about it all tonight or this weekend either. But people say, well, Marge, you're just judging AA. Well, yeah. I am in a way. You have to understand this. It's also my fellowship. It's aussi the fellowship that saved my life. and I have a daughter that's 29 years old that got here three years ago so it all takes on kind of a personal cachet it stops being something that I can just look the other way and ignore the goofiness that happens right in our own room as we talk a little bit tonight and then tomorrow what I'm hoping that we can do is A we're going to look at some steps but we're also going to look at other things like some of these experiences, but everything that I share, everything that I come across is, it seems to be slanted through the eyes of sponsorship. So if you don't dig sponsorship or you're not interested in sponsorship, then maybe y'all can go swimming at the quarry starting at, let's say, 730 in the morning. Because the secret handshake in AA, the thing that connects us all, the thing that makes things so special is this idea that we're going to be of service to somebody else, that we could actually help somebody else plug into a miracle profound enough to take them to a place to where they could recover. It's a pretty cool deal. In our neck of the woods out in Texas, there's whole geographic areas where nobody's sponsoring anybody, where the whole meeting is just about fellowship. The whole thing is about how do we keep ourselves sober one day at a time? How do we Keep Ourselves Sober One Day at a Time? Not God, not a program, not anything. You see the conflict that sets up, and it just gets... So you end up with just a frustrating kind of a deal. So listen, let me... I'll tell you a couple of little things here that I think will connect up some dots so you'll begin to understand where I'm coming from on this thing. Chris, the evil twin, some of you guys know Chris. My twin brother sobered up November 12th of 1987, and then two months later in January of 88, I sobered He took me to my first AA meeting. And I was the kind of guy like that, I fell in love with it. I mean, I'm telling you, I had one sobriety date and I absolutely fell in Love with the rooms and the smoke and the women, the jokes, the coffee. There was nothing about AA that I didn't like. Your stories were fascinating for about six months. But that's all we did. You see, There wasn't a big book in the club I sobered up in. We didn't know anything about the text. We just shared various experiences like this. And so what began to happen was I began to put together a head full of doctrine based on your opinion and your ideas. Some of it was big books. Some ofit was actual program. But there was a whole lot of it that wasn't, guys, and I know that today. But it didn't seem to matter at the time because I'm sober. You understand what I'm saying? And sobriety is a funny thing. It's cool right up to the point that it stops working, that it's not cool. Any of you guys ever get real uncomfortable in the rooms of AA? I mean, where everything is warm and fuzzy and then all of a sudden it's hot and stuff. It's not so warm and fizzy and then pretty soon... There was this guy named Horse Jim that was in the first AA meeting that I was in and he was a staple around there. He was always there and every time he shared he shared exactly the same thing. His little piece of story and that was all he ever shared. It didn't matter if the topic was something else. He'd always just share this little piece de story. You know this guy, okay? He lives here too, I promise you. He's everywhere. And so at the end of about a year and a half of listening to Horst Jim tell this story like this, I'm sitting there in this meeting now coming undone. The meeting is not treating the internal condition, which is alcoholism, and so I'm starting to get sicker and sicker. I don't know what it is. I just know that I'm not well. So I get there and Jim's in there and I go, because I know it's coming like this. And as soon as he starts talking, then I start thinking about it. And so my head drifts off into this idea was, I wonder, because I've never done any real jail time. I mean a night in a drunk tank, but no real time in jail. But if I killed Jim and I drug him out behind the meeting hall and buried him, how much time would I really do in jail? You see? And so for the rest of the meeting, that's where my head was taking me on this stuff. And that's not where we want to go. I mean that's, that's very spiritual. And so there's this loyalty to these groups. There's loyalty where we go. Some of you guys understand this. I mean, most of you do understand that. And so I know I'm not treating my alcoholism. I just know that I'm nicht drinking, but I'm getting sicker. And it's finally getting to a place to where at about three and a half years sober, in big quotation marks, I am a total fruitcake. Listen, every woman in AA is more exciting than my wife, which is not a good thing. I'm writing hot checks all over Denton County. I'm simply just coming apart. My family never knows who's coming home. Is it good old Myers that was like maybe yesterday? Or is it the son of Satan? It could be. You ever leave a meeting feeling like a spiritual giant and you step over a book bag and there's dirty dishes in the sink and all of a sudden you're twisted up around the axle and pretty soon you're just like, they don't know who's coming home. Spiritually, I'm just like walking on eggshells on this stuff. It's just kind of crazy. But I can't leave. These are my peaks, man. These are our peaks. These are these are my buddies here. We love each other. We take a bullet for each other it's all about don't get that right and yet I don't really understand my disease. I don' t really understand what's going on. I get real sick and now I'm starting to fight my wife tooth and nail. She's now moved to the other end of the house. She hadn't left me, but she might as well have. She lived on the other side of the building. She lived in the other bed, and I'm living down here in the little bed. She's down here on the big bed, and we're not going to get back together. And here I am almost seven years in the deal. I almost drank one night. It's a long story, but it was just a bad deal. I was in a place where I shouldn't have been and almost drank and had this little moment, got clear of it, called Chris. Now, Chris now has moved to The Hill Country, and he lives down there. He's married this little gal and he got a big book sponsor. Don't know what that is. Don't care but it was just he but he was happy every time I talked to this cat he was on the phone and he was so happy on the telephone and I'm trying to figure out what's going on so I called him and he said you know what for seven years I've been telling you that you're going to have to find a place where they'll talk solution and where they tell you the truth instead of just patting you on the butt and telling you it's going to be okay because let me tell you something brother it's not going to be okay. You're getting sicker not better and you just won't admit it. All right? All right. Fine. Listen, some of you guys don't have that story. Some of you guy came to AA and got all warm and fuzzy and it stayed warm and fizzy. To this day, it's still warm and fuzzily. And I'm so envious. I am so enviously that you could do that like that. I watched a sea of men and women that sobered up about the same time that I did relapse. And most of it was because we had done some crazy ass things like we voted God out of the meeting one group conscious meeting that's interesting to go back and tell your family what you did it's just crazy stuff Chris hooks me up with Krusty Cliff and I'll talk about him a little bit this weekend Cliff Bishop has been my sponsor for 18 years now Clifford is 90 years old he was like he was 110 when I met him I never met a man that old now I'm 60 and I'm looking at him he's not so old after all But he was one of these kind of guys that would start asking me questions about Big Book. Now listen, he was asking me questions like this, Myers, who are the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous? And I go, some old dudes? I don't know. I've seen pictures of them. I don' t know. Some old dudes. Okay. And he'd ask me something else. I mean, he's lobbing grapefruits at me and I can't hit him. And so his wife, Elaine, would later become my Al-Anon sponsor. She would help me with some Al- Anon issues and help me immeasurably. But she would tell me later that that was the most uncomfortable conversation she'd ever heard two men have. Clifford's not trying to make me feel bad. He's just trying to help me see that I don't know anything. I've managed to stay clear of the booze and the dope for X number of years, seven years almost, based on fellowship alone. I'm not knocking fellowship, guys. Please don't... don't go there. I can see some of you like this already doing this. Quit. Come see me and we'll talk about it. We've got all weekend to do that like that. Fellowship is groovy. I'm not saying anything about fellowship, but if you think fellowship is the only thing that connects the dot, you may have some trouble, you see? Because otherwise, I think that if nurture, if love was enough, I think your wife would have got you sober. I think you're going to get a job. I think my girlfriend would have gotten you sobered. I think mom and daddy would have... You understand what I'm saying? I think the dots would have been connected like that and they didn't get connected. There was something deeper. There was something that we had to do that was different. And then enter the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, which I knew nothing about. On page 17, they talk about this thing. They talk about a common solution. And I had no idea what... I mean, I didn't... Listen, because guys, I'm thinking that the only thing that connects us is this idea that we're all little drunks. That we're just sitting around the room looking at each other and we're connected like that. Now, is there some truth to that? Absolutely there's some truth to that. You bet. The fact that we are connected with a common idea there. A common addiction is important, but it would never have held us together. Isn't that what he says? As we are now joined. This common solution would be baffling for me, guys, because in order to look at a common solution, I had to unlearn what I had learned in AA from a lot of wonderful people. Listen, it would have been easy if this room had been full of a bunch of dicks that were just spoon-feeding me bad data to just mess me up? Wouldn't it have been easy? I could have said, these guys are just mean to me and they're just giving me bad data. Well, the reality of that stuff, guys, was that these were people that I loved. To this day, I still love some of those guys. The guys that lived, they weren't trying to mess me. We were all caught on the same bus thinking that we were doing AA and the reality was we were just doing a lot of fellowship. We were just having a lot of fun together and it worked to some extent but the problem was is that the disease was still progressing I was still the idea of restless, irritable and discontent that we're going to talk about in the morning had never even been introduced to me I didn't even know anything about it like that how many times do we walk into AA meetings today guys worldwide it doesn't make any difference where you are and you walk in and you see people coming apart sitting in the meeting that have no business coming apart they've been around for plenty of time to get sober but they just haven't got there yet in Iceland those little guys out there in Iceland, they used to call them dark tunnel meetings. And they were. In Iceland, the young guys, we're talking guys 19, 20, 21 years old and younger had 12 year olds sitting in the AA meetings in Iceland. And these young guys were in one room and the old dudes were down in another room. And you should see what the meetings were like. When I first went to Iceland, this is a side road I promise y'all will bring it back. But when I first went to Island, these guys they had 400 lathered up little buckaroos these crazy kids I'm talking it's 18 degrees and the wind is blowing 32 knots right out of the north right off the Atlantic Ocean I'm freezing to death and they're standing there in shorts and cut offs just having the time of their life there's 400 of them all latherd up in the basement of this place having this workshop we do this deal like this and they have a great old time there was one man in there that was in his 40s and nobody else older than that in there I was the oldest guy in the room. Two years later, I went back, and the room was about half and half old dudes and young guys. And I asked one of those old dudes, I said, man, what changed? And he said, we got tired of hearing them laugh. These guys never stopped laughing. They laughed the whole time they were sitting in a meeting. And we were just sitting up there sharing war stories, and none of us was getting this deal. And I went, holy cow. And they finally got together and started doing the deal like that. The big book study that they started, This was in 2000, I think, 2001. That big book study they started there is still going strong at Reykjavik, and if you ever just happen to be in Iceland, God knows why you would be. Clifford says we've got three meetings a week. They're all literature-based meetings, and I want you to start coming to that. I don't want youto go to any other meeting until we get you back on the straight and narrow. And I went, fine, whatever you say, I'm willing. Listen, guys, as badly as I was hurting, I'd have eaten a handful of spiders if he said eat one. I didn't care. I would have done anything to stop hurting the way I was hurt. I didn'T want a drink for sure. And so I start going to these meetings. Now, I've got to tell you real quick because here's what it looks like. I'm so judgmental. I'm sitting in these meetings judging every one of them. They'll say something and I'll look at her and I go, self-righteous, just that, what does she know? And I'm just judging everybody because they're studying text. They've got the book in front of them like this. But I just want to, I mean, every time they look at me, I go, oh, oh ,oh, I've got something I want to share. And they're just kind of looking at me and I'll say, they'd say, okay, well, what is it? And I'd share some lame old piece of story or something like this and they'd go, well yeah, but you're still not quite catching on Myers. We're only interested in the text right now. We're trying to teach you what the text is so that you can look at it as a set of directions, you see. Oh, but there's no directions in AA. and I'm trying to give them every one-liner I know and this kind of stuff. And these guys are doing the very best they can to keep from hanging me. We were sitting in a meeting one night, and this guy, I bullied Dara, this girl that was chairing that night. I bullied her into calling on me. I wouldn't shut up until she called on me, and I shared something I thought was profound, and Cliff Bishop got up. This old guy gets up and walks towards me, and as he walks towards him, he's got something in his hands, and I don't know what to do. I'm sitting there going, yeah, he likes what I said. He's going to come over here. I thought he was going to go over here and tell me how cool it was that what I'd shared. And he threw this note down on the table, and it hit my big book and landed in my lap and dropped off on the floor. And I picked it up, and I opened it up. And it says, why don't you shut up until you know what's in this big book? Just like that. Now listen, guys, I ain't feeling any love. I'm thinking, now this is crap, man. My own sponsors treat me with no respect like this. And I got up and I walked to the door and Philip Files stopped me at the door and he said, Myers, don't leave, bud. He said, just sit down. There's a lot of things you don't understand yet, but you will. And I said, man. And he said and by the way, most of us in here got that same note. And I just sat down right where it was. There was a chair right by the door and I just set down like this. And so what happened was I just kind of let my guard down. I quit judging it and I started paying attention to what they were saying and the stuff that they were listening to. And every day, what happened, guys, I started connecting up these little dots. Connecting up little pieces. And so we're in there one night on a Thursday night and somebody said something and I went, holy cow, I'm an alcoholic. And this girl said, what? And I said, I don't know. I'm not an alcoholic! And she goes, I know, that's why you're here. And I say, no, never mind. And I go home and I remember kicking the front door open and I ran in like this. I said Londa, Londa. Man, I am an alcoholic and she just looks at me and she goes, no shit, Myers. And I went, no, no, really, really, don't you? But you don't understand. I understand that I'm an alcoholic now. But it has a face. It has an appearance to it like this. It's not just some lame thing. I'm not an alcoholic because I drank a bunch of booze. And I start connecting it up for her and explaining and she says, well, I'll be darned. That makes a lot of sense. And I go, no kidding. And that started it. I just began from there I began piecing together There's the rest of this stuff. And I began to understand that the idea of sponsorship became just otherworldly. It became such a joy and such a pleasure because no longer was I thinking that what I had to do was just be witty. I didn't just have to be light on my feet and snappy with the pattern. I didn'T have to even be smart. You understand what I'm saying? My reason for not wanting to sponsor anybody is because I'm not too bright. I said, well, if I'm NOT smart, then I'll hurt somebody, and so I just won't do that. and so I make up all these excuses why I can't do that the reality of this stuff is the more I learned about the text the more i understood where the boundaries of my responsibility were my responsibility isn't to make sure that you're solvent in a year my responsibility is not to make sure that you don't date the sister of satan you understand what i'm saying i'm not here to run your life there are boundaries that are appropriate like this can i help guide you if i can sure. But we bump into things all the time that are over my pay grade. I don't know nothing about paying medication. Let me go help you find somebody that does. Let's go get you plugged in like this. And then we'd begin to do that. But it got to a place where sponsorship was just the funnest kind of thing. If we do anything, what I'm hoping that we can do this weekend And I need to put this into perspective. A month or two ago, I talked at a state conference and there were 6,000 people including the overflow people in that room. They're my least favorite talks to do. I'd rather eat broken glass than talk at those kinds of conferences like this. Because let me tell you what happens is I've got one shot to tell you what I came to tell what I hope that God wanted me to say in this deal and then I'm out of there. Whether you heard it the way I said it or not is I don't know. You don't know. Sometimes just because I'm talking doesn't mean that we're communicating. And so this is the reason why these kind of deals in the talks that I've got scheduled over the next two or three years out, almost all of them are workshops like this. I've said no more the last two years than ever before because I don't want to spend more time doing that. I want to spent more time during this where we have some time. So if I say something, I talk fast. I know I do, and if I say something or you flat disagree, listen guys, you're not going to hurt my feelings if you disagree with this old guy from Texas. God didn't tap me on the shoulder and say, Myers, I want you to go up there and straighten them yanks out. He didn't say that. He didn's say that, but believe me, I learn more every time I come and do these things than you will ever know. But it also gives us a chance over a dinner to talk about some ideas. Now, that said, what I'm hoping that you'll do is entertain the idea that perhaps you're here with some ideas that are old, that are ideas that may not be effective. All I'm ever asking guys to do in this thing is to, wouldn't it be cool if we could just take everything that we think we know about this deal and just sort of set it down and then reinvestigate it before we pick it back up again so that what we end up with in our little toolkit of stuff that we're going to use is stuff based on doctrine, based on a program that was handed to us and divinely inspired, I think, rather than a whole bunch of stuff. We assume that the new guy sitting in the room knows exactly what we're talking about and the reality is a lot of times they don't. I remember sitting in a meeting one night and this guy's talking about some step stuff and then there was a girl over here. She was sitting right about where you are. Sweet lady. I've known her for a while, and she said, you know, I didn't do any of those steps to get sober. I didn' t do anything. All I did was practice yoga, and I'm still sober. Now, listen, I'm not knocking her because I practiced yoga for years. I mean, I' m not knocking any of that. I'm just saying that was a personal opinion, but it wasn' t couched as a personal opnion. For the new guy sitting in the room, the new guys going, let's see, work a bunch of steps that make me feel uncomfortable or be in a room full of sweaty, half-clad women. I think I'll do this yoga thing over here. You understand? I mean, it's just like, wow, who knew? The idea that we could unlearn some of this stuff and begin to pick up new tools and begin the right things and begin a new way to look at this thing will give you unbelievable confidence in your ability to carry a message. If you're not carrying a message, then I'm going to ask you, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable, why? What is it about this deal that makes you think that you have the right the right to not do what the rest of us are supposed to do. You understand what I'm saying? This isn't a free ride, guys. None of us just get to sit here and take up space. We're here because each one of us, male and female, are uniquely qualified to help those that come into the room. Y'all would agree with that, right? I think sometimes we sell ourselves the idea that we're not appropriately set up to work with folks, but the reality of that is I think that's just some old idea stuff. If you haven't gathered by now, I call everybody guys. It's like south of the Mason-Dixon, everybody says y'all, but in Texas we got chiseled out to one side and everybody just says you guys. Even if it's a girl or I raise three daughters and my wife, and I just, you guys ready to go? And we just, I mean no disrespect, and if it bothers you I'll do my damnedest to not do that. I got a lady in California so pissed off last year that she was, I thought we were going to have to put her in a hospital. She was angry, angry, angry and I was just trying to explain. I meant no, you'll never ever meet a man that is more of a flag waver for women in our fellowship and more supportive of our sisters in this deal than I am. I would never, never disrespect you. That's enough. What we'd like to do in the morning is we'll start off talking about a few things specifically about step stuff but we don't want this to get into a long drawn out weekend of steps because the cool part about it is if you look at your schedule the way it's set up we've got plenty of open space plenty of down time so that you can do some other things one of the things that always irritated me about workshops I've been all over Europe doing workshops and these guys will schedule them but they schedule them so that when you're there you don't have any time to see them I've seen them I've met in convents that would make you weep they're so pretty and monasteries and you never get a chance to see them because you're sitting in a conference hall from 7.30 in the morning until 9 o'clock at night. I'm just going, guys, come on, man. Can't we tap the brake on this thing and give these guys a chance to get out? You get a new idea. You get this idea that maybe something is not cool that maybe I need to investigate it a little bit. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just walk out and be by yourself for a little Bit and think through some of this stuff and kind of process it a Little Bit? Recovery is not all intellectual. If it is, I'd be screwed. I'm just telling you like that. There's a lot of bulbs here that aren't real bright. I'm not that bright and I just can't... But it is experiential. It is such that as you experience these things they become deeper and more profound and that's what we're kind of after. All groovy? Alright, you guys sleep tight and we'll see you in the morning. All right, good morning, everybody. I want to thank everybody for coming. He's got a quick question. Oh, yes, go ahead. Somebody here has just had a 12th anniversary and may not know that they dropped this outside the church parking lot last night or this morning. Anybody in here? Or anybody know of somebody? 12 years. Oh, they dropped their medallion? It's a medallions, yes. It's an 11-year medallium. Okay. All right, I guess I've got 12 years now. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. I had a spot see who counted his time, but he didn't count it consecutively. So he always had a lot of time. Well, anyway, good morning, everybody. My name is Chris. I am an alcoholic. Thanks for being here this weekend. And I'm really going to enjoy this weekend. We're going to be talking a little bit about step one. We're probably, before lunch, our aim is to get through step four and maybe leave everyone with a couple of exercises, a couple OF writing exercises with inventory just to do in the afternoon. There's going to there's going to be a break around 230 where we're all going to we have the option to go down to down to the quarry It might be a nice afternoon Supposedly the weather is going to be great You could also take that time To go into town Do whatever you want to do Myers and I do quite a few of these things And sometimes The people that put them together Pack them so tight That you go up and you spend the weekend And you never leave the premises You never have a chance to do anything And we wanted to make sure That everybody had And had a little bit of free time to go into town, to go visit Bill's grave. You know, whatever you think you need to do. Anyway, we're going to try to get through step four by noon. We'll see how that goes. Step one. I believe that step one is quite possibly the most misunderstood step in the 12-step fellowships. So often we get that wrong. wrong. And a lot of times it's because we're not listening. But a lot of times, it's because we are getting bad information sometimes from the fellowship meetings. It's really easy to talk about staying away from a drink. It's really easy for people to say, you know, I didn't take a drink today so it's a good day. And those are all very positive statements but when people are new, sometimes they really start to get the idea that the main problem is they need to buckle down and they need to stay away from a drink. They need to remain convinced themselves that they needto stay away form a drink and the first 40 pages or so of the book Alcoholics Anonymous is aimed at convincing us that we can't do that. We can't stay away from a drink and if you're in here for anything besides alcohol, you can't stay away from that without a vital spiritual experience without a change in perception, without a personality change, without being reborn there's a lot of different languages that they use a lot different descriptives that they used in this book for the state of being that puts us in a place where we are safe and protected from the next drink or the next drug. But us convincing ourselves that we're just going to stay sober is not one of them. A lot of the things that they learned in the early days came from different areas. I believe that Bill learned a lot about the problem of alcoholism from Silkworth, who was basically a psychiatrist in the place where he would go to New York City.