The Big Book and Amends – Retreat/Workshop – Part 4 of 4

okay in good AA tradition we're going to start on time I think it'll never be organized but our events have to be so we'll be starting at 10 o'clock morning everybody my name's Liz I'm alcoholic this is an AA copy 2014 but open to all 12 step memberships members of all 12-step program. So welcome everybody today. I just have several announcements before we start our main program. As you'll see at the back, on the table at the back, there's a lot of literature. There's a lot of AA literature, there is AA literature in French and there's some Alenon literature. So three lovely ladies at the back or there's only one lovely lady at the moment but three lovely ladies are around to serve you during the coffee break and lunch break and through today and tomorrow. There are lottery tickets, so the lucky person will go away with not a big book but some of the other reading books that are up there. So please buy from the literature stand your lottery ticket. They're two francs a bargain at the price. There's an ask it basket at the back. You will see tomorrow in the programme on Sunday morning, this is a great this is a great a great there's an ask it basket paper and pens so if during the various sessions you have a question and there isn't time to address it at the time write it on your own on your paper and put it in the ask it basket there's a slot tomorrow morning that will deal with all questions related to to the to the program this is a back to basics it's called so we'll be referring heavily to the BB the big book there on the on the door into the refreshments there's a lot of information there's an information on online sources lots of people are now using a a online so Julia's prepared the list of online sources. There is a sheet there on the guide of where you will find the steps that are in the big book, so there's actual references there. There's a couple of copies round, but we thought you could, if anybody wants it after the event, we can put it on the website. And the toilets are downstairs, housekeeping, so just outside and downstairs. Sorry? Oh, the men's toilet. Well, how would I know? Anyway, ladies, the toilets are downstairs. Gentlemen, the toilets are where? Upstairs in the balcony? Oh on the entrance. There you are. Okay, so without more to do, the first session is Tim's story and Tim, I wanted to do an announcement but he tells me he's just an ordinary bog standard guy from London. So without more ado, I'll introduce you to, I won't, he'll introduce himself. So this is Tim from London. It's all yours, Tim. Thanks. My name's Tim and I'm an alcoholic. The applause may be a little premature. Tim, I'm sorry. I forgot one little thing. Can you just test for Pascal? How is the sound at the back? Say something. so can you hear me alright no speak more into the mic is that alright, can you here me now I won't make any reference hold on we have micro droop we have an expert here okay can you hear me now i can hear a slight echo so this is probably a good thing thank you thank you for inviting me to geneva thank you for inviting here and i've got a couple of friends with me as well so i'm not on my own in the city in the big bad city of geneva um and well done for getting up on saturday morning and coming to this I'm an alcoholic, and so it's amazing to me that I'm anywhere today, let alone Geneva. I came into AA for the first time in the early 1990s, and most of the people that I met around that time are not anywhere anymore, so the fact that I am alive is amazing to you. And alcoholism in my family, those of us who are alcoholics tend to die young. My brother was in his 20s when alcoholism killed him. I'm in my 40s now, so I've got a good few years that by odds I shouldn't have, really. They say very, very high proportion of alcoholics die drunk. I don't know what the proportion is technically I'm not here as a scientist or I'm all here to report statistics but I'm aware I'm very aware that I was going to say lucky that I'm alive I'm sure how much luck has to do with it but then again I'm also in charge of the universe so who knows really why am I still alive being an alcoholic as I am after all these years. I suppose that's the point of what my story is, is why I'm still here. I'm not still here because I'm a good person. I're not still hear because I'm clever. I am not still there because I am nice. I still here, because Alcoholics Anonymous works. It really does, but it doesn't work because I walked in through the doors and sat down and listened, although that was surely necessary if I hadn't walked in, if I haven't sat down, if I hasn't listened, I wouldn't be here. I'm still here. My sobriety date is the 24th of July 1993, so I'm something over 20 years sober now. I believe the reason I'm here is because I broke, I gave up. I realized that my way of living did not work on any level. And I was willing to say to people who I trusted, just tell me what to do, show me what to do. Show me how to live differently than the way I've been living. And I knew that my Way of Living had failed. I knew my Way Of Living failed before I ever drank. I remember at the age of 11 or 12 realizing that the universe had nothing to offer that I was remotely interested in. I turned my face to the wall and said to the universe, go away, just leave me alone. I just want to wait until the whole thing is over. I remember making the mistake of mentioning how depressed I was to my family and my mother said, well we're all depressed. We'll just have to get used to it. now I might add that my mother is French which may explain something of this response my father was English and cheerful and here's an interesting thing I have the example from a very early age of my mother's negative neurotic thinking God bless her and I saw the effect of this which was anger and frustration and enormous tension, wasn't a relaxed household I grew up in. If my father made the mistake of coming back from the supermarket with the wrong type of milk or the wrong types of grapes there would be hell to pay. I have this example and then I had the example of my father who was cheerful, relaxed, happy-go-lucky. He'd had his difficulties but for whatever reason in whatever way he'd gotten over them. And he just took life as it came. He didn't worry about things on the principle that worrying didn't help. He got on with people, he made himself useful. Now I have these two examples. From an early age you'd have thought I would have observed which way of living worked best and I would've copied it but I didn't have the power to do that. I grew up as an identical copy of my mother baffled by my father I have the information there information is not my problem lack of power to change lack of how to become what I need to become was my problem alcohol alcohol is wonderful it really is I don't know if any of you have ever drank But when alcohol first entered my system, I thought, oh, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. Now, I may have to have a job and spend time in the so-called real world, but this, this, is the real world. The other real world is not the real one. It's a place where you have to pretend a lot. But in this little bubble of alcohol, everything is shiny, everything glitters, and everything is slightly fuzzy. The first time I got properly drunk, I was in Germany. I was half, as it may be, to believe in a military band, and we were on tour in Germany, a British military band on tour, you don't get many of those. and we were being hosted in Frankfurt and there's something in Frankfurt, I don't know if any of you have been to Frankfurt but there's something at the time which was called the Apfelwein Express and the Apfelein Express was a tourist tram which ran round the centre of Frankfurt and under, there were these wooden benches and under the benches were these crates of cider at the Apfelwein Now, this is interesting to me at any rate. When I walked into the tram and I stepped onto the tram, I was 14, I saw these crates of cider and I looked at the people around me and I did a very rapid calculation. If you're an alcoholic, you get used to doing very rapid calculations. And I was worried that there wouldn't be enough for me. I'd never been drunk before, but I instinctively knew that this was going to be an issue. Is there going to enough for me? And I drank and drank and drunk, and I looked at the people around me, and no one else was drinking the way I drank. And inside the tram, to me, everything was glittery. Frankfurt was whizzing past outside. It was December. it was warm inside the tram so the windows misted up so this so-called tourist tram of Frankfurt you couldn't actually see anything at Frankfurt it was just this mist and you had to rub the windows to see what was out there the real world was now slightly murky I couldn't see it all I was aware of was the warm glow inside me and it was as though the air was full of Christmas lights this is what alcohol did for me and I mean it's you know 28 years later is that correctly right? it's 28 years after 28 years later and I remember that more clearly than anything in my childhood up to that point this tells you something about the powerful effect of alcohol on someone like me people talk a lot about what alcohol does to them, and that's surely important. But what is important as well is to recognize what alcohol did for me. It instantly changed my perception of reality and turned the universe into a place, temporarily, that I didn't mind being too much. When I was around 17 or 18, the headmaster of my school. I was sent to see the headmaster for something good, actually, that I'd done. And he said that when I first arrived at that school at the age of 14, I was like a little old man. But something had happened to me in the previous... I was 18, I think, at this point. Something had happened in the last few months which had meant that I had flowered and become essentially who I was meant to be. And I had indeed flowered and become who I Was Meant To Be. And the funny thing that had happened in those previous six months was I'd become a daily drinker. I had gin and vodka and Blue Curacao hidden everywhere. It was a boarding school. Hidden everywhere. I constructed hidden cabinets to house my alcohol. My supply was secure, I was safe, and every night I would get as drunk as possible. It allowed me to operate in a world which was now safe because there was somewhere I could run away from, but run away to from the world. I had a hidey hole, I had an escape bridge, I have an escape hatch. Now, this would be fine. I mean, there's nothing wrong with alcohol. A lot of people operate in the world dependent on one glass, two glasses, 18 glasses of wine. Depending on your constitution that may work for you. But I've got a couple of problems. My problems were not the arrests. My problems were not waking up so ill that I couldn't function that day. You hear a lot of dramatic stories in AA, and when I first came to AA, I'd say three quarters of the room were men over 50, and I was a bloke of sorts at the age of 21. My story did not match the story of people who... I had not lost a marriage or a house or a job because I'd never had a marriage, a house, or a job. I couldn't identify with lots of the external stories. But I had a couple of problems with my drinking and as soon as I identified these, I could identify an AA. And I have to say for a long time an AA, I felt as though I was a fraud because I thought I had to identify with the external stories, the biographical stories, the disasters. My two problems are these. When I have a drink, I don't know when I'm going to stop. Now that doesn't just mean during the course of that evening. I mean that's a fairly easy story to tell. There were times when I would meet someone for a drink at five or six in the evening thinking now I really don't particularly want to get out on the town tonight. I don't want to go to the pub. I just want to have a few drinks, have a quiet time, go home, get stuff done, get up early tomorrow. There's an awful lot of pressure and you get home at two o'clock in the morning. I mean this is a fairly easy story to tell. This is a very common story to talk about. I won't labour that particular one. If you've had extensive experience of aiming to have few drinks for a quiet night with friends and it turns into a frenzy and you drink to blackout, then this is a good sign that you're in the right place. But in 1991 I was sober for three months. I'd had a catastrophic time drinking. It was clear to me that even my drinking turned at the age of 18 pretty badly. And I discovered I could no longer get to the place I needed to get to drunk, I would get physically drunk. But I'd become crazed and crazy, and even more desperate drunk than I was when I was sober. And where do you go then? The place you escape to has become even more frightening than the place you've escaped from. And I decided I would go and stop drinking. And for three months, I was living in Finland at this point. For three months I didn't drink, and I did my best to enjoy the Finnish summer. But I was having an awful time, frankly. I was even more insane sober over this period than I was when I was growing up. I would sit in the middle of a very busy road near to a very fast road near to where I lived and the cars would swerve around me because I wanted to die, but I didn't want it to be my fault. I wanted it to create an accident so I wouldn't be blamed. But I was sober and I didn�t want to drink because I had a terrible memory of what the last few months when I was 18 or 19, I had a terrible memory of how those last few moments were like, the desperation, the inappropriate behavior, the sexually inappropriate behavior. And I thought this is awful but a drink won't help and I can't get things done when I'm drinking at all, I can' get things done, I'm too ill during the day. And i was sober for three months and I was desperately asking for help from all sorts of people, I didn't know who to ask help from. I didn't know what was wrong with me, I didn' t know how to ask for help. And people tried to help me but it didn't help. Helping professionals tried to help me, but they couldn't help me. And I got back to London and the first thing that I did was I got excited. I got excited at the prospect of drinking even. And my mind was filled with the same thoughts that it was filled with when I was 14, 15, 16, 17 where all I could think of was the joy and the excitement and the exhilaration and the promise and the possibility associated with having a drink. I arrived in London and I met some new friends and I started drinking and something in my mind clicked after I think it was a bottle of Cinzano something in my mind clipped after the first bottle of Quinzano and this desire to at least make something of myself in the world and live some kind of sober life left me after the first drink and didn't come back for another nine months and this would keep happening for. Every summer, I'd get to May or June and the weight of the awful experience of drinking over the previous nine months would hit me all at once and I'd say, I can't do this anymore, I'm done, and I would stop drinking. But when I started again, the resolve of the three months that I was so would go instantly. This is the effect of one drink. I can be absolutely convinced that I must stay sober, committed to staying sober, sure at a cellular level that being sober, although difficult, although crazy-making, was the right way to proceed. I have one drink and this plan is wiped from my mind. It's like a data disk being wiped and it's replaced with a new plan which is I'm going to essentially live in the drunk world. I may need to spend some time every day in the sober world To get some money in order to sustain my drunk life But it switches And I don't get to choose when it switches back At one point, I started drinking again It was a year and a half before it switched back And I said, I want to be sober again And I know today, if I stop What I'm doing in AA If I have a drink I don't know if the gift of grace to want to be sober would come back, and if so, how long it would take. I had some slips in AA after I came to AA, and in some of these cases, I came back the next day. In other cases,I didn't. In 1995, my best friend in AA drank, and it's 2014, and he's still drunk. Other people I saw drinking and were dead the same day or dead within weeks. So my two problems, the two problems which constitute my alcoholism are number one, when I have a drink I don't know if I'm ever going to stop. Number two, if you leave me sober for long enough, left to my own devices, all I see is the glow and the excitement and the joy and the exhilaration and the world of possibilities around a bottle of gin, a bottle of cinzano, a bottle of sherry. It doesn't matter what it is and the rest of the world gets blocked out and all I can think about is that is where I want to live and no memory will stop me no argument will stop me, no goodness will stop me. I have to do it and the reason I'm still sober I believe is because the underlying problem has been solved. I was tense my whole life before I ever drank. And there was something terribly wrong, but I didn't have the words for it. When I was sitting on the... I bitterly think my Lake Geneva helps, but I was siting on the wall out there thinking there's nothing wrong. This is just before the meeting. There is nothing wrong now. There has never been anything wrong. There's been a barrage of thoughts in my mind at certain times telling me that everything is wrong, everyone is wrong. The world is screwed. There is no hope. But there was never anything wrong, I was never harmed. Now how I got from there to here, I can't look back and I don't understand why, intellectually, why I was so unhappy as a child. I don'T UNDERSTAND INTELLECTUALLY WHY I WAS SO UNHAPPY, I SHOULD ADD, FOR MANY YEARS SOBER. THOUGH THAT'S NOT COMPULSORY. WE'LL GET ON TO THAT. BUT A CHANGE HAS HAPPENED. AND THERE'S A MARVELOUS LINE IN THE BIG BOOK WHERE WE TALK ABOUT, IT SAYS, WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US. And sometimes when people who've got a good program in AA will convey that program, they'll tell you all the marvelous things that they did and how wonderful things are now. Yeah, I've had to do those things. There's a lot of action in AA. There's is a lot that has been required of me. But that is not what has kept me here. That is not has solved the underlying problem. problem. The thing that has solved the underlying problem is the grace of a power greater than me working initially through everybody else in AA and then working through me to keep me here. I need to take some action to activate my faith. As a woman I met in Austin, Texas said a number of years ago, I only met her very briefly but the memory of her is seared in my mind, you need to take action to activate your faith. God isn't going to slide a hot dog under your door. So yes, I've needed to take a lot of action in AA, but AA has essentially carried me for the last 20 years. If I meet the conditions, AA will carry me. And the only condition I needed to make when I was very new was I needed follow the first instruction. When I phoned AA, a woman said, there is a meeting near you tonight. This was February 1993. And something in me was broken and said, I'm going to follow the instruction. So I sat in my bed for the next nine hours until it was time to go to the meeting. And I went to the meet and I said, is this... I must have fumbled what I was saying. I must've been incoherent because there was enormous confusion when I arrived. They tried to send me initially to an Alateen meeting down the road. So I looked around 16, 17. I hadn't been eating very much and I was sort of small and frail. eventually they worked out I was indeed in the right place and they gave me half a cup of tea and they sat me in the middle of the room and I felt a curious sensation which I was safe what I had to do was follow the instruction go to the meeting, follow the next instruction take this cup of teapot, sit there and I took the cup of tiapot and sat there I didn't argue, I just waited for the meeting to happen to me And that's been the story of the rest of the steps. I didn't stop drinking straight away because, I mean I have to say, I was surrounded by people in AA who were good people when I first got to AA and there were people who were working with Steps, there were who had a program, there are people who are sponsoring, there were people who had a spiritual life, there are people who are praying, meditating and making events and doing all of these things. Now the trouble is there are lots of other people too who are great and kind and lovely but when there are two people in the room who are working the steps and 19 who are not and come to AM talking about their day and blah blah blah. How would you know that the two people, the two crazy people working the steps are the ones you need to listen to. They're in the minority. You're going to go with the majority, you're goingto go withthe consensus. And the consensus, what I was told as a majority of the time was don't drink and go to meetings and you'll be fine. And I didn't drink and I went to meetings and then I drank and I wasn't fine. And you see, I can't consistently follow the instruction don't drunk. So I don't tell people don't drink. I'll tell people, if you comply with certain conditions, you'll be given the grace not to drink. The first night I went to AA, I went home at the end of the meeting and I poured a bottle of gin down the sink. I'd never poured away a drop of alcohol in my life. I was given the power to do something which would have been beyond my mind to conceive Now, initially the shock of being surrounded by all this power in AA, that was enough. But there is something so powerful inside me. There are two powerful forces in the universe. One is a power greater than myself. God working through people in AA now working through me. The other power is a destructive force within me. And that was in charge of my life. And as soon as I came to AA, that power was still growing and that grew and grew and grew until a voice inside said to me, you need relief. I know where the relief is. And the relief came in St. Petersburg in March 1993 from a bottle of Hungarian brandy, which I knew as soon As I drank it was the wrong thing to do, but I had to carry on drinking. in july 1993 after an incident which involved a traffic accident with some policemen i won't go into the details um something in me broke even further and my story is a story of breaking something in my life something in you broke further and for some reason you see when i break i hear different things i hear things i haven't heard before i see people i haven's seen before and a voice reaches me from them that hasn't reached me before and a woman called Maureen who was 19 years sober at the time is still sober today MaureEN said did you know we're dying and I thought this was very imparting because people said people had been saying to me for months did you now you're so lucky you're lucky coming to AA so young and you're going to be alright and I didn't feel lucky and when you're lying in the middle of the road and there is a car heading towards you at high speed, you are not okay. The people that said you're going to be okay were speaking from the heart, but they weren't speaking accurately. She said you were dying and I knew she was being accurate and that cut through all the sentiment and I found a man called Doug who was not bothered remotely what people thought. He was just happy and cheerful in rooms of AA, which were sometimes not very happy and not very cheerful. And I was amazed. I was amazing. I was amused at this. There was a lightness and there was a buoyancy about him. And I said, what do I have to do? And now he gave me instructions over the following year, which were good and helpful. And I completed, I ran through the steps very quickly. I didn't have a strong concept of power greater than myself. The type of AA that I went to at this time was very much just follow the instructions would be absolutely fine. And the funny thing was, I did and it worked. I didn�t have any real concept of a higher power. I remember three or four months sober having a bad day and I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, no mobile phones, no internet. And I opened the big book hoping this might help and there was a chapter, We Agnostics, I had a vague idea of how greater than myself might help and I read the chapter and it infuriated me and I threw it across the room. But I was following the practical instructions I was given and I'm staying sober and boy was I doing better than the people around me who weren't, who were drinking and some of them were dying. So I knew the instructions helped and my current sponsor's sponsor's sponsor says a lot of steps two and three are about taking actions you don't believe in because the people who are giving them are doing better than you. Doug was doing better than me. He was bright, he was successful, he was funny, he was relaxed, he had a bunch of friends, he led an amazing life and he was doing better than this. I just did what I was told. And I did a step four and five, which by my standards now is shoddy. But I told the truth. It was the best I could do. And when I told the truth in step five, I realized at gut level, I was unhappy because of this? This material, literally five pieces of paper. A terrible step forward. It was an honest effort and I told the truth and it worked. And I made some amends and they were, you know, based on how I make amends now, there were shoddy amends, there was rotten amends. I wouldn't give you toughness for how I made them but I made then. You know what happened? I stayed sober. I had some effort at steps 10 and 11. I found meditation very difficult. I tried to go to meditation classes, I tried reading meditation books, but I couldn't do it. I didn't develop a spiritual life because I think the big reason was when you look at meditation and dictionary now, it points you eastwards. It points you towards Buddhism, it points me towards mindfulness, it puts you towards specific postures, relaxing tapes, all these wonderful things. I'm not mocking these things, I think they're wonderful. You take an alcoholic who is mid-treatment and ask them to sit in a room alone, cross-legged, with no external interference, and you ask them to quiet their mind. I became suicidal within seconds. I could not follow these instructions for long enough to get the benefit because the noise in my head was too loud. So I didn't really follow a spiritual path. I followed a purely practical path. And I did sponsor people. I did a lot of service in my first five or six years. But something was happening, and I didn't know it was happening. My ego, which was so broken, which was broken sufficiently when I came into AA to follow instructions, was growing back. And you know you've got an ego when you have a plan. and my plan was to make it as we say in english i was going to make it in the world now alcohol wasn't in the way the world was my oyster i could do what i wanted and my idea of making it was i need to get a career I need to get a career in which I move fast, I progress rapidly, I rise up the level, I get money, I get power, I get prestige, I get security so they can't get me. If you've got a concept of they who are the ones who are going to get you, you might be ready for this program. I wanted to make myself safe. I thought I need a relationship, I need someone to look after me who is going to stay with me come what may. I need a mortgage, I need a pension, I needed a big house in the suburb where I'm safe from poverty and from want and from fear. And I'm going to construct this. How am I going to do it? I need the position in AA. I need good social set. I need to look good. I don't know why I thought I needed to look good physically. Clothes. and i had a plan and the thing is when you're sober and you've been given half a program and you're surrounded by people in ai who are very competent and very capable you will be taught exceptionally well how to win at the game of life in the world's terms and at eight years sober i was the finance director of a dot-com in london uh i was earning a lot of money i had big house in the suburbs I had a boyfriend who I'd been with for many years who was in LA. We were very happy, we were very secure. I had the mortgage, I had the pension. I had an amazing set of friends from a social point of view. They were wonderful, they were exciting, they Were thrilling, they were friends you could boast to your other friends about. That was the point of friends. It wasn't whether you enjoyed being with them, it's how impressive they were to your other friends. And if you left me alone for long enough to be aware of what was going on really underneath, I became suicidal and asked him to give me something to do, give me somebody to distract me. And I broke down rather spectacularly and became ill physically. And i went to AA and said, what do I do? I to the people around me and said, what do I do? And they said, go to lots of meetings. Get lots of service. I've been doing lots of services. I'd been going to lots of meetings, and I tried, but I didn't find the solution I was looking for. So I left AA. I don't know if any of you have left AA, but But I did, and I didn't drink. But I became over the course of two years a recluse. I became stranger and stranger and more and more frightened until I was forced back to AA because I didn t know where else to go. It had failed but I didn d know where else to go. And over the course of the next five years, which was a very painful five years in some ways, I found some people. I found some people not in my local groups. I find some people over the internet. I found some tapes and I listened to these tapes and I found tapes of people that talked about the doctor's opinion what really made an alcoholic an alcoholic, and it wasn't the dramatic drinking story. It was the two features I talked about earlier. And then I found lots of Al-Anon tapes, and these explained my reaction to all of the alcoholics around me in AA. They explained my reaction to my parents. They explain why I was so affected by everybody around me. I then, fortunately, found tapes of people that talked about the promises in the big book. They talked about freedom from fear. They talked abut living in a new and wonderful world, whatever their present circumstances. Now, I had read the big-book a number of times by this point, and I agreed enormously with some of it. But Bill W., in the chapter where he tells his story, talks about the Bible, where some bits he agrees with hugely. The morality was impossibly good and other parts were impossibly bad. And that was my attitude to the big book. There were some very good practical things. But there were some bits which were just poetic license. It was just Bill trying to sell something. And I would go to big book meetings and tell people, don't take it with a pinch of salt. Don't believe everything you read in this book. What I heard these people saying was that if you haven't met the conditions for the promises to come true, don't be surprised if the promises haven't come true. There are seven points in the big book where it describes, if you do this action, you will get drunk. If you don't do this option, you'll get drunk." drunk. And I looked at whether I was complying with these conditions. Now, I wasn't getting drunk, but I was close to it in many ways. In many ways my life externally was very good. I was certainly doing better than lots of my friends, but there was a deep unease which hadn't been solved for 15 years sober. I was happy in some ways, but not functioning at a profound level. I knew there was something deeply wrong. And i had to ask myself, am I fostering resentment? Am I harboring resentment? And yes, there was a lot of bitterness in my life towards my parents, towards my siblings, for instance. Secrets, oh boy, were there secrets. There were things I couldn't tell my AE group. There Were things I hadn't told anyone. Were there creditors I haven't faced? Yes, I've built up amends over the previous 14 years since my first round of amends. Amends I haven'd made. Things I'd stolen so well which I haven't given back. Were there other amends I hadn't made? Absolutely, there were amends that I hadn' t made the first time round. I've been given licence not to make them for people in AA. Well-meaning people said you don't need to go back to exes, you don't have to go to former partners, you don' t need to back to people who have harmed you. If you've harmed them, you have to make amends unless they've harmed you, in case don't lie. Now, these people meant well, but I knew there was guilt, there was shame associated with these. Was I giving up much of my free time to help other people? Not really. I wasn't meeting the conditions for the promises. I decided that I was going to test what the big book said scientifically. And the only way to test it was take every action described in it and see what happens. And let's see whether these promises are real whether they're a pile of rubbish. And over the course of three months, I did exactly what it said word for word. I made every last amend that I could find. I had a list and I came up amazingly with a list of 78 people. I couldn't believe that that list was there until I looked for it. I didn't find it. The roof of my head blew off and I realized I'd been living my whole life under a blanket and I hadn't been experiencing real life. I'd been experiencing this grey monotony and I thought that was real life but it wasn't. Over the last five years my life has blossomed in an unbelievable way and it happened because I met the conditions and the conditions are not difficult, they're about an honest effort brother, about an earnest effort combined with a desire to complete what was started. I didn't complete what was started the first time. And I've been shown I've fortunately over the last five years been exposed to people who have shown me how to pray and meditate in a way that works for people who are crazy. A way to pray and meditate for people whose head is full of noise. I've being shown ways of helping people simply by showing other people what helped me. The gaps have been filled in and what I'm looking forward to doing in conjunction with Laura for the rest of the day is to show you what was shown to me, to show you how to fill in the gaps so that hopefully you'll get the experience of AA that I've had over the last five years and not the experience I had in the first 50. I've got my thoughts in here so I'm going to stop now. Thank you for listening.