Big Book Workshop – Myers R. – New England Weekend – 2020

Before our step speakers begin, we will begin with our first keynote speaker, Myers R. from Hickory Creek, Texas. Welcome, Myers. Thank you, guys. Can y'all hear me okay? All right. I wanted to double check and just make sure that my time was okay. I've got five 50 on here and I thought we were starting at six o'clock. So I'm glad I got on when I did, I'd have been in trouble. The that'll work out really good. So I guess, I'm guessing that you, that we're going to go about 45 minutes, 50 minutes, something like that. Okay. That'll work at okay too. That I never know, man, I'm doing these a lot of zooms in Europe and a lot Of these meetings are, I was on one the other day that was two hours long, but they never told me. And so I'm just like going like that way, but I don't know what to do. So it's kind of funny. What a treat. I wish I was there personally. I tell you, I love being in that neck of the woods and just pretty special. It's sort of amazing. In March when all this crazy stuff started, I had 36 scheduled travel talks and in a month and a half they were all gone. and so the I don't miss the inside of an airport but I do miss seeing you guys in person it's a kind of fun to be able to just sit there and visit with y'all and pretty uh pretty amazing um you know I'm I'm some of you I was looking at the the participants on there some of you I've met before and I know for those that I haven't met my name is Myers R. I'm a very grateful, recovered alcoholic from Dallas, Texas. My sobriety date's January 15th, 88. And what a trip. My home group is a bunch of lathered up big book guys and gals called the Primary Purpose Group in Dallas. And we got three book studies a week. And we're just big into carrying the message, this kind of stuff. when the, when the virus stuff started in March, we had 52 commitments a week that we were carrying the message other places. And so it was one of those things that I came by later in my sobriety, my early sobriete. I never gave, I never give a single thought to carrying the message to somebody never, it never even crossed my mind because that's not really what we were about. We were about sober bowling and sober softball and a lot of, I don't know, they were fun. They were fun, But you sure can run out of stuff that's important that way. And it's kind of funny. When I sobered up, I'm a functioning alcoholic. I'm from a long line. I've got four generations in front of me. Great-grandfather, grandfather, my dad were all alcoholics. My identical twin brother, Chris, who some of y'all have met. Um, Chris, um, had been trying for years to get sober, um And had struggled and failed And he finally got sober That was kind of amazing And, um He sobered up in November of 87 And, uh In January of 88 A couple months later Um I had had enough nonsense Um Um It's just a bad deal Guys I have a I say stupid things anyway Sober I say stupid things, but when I'm drunk, it's like stupid times 10. It's like I think about the things that I've said and things that I do, and I just go like, why would you do that? And so I kept getting in trouble. People don't like it when you say stupid things to them, and I just got really tired of that. So anyway, Chris took me to my very first meeting, and I was delighted to be there. I'm one of these guys. I've got one sobriety date, And I fell in love with AA and the folks there. And I can't begin to describe what a life-changing event it was. A lot of y'all have experienced that. It was just something I never really, I never had experienced it. My dad had tried to get sober over the years. He was a brilliant craftsman, real quiet, kind of a gentle guy. and um he um but he it never never stuck i don't know i've often i wish he was still alive so i could talk to him and ask him kind of what was going on what i suspect happened was that he fell in with a bunch of folks and they ended up doing a bunch Of stuff like sober bowling and sober softball and and not much else and i'm listening i'm here as the poster boy of middle of the road solution i'm Here to tell you for a little while you can stay sober doing all kinds of crazy things Um, but if you're like me, I think a lot of you will find yourself in a situation at some point in time where the stories are, um, have lost their impact where they, um uh, I'm just not feeling the connection that I did when I first got there. Um, and so, um I mean our single rule in the group that I sobered up in, her single rule was uh, just don't drink and go to meetings and that was it. I could tell you every aphorism off the wall, think, think think, just don't drink. I mean, I could tell you all of those things but I couldn't tell you who the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous were. Isn't that weird? I mean I just didn't, I didn't know there's a piece of me kind of a perverted piece of me that wanted to blame all of that on my original home group. Just those bastards if they had just, well, you know what? I had a big book. I used it every meeting to set my coffee cup on. I did. I had A Big Book. I was just too lazy to read it. So I didn't understand that there was a program out there. This is the reason why these kind of weekends and the kind of things that we're going to do this weekend, why it's so special to me, because there is a need for clarity around what our program really is. The way we all present things like this, the way Kelly presents the program, theway I present the program the way some of these other folks will present the program, we will present it differently. But the basic idea of what we're presenting should be the saying there should be a common thread that runs through all of that the problem we run into is and all you got to do is go to a bunch of meetings different meetings and you'll begin to see and understand um the the that there's a problem here um that a lot of times the things that you'll listen to at one meeting will be completely different than what you hear at another meeting and what i've seen this magnified many many times before in in various things but during the Zoom era, the last six or seven months, I can't tell you how many meetings I've been to where I'm going, okay, I know I signed into an AA meeting. When are we going to start talking about some AA? Because it would just get crazy. And so I'm a baseline guy. I like to set things back over on page 17. Bill Wilson, one of the coolest places that they wrote with this idea that our stories are cool, but at some point in time, they're not going to be enough. And then they talk about this piece, this common solution. And so it's imperative, I think, as individual members of this fellowship, that we understand what the common solution is. And the only way you're going to know the common resolution is to study a little bit. You're going to have to do what I didn't do, which was read the book. So I don't, I need to tell you one little piece of this story because it has a bearing on the rest of this. And so when I got to AA and memorized all the aphorisms and we're doing all this telling stories every day. And I'm going to six meetings a week. It's right down from where my bindery is. I'm a book binder by Trey. We had a big book bindery, right? Right. I mean, I could literally throw a Coke can and hit the building where that meeting was. And so I was there six or seven times a week, but and it was, it was cool for two years. I thought this was special. My wife was digging it. We ended up having another little baby girl. So now I got two and we'll have another one on the way before too long. And it was just, it was good. I was doing okay. I mean, sober is better. I'm telling you. But stick with me a second because it was weird. And I've talked to a whole bunch of people over the years, guys and gals both who at some point in time, you began to find yourself in a situation where you feel like you're drifting sideways towards something that may not be where you want to be. Um, I'm starting to manifest some weird stuff, uh, between two and three years. I'm dealing with an anxiety disorder that I got to have medication to treat. Uh, I got out of the, uh, uh traffic. I got Out of my vehicle twice and left my car in the middle of a traffic jam because I couldn't stand to be in the car. Um Uh, it's just, it just not, not a fun deal. And, um, so I'm Dealing with that. And then out of The blue, this depression starts coming back. Now Guys, I've always struggled with depression. Since I was a little kid, I had problems with it. But it got to a place where all of a sudden it was back times 10. It multiplied itself. Suicide was part of it. I was really, really worried that at some point in time I would eventually kill myself. So it's funny, all those years drinking and acting a fool. I never one time thought about killing myself. And I've done some stupid, stupid stuff. I never once thought about it. Had a lot of guilt, a lot or remorse, a little bit of shame. A lot of shame, but I never thought about killin' myself. And here was three, three and a half years into the deal. And that's all I could think about. It's killing me. um i'm starting to um manifest things in a way that later somebody would say myers you didn't see that as untreated alcoholism and i said no i didn't i didn'T understand what alcoholism was and so i didnT understand that it was manifesting like that let me ask y'all hey how many of y'ALL have ever spent money on things you DIDN'T need you bought clothes you DIDNT wear you bought music you didn't listen to. I'm a tool guy, so I buy tools like we were laughing one day that when I die, they're going to clean out my garage and they're gonna find a dozen hacksaws. I just got to ask you a question, just because y'all seem friendly enough, I could honestly ask this. Why does a man need 12 hacksaws i mean it i dang but they're so cool i mean they they come in all sizes and but i'm buying all kinds of stuff like this i um one of the things i learned to do when i got sober i really wanted to finish my flying uh deal i was had studied to be a private pilot for a long time but i couldn't stay sober enough to take a check ride i think the faa is kind of sensitive maybe too much sensitive that they wouldn't want to get into a cockpit with a drunk pilot. I think they're being just babies, but, um, that's just me. I just, um. I couldn't take a check ride because I couldn'T stay sober. And so when I finally got sober, I finished it and got a check riding and I had to buy an airplane. And then a little bit later I bought another airplane much to my wife's dismay. Uh, she's also my business partner and the smart one in the, in the relationship. And, and a couple of years later, I ended up buying another one. I said, we can't afford one airplane, but I own three now. And it's just, I'm trying to connect all these dots and I, and I just can't I just can't line this stuff up. Finally made up my mind. I was going to leave AA. It wasn't going to work. And Chris had moved to the Hill country and he got a big book sponsor. I didn't know what that was and didn't care. But he was always happy when I was talking to him. And so. So I wrote out, I made this little little speech that I was going to give by this time, six, a little over six years sober. And sober, I use those in quotation marks and the the kind of not not not doing too well. And so I was going to read this little speech at the meeting and it'd be my little swan song kind of thing because I'm going to leave AA and I want everybody to know that I love them and that I blah, blah, bla. It was just stupid. And so, I start talking and this guy named Horse Jim, I'll never forget his name, Horse Jim. I knew the guy for six years and that's all I knew is horse. and I'd go horse he said Myers listen I I know you're struggling buddy I I just I think I can I think i can i can help you and I said okay now that he interrupted my swan song um and so he said Mars when you got up this morning did you drink and I says no and he said Marsh gee you're a winner then dude you're winner and I went oh okay okay and I remember walking out of that meeting that night, and I walked out on the street. My old Toyota Land Cruiser was parked out on a street, and I remember sitting in behind that wheel, and I put my head down on that steering wheel, and I cried, andI cried,and I cried. I just wept like a little kid. Guys, I don't want to drink. I don' t want to go to a stupid dope house. I don''t want to be loaded in any form or fashion. I want to do it. I want me to be sober, but I cannot do this. I'm thinking, if I'm such a winner, how come I feel like such a loser? How come I'm coming apart? I finally got a hold of a guy. The story got convoluted, but I've got ahold of a guy named Cliff Bishop who passed away some years ago. Clifford was a crusty old guy and he was old as dirt when I met him. And he sponsored me for 23 years. And he was something special. He was sponsored by Joe McQuainey, Joe and Charlie. and um you could you could you could tell by the way he talked and stuff but but he he would would would try to get me to see the things that I needed to see he told me one time he said Myers he said I gotta tell you buddy he said teaching you the steps teaching you those little things like that is gonna be the easiest things in the world to do I mean seriously I teaching you the steps and getting you in the program is gonna be easy I gotta Tell You Dude getting you to a place where you can forget all the old crap that you brought into this thing may be impossible. And at the time, I didn't fully understand what he said, but later I connected it up and understood exactly what he meant and exactly what He said. A lot of us sit in rooms with people who mean really, they mean well. These are not evil people. We just tend to teach what we're taught. And if you're in a situation where you were never taught the basic text, and you were never taught what the book was trying to teach us. You'll find yourself in a situation where you will, you'll feel less than that you'll find yourself in A situation where restless, irritable and discontent will come back and bite you in the you know what, and pretty soon you're trying to figure out what do I do? What? And so this is the reason why we end up with so many people that are trying different things now they go, well, AA didn't work. I'm going to do this. I'll do this, they're still trying to scratch the same itch. What I found was at the moment, I got serious about my alcoholism and the progressive nature of that alcoholism. The moment that I got seriously enough to understand what a step one experience was, the pain of that understanding was enough to motivate me to move on and try to do some steps. And I began to do what I didn't want to do, what I refused to do which was read the stupid book. Just read the text and it was real easy. Guys I'm a reader from way back. I mean I just I love to read. I just don't know why I just moved away from the basic text but I did. And so when Clifford and those guys got me involved in those book studies every meeting I would walk out. I looked like I'd been hit in the face with a tire tool. I'd be just kind of looking around going, well, what, what just happened in there? What did I just hear? And, and I'm starting to connect up. Oh, that's that guy. Oh that's oh, I get it. I get It. And you began to start seeing things like prayers and promises and directions that you never, that you ever saw before that you Never even knew that they were there. And this was what got to be an amazing deal. I've had the great joy and pleasure of traveling all over the world doing AA stuff, and I'm blown away by how many folks have lived through the same sort of experiences that I have. Um, but unless you're studying, unless you'RE willing to look at some basic text and then take some directions from a sponsor who understands that stuff, what you'll find yourself in is a situation where this idea of just staying sober one day at a time, which by the way, is not in the book. It was in some of our literature later, but it was not in the basic tech. We live life one day at a time, but we stay sober for good and for all. Guys, sobriety shouldn't be bondage. It shouldn't been one of these situations where we're walking around frustrated and holding a trigger list in this hand and worried about the day in this kind of thing. They never painted that kind of a picture, and this is the reason why it's so important that we kind of look at some of this stuff and try to decide, um, what it is that we want. If, if you're okay with staying sober one day at a time, if that's what you want, well, rock on. I mean it rock on, but I think that you will find yourself in a situation like I found myself where you'll, um、 in the words of an old Mark Houston, uh, talk, um,"I smell more. I smell more." I feel like there's something else there. um and um and there there truly there truly is i'll tell you there was a guy that i sponsored for uh still sponsoring um but this was some years ago but he called me and he was crying and he Was just all all shook up and i said what's what's up and he said i man i'm i couldn't be sadder and i Said what's going on and he Said my daughter's getting married and i went you're sad because your daughter's Getting married and he goes no no no i'm getting i'm sad because my daughter's getting married and i can't go to the wedding and i said ed pray tell why and he goes well the the family together their side and this and my side of the family had decided that they're going to serve champagne at the wedding at the reception after the wedding and so they i can'T go and i this guy's name is stan and i i said stan if i could crawl through this phone, I would bitch slap you. You've got to be making this up. You can't be serious about this. And he goes, well, I am. And I said, guys, you have to understand. I said where did you get that idea? And he said, well I've got it from treatment and from some other stuff. He had taken a little foray into some other ways to quit drinking and the trigger lists were part of it. And I just kept saying, you guys, come on. That that sounds like bondage to me. That that that sounds Like the kind of life I don't want to live. I want to be free and clear of this stuff. I want To go where I want TO go and do what I wantTo do and and and be with who I want To be with and not have to be always worried that all of a sudden somehow I'm going to be triggered um this is that's not freedom i sometimes when if you ever get a chance to meet my twin brother chris if you never get a change ask him about our we had a 12-hour layover coming back from copenhagen one time back coming back to to texas and um we have a 12 or 13 hour layover in amsterdam and so listen for some of you guys that are they're younger in there go google amsterdam red light district it's just like a walking distance from from the from the airport and you go through a train station and then you come out the other side of it and you're down there and it's like it's the craziest place i've ever been in my life and we and we laughed and and i'm telling you i could chris was i thought he was going to throw up he we were laughing so hard the people and the things that were going on and this kind of stuff and not one time not one time did we ever think about any of this goofy stuff. Why? Because I've recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. The obsession has been removed. Sanity has returned. That's what this stuff is all about. That'S the reason I introduced myself like that. That reason, and because they asked me on page 90 to introduce myself like THAT. I don't want to introduce myself as somebody that's going to be sick for the rest of their life. It's not the picture that they painted, listen, I'm going to turn into, to, um, I got a, I Got a few minutes here. I want to, I want To turn into book nerd for just two seconds. Okay. And, and just, um over on, um The, the, the forward of the second edition, um In two places on XVI y'all don't have to reach for your book. I'm just going to read it real quick. It take just like, I'll just gonna to make a point here um on xvi in uh the forward to the second edition there's a place up toward the top of that page where it says um from this doctor the broker had learned the great nature of alcoholism the nature of alcoholismo and then at toward the bottom of that page is it dr silkworth's description of alcoholisme they're addressing it from two different places here like this and then when we flip over into more about alcoholism and there is a solution. There's two places in there where Jim's story and Fred's story, where they're relating these stories. And in both of those stories, they say the same thing. They come back and they struggle with the disease. And in both cases, they says, we told them what we knew about alcohol. Okay. There are four places right off the front of this thing that began to talk about this idea of knowing and understanding what alcoholism is. Listen, my story does not define my alcoholism. And yet how many of us have said in hundreds and hundreds and thousands and hundreds of meetings where people wanted to define their alcoholism with their story? Don't get me wrong. Folks, I'm not saying that your story's not important. It is important. You're gonna need to know it and understand it like this. But at some point in time, The story has to stop, and you need to be able to pull folks with a vision of how cool recovery is, but you need to help them understand what alcoholism is. If you depend on the media and everybody out there, guys, come on, listen to Dr. Phil or Oprah or any of these other people. Listen to the things that they say about alcoholism. you'll it's all right i'll i'll simmer down it's crazy we have a million people out there that want to define alcoholism based on what they think that they know and what we really need to do is read the basic text and then look at what alcoholism is they're going to talk about it tonight in the morning they're gonna talk about this stuff a physical component and a mental component and a spiritual component. And as these things manifest in our life, they have a nature that is unique to just us. My wife is a picture of mental health. A picture of mental health. And if she gets goofy, if the spiritual malady hits her, she'll deal with it. She'll talk to a friend or a pastor or somebody like that. It's just fine. But these other pieces of this disease, this physical part and this mental part, it's the reason why Silkworth was hitting it out of the ballpark. 99% of everything they talk about in Silkworth's story was about a physical component of alcoholism. And then we get over out of that. We get on the other side of Bill's story and Bill spends like 20 some 20 pages before we get into we agnostics talking almost exclusively about the the the spiritual malady, this why stone? Why is it that stone cold sober? We find ourselves back in a situation where we were struggling again. And that's a goofy deal. Years ago, I did a men's retreat at a place in Kent, England, which was in a big monastery. And it was a fascinating place. And there were 80 or so guys in there. And I'll tell you this little piece of the story because I want you to understand. This was sort of an epiphany to me. It was sort of the defining moment when I began to realize that a lot of times we say that we understand things that we don't really understand. Now, I know that guys do this. I won't read directions. I know there's some guy stuff like that that I just won't do, and that's problematic. But I find gals doing exactly the same thing in this case. They go, oh yeah, I understand that. I understand it. But when you ask them specific questions about it, they go, well, maybe I don't understand it. And so here's what happened. I was doing the first session in the morning and we were talking about some stuff and there were some guys that had these kind of question marks in their face. And I kind of went, I'm going to call an audible and kind of redo what we do in this next deal. After break, let me just ask you this. how many of you in this room, and there's like 80 guys there. How many of you in the room understand the nature of alcoholism? You understand what alcoholism is. And then everybody shook their head yes that they get it. And I said okay well okay if you understand that let me ask you this. If you were working with somebody brand new. If he had a brand new cat sitting right in front of you like this would you be comfortable? Would you understand what it is that you're supposed to say to this new guy that you are beginning to work with and 80 guys go yes just like this and I went ok the old dad in me everything is going off this is crazy so at break time I found a little stack of index cards and I already had a bunch of stubby pencils because we were going to write some exercise stuff And so I passed out these cards after the break, and then I passed out those little pencils, and I said, okay, do me a favor, guys. I want you to write the first three things you would do if you met somebody brand new in the room. Somebody just came in, and you don't know them. Are you guys comfortable? Would you just – y'all know what you would be doing? And people are, yeah, yeah. We get this. We get that. Okay, well, I want to write it down because I want to see it in black and white. okay from my perspective looking at them i i looked at two people look down and start writing the most of the room they never even picked up a pencil and i said i guess come guys i know i've got this texas accent sometimes and maybe y'all didn't understand what i just said i want you to write it down so that we know and we can talk about what you wrote down and a couple more people wrote a little bit and then they set back up again there's no way that they wrote description. And so I started asking some questions and I asked them, I said, guys, this is what I'm talking about. This is the clarity that I'm trying to get you to see. Because we all have these heads that say, I get this, I got this, I got it. Did you ever stop and ask yourself the question of why there's so many different ways to carry people through the work? Guys, I'm not trying to make people like a big book, you know zombies out there beating people up with big books and this kind of stuff i'm not trying to do that but but the the common solution that bill wilson talked about this baseline that we talk about like that i think it's important that we that we look at this thing and and see the rest of the of the workshop was fascinating the rest of the morning was because we talked about some specific stuff about what what you would do if you met somebody for the very first time we won't go there. I've got a bunch of other stuff we want to talk about anyway, but let me just tell you this so you'll have it. I think the number one thing to do is to qualify somebody, is to help them see their truth. Guys, I was sitting in meetings for seven years. I was three weeks shy of seven years when I met Cliff Fisher. And I'm sitting there for all these years and I'm still questioning. There's still that lurking notion of whether or not I'm a real alcoholic or not. Let me just say, all you got to do is stay sober for a little while and your head will start working overtime trying to talk yourself out of it. This is the specific reason why it drives me crazy when people say, well, if they hang around long enough, they'll hear what they need to hear. Maybe they will, but maybe they won't. And that's where I struggle is how many times I see people come in, get excited about it. And then leave. And you talk to them later and they say, well, I just couldn't identify. I didn't eat out of a dumpster. I didn'T. You know, I'm hearing this guy's story and I didn' t do this and I did' n do that. I didn''t go to treatment. I mean, you have to pay attention to it. Going to treatment isn' t necessarily a qualification of being an alcoholic. And yet we hear people telling stories all the time about it like that. My alcoholism is defined by how many times I went to treatment? Well, okay. I wish you'd rethink that. And I think as a fellowship, we'd be healthier if we did. I want to know, I want to help you qualify like that. If I just met Jose, I'm going to talk to him like that, I'll ask him some questions about the physical part and the mental part and spiritual part and see if I can help him understand where he is. I'm not trying to run him off. God knows I want to love him and there still needs to be a bunch of that love in the equation But we're going to talk about that stuff. I don't want him to be sitting there scratching his head, wondering what he is. The second thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to ask him for some basics about God. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience with God? You see, can can you just just let me know? I need I'm trying to figure out if I'm dealing with a real life. Am I dealing with an agnostic? Am I doing with an atheist? Am i dealing with the satanic worshiper? I need to know who I'm dealing with because it'll make a big difference. If you tell me, I had some bad times in church years ago, but basically I believe that there is a higher power next. We don't need to spend a bunch of time with that stuff. There's going to be plenty of time to deal with that. But what if you tell Me that you're an militant atheist and you don't believe in any higher power? We may have to go do some reading. We mayhave to go see some things. Um, but I think that that in the early days, based on my experiences dealing with a lot of archivists and talking about early day stuff, um, most everybody was qualified during their very first meeting. Um, uh, we're going to love on them, but we're also going to help them see their truth. Um, and we're all still going to find out where they round around the spiritual part of this kind of stuff. Um, um. And then the third thing that I feel like is important to ask, and I think that most of us in the fellowship seem to have stopped asking, but, uh I think based on the early stuff that I read, again, this is coming from the archivist that I'm dealing with. One of the things that they always ask was, are you willing to go to any length? The book asks us a couple of different times in a couple Of different ways. Are you willing to Go to any length? And how it works over on page 58. There's a million meetings a day that read chapter five, how it works before the meeting and which is rock on. I'm okay. But we read it so often that a lot of times we don't listen to it. And I totally get that. Halfway down the page on that very first page on this, it says our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened and what we are like now. If you've decided that you want what we have, that's one question in the same sentence, one sentence and are willing to go to any length to get it, that's the second part of that same sentence like that, then you're ready to take certain steps. The qualifier for whether you're ready to Take the Steps is if you've decided that you want what we have and are willing to go To Any Link to Get It, and I'm going to tell you what that is, what that looks like, that Any Link part looks like like that. Then you're Ready to Take Certain Steps. Let me tell you why this is a big thing, why this is a huge piece for me. It's because in my experience in AA, I'm talking to people who come to AA and get involved and get busy. And 30 or 45 days later, they're through the steps. And then I'll go to meetings where people are sitting there going, no, no. No, we don't do that here. We work it like a year or so like this. And in Germany, they used to have this deal. I I don't know if they still do, but they used to have this thing called, oh, because I used to always laugh about it. They called it the German system in Germany, this real original. Anyway, they said that they didn't want anybody working steps for 160 days. Well, here's the problem. I mean, maybe I'll be lucky and maybe I'd be able to hold you and keep you laughing and having a good time for 160 days. But stop and think about that kind of stuff, guys. Most of us within a short, within a month, we're already scratching our head wondering if there's some other way to do that. Listen, let me tell you how you can tell for sure. If you've ever carried the message to a treatment center or a windup joint where they're keeping people for 30 days or 45 days or something like this, and you meet somebody. Let's say I met Jose. Jose, you poor bastard, you're right in the middle of my screen, and I can see you, and so I just keep picking on you. I'm sorry, buddy. So I met José, and he's just got to treatment, and he's digging the book, and we're talking and laughing, and he's having a good time like this. And the treatment center, they say, hey, well, you can come in and do some step stuff, but you can't do anything else. like a third step we would prefer that you don't do that until they get ready to leave in 30 days and I said okay that's fine I'll come back and I'll so I could we continue to kind of stay in contact like that but at the end of the month man I'm going back like that I'm ready to do a third step with Jose and we're going to get off into that fourth step and it's going to be all groovy like this and I walk in and Jose's got his hat on backwards and he's sitting in the back of the room kick back against the wall he's got sunglasses on inside like this And he's ignoring me like a big dog. He's just ignoring me completely. And I'm going, hey, dude, you still want to do this step stuff? And Jose goes, nah, no real need to do that. He said, I'm feeling I'm feelin' like a million bucks. I realized while I was here that most of my most of My frustration, most of the reason that I drank was because of because of my girlfriend. I said, your girlfriend? He said. Yeah, I mean, it's gonna get a different girl and I'm gonna be OK. I'm just that and I'm just not going to make those same bad decisions again guys if I've seen it once I've seen it 500 times in treatment give you 30 days to sit eat some good food crawl up in your head play ping pong on the back deck with your homies and and I guarantee it you will you will absolutely feel the blowtorch at some part in there the blowtorche will back away from your rear end like that and there is no motivation whatsoever to do these steps which make you feel uncomfortable you'll look at them on the wall and you'll go no no no i don't think i need to do that either i see it all the time and i'm not judging it i i understand that i truly i truly understand that And so based on the steps, based on the archival stuff that we've read over the years, based on just the way the book was written and the way that they lay the stuff out, what lines up more with the basic text? A more timely working through the steps or take a year to work the steps? Now think about it because I'm guaranteeing you there's nowhere in the steps. There's nowhere in the first 164 pages of the big book does it say, take your time. It says, be thorough. I'm not trying to give this stuff to you like it's an enema. I'm going to give you time. I'm trying to do this stuff, but I want you to understand there's a timeliness to that. There's this period of grace where you see and understand the depth and the ugliness of this crazy disease and you are motivated and you will do the things that make you feel uncomfortable like inventory and some of this other stuff and amends and some other stuff. You will do this stuff because you're driven by the pain of the way that you feel. I don't care how egregious my behavior has been. You give me 30 days to think about it, and I guarantee you I'll make it your fault, not mine every dang time. I can twist that story in two seconds like that. And that's what we're trying to avoid. What we're try to do is get clarity, clarity on the basic text, clarity on where we're headed as a program uh what recovery actually looks like and the clear that we are how many of you how many some of you guys are in there old enough might you all might remember crosby stills nash and young um as a band from the uh yay buddy i love y'all already okay um that some of your kids y'All need to quit listening to that crazy ass music and go listen to some some some csn okay um the the i'm just going to say this off the topic completely like that if you have to have a tuner that sings for you quit don't listen to that stuff it'll warp your mind go listen to some csm and the um in the middle of a song that they had written um there was a line in there that always blew me away and it said confusion has its cost and it's the truth guys, the confusion has its cost. And if we with our own experience and then with the experience that we're trying to pass on to other men and women, we want to take as much of the confusion out of the picture as we possibly can. And then we'll begin to see that things will get better. There was a guy I talk about him all the time because he had such an effect on my recovery, A guy named Don Pritz out in Denver. And Don was a special dude, and I had the pleasure of talking with him a couple of times in our travels, and he was just a good egg. And in an early talk that Don did, he said this was Don talking in the talk. And he said, I'm concerned that we began to talk about sobriety, but we sort of have started to ignore recovery. And I remember when I heard it, I didn't connect up really what he was talking about. Later, I went back and listened to it again. and I did. There is a huge difference between recovery and sobriety. If all you're after is just sobriete, then rock on. But there is more. Let me connect up a couple of dots here real quick for you. So I went from going to these kind of middle-of-the-road meetings that were full of nice, really nice people. I was going to those meetings for a long time. And then I started, I stayed over at this book study and I got fascinated with the study. And so I'm studying, I'm getting book smart, but there's still one little teeny problem, maybe two little teeny problems. One of them was I still play games with God around step 11. I'm kind of a disco spiritual guy. I'll be spiritual if you are looking at me and I need to be spiritual, but all of a sudden I'll wake up one day and realize that it's been three or four days since I prayed, three or Four days since I did anything other than just look at Myers' dilemma of the day kind of thing. And it was goofy. So that's going on. And then the other thing that's going on is that now I'm approaching eight and a half, almost nine years of sobriety and I've never sponsored anybody. Okay, so I'm a walking, talking hypocrite. I have a program that centers around A, a deepening relationship with my creator and B, helping others and I'm not doing any of it and I am wondering why all of a sudden even the knowledge that I am getting from the big book is starting to get goofy. My wife noticed it. Let me tell you something. If you want to know how you are really doing ask somebody that cares about you it'll take some courage to do that like that um uh but kathleen i guarantee you like that if that guy sitting next to you is in a program like that y'all be honest with each other and tell each other the truth about what's going on on that thing and send me that baby in the mail please because i i love i i i do i love those little rascals just like that. It's like, it's like get somebody that you've given spiritual consent to tell you the truth and then ask them, Hey, how am I really, how'm I really doing? And you'd be surprised. My wife kind of looked over my shoulder and she said, do you really want to have this conversation? And I said, yeah, I do. And she said okay. And she told me, and I'll never forget the conversation. And it was really, really, really uncomfortable because understanding the basic text and understanding what the big book said made me in my mind's eye, Mr. Guru, Mr., spiritual giant. And then I would leave that meeting a spiritual giant, and by the time I got home, somehow or another, I would be a jerk when I got Home, and it was just manifest that way. All of these are pieces of evidence. We were talking about this in a talk the other day. I just want to mention it real quick. If you ever really want to know how you really are, go back and read from the ABCs to the Third Step Prayer, 60, 61, 62. Read the two-and-a-half pages there where Bill Wilson stops talking about booze completely and describes this stage character guy. And then ask yourself, whether you're a guy or whether you'RE a gal, whether you'Re new, whether YOU've been around for a long time, ask yourself the question, am I different? Am I a different man to different people? Guys, this hurts to look at this sometimes like this because I would leave everybody in my AA meeting thinks I'm a spiritual giant. But I'd go home and I'd act like a petulant third grader in the way that I treated my daughters and the way I treated myself. And I'd be like, I mean, I'm telling you, I can be a childish little punk. And And I'm going, well, how many of you have ever noticed that you're one way in AA and you're a different way at church? Or I used to ride a lot of motorcycles and still fly with my buddies like this. And I'd be a completely different guy. We'd be out there on the runway talking crap and F this and F that and acting like an idiot. And then I'd walk into AA, Mr. Spiritual Giant again. I'm not, y'all understand? But this is what Bill Wilson was trying to get us to understand in these two and a half pages. One itself was driving this whole thing, but that authenticity was huge here. And if you can relate to this, I mean, come on, guys, how many of you, I'm taking just straight from a man's perspective. How many ofyou, if you went out on a date, you could be the nicest guy in the world at the beginning of the evening. And if it seemed anywhere in that evening that you might not get what you wanted, you could turn into an absolute jerk. Am I the only one that ever did that? I mean, in an evening, I could just do it like that. This is what this is what inauthenticity looks like. And this is the stuff that that I mean do I do I even care about my character? Do I care? But part of recovery, part of living recovered is that we get to live a chance to look at what life is like, um, where we care about our character, where we are who we really are. Um, and this is, this is huge, huge, huge. All you got to do enough said, but all you gotto do is sit in enough meetings and listen to people talk and listen to what they spout as they tell a story, knowing that they were physical with their wife or whatever the deal is. The inconsistency will, will make you go, Whoa, Whoa. Whoa. You know, I'm not talking from a spiritual mountaintop. I'm talking for a guy that finally got tired of emotionally getting his teeth kicked in, and I finally just said, you know what? The problem is not them. The problem, based on what I just read between 60 and 63, is me. It's me. I keep doing this kind of stuff, and I keep insisting that people treat me certain ways, and then I get irritated when they don't treat me that way, and it's just crazy, crazy. one more thing and then i'm going to close this up um if you had a big book still out flip over to page 25 and there's a promise in there the book's full of them obviously and most of y'all know that already um there's agillion of them um um there is one on page 25 that always really got me it always makes me think about something. It says, I'm two-thirds of the way down the page, the great fact is just this and nothing less, that we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences which have revolutionized our whole attitude towards life, towards our fellows, and towards God's universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by herself. Now listen, if you read that, the path is split. Some of you will read that and went, yeah, rock on, badass. That's, yeah I get that. And half of you will be like me for a decade in AA going, okay, nice little paragraph. Next, I'll be Because what I thought, guys, was I thought it was just something that Bill Wilson wrote to sell books. It never even occurred to me for for even a second. It never Even occurred to Me that that that experience could manifest in my life. That I could have a relationship with my creator that would be so deep and so rich that everything would shift in the way that I treated others and the way that I treated my disease, in the way that I did everything. It affects the whole thing. Guys, some people say, Myers, it just seems like you're so critical of AA. Well, I've been in the rooms almost 33 years and I've seen a lot of good stuff. I love being here, but I've seeing a lot things that make me uncomfortable, things that makes us look like a cult or things that make us look you know i i just i've seen hundreds and hundreds of men that i've had the uh the pleasure of working with over the years who have never experienced the promises ever they don't experience them and they go well i'm sober today and i'm going you know in the words of mickey bush so is the cat i mean i don't i don' t why should i pat you on the back for doing something that you're supposed to do in the first place when you look at how much of this book about that I'll hold it up about that much of the book is about getting sober the rest of the first 164 pages is how do we live life sober how do мы live life on God's terms instead of our terms I remember sitting at a breakfast thing one time with Joe McQueen and If y'all have never had an opportunity to go back and listen to some of those old talks that Joe and Charlie did in the 60s and 70s, some of Those are fascinating. They truly are. And so because he sponsored Clifford, we would get together regularly. He would come down from Arkansas and stay with Clifford. And then I'd come over and we'd sit and we would have coffee and just talk about stuff. And McQuinney was brutal on me sometimes. He would just he would just lean into me. and he looked at me one time and he had his finger like this and he has enormous hands like he had a baseball glove on and he would look at me like this and point that big hand at me like that and go Myers let me ask you this question do you think that you can have what you want in life sobriety, happiness joy, peace all of these things if you just exert enough willpower and I went damn straight you bet I do And he said, and I remember him looking at Clifford, Clifford sitting right there. And he looked at Cliffford and he goes, oh, man, they ain't paying you enough. And then they would laugh like this because I didn't understand. I didn' t understand. I was in a meeting the other night with a guy who had been, it was 37 years sober. And he went on a tirade for about 10, 15 minutes talking about some weird deal that had happened to him. And it was like off the chain weird. I'm talking like, like weird. And, and I got a bunch of treatment center guys that I'm helping that I was working with. And I was, I had them a bunch Of treatment center guys in there with me that night at that meeting like this. And and I'm looking at them and they're looking at me and like this kind of stuff. And afterwards, this guy stops and he finally stops talking. And then he goes, Oh, wait a minute, before the big book guy over there steps in and says something, let me just tell you something real quick. This book is about getting sober, It has nothing to do with how you live your life. And guys, I'm getting woozy. I think I'm going to fall out of my chair. I think it was a candlelight meeting and the lights were really low and there's candles in front of them like that. Those patients at that treatment center the next morning in Big Book, they were going, Myers, we thought you were going to come unglued. And I said, buddy, it was really good that it was dark in there because if it had been any lighter, you'd have seen steam coming out of my ears. That's the stupidest thing that I ever heard. Okay, listen, does he have a right to say something stupid? Yes. But what if my new best friend Jose was in that meeting brand new sitting there listening to this guy? Well, he's been sober for 37 years. You see what I'm saying? You see why this stuff gets goofy? It does. Something's got to set the baseline and our opinions and ideas are a bad baseline. Mine, everybody else's. I think the better baseline is study the basic text, get a feel for what the book is about and what they were trying to teach us and how they taught us and and what it was about to to work with others. If you're new in this room tonight, I know the virus crap has caused a problem with the stuff that is getting better, at least in Texas, it seems to be getting better. We got meetings that are starting back up again, finally. Get a job, get busy, start doing something for your meeting to try to help folks. I'm a big greeter fan. I am not a type A personality. It kills me to get up in front of a bunch of people. But I'm telling you, my favorite job in AA land because our meeting is huge. It's 220 people there on a Tuesday night and there are a lot of cars and it's a lot OF chaos before the meeting. And my job is to try to make sure that people know what to do and this sort of thing gets you a job as a greeter. Don't just sit back and and and do nothing. I was asked before the shutdown stuff, I was ask to do two talks in the Dallas area and. Two or three weeks apart from each other, and one of them was an enormous group in Dallas, and I got there and it was raining and there was a whole bunch of people standing out front smoking in front of this big fancy schmancy building. And I got out, I got a coat and a tie. I apologize for not having a tie and we're down at the Boundary 300 miles from where I live and I realized I didn't have a tie when I got down there and I about died. But I remember walking up on that porch and nobody said anything and I said, is this such and such a group? And they go, yeah. and I went well okay cool everybody else is dressed in work clothes and stuff like this and I'm dressed in the coat and tie but nobody said anything nobody said hey how are you who are you you know I finally walked inside I sat by myself for 20 minutes before that meeting by myself just sitting there like this just just kind of waiting eventually a guy that I sponsor showed up at that meeting and he walked over and then some couple other people came over and they visited, and I went ahead and did my talk, and it was a bit of a bloodbath. Three weeks later, there was a group over towards Fort Worth that had asked me to do a talk like this, and I got out of my truck. I pulled up in front of this place. Now, Fort Worth is a completely different place than Dallas is. It's more country and more real people, and when I got out of my truck, yes, everybody has a truck in Texas. And so I got a, I'm straightening my tie in the window, in the side mirror. And when I straightened up and turned sideways, there were 20 people standing next to my truck. They had been, they'd seen me pull into the parking lot, the ones that were out there smoking, had called the ones from the inside. And everybody that was in that building had come out into that courtyard and then walked out into the parking lot and walked up to my truck and greeted me at my truck, and they put their arms around me and they walked me inside. I'm telling you right now like that we had that we laughed until it was the coolest thing in the whole wide world. Now let me just say as a newcomer, where would I rather go back to? I'm going to Fort Worth. Yeah, for sure that was good. I'll tell you one little piece of this, and I swear to God, I'm going to stop. At that same meeting over there in Fort Worth when I did this talk, I am feeling like on cloud nine because it was just that kind of setting and feel kind of like this. I am looking in the back of the room, and there is this old guy with two old guys on each side of him, so it is like three old guys standing in the back of a room, one of the old guys has got his hand up like this, he has got his finger like this, like this. And he's throwing a finger at me like this and I went, Oh no, why would he do that? Like that? And I'm thinking, Oh crap. Okay. And so I just saw my best behavior. I did, did the talk, got done with it. And So I'm watching the little receiving line afterwards. And we got, we had about 60 or 70 people in there that night and they were, they all left. And I look up and my three old dudes are, are in the back kind of lurking back like this And I am going golly, they're going to rip me up. And I walked up like this and the guy in the middle that was throwing the finger at me like this walked up to me and he stuck out his hand and I shook his hand and his hand was shaped that way. He'd had a stroke and his hands were like, oh my God, his hand is deformed like that. And that's the way it was like this. And when he shook my hand like this, he started crying and the other guy next to him started crying. And the other guys standing him like this was going, these guys act like babies. When they hear something they like, They just cry and cry and I started crying. It got me in the field so bad like this. And we were just kind of talking. And these guys were going, man, this is exactly what we wanted to hear. We're trying to start a book study over here and we hadn't been able to get one off the ground. And we are now. And it was just the coolest. The whole reason I told you that story was don't believe what you see. Sometimes it's not anything like what reality is like that. I just, I couldn't have been more, more surprised. Um, pretty cool at the heart of our program is not a meeting at the hard of our programme is a deepening relationship with our creator. And I want to do whatever I can to, um, establish that relationship, um and deepen that relationship so that I can move into an area that I never dreamed that I could. Will I stay sober? Yeah, you bet. So sobriety is kind of a given at that stage of the game, but I'll also be in a situation where I could affect change in other people's lives. And that, guys, for a loser train wreck like me that was never able to help anybody to be able to be in a situation where I would be able where I can gently as I can help somebody change. You might actually save those lives. Pretty heady stuff. I'm honored to be here, y'all. So honored. Thank y'ALL for letting me come. Thank you. Thank you.