Bill C. at the Cedar River Big Book Study – 2020

Hey everybody, I'm Bill. I'm an alcoholic. I remember going to your house after that for a spaghetti feed and your house was full of your kids and a bunch of losers from AA. And I thought, this is one of those places. This is oneof those places where weirdos come and gather and lives change. You know, I still remember that very clearly. It's just, I love that. My house is like that too. You know, it was very familiar. Well, I think the definitive spiritual thing we heard from Mary Thayer is some days you're a daffodil and some days you're tulip. That's certainly true for me. Some days I'm a weed. And my sobriety date is March 27th, 1985. So I'm just a newcomer with 35 years. You know, and struggling along the path, thinking I know stuff. And people ask me to come and talk to them and tell them all the stuff I know. So I'm going to share some of that with you today. I was supposed to talk on the 11th step. It's one of my favorites. You know, there's a lot of wisdom in Alcoholics Anonymous, an immense amount of wisdom. And what wisdom is to me is experience first and foremost, and enough intellect to be able to express the experience or tell a story. um i'm an opinion guy i will give you my opinion many times i don't qualify it but it's just an opinion i don'T have a problem with that i think what we do around here is we give advice and we express opinions if we didn't do those two things we wouldn't have much to say to each other you But one of the beauties of AA is it's rooms full of experience, just immense amount of experience, lots and lots and loss of experience. The other thing that's interesting about that in our ability to be able to express that experience to each other is we have an amends process. We stop blaming other people for our problems and we try to clean up the wreckage of our past and as you heard in the tenth step talk we try to clean up the wreckage of our present you know it seems to be a very vital component of this process is the amends process the ability sandy beach used to talk about how hard it was for him to say when he was wrong and he would talk about he goes well I was remember it just wouldn't come out of his mouth and I remember the first time I heard him do that, it made me nervous. I was sitting in the audience going, oh God, they're talking about me again. And I've had that experience over and over in AA where you hear somebody, either a speaker or somebody you're just talking to who describes your situation. And I think the longer we go down the road, the more quick we are able to admit that. I mean, yeah, yeah. I do that. Yeah. I'm a loud mouth. I don't listen very well. You know, I'm waiting for you to stop talking so that I can start. So I have to suffer through what you're telling me. And I, and people talk like that and I sit and I listened to that and I go, my God, I'm like that. And then ultimately I think the, the end of the equation is, is I don'T want to be like that anymore. I want to, I don't want to be that guy. And how do we get there? You know, what is the evolution of this thing? Well, when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was 37 years old. I was on my second marriage and a second set of two kids. My daughter was three and my son was four months old. brand new little kid born on Christmas day 1984 in March of 85 I called my mother like any good gangster I called mom and she came and got me and put me into a recovery place in Acosta Mesa California called starting point and I spent 35 days in there while I was in that drying out place they made me wear a sign around my neck we had to make the sign we made it in crafts it's a little rectangular piece of cardboard with a string that went through it and it said i am not a counselor because evidently there was some confusion about that and up to that point in my life i'd been to group therapy i've been gestalted enrolled and primal screamed. I've been in a mental institution a couple of times, so I knew more about myself than really was safe to know. And I would expound on that. In the depths of my alcoholism, in the depths of my sickness, I was physically very ill. I had hepatitis C and I had cirrhosis pretty bad. I was bloated to over 330 pounds and I had gotten into a bar fight and they threw me down the stairs and I shattered my ankle so I walked with a pronounced limp and muscles in my upper body had atrophied and I had a pinched nerve in my right shoulder and my right arm was curled up against my side and I couldn't reach out to shake your hand. In that condition, I am still shooting my mouth off. I am still butting into your conversation. I'm still arguing, you know, I feed off of negative energy and I'm still that guy and I am absolutely unconscious of any of it. I m just like that there's no awareness in me. The way you determine that, the way you discover that is you get sober and you work some steps and you become self-aware and you look back and you go, my God, I was sound asleep completely. I'm just on autopilot doing what I do. So I come into Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I started drinking when I was around 14 years old. And I did it with a lot of energy, you know? And by the time I was 17, I was a bad drunk in high school. I had a big jacket and a slouch and a sneer and a foul mouth and a bad attitude, and I carried a gun. And I'm from the mean streets of Palos Verdes. Man, there's no gangs in Palos Vertes. Nobody was looking for me. I was gang of one, you Know? I was raised by a couple of nice people in the middle class neighborhood. My dad was sober. He got sober in 1954. I was raising in an alcoholic house, just like the one that Erica is in with spaghetti dinners and weirdos. There was all kinds of aunts and uncles hanging around. The Al-Anons were weirder than the alcoholics, you know? And so at 17, I'd already been to jail. I was already in trouble, you Know, and there was no rational reason why I should behave the way I behave. Who knows why the hell I was so angry? They sent me to my first shrink when I was 13 years old because I had rage. But right in the middle of the learning process where we learn to grow up, right inthe middle of it, rightin the middle where the ego is evolving out of self-centeredness through experience, it learns that it doesn't pay off well. Right in the middleof that experience, I start drinking. When I show up at 37 years old in Alcoholics anonymous. I have the emotional development of maybe a 16-year-old, and this kid is not an honor student. He's not the one that's mature beyond his years. This is the kid with a bit of a problem with authority, and I look grown up. I'm a big dude. I're six foot five, fat and sweaty, but I look like I'm an adult, right? And I have The Emotional Development of a 16 Year Old on a good day i think that's true for all of us i don't think we have alcoholic thinking i think we're emotionally immature now all alcoholic thinking is is give me another drink you know it's like you know if you know but do we are we especially neurotic especially self-centered i think we're more self-centred than we should be when we get here when we're older because we never grew up. I don't think we're that profoundly neurotic. Some of us have bipolar disorder, some of us had mental illness, but that's for sure, no doubt. But me, I don t think I'm mentally ill, I think I m just really self-centered. You know, I just, I never grew up. Am I more self-centred than other people? No, I dont think so. I think Im just too self- centred for my age. I should be better than I am and Im not. And Im completely unconscious of this. Totally. I have no idea. I mean, the thief thinks everyone else is a thief because that's his reality, right? I think everybody probably feels pretty much the way I do. How would I know any different? I've never felt, I've ever been inside anyone else. I can't stand it. I lived in the house with this second wife and these two little kids, and I had no emotional connection to another living human being. And I was completely unaware of that. my character defects are pretty obvious you can see what they are their arrogance pomposity I'm a bully you know I retaliate I'm angry I'm rageful all that stuff what about the parts of me that are completely missing that I never learned because I've medicated myself from a young age what about that how would I know that it wasn't even there I've never had it so how would I know? I think that's the grand journey in AA. People talk about that we're on a search for self, you know, I think we're at a search to get out of self. You know, the whole idea is disidentification with self with who I think I am. You go it constructive of who I think i am that needs to be defended and protected analyzed and thought about worked on incessantly it just wants attention any kind of attention it can get positive or negative doesn't matter you know and i think the journey is about stepping outside of that and looking at it seeing the human condition not that there's anything wrong with it but now we can observe it now we can look at it and I don't necessarily have to go where it wants me to go so the very first concept they hit us with when we walk into a is this whole idea of powerlessness I'm powerless over drugs and alcohol in my journey here I've yet to discover anything I seem to have any power over And my sense is, is the universe by its very nature is a giving entity. It's supplying me with everything I need all the time. I just take exception of what's being supplied. I think it should be something different than it is. And I suffer because of that. I mean, you look at the situation we're in now. You know, Mary did an inventory on the pandemic. I don't know that I've actually written anything down, but I think I've done a little inventory on the pandemic. Hopefully I've been around long enough where I don'T struggle as long as I used to over the way things just are. I mean, clearly what God's will is, is what's happening right now. What else could it possibly be? And I have difficulty with right now and I suffer. evidently what i believe is that things outside of me should be different than they are for in order for me to be happy right i mean i talked to you incessantly about how if you were just a little bit different the two of us would be a hell of a lot happier and you absolutely insist upon living your own life and it pisses me off at my core right and i suffer because of that So I don't, the geopolitical situation in the world, look at it. I think it should be different than it is and it doesn't change. And I suffer. I have no power over it. About a month ago, I shut the news off. Took me three days to detox. I've had a couple of slips lately, but I feel a hell of a lot better just shutting it off because it's not my world. It's not where I live. This is where I Live. I live in Alcoholics Anonymous. My wife's 30 years sober. We have one of those houses. I have a big backyard, so people sneak over here and we socially distance and smoke cigars and talk about politics, you know? So I get some human interaction. But this is where I live. I live at AlcoholicsAnonymous. This is my reality. This istmy world. Thisis where my friends are, you know i've got sponsees that i've sponsored for 30 years you know they're part of my family we are family i've done inventory with some of them in order to break down the whole hierarchy of sponsor sponsee this is my world so the first thing that hit us with this powerlessness you know the the first pillar of spiritual condition if the only thing that's going to save me to keep me sober, as it says in our book, is the maintenance of my spiritual condition. I should be focused on that. Do I have a spiritual condition? What's it made up of? Where did I get it? And more importantly, how do I maintain it if I even have one? And I've been looking at that since this pandemic. I wrote some stuff down. I've Been Talking to My Sponsor More Regularly. Matter of fact, I'm doing way too much AA. I need to back off a little bit. I think I'm getting over sober, you know? I mean, can you imagine all these alcoholics that put us in a position to sit at home with nothing to do and think, you Know? And I've come to some conclusions, and I agree with all the conclusions I've comes to, you Now? I have support for that. And so I wrote some stuff down. It's powerlessness seems to be one of the primary pillars of spiritual condition. And I think it is everything. I don't believe I need any power. Lack of power is not my dilemma. I think I need power, but it really isn't my dilemma, you know, coming to the understanding that I don' t need any power. And the next indicated thing is obvious. Usually it's not rocket science, you know. We sit around AA and we have big arguments about my will as compared to God's will, as if that's possible. My little ego that presented itself at about two and a half years old, we call it the terrible twos, that's when the ego presents itself in the human creature. And its job is to create separation. That's what it does, so that we can have reality. Subject, object, right? Prior to that, the little kid doesn't have any consciousness that it's separate from anything. And then the ego represents itself as it does in every human being, and it creates this separation where there's us and them. That little ego loves the idea of us having a battle of wills with the power that drives the entire universe. That's what a wonderful concept. There's me and there's God, and I need to go get this God in order for me to be okay. I literally don't believe that's true. I don't think it's possible that I'm separate from the universe or separate from nature, yet I believe I am. My sense is, my experience is that I'm separate. Along with that comes that everything that happens is personal, right? I mean the primary attribute of somebody that's selfish and self-centered, which is the root of our problem, is that everything is personal. They're doing it to me. It's happening to me and like in this pandemic it's happening to the entire world everybody it's happening to everybody it not just happening to me I'm part of a community in our world community should take some advice from Alcoholics Anonymous, you know. In our tradition where our common welfare should come first. You know I'm not only a part of Alcoholics Anonymous I'm a part of the world, I'm apart of my neighborhood, I am a part of my city and my state, my country, my world, and part of the world. And what you see when you look out in that world is division, polarization and all of this you know and it happens to me the human condition wants me to be on the right side of any issue that i'm correct and you're incorrect and you see that around the world the world suffers from this powerlessness concept not just us but on a spiritual path you're forced to look at we do an inventory right what do we learn from the inventory the fourth column of the resentment list what are my faults and mistakes we're starting to grasp the powerlessness thing a little bit you know at least the drugs and alcohol part and then we do an inventory and what we realize from that is i have to stop blaming other people and institutions for my problems this seems to be a primary aspect of spiritual condition. Stopping the blaming, owning my own life, growing up, growing up. I'm emotionally immature and what do teenagers do? Everything that happens to them is someone else's fault. Now they are appropriately self-centered. When you're 40 years old and you still feel that way, that's just stupid. You know on my first inventory was the entire federal government and specifically the Department of Motor Vehicles. Who the hell are they to tell me that whether i can drive or not you know i'm resist resist damn it i'm from the 60s right burn down the house you know who are these people telling me what to do now when you're 37 and 38 and you still are like that that's embarrassing right nobody supports you in this effort except the other idiots that you're drinking with in the bar that are also emotionally immature. Now, in Alcoholics Anonymous, you can find people, have you ever seen somebody that's 20 or 30 years sober and he stands up at a podium and says, never tell an alcoholic what to do. We don't like to be told what to do. If you tell us what to we'll just do the exact opposite. Never tell an alcoholic what to Do. What is that? We had a local guy here that said, I'm living proof that you can be a long time sober and still be angry. And I thought to myself, boy, there's something to shoot for. And how do we justify that kind of behavior even in long-term sobriety? Well, we have the ism. I'm a sick puppy and I hope I never grow up. I mean, we justify bad behavior and blame it on alcoholism when all it is is you're emotionally immature. It's time for you to grow up and the people I surrounded myself with, two things happened to me when I walked into AA. One is I just liked it, which is probably the most important and I've never lost my enthusiasm for it. The second thing is I asked a man to help me and he actually did. He actually helped me. He told me to read the book and he had me come over to his house and he had to sit there and read it to him out loud. And we talked about things and he told me this stuff. You know, we did an inventory. I did a fifth step when I was six months sober and I had an experience, one of those strange experiences, you know, where I realized, my God, it's going to be like this now. My old life is over. What a remarkable experience. And in that inventory, when I would come to him with my problems, he would tell me things like, stop yelling at your wife. And I explained to him why I yelled at her because it's because of what she said to me. If she didn't say that stuff to me, I wouldn't have to yell at her. If people would behave themselves, I wouldn't be forced to straighten them out. And he just kept saying to me, stop yelling at your wife. He wasn't interested in my justification for bad behavior. He just told me to stop yelling. At my wife. I think that's really good advice. I think I should not yell at my wife It's taken me 30 years to finally learn that, you know, but I believe that's true. I'm a bully. I'ma bully. Who wants to be a bully? Who really wants to be a boy? Who wants to be an allowed, aggressive overbearing thing? You know, I don't want to be that so I have to stop blaming other people for my behavior and just focus on my behavior. I can't blame the world for my problems then we get into the amends process and these people I've been blaming for my alcoholism and my way of life these people you want me to go to them and make amends to them and I do not want to do that. I don't want to pay them back their money. I don t want to go to people and look them right in the eye and tell them that I was wrong and lose the war, you know? These resentments that I have are the engine that drive my life. It's a major aspect of who I am or my angers and my hatreds, right? And in the immense process, this is a cathartic experience when I go look at somebody right in in the eye that I don't ever want to see again. And I give in and I apologize for my behavior and I pay back the money when I turn and walk away from that experience, I am changed. No waiting, no waiting. This is where we begin to get some self-esteem where we actually take action to owning our own life. I need to rid myself of these resentments. So what do we learn in the amends process? What's the big lesson in the amends proces? Nothing is personal. It was never personal. No one was ever doing anything to me. They were just doing what they do and I was in the blast radius of their behavior. And sometimes you're in the blast radius of my behavior. This is a very deep and profound spiritual concept, an idea through experience, that truly nothing is personal. I had a horrible anger and hatred towards my father. It was awful. And I made amends to him anyway, even though I didn't feel it. And then I had another one of those experiences. You know, I started sobbing and I couldn't stop. It was like somebody dragged something, dragged that rage and anger out of me. It Was a cathartic experience. and I began looking at my father as a person as compared to who I thought he should have been. And I realized he wasn't doing anything to me. He was just being who he was. He came from a certain place, raised by certain people, had a certain ethic. He was a depression kid. You know, he wasn'T touchy feet. He was, he was just that guy. And I started looking at him like a person and it changed my last 15 years of his life. We gave each other birthday cakes and the Hermosa Beach Men's Tag. And I found my father in Alcoholics Anonymous, you know? You know, when we – when I first started, we could barely do five minutes with each other. When it got really healthy, we could do an hour, an hour and a half. It was like – it wasn't this blissful thing, but he could never hug me. And I started – my sponsor said, you think you're so spiritually advanced you're going to have to make the first move. So I started hugging him, and he was very stiff and he didn't like it. At the end of his life, he couldn't keep his hands off of me. He was finally able to be proud of his son, finally, in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'm so grateful that that happened before he passed away. But I learned something from that. Nothing is personal. Now, when you combine these three things, the idea of powerlessness, you can't blame people. You're still going to do it, but you can'T blame people anymore. And you begin to realize that nothing's personal. What happens? What happens, right? The fourth principle, the fourth pillar of spiritual condition happens. Self-awareness. Tenth step that Mary talked about. Self-wareness. Making amends in the present moment because now I can see myself. Hold on here. I have to take my pills. When self-awarenes happens, this is a painful process. it's not an easy process and self-awareness doesn't mean the behavior changes it's just that I'm not deluded anymore I can see it now Mary talked a little bit about developing the skill of a watcher being able to watch yourself move through life self- awareness is compared to self-obsession right when this happens this egoic construct of who we think we are begins to collapse. What am I defending? If nothing's personal and I can't blame you anymore, what am I depending? Why am I so concerned about what you think about me? What's the purpose behind that? You know somebody asked a question last thing about people pleasing. I always wondered what do you mean by that? Like being nice to other people? It's like sometimes we've made a disease out of just being approachable. I want to get along, but what am I protecting? What am I defending? This happens, it seems to happen between about eight and 12 years sober. At 10 years sober, I had a mental and emotional collapse. I blew up my family. I ended up living in a storeroom over my office. I had one of those experiences. People talk about the second surrender well maybe you get to the third one and the fourth one they're really interesting too you know and what is it what are these surrenders you know giving into reality it isn't self-condemnation it's self-awareness you know it really becomes absolutely true that whenever i'm disturbed it is always me always you're just doing what you do and i react then i react now i'm sucked into the psychosis but i'm sitting in that storeroom over my office and i had to start over i went to my sponsor he said time to do an inventory he said get up in the morning and pray you all of us will reach a point in our sobriety somewhere where we will be reduced reduced to prayer and meditation. Reduced, because I'm a self-reliance guy. My ego wants its own personal relationship with God, one that's preferably better than yours. I get into the spiritual realm, and I want to be spiritually correct. I want To Be Spiritually Advanced as compared to you that are less so. I mean, this is what happens to me. This is the way I operate. And my sense now is that God by its very nature is impersonal. It's all there is is that. And once again, this feeling of separation is that there's me and there's God, and I need to get that in me. When I get quiet enough, it becomes apparent as all there isthat. There is no separation. there's not me and it it's just everything in the 11th step my sponsor told me when this crisis hit me and then I had another one years later where I almost died I got a liver transplant four years ago and I almost died people were coming around to say goodbye and in these crisis periods stuff happens in life things happen you know the 11th step becomes pretty critical i've always messed around with meditation i've always been interested in eastern philosophy kind of stuff you know and i've been a reader of this and you know i've sat with holy men and gurus and hung around with bamaram das a little bit and i have a signed copy of be here now it's one of my prized possessions you know him and i had the same hairline. And I'm a big fan of Alan Watts. One of the things that Watts says is, true faith is not knowing and having that be okay. Now what I thought faith was, was I have a belief mechanism that I've put together that that somebody has given me, or I've cobbled it together, a belief mechanism about what life is all about and what happens after death. Whatever, I put this together, this belief mechanism, and I have faith that this belief mechanisim is correct. Watts is saying something much more profound than that. Watts is having no belief mechanism at all, not knowing what it's all about, no dogma, and having that be okay. That all is well, as the Dalai Lama said. They asked the Dalais Lama, what's the ultimate spiritual truth? He said, all is Well. All is Well, and I look at it, and I go, no, it's not. It's not well. Things are not well, they need to be different, and I'm convinced, I have faith that he's right, that all is well. And I believe what? True faith is not knowing and having that be okay. And what's that lead me? What that has led me to is a lot of meditation, a lot of getting quiet and trying to sense the connectedness, trying to go beyond the feeling of separation that I've always felt, that most human beings feel. Getting over this idea, what Alcoholics Anonymous is what it is, it's going to subtract from me everything that's blocking me from seeing that I already have everything I need. There is no God-sized hole in me. There's nothing missing in me." This is the delusion, the lila that the gurus talk about. The miserable seekers that are looking for something that the Gurus know that they already have, they just can't see it because they're blocked by their human condition. I love the line that we're spiritual beings having a human experience. I think there's some truth to that, you know? You know, when I get quiet enough, I can feel that connectedness every time. No, not every time, but I've had some very interesting experiences. So within the 10-step, within self-awareness, within this watcher, in meditation, you can focus on your breath and focus your mind on your breath. And then the mind will wander away. The little ego doesn't like being in the present moment. There's nothing for it to do. It wants to be in the future or in the past where it can work on stuff. It's very uncomfortable in the present moment because it's not being observed. It's not being paid attention to. It wants to move into the future to plan for tomorrow and go back in the past and work on what we should have done before in order for things to be okay now. That seems to be just its natural bet. It is constantly trying to warn me of things, to be careful, to look out for what might happen so I won't get hurt and I won' t be injured. It wonders about what you're thinking about me. It thinks it's me, and I think it's me too. I'm in collusion with it. So in meditation, when it wanders away from the breath, I notice that and I gently bring it back to the breath. This is absolute conclusive proof experientially that who I am is not my thinking mind. this is a game changer this isn't airy fairy spiritual weirdness where you got to take the course and buy the book and all of this this is blue collar anybody can do this kind of thing now i had been doing it for a while and i had some grasp of it i at least intellectually and in about 20 years sober I got really sick. I was on interferon and ribavirin to try to get rid of the hepatitis C and that's like chemotherapy, it makes you very sick and I was getting ready, I was going flying on an airplane to Hawaii to lead a spiritual retreat and I was a mess, man. I was sick and I was angry and I was just having a hard time. I was in one of those crisis situations. I was very sick. I don't think I really had a handle on how sick I really was. As it turned out, I went into liver failure and almost died but that was going to be years later but this was the beginning of it and I'm at home here and my friend Crystal came over, unannounced. And he's French, so he's an asshole. And he's one of my dearest friends. And it comes over and he hands me the book, The Power of Now. And he says, read this. And I said, Oh, I've read stuff like that before. And this was around totally was new on the scene. This was pretty new. And I said I've read non dual stuff before. and he yelled at me. He says, God damn it, read it. So I did. And I read it on the airplane going over to Hawaii. And when the student's ready, the teacher will arrive. And sometimes you need to be in a life situation where you read something or you hear something that really has depth of meaning, where it kind of brings things together for you. And this was a new voice on the scene. And he was talking about this stuff that I'm talking about with you, you know. And it really had a profound impact on me. And I led that retreat and I spent the whole weekend kind of talking about that stuff. I have no idea what they got out of that retreat, but it was very cathartic for me. And they invited me back later, so it must have couldn't have been too bad. And during that retreat, at one point, it was in a beautiful little valley in Hawaii on Oahu at a church camp center. Beautiful place. Lovely place. And I walked up on the side of this hill and I sat on this bench and somebody had made a shrine in the side of the hill to the Virgin Mary. It's a little handmade shrine with stuff hanging all over it, a little statue. And I sat down and I said, I sat there on this beach and I looked across this little valley and I closed my eyes, and I started breathing. And what happened is I started meditating. The description I use for it is with intent, meaning I need help. And I knew that I couldn't change my outside situation or my physical being, but I needed some kind of inner peace. And I was really looking for that. I mean, it was a heartfelt thing where I just was sitting and breathing and I could just feel the breath. And I just kind of went into a state and I opened my eyes and I looked across that Valley and the wind blew through the wispy trees across the Valley and it wasn't blowing on me. I couldn't feel the wind, but I could see it in the trees and it was like something took its hand and just raked through the grass and I just got it. i just got it what is it i have no idea but it was an emotion it was a feeling it was a sense now i've gone back and i've done that retreat several times before and i tried to recreate that experience on that hillside every time like any good drug addict would you know i want to get off again and it was a one-off. I've had several of those over the years, and it's an experience much more than it's a thought. But I just got it, and I've never forgotten that. That experience changed my life. How did it change my life? Because it changed my perspective. Now people that have a problem with God, essentially what we do is we create a God and then don't believe in it. sometimes we create a god and try to believe in it but what we're doing is we're creating something that we want to believe it and we work towards that my experience has been that i stopped trying to create it i've had experience in alcoholics anonymous we get to experience the power we getto experience it and then what we do like any human being as well will attach some kind of a concept to it that makes us feel good. And I get that, but I try to stay out of the concept business and I just try to say in the experience business. Meditation has become a real key component at this time when I started meditating with a tent. What I said to myself was, okay, in the past I've tried to be very disciplined. Get up at a certain time in the morning, even if the house is burning down, you go sit somewhere where the only thing that happens is meditation and you sit there for 20 minutes or whatever time limit every day, no matter what. And I hear people talk about that, about being disciplined, getting up and reading certain spiritual books and then sitting in meditation, getting quiet every day. Some of morning and night with discipline. Every time I've tried to do that, when I miss a day, I just quit. I have no idea what that's about, but I'm just an undisciplined person. I have never been disciplined in my life, and my nature is to be undisciplinary. Now, I think I should be different than I am, but so what? So I think that. At some point, I have to accept the way I am and quit trying to be something that I'm not. So one of my first attempts at this is like, okay, I'm going to meditate every day, but I'm Not going to do it at a certain time. I'm NOT going to set a time limit. I'M not going to have a timer. I' m just going to DO IT EVERY DAY! And I've been pretty damn good at that. And I' ve not stopped since because I don't have to worry about failing if I miss a day. Now, my record's not perfect. So sometime during the day, irrespective of what I'm doing or where I am, I will sit and get quiet. Maybe close my eyes and just breathe and follow my breath. How that has transpired for me today in the pandemic? This last four years has been one of physical recovery for me. I was on dialysis for six months. I was a walker for quite a long time. Then I had a cane. I could hardly walk. I got down to 190 pounds, and I'm 6'5". I look like a poster child for Doc Out. You know, I mean, it just sucked all the protein out of my muscles and my body when the liver doesn't function. And so this last four years has been one of recovery. And one of the ways I've done that is I've started walking. At first it was very difficult. Now I walk, you know, four to seven miles a day, you Know, pretty much every day. You know, I try a bunch of us post our steps on a chat that we do and we have competitions. We give each other crowns and stuff, you know. And as a group effort, a bunch OF old guys trying not to die and trying not to balloon up and get fat so we've been out walking. And what I do when I walk is I don't wear headphones. I don' t listen to anything. I just try to be exactly where I am, you kno. And I walk along and I stare at the asphalt in front of me and I just try to be right where I am, you know, throughout the whole exercise. And my mind will wander, then I come back to right where i am. Now what I've learned from that, and this has been pretty intense because there's essentially it's a long meditation. You know, essentially that's what that is. Anytime you're in the present moment, it's meditative place. In order to be in the moment, you've got to kind of focus on that. Watch your breath and just be right there and you can feel your mind. You can feel it try to pull you away from that. It wants to think about stuff, and some of the stuff is very important. It should be thought about, so you get sucked right into it, right? And sometimes I go with it. You know, I'm just unconscious, and I go, then I'll realize what's happened, and I come back. Now, every once in a while, it'll try to put me in a position where I'm like, oh, my God, I don't know what's going on. Pull me into a dark place. Usually what that is is a memory of something really incredibly sick that I've done in my past, maybe clear back to my childhood. Some of these memories don't ever seem to go away. And it'll draw me into this and it makes me uncomfortable and there's nothing I can do about it. I've made the amends, I've done the work, and yet it's still there and I can feel it pull me there. And what I will do is I'll just look at the street right in front of me and not go there, right? Bill Wilson talks about a good use of the will. You know, sometimes you can work on your focus, you know, and I'll Just stay right where I am. And I realized through this experience, I do not have to go where it wants me to go. I don't have to go there, evidently. Evidently, there is some choice that I can choose not to go wherever it wants to take me. Now, in AA, we talk about it in the third person, don't we? We say things like my head is out to get me. We make it adversarial because that's who we are. I don't think it's trying to hurt me. God knows it needs me for transportation. Why would it kill the host? You know, it's not the enemy. But you can't observe it. And it's like shining a light on a shadow. It goes away. When you look at it, it sneaks off into the bushes. It doesn't like to be observed. It literally thinks it's me. And I think it's we are in collusion with each other. And when you start looking at it kind of scampers away. you know and my experience also is the more I do this the longer it seems I'm able to stay in that present moment and in that présent moment there's never anything wrong everything is absolutely as it should be it couldn't possibly be any different than it is and there is peace and tranquility in that presente moment sometimes it's for a minute or two you know my experiences the more i do this, the longer I am able to say they're not always though. Sometimes the mind is very busy. Now, also in here we talk about self-acceptance, you know, learning to love yourself. Sometimes you'll hear some hokey stuff like you have to learn to love yourself before you can love others. My feeling about that is that'll pretty much kill you. In AA what we've learned here is that we practice on loving other people and through that we will gain some self-esteem. When I make my amends, I'll start feeling better about myself. I feel, you know, AA is man's school and it's woman's school. It'll make, it'll make you a better person if you follow these, this process. It really, you can't help but become a better person. And in that process, you Know, if I put myself at the bottom of that amends list, I'll make amends to myself. Ultimately, I will come down to that. And what does transparency look like? Well, when this idea of who you think you are begins to collapse, there's nothing to defend. You just become transparent. I mean, it's very much like if we want acceptance, we have to turn things over, right? We talk about acceptance a lot. And my experience with that is if I really understand how powerless I am, the depth of my powerlessness, acceptance just happens. we don't have an acceptance problem we have a powerless problem if I really understand how powerless I am there is no attempt to try to change things that I can it's just I don't try to change anything acceptance just occurs because I am not I can't control what's outside of myself well meditation is very much the same way the true self I think the closer we talk about the true self as if there is something there that's truer than what we are. I'm not sure about that, but I understand the concept. But what seems to be able to happen is if you can actually see yourself, transparency just happens. There's nothing to defend anymore. I don't need to protect myself against you. You know, I don' t have to set boundaries. There are no boundaries, you know? I mean, today in my life, truly, there are no resentments in my live. I' m not angry. I don't resent, but there are people I avoid. You know, there's people that feed off of negative energy. There's people I choose not to be around. You know? I just don't care to be there. But I don' t hate them. I'm not against them, right? It's just I choose to stay in my little realm, in my little area. Somebody in the last talk asked a question about people please, you know? What I think that the way that it manifested itself in my life is I would look across the room and determine who the cool people are, right? I mean, this is like when you're in elementary school and you look across the room, and you make the determination that if I looked like so-and-so, I'd be cooler. If I was more athletic like little Jimmy, I'd Be Cooler. This is a human experience. This is the way humans are. And then we try to adapt into these groups. You know, we find our peer group, and we try to get along, and want to be with the cool people, not the weirdos, right. Well, in AA, one of the things I discovered is I would look and see who the cool people were, and I would adapt myself to be with them, to get along with them. And I would completely ignore the people that were naturally gravitating towards me. Now, how do you discover this? Well, you look back in the past and realize that's what's going on. And you have trouble with personal relationships, right? You know, your relationships are difficult. Why are they difficult? Well, it's because of you. Well, what is it I'm doing that's making my relationships difficult? Well, maybe you're with people that you don't belong with, you know? That might be one of the answers, you know? Why are you trying to get along with these people that you really don't care about just because they look cool, because they've been sober longer? Like the first 10 years I was in AA, my total motivation was I was trying to make a name for myself in an anonymous organization. You know? Now, you can actually pull that off. You can be famous on the short bus, you know, you could work your way up to be the driver on the short bus. You can actually do that, and you know what happens when you get into the hierarchy of AA because you think there's a hierarchy? The people that are there in that hierarchy you think exists, they are laughing at you because they know you think they're the hierarchy, and they've been around there long enough to realize there's no hierarchy in AA, but I certainly thought there was, and I tried to, well, what happened in that process? Well, one of the things that happened in that process is I had a lot of trouble with personal relationships. You know, there was a lot chaos in my life, NAA. When I ended up in that storeroom and I blew up my family, I had to do a big inventory. And one ofthe things that came out of that is Ihad a lotof amends to make in Alcoholics Anonymous. I was an overbearing, pompous preacher, and I created a loto chaos. I was telling you how to do it because I was doing it right and you weren't. Now, was I totally conscious of this? not really, you know, but I could feel it from time to time. But when I did that inventory and realized what I'd done, I was ashamed and embarrassed. Really, I wasn't embarrassed of myself. And there were people around me that had been kind of patting me on the head telling me I was going to be okay. Then I fell out of the tree and they were there to catch me. And they let me bounce a couple of times so that I realized what i had done so I wouldn't forget the experience. but then they held me and just loved on me and told me you know I mean I made a fool of myself a very public fall from grace it was really painful I have never been in that much emotional pain in my life it was awful and it was all me now coming out the other side of that you will change you know and one of the things I did is I just started relaxing into who was around me and all of a sudden I could sense the love. In the 11th step, you can tell how spiritual you are if you're surrounded by people that love you. And today in my life, I am surrounded by People That Love and Respect Me. And I believe one of the reasons that that is is because I love and respect them. These are my people. One final thing, when I was dying and people were coming by to say goodbye, right? It was that bad. It was pretty stunning. And I was never afraid, but I was really disappointed because I wasn't done yet, you know? It's like, and I realized I could see how hard it was for me to accept this love, right. Isn't it interesting that we don't think we deserve it, you know, deep down, no matter how blustery and talky we are, you Know, there's something about us that says, oh, I don't do, and i can feel that And I had enough awareness where I could see that happen and let go of that and just let people love me, let people take care of me. I didn't want to go to the men's stag after I got out of the hospital because I didn'T want to be the old guy on a walker. You know, I didn' t want to do that. And so they came over and got me. My wife said, Get him the hell out of The House. And they took me there, and I'm on the walker, and I am the old guys on the Walker, and they made a pathway for me. And then I realized, I'm the center of attention again. Not so bad, you know? I'll be the old guy and let them all take care of me. And I get to look at little Bill enjoying being the center of attention. Again. And it's, I mean, everything's a double-edged sword, right? I mean everything. And letting people take care of you is a warm, loving experience, you know? My ex-wife, when I blew up that marriage, she was in the hospital with me with Kara and my current wife. And Mary, my ex-wife, was laying on the bed with me, just holding me and loving me because we have been healed by Alcoholics Anonymous. I've made my amends. It took a long time, but we're like brother and sister today. So there's peace in my life and there's peace in the present moment. The key to this whole thing, the final pillar of spiritual condition is compassion and that's what we learn in the 12th step you know is how to love each other you know and even though my motivation was based on self what happened is i fell in love with you you know and the 11th step has become more and more important it's more of a peaceful quiet place you know the practicing of this meditation and when i pray my favorite prayer pretty much my only one is please, please leave me of the bondage of self. And I'll leave you with this. They say around here that you got to give it away to keep it. No. You have to give away to even get it. That's how you get it! Thank you very much.