Bondage of Self – Workshop – 2023 – Part 3 of 6 – Bob D.

But I'm a fan of, I'm Bob an alcoholic, I am a fan of Winston Churchill. And Winston Churchill one of his great lines was he was at a formal dinner at Buckingham Palace and he was sitting next to Lady asked her for prim and proper a woman of royalty in England and he's drunk he's always drunk it's this is these a guy he's a good-natured drunk and she says sir you're drunk and he says yes yes my lady I am but tomorrow I'll be sober and you'll still be ugly. You got to love a guy like Churchill, right? Yeah. Many years ago there was a guy he comes to me and he says you know I made I'm making amends to my family I made amends to my mom a couple years a year ago or so He's a young guy, young single guy in AA. He's very active in the Young People's Group, Young People Conference. Nice guy. Goes to a lot of meetings. He says, even though I made amends to my mom, every time I see her, I feel bad. I feel like I get resentful towards her. I don't want to be around her and I don' t want to not be around her because she's my mom but I got a problem to do. So I told him what the kind of thing people in AA would tell me. I said, listen, what you need to do is you need to treat your mom like a newcomer. And he says, you want me to sleep with my mom? Enough of this nonsense. One more. No, that's enough. Enough of that. No, I got it. That's enough, enough. We're not here to tell jokes. You know, when I got sober, you know, I would hear stories in AA about how people, they just think their old timers just love them. And, you know, that old adage, let us love you till you can finally love yourself. That's not my experience. My sponsor needled me and made fun of me and joked about me. And oh, my God, I think and it started to have an effect on me, a very good effect. I started to laugh at myself. And I think that's the real truth. It's not let us Love You Till You Love Yourself. Let us make fun of you until you can Finally Make Fun Of Yourself because in the bondage of self, one of the things that fuels it is a serious, controlling, rigid position towards my own life. When I got sober, I was very serious. I'd sit and meet people and laugh about some stuff. That's funny. You know, I just, I was really serious. I was always very uptight and you guys worked on me and you got me to start laughing at myself. when you can laugh at yourself it's a great thing because you start to realize how silly this thing is that talks to you and has ruined your life it's silly that the crazy part is that I that it affects me I was early in sobriety in a oh god I was having one of those meltdown days I had a sponsor used to talk me off the ledge about every week at least because I just I'm one of those kind of guys you shouldn't leave alone because I just I want to think when I'm alone and I've never sat and pondered my life and spiraled upward I always it's always into the drink you know it's all it's just the more I ponder the future the bleaker it looks the more I look at my life the more of a failure I feel like it's horrible and I knew in my first few years of sobriety i had a lot of problems some of them imagine some of them actually real but they weren't really problems they were just situations that needed to be mended that i needed to take action for but i didn't know that i just they just get right here on me and i can't get them off and i'm telling this old timer about this stuff and i had all the time a lot a lot stuff i accumulated these worries and all this anxiety and i'll never forget this he said he listen to me dump all this crap on him and then he said to me he said well he said he started loud chuckling he said you think that you are your head you think you're your mind don't you i said well yeah it's my mind my thoughts my head yeah he said that's not you i said no he said no you're the idiot that listens to that shit the voice and see i think the voice in my head is me right and if you ever got into any practice of meditation uh in in addition to what it talks about on page 86 and 87 you start in the in the quiet in the silence what what starts to you start to experience is that i am not the chatter in my head i am the observer and the listener that that's not me that's the talker that's the voice of my ego and so i'm not that guy and when it when i when when it has me when I'm in the bondage of self, I have a tendency to be very serious. I have an tendency... What is the symptoms of the bondages? The bondage yourself. Seriousness. Opinionation. You want to measure my distance from surrender? You want me to measure the distance from the decision in step three? Measure it by the amount of opinions in my life. That's why one of the great traditions for me is what Wilson, he personalized it. And it's really about me and it's about you. In Tradition 10, as he wrote originally in the long form. Let me read this. It's kind of, it's pretty amazing actually. The implications of what he says here are vast. He said no AA group or member. So he's making it a little personal because I'm a member of AA. So no group or member, so that's Bob, should ever in such a way implicate AA by expressing any opinion on outside controversial issues. Then he goes on to explain the three predominant ones, particularly those of politics, alcohol reform, or sectarian religion. Alcoholics Anonymous oppose no one. Concerning such matters, they express no views, whatever. Well, what if you never expressed an opinion? What the hell would you talk about? I mean, I generate opinions at a rate that a board of psychologists couldn't dismantle as quickly as I can create them. I have opinions about everything. So it might be unrealistic to expect a guy like me not to have the opinions, but it's not unrealistic to suspect a guy let me not express them. Keep my mouth shut. Sometimes spiritual wisdom is contained in silence. One of the great directions in our book is to pause when agitated. I don't like to pause When Agitated. I like to accelerate When Agitate. I like attack When Agitated. I like explain to you how wrong you are when I'm agitated, to pause. And in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions And Wilson says some amazing things in Step 10. He starts off by saying something that it took me a while to get my head around. And then I did an aftercare meeting for the Salvation Army ARC rehab for a number of years just as a volunteer. I ran this group of alumni, and I had a challenge that I put out to every one of them. I said, there's a thing in our 10th step. It says it's a spiritual axiom, which means this is something that is true under all conditions. It's a Spiritual Axiom that when you're disturbed at all, no matter what the cause, no matter the reason, that there's something wrong with you. And I put the challenge out. I said if anybody can find an exception to that, can you look and see? No one ever found an exception for that. Because when I'm disturbed, I am the source of the disturbance. Now, my ego will chatter at me how it's your fault. Well, if you hadn't. But I am The Source of the Disturbance. I amThe Source ofthe Separation. I amthe SourceoftheConflict. That when I am disturbed at all, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with me. And later he says that one of the great things to cultivate is restraint of tongue and pen. Now, if he said it today, tongue and pens and email and text and on and on but this restraint, and I think it's so important because some of us have a tendency to we have like rubber bands attached to us and we're cocked back ready to go and not to go. I can look back over the years and I bet you I could find a dozen examples of trouble I wish I wouldn't have gotten into and it all came from my inability or unwillingness to keep my mouth shut. And, you know, I understand it because when people are out of line, they need to know. they just need to know and i told my sponsor that well they may need to know but it's not your job to tell them um to keep my mouth shut to pause when agitated the restraint of tongue pen and um so what what if i oh no just oh god you know during the last election i saw people leave aa because of other members extreme and adamant expression of their political views and it's real it's and people bashing but one person's on one side of the aisle and they're bashing people on the other side of yeah now i don't think there's a level of selfishness greater than putting that my beliefs, which are erroneous. How do you know they're right? You think they're Righto. The ego believes it's right. But your belief is more important than that guy's membership in AA. You're going to hammer him with that so he feels uncomfortable, especially the ones that bother me. Newcomers, I just give them a pass. It's the guys that are sober 30 years that are bashing people that are sober three years with their political opinions. And we went right into the pandemic I saw the same thing there. Oh, my God. It just it's split AA into the the mass. Don't go out of the house. Suffer in place. I mean, shelter in place people and in the people who just thought. I got to I got To be on the firing line of life. I'd rather I would rather die of covid than alcoholism. And you had the two polarities, and there was bickering back and forth between the two. I was very fortunate that California wasn't this fortunate. I lived in a state where our governor came right out and said that Alcoholics Anonymous was an essential service. So we always had in-person meetings. Now, you're supposed to wear masks and be six feet apart, which trying to get members of alcohol examiners to follow. It's like trying to herd cats. It's, like, Jesus. But we did the best we could. We did it somewhat. Some people didn't do that good of it. But it was what it was. And there were people who stopped talking to me because I went to some live in-person meetings with a mask. And then there were other people that refused to go and they couldn't do Zoom because they had an attention deficit disorder. They couldn't pay attention. They couldn'T get connected. And I understand, I probably did 250 Zoom meetings through the pandemic. I did a lot of them. And I'll tell you, I tried to get the same connection there that I got in a live meeting, and I just felt so horribly inadequate. You know, I felt like there's something must be wrong with me. I would go on early and try to look for new people and talk to people. Well, you get onto one of those big Zoom meetings early, it's a cacophony of people just talking over each other. I put my name and phone number in the chat just hoping some new guy would call me. Never got a response. I thought, isn't there some way I could take a guy? How do you take a guys out to coffee after the Zoom meeting? What do you do? and I felt useless, and I felt flawed, and I felt terribly inadequate. And there were some people, like my friend Mari Gallagher, and an ex-trustee friend of mine, Martin Ayers from Canada, that just wouldn't go to they wouldn't do Zoom. They thought it was a breach of the traditions. I don't know. I went because it was all we had, or at least for the most part it was what we had. And I went cause I thought maybe if it's an opportunity where I can help somebody and be useful it's my job to say yes so when I got asked to talk somewhere, now I don't do Zoom anymore because there's no reason to do it, I'm putting a lot of, I am going to eight live in person meetings a week because I kind of feel like I am on a mission to restore Alcoholics Anonymous to the Alcoholics Anonymous I knew prior to the pandemic where that spirit where you'd walk into a meeting and just get lit up. And so I put a lot of time and energy into that. And I encourage the guys I sponsor to put a lot of Time and Energy into that, but that we're not to express any opinion. I mean, my opinions are so ego driven. And I've had some opinions over the years and I've said some things I wish I wouldn't have said. I wish it would have paused. I wish i would have kept. I wish I would have realized that it's an opinion. But isn't it funny how we think our opinions are solid? Yeah, that's your opinion. My view is right. The ego is indomitable. And there are times I wish I would've kept my mouth shut and that I didn't. But if you can, you can make amends and sometimes you just get a do-over. the realm of the spirit is is the realm of do-overs it's the realm of opportunity you screwed up your first marriage you get a do-over in your next one and if you didn't learn from the first one you're probably going to screw up the second one you know because if you ever ever listen to many fifth steps you get to the sex inventory and there's a patheticness about about mine and everyone I've ever listened to it's it's a documentary of a person who never learned from their mistakes. They change partners, but they never change the way they conduct themselves. It's the same thing over and over and over and again. It's evidentiary of someone who never gets it. You know, that must have skipped that crucial question in the sex inventory. What should I have done instead? because they don't know. And I don't know about you. If I can't see a vision of how to do something different when I get in that spot again, I'm probably going to do what I did the last time. It's like the ruts in a road. The wheel always slips back into the rut. And I listen to a lot of those. But I get do-overs. I think my wife today is my do-over and I'm hers. And we both, we talk about that. We're very conscious of that. That this is an opportunity, let's not screw it up. This is some sort of, some kind of a different type of men's because it's not direct to the people I'd hurt, but it's indirect and it's a do-over. That I get to be a different husband with her if I'm willing to do the work than I was in my first marriage. And my first marriage wasn't bad, I never fought with my wife I was never abusive, I was very nice I was a good provider, I've never cheated on her I've ever cheated on any of my wives but I sure wasn't emotionally accessible and I sure didn't know how to do intimacy and in the areas where she needed me I didn't know how to be there, I didn' t know how show up and she felt like i was dissing her and rejecting her what the truth is i just don't know how to do that stuff and uh i've been learning not easy they you can uh they say you can't teach old dogs new tricks well if the treats are good enough you can i mean The reason I say that is we're training a dog right now, a puppy. You've got to use a lot of positive stuff, a lot of treats, a little praise. So trying to do some things differently. So what would it look like? What would I look like, how would I show up if I really could get to a place of surrender I really have abandoned my will, which generates all my opinions. What the hell would that look like? What if I didn't have any opinions? Well, if I don't have many opinions, then I don t have any resentments. Because you got to have an opinion about the person, something they did, the person you resent. If I didn t have any opinion, I wouldn t have fear. Because fear is always attached to my fear of not getting my way, and my way is the opinion. Or my losing something I have and my losing something I haven't is my opinion. How surrendered would I be if I really could have no opinions? I think then truly I would be the guy who was one with. Because all the separation I've known in my life has started with an opinion in my head about you and i i form i have a formed opinions on based on nothing this is it's silly but this is true i quit jobs based on what i thought they were thinking you know what i mean just some little thing some little things happens at work and i say hi to somebody and ah they don't even pay attention to me and i know i know and if he's he's probably going to try to sabotage my job you know that asshole you know you it starts and next thing i know i'm either i'm quitting the job or i'm getting fired or i'M GETTING IN A FIGHT WITH THE GUY BECAUSE OF AN OPINION i went through this is this this speaks volumes of untreated alcoholism but This is, honest to God, I went through nine jobs in my first four years of sobriety. That means I don't stay anywhere long enough to get benefits, to get insurance, to get anything. I'm changing jobs quick. And it's always, and you start, it's hard to deny the patterns. You can blame other people and, oh, those people are jerks. You can say that to yourself, but after a while, a pattern emerges out of the dust. And the pattern was me. And the problem was me and the problem was my fear driven ego would generate opinions about the people I work with. And it was very similar. I'd interview for the job. I get the job, man. God, this is the job this is the job these people are wonderful. two weeks later boy i can't believe they're so stupid three weeks later they're doing it so wrong i have to start telling them how wrong they are you know people that run companies don't like their employees doing that it's just i don't know why it's just they're unreasonable i suppose and and uh i had a friend jimmy jimny williams he was so he's such a great speaker. He's so funny. Jimmy said this, it knocked me over because I just came out of the back end of the nine jobs in four years. I was only two years past that probably. And Jimmy said, I worked over, he said, i worked over 50 places in my life. He said some of those jobs are good when I got them but I never worked anywhere where they did it right. And then he said you know some of Those places have been doing it wrong successfully for decades and then when he said that i thought yeah and i'm always the guy that's leaving and some people retire from those jobs with great benefits and great pensions and i'm the guy this leaving and why why is that because of this ego-driven opinionation and it's not good if i if i ever left aa would probably be on a sled of opinions about the people in aa about me about what i know there's a prayer in 1980 uh 80 i was a speaker host at the las vegas roundup for a guy from aurora colorado named don pritz and don and i over the years became really good friends and we did some workshops together in a bunch. He's a good guy, nice guy, great storyteller. And he had this newcomer with him, I think that year, maybe it was 81. I'm not sure. But he was telling this guy he sponsored to say this prayer. I want you to ask God to set aside everything you think you know for a new experience. And that prayer has spread all over Alcoholics Anonymous and been fletched out to some versions are like 10 minutes long. God helped me to set beside everything I know about my dentist and the big book. I mean, it gets a little carried away. But the concept of knowing you don't know is one of the spiritual principles of Buddhism that is tied into enlightenment. That when you know you don'T know is when you really know. The ego is what thinks it knows everything. And when I know it... And I went from 1971 to 1978. I was in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous. I worked as a therapist for two years in the earlier 70s. I was the I know guy, read a lot of stuff. I was handicapped by intelligence and intellect, handicapped. And I did that and pursued knowledge because I functioned under a delusion. And the delusion is that I need something here desperately, and I think I'm going to find the power I need in knowledge. I never did. You know what I found in knowledge? I found fodder for my ego. I found the things that would puff me up into becoming the I know guy. The guy you can't talk to. The guy that can't learn anything. You can't learning anything when you know everything. And in 1978, in my last detox, I remember sitting there. I just tried to kill myself. I was at a state of demoralization that was beyond anything I'd ever known. And I had known some demoralisation. I had know some shame. I had knew a wealth of consequences. But this broke me. and I remember sitting there and after one of the in-house meetings I went up to my counselor and I said I'm scared what are you scared of I said I can't even trust my own thinking and she smiled she said maybe that's good maybe that is good to know that you don't know is the essence of surrender and so I was at that place and I don't think I could have gotten a sponsor and become Sponsorable if I wasn't at the place Where I knew I didn't know because if you know You don't need a sponsor Why would you need a Sponsor when you're smarter than him anyway But when you know you Don't know and you know that you can't Trust your own perception and you Can't trust your own thinking Then for the first time I was on to something It's the essence of surrender Surrender of the ego the will and so this uh this dismantling of opinions you know for me it was the it started in that fourth step when i started to look at some of these opinions these judgments these resentments from an entirely different angle and i startedto realize how wrong my perception was about so much stuff. And then you make amends. My God, how many times do you make amends to someone because you're told to do it and because you intellectually understand? OK, I need to do this. It's the right thing, even though the guy's an asshole. I need To do this and you make amends and you humble yourself. And clear up your side of the street and all of a sudden the other person changes. All of a sudden they start admitting their wrongs all of a sudden it's it's a different thing it's it's like and i don't know i've often wondered because i've seen such a dramatic evidence of this how amends affects the person you're making the amends to how does that happen been. I don't know, but it happens. I'll tell you, a couple of things that changed so dramatically as a result of the steps. One is my parents. I remember after the first time I got together with my parents and made formal in-person amends to them. I was going to my sponsor a week later. I said, you know, they've really changed. They hadn't changed. I had changed. But as I change, my perception changes. I went through a spiritual seeking thing for a while where I never stopped doing AA, but I started exploring different churches and different things and everything from SGI Buddhism to Unity to Church of Religious Science. I went back to the church in my childhood, and I told my sponsor, boy, they have changed a lot. They didn't change. I changed and my perception was kinder and it was more considerate and it wasn't so demanding and conflicting that that I AA was changing me to fit the world I heard a story I stopped sharing it because some guy in AA started from California started sharing all my stories so I had to change sum them up i stopped sharing them so i just got tired of hearing him share them on but this it was a great story and the story the story is there's this this guy and he has the day off and he's uh sitting in his easy chair relaxing happy to just do nothing he's reading the newspaper he likes to read the newspaper he's a like a three or four year old daughter cute little girl She comes up to him. She says, Daddy, Daddy. Can you play with me? He loves his daughter, but he doesn't. He just wants to relax. He Just wants a little, a little bit of shush. Just wants to be quiet, sit there, read the paper and she won't go away. Daddy, please play with him. Please. So on the back of the first section is an ad for an airlines and it's a full page map of the world. So he gets an idea. He tears that back page off the newspaper he tears it up into little pieces gets a roll of scotch tape and he says sweetheart here's a puzzle it's a map of the world tape it together and bring it back i'll play with you for the rest of the day and he thinks she's just a kid she can't she doesn't even know what a map of the word looks like and she comes back 20 minutes later and it's taped together just about perfectly and he goes my god sweetheart how'd you do that she said well Well, daddy, I didn't know what the world looked like. But on the back was a picture of a man. And when I put the man together, the world kind of fell into place. And that's what Alcoholics Anonymous does in my life. It changes me. And as it changes me, the word alcoholics anonymous does. The world appears to be different. And thank God. When Clancy used to say this is a disease of perception, I'll tell you, he hit something right on the nail. Right at the nail right on their head there. and to be suspect you know i got this just this recent argument i had with my wife i lost the suspectness of my own perception because if i'd have been even in the ballpark of surrender the things i was reacting to i would have understood that my perception could be wrong here that i might be wrong you know we grow from being our willingness to be wrong you don't grow nope we grow sicker from our need to be right and we grow spiritually from our need our willingness to be wrong i mean if that wasn't true if you could grow from being right you know somewhere in the literature would say and when we were right we promptly admitted it but it doesn't say that it's when we Were Wrong We Promptly Admitted It And I got a little beef with my wife because I forgot that. I forgot my perception and my reactions and all that stuff can be wrong based on opinions. In the eighth tradition in the long form, Wilson says something very clear. It's the one on professionalism, but he says something I have taken to heart. And my first sponsor believed in this adamantly. Bill Wilson believed in it. My second sponsor believed it. My current sponsor believes in it." It says our AA 12-step work is never to be paid for. You know, I don't imagine anybody's come to AA with a greater propensity for selfishness and self-seeking as I have had. And I fight against that. And my sponsors have all told me you can't. Alcoholics Anonymous is your giving place. It's not your taking place. This is where you come to self-sacrifice, to be inconvenienced, to help people. This is sometimes AA costs you money. You just roll with it. I know that I speak a lot, and I didn't want to. I really did not want to, but I had a terrible feeling about being a speaker. I tried to quit when I was about 30 years sober. I talked to Clancy. I said, I don't wantto do this anymore because I'm going out there, and I'm goin' to conferences with people that are predators. They're sexual predators. They're financial predators. They're using the podium to hide a bunch of sleazy stuff behind, and they're hurting people. I don't want to be associated with that. And they have crazy messages. Some of these guys have written workbooks, and they'RE making money off of them. I don'T want to BE a part of that. And Clancy said, You can'T stop, kid. He said, There's not a shortage of people that are takers in AA, but there'S a shortage OF giVERs. and if you stop showing up and trying to carry your experience with this thing then those people take over and I think there's a tremendous dynamic tension it's a rightness you have everything on the spectrum of self-serving to selflessness and Ithink it's all necessary because God somewhere is in the imperfection of the middle. He's not in either extreme. Because I know, I know that people that, you know, we all know those people that just every time they share, you can hear angel wings flapping in the background. You know, the guys that, there was a guy in Vegas, I loved him, but he used to say this over and over all the time. He said, I've been, he was sober 40 some years before he died. He said, I'd never had a bad day sober. If I was having a bad day, I'm giving him a wide berth because I'm not going to talk to him. I got to go talk to people I know had a Bad Day because it's in your flaws that I feel the community. As Wilson said in one of his writings, it's the fellowship of the defective and I need that. I need to be right in the middle here and a lot the guys I sponsor, they don't ask me to sponsor them because they think I'm perfect. They ask me to sponsor him because they suspect that I might be sicker than them. So when they've really screwed up, I'm a guy they can come and talk to. They don't feel like they're going to be judged or put down or preached to or moralized because we don't do that here. We never talk down to another alcoholic from a spiritual hilltop, never. So it's in my defects and in my flaws that I seem to be useful to people. When you start thinking about this alchemy of recovery, it's God takes the worst of you. You know the things that you did that you're so ashamed of, you hope nobody finds out about? Maybe you dimed some people out to the cops and they went to prison. Maybe you had such sexual stuff going on that you'd be humiliated if anybody knew about it. Maybe in a drunken rage or a hungover state, maybe you beat your kids and you can't get that look in their face out of your mind. And you think, I'm going to take that to the grave. I can't even stand the idea that people would know about that stuff. And years later, as a result of the steps and a result of sponsoring people, you're sharing that openly with people. And not only are you sharing it, it's helping. Because the person you're showing with comes here convinced that he's the only person that ever did that. convinced in a in a state of painful isolation that he's flawed so much that he doesn't fit here until you share that with him and then i remember the first time i i shared one of my deepest darkest secrets with someone and god picks his people god amazing the person now this is something that not that many people in a have done handful and the person i broke down and shared it with happened to be one of those people that did the same thing. It's like, wow, wow. How did that happen? And this alchemy, the worst of you becomes the best of you. And when you think about if a guy like me is willing to surrender and willing to set himself aside, even though it may be very intermittent and doesn't last, and I keep trying to do it and trying to do it, and re-surrender, re-surrender. Just to the degree of willingness that I try to do that, some magical stuff starts to happen. I find that everything about me, everything about Me is perfect in being exactly who God wants me to be. The flaws, the defects, the mistakes, the divorces the amends that I had a hard time making I didn't make right I had to remake them later everything that was wrong with me becomes what is right with me if my purpose is to make that stuff useful to help the next guy that comes along and that is as crazy as the old alchemists that we're trying to turn lead into gold, we turn crap into chocolate. You know, it's amazing what Alcoholics Anonymous does here in our lives. And it all comes from a willingness to surrender. Or as Dr. Bob said, trust God, clean house, and help others. And that's really what he said. Bob said that that's what the whole program cooks down to, It was those three things. His son and I were very good friends. His son came and stayed at my house for a week many years ago and got to spend a lot of time together. He sat in my living room, told about 50 of us the story of him taking his dad. He drove his father, his aunt, Bob's wife, and Bob were sitting in the back seat and Smitty, the son and the stepdaughter were driving in the front seat taking him to the cyberling gatehouse to meet this guy from New York and Bob did not want to go. He did not wanna go and his son's telling me oh he's dragging his feet but you see he had gotten drunk and screwed up Mother's Day so he's guilty And it wasn't that Ann was pulling him by the ear, but I think emotionally she was pulling, she was guilting him to go talk to this guy. He didn't want to go. He made them promise. Please, please, I'm sick. I'm hungover. I feel horrible. Don't make me stay in there and listen to this guy talk to me about my drinking. 15 minutes is the most I can take. And they promised. Okay, okay, Bob, just go in there and talk to him. 15 minutes, you can come home. he stayed in there for i think it was over four hours i ask his son we ask his son what how come you'd already promised you would get bob out of there within 15 minutes you let him stay for all those hours how come and he said we were sitting on the outside of the library in the gatehouse and we could hear him laughing and we hadn't heard our dad laugh in years they could hear his spirit coming out and becoming alive and that this laughter thing that happens to us and when you start laughing in aa and you start laughing at yourself what's happening is you're starting to breathe because when i get sober i smother myself with myself it's like that part of that movie alien where you just get yourself right on you like that creature in that movie just gets it right here and i start feeling like i'm suffocating and yet i have a universal experience that so i've heard this from 100 people you're sober three months and you feel like you're being smothered here you don't know why you don't even know what's going on but you're on yourself and then you take that first double shot of whiskey we all have a similar reaction we all go like somebody turned the damn air back on like i can breathe and the word spirits and the words spirit come from the same latin word spirit meaning breath of life that I drank spirits because they let me breathe and I do AA because I need to breathe and I need you to get free. If you ever get a chance to read the letter that Carl Jung wrote to Bill Wilson, it's a beautiful letter. He wrote it towards the end of his life when he was in a deep depression. Young had, he was so depressive by nature. Some people speculate that he was an alcoholic. Well, we don't know that for sure. But he had a tough time at the end. And he felt like maybe he never did any good. And he got Bill Wilson's letter where Bill said, you know, there's thousands of people now that have changed their lives and you were a big piece of that. The conversation you had with Roland Hazard was brought to us And it became one of the foundation stones in Alcoholics Anonymous. And Carl Jung didn't have a clue. He didn't know that. And he wrote back to Wilson. The first thing he said is, your letter was really needed. I really needed to hear your letter because he felt useless. And he had no idea. and that his helping Alcoholics Anonymous is truly in the spirit of anonymity you know anonymity is it's like the essence of God working through people to create an amazing amount of good and nobody gets the credit and one of the things that my first sponsor told me to do it and it's hard do something really nice for someone every day and don't let anybody know first of all i don't think about things for other people much right so that in itself is a big step for me and then not to let anybody know i remember i do something and it was it's it's like it's like uh something that has to come i'm not gonna say i can't say anything can't tell my but i should tell my sponsor because he gave me the direction I'd tell him, he'd say, well, it don't count. I don't know what's harder, doing something nice and not telling anybody or seeing something wrong in someone and not calling them. I don' t know what' s more difficult, right? And they're all manifestations of ego. and i was able to do that a couple times but i failed many many times more than i succeeded because the ego is just clamoring for attention and yet in our 11th tradition in the long form wilson warns guys like me of something he you know it's it's about promotion And he talks about we never promote ourselves. We don't. I mean, when you think about it objectively, if ego and selfishness and self-centeredness is the root of our trouble, then promoting yourself would be like arming ISIS or something. You know, it's like you're feeding the enemy. You're feeding them. You're eating the thing in you that should be starved. It says our friends can recommend us, but we don't promote ourselves we respond because spiritually responsible people have the ability to respond if I'm asked to do something okay I don't try to promote myself to do it but if you ask me to do something in A you want to come over to my house and talk about something And yeah, I'm going to go somewhere and do a retreat or go somewhere and speak on a panel or go down to this new detox meeting. Yeah, if I'm free, I don't have a conflicting commitment. I get one answer and it's yeah, sure. I've been both my sponsors were big on that. You just say yes. And I remember I was early in sobriety and I had a guy. I was only sober maybe two months. and the first guy that ever asked me to sponsor him asked me and he was only sober about a month and I turned him down and when I told my sponsor you would have thought I peed on Bill Wilson's grave oh my god he just went ballistic I never did that again and he said to me something I've thought about over the years how do you know that God didn't ask you through him how do you know I never forgot that so when somebody says you want to come to Alta and shiver in a cabin in the snow yeah oh I can't wait some guy asked me a couple years ago to come to India and do a workshop and I said yes then I bought a plane ticket for myself and the gal that was my fiancee we flew over there where they said we'll reimburse you for the basic cost of a coach ticket and we'll put you up at a hotel well we got to the hotel i would couldn't stay there i just couldn't they had a toilet in the same room next to the bed with no toilet seat it's like a prison toilet you know with no toiletry there were bugs all over the place there was no air conditioning and it's india and i just very politely said well thank you for the off the room and the offer but i know i was online i found a place there's a sheridan down there where i'm gonna stay down there well and then it came time gave the guy the receipt for my plane ticket and he said i'm sorry we don't we thought we could have the money but we don't between my the girl i was with and myself food beverage hotel this hotel was very expensive the flight was very expensive because we went business class that cost me about 10 grand out of my pocket but it was a privilege to do it in that room there was about a hundred guys no women women don't make it into aa in india for some reason very i think it's rare you ever see a woman there same thing with the middle east i've done a lot of stuff over there but of those hundred guys there were people sober from within their first year to one guy was sober i think 38 years 39 years something like that and these are hindus these are guys that don't even know anything about the bible or jesus or nothing that i grew up with they know nothing about any of it but they knew about the pain of alcoholism and it brought them to their knees and they came into Alcoholics Anonymous and they got a sponsor and they started going through those steps against the backdrop of Hinduism. And they all would talk about their spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. They became better Hindus. They became bigger Hindus. They became greater fathers and husbands. Their light came on. And I remember seeing that, and I thought, whatever this cost me to come over and witness this and experience this, it was worth it. because I have a very, very narrow view of life at times. I had a very similar experience in the Middle East. I was over there several times, rooms full of Muslims that had the same experience that you have and I have. And that's the great promise, I think, of Alcoholics Anonymous, having had a spiritual awakening as the single result of these steps. But we don't know what's going to happen to you. But you know that thing that alcohol lit up inside you and set you free? We know that something like that's going to happen. Whether you tack it on to a spiritual experience, you tacking on to God, you tacked on the church, your childhood. We don't know. We just know you do the work, you get the results and it's universal and it has nothing. There's a tie. I was with a guy not too long ago and he's very close minded. And he thinks if you don't, if you haven't had Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, you're not really sober. Well, I could take you to places that people are as sober as we are that don't have any of that experience. Is God really that big and that inclusive and that available? Evidently, He is. I like that. It makes me feel, you know, it sort of sweeps around, it sweeps away the last opinionated remnants of not being good enough for God. That I don't measure up because maybe I don' t have to measure up. Maybe he loves me as is. That's amazing. and um so in our 11th tradition it says that we we never promote ourselves i that's why i i i'm involved in a conference there's i brought a couple flyers i don't i don' even know why i bring the flyers around it sells out it'll be sold out sells out every year like months before it but it's a great conference and i love I love the idea of people that have never come there to come there and experience that because it's a game changer. And the first year we did it, the speakers we had blew the top of the building off. It was unbelievable. We had Sandy Beach, we had Clancy, we Had Tom Ivester, we have Clint Hodges with Angie Dill. We have Sharon Crane, Charlie Carney, Scott Lee. I mean, this was I mean everybody and it was limited that we had a smaller room it was only 420 people which we didn't think we were going to get 150 sold out in three weeks 420 people and everybody's on this cloud and when it's over it's like amazing people are just like ah and a guy comes up to me after the closing session on Sunday we're kind of putting some stuff away and he comes up to me and he says, yeah, it was a nice weekend. Yeah, I thought it was amazing. He said, you know, I give talks on the steps. Oh, okay. He said as a matter of fact, I'll get you some cassettes of my talks from the steps Oh, okay. He said matter of act, you don't really need all these other speakers. I could do the whole weekend. his arrogance took my breath away and i said what i said to him if i would have been more spiritually fit i wouldn't have said i would i would have been a nicer guy but i said oh you know i bet you you do an amazing job but unfortunately and this didn't actually happen till the second i said it unfortunately it's in our bylaws that we can never have someone speak who's volunteered to speak and he starts giving me the stink eye like because he doesn't know if I'm screwing with him or not right and a more spiritual person wouldn't have enjoyed saying that to him as much as I did but you know why that bothers me you know the real reason that bothers me the real reason sometimes i get upset with these people that charge exorbitant amounts of money to sponsor movie stars and stuff because that tendency is in me and i gotta tell you something i don't even like the tendency in me and when i see it in you it offends me because i'm seeing you actualize something that i keep under wraps and I'm glad I keep it under wraps because I believe that what my sponsors have told me, you don't do that stuff. You just don't do it. There's a great, I sponsor a guy with 20 or 30, 38 years in Plymouth, England, and they have a great saying over there. When you do something like that, they say that's dodgy and bad form. And I don't want to do anything that's dodgy in bad form in Alcoholics Anonymous because I hope I always remember that whatever I do is an example to the newer people. And I don't want to be a bad example. If I started putting talks of myself online, if I started promoting myself, if I stated making money off of helping people, you can bet that a third of the people I sponsor would be jumping on that bandwagon of convenience and self-serving within a year. And here's the problem with that. If some of us don't stand for these principles, we're going to end up with the Alcoholics Anonymous we deserve. And that's not good. So you have to stand up for this stuff. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Does it take away things you could have had maybe if you weren't so principled? Probably. Is it difficult? Often. Is it worth it? You bet your ass. I often, I get scared sometimes. I have a grandson who's adorable. He's just, he's a year and a half old. And in my family tree, there's a pattern of alcoholism. And it's not everybody in my community only trees and alcoholic. If you look back through the generations, it's as if it skips every other generation. My mother and father were not alcoholics, but my mother's mother was and my father's father was. I had uncles that were alcoholics. My parents were not alcoholics they could take it or leave it alone. My daughter is not an alcoholic. But that pattern brings into reality a possibility that my grandson, who I adore, could grow up and be an alcoholic. That maybe the gene hopscotch is like that. And if he's an alcoholic and in 20 some years from now, in a moment of despair because he can't stop drinking and it doesn't help him anymore and he's out of options and he'S thinking about killing himself. My God, I hope he can find the same Alcoholics Anonymous that I found when I came off that bridge in 1978. Because if I had to come off that bridge and you weren't here as you were, I'd have found my way back to that bridge because I'll tell you something, that bridge waits for me and it will always wait for me. So I love alcoholics. But of course, how could you if you sponsor people and you do service here how could you not love aaa really i i don't understand it why people could come here and be and hurt aa and be predators and and take advantage of people i donno i guess that something happened back in the early 80s i think it started that never i don t think happened much in in the early days, maybe a little bit once in a while, is that because of our success and because of our growth and because of notoriety, we became like a herd of sheeps for sociopaths. And we get people... Now I understand somewhat, when I worked as a therapist, we studied all this dsm diagnosis and i understand the principles of sociopathology and i understand that as an alcoholic i'm capable of doing everything a sociopath has ever done i can lie to you cheat you etc etc i can do all that the problem and the difference between me and a sociopath, when a sociopath does it, he reaps no internal consequences. There's a major disconnect between them and their moral compass and that thing inside them. I can do the exact same thing, but he eats my lunch. And often I will have to drink to live with that behavior. I know I did some pretty sleazy stuff when I was drinking and I'd hurt a lot of people and I did some pretty stuff, shameful stuff. But it just fueled my drinking. I needed the anesthetic. I needed even more to soothe that conflict within me. I'm not a sociopath. I'm selfish and I'm self-centered and I've been driven by fear. But I have a conscience. Thank God. I think there was a time in my life I kind of wished I didn't have one because I could get away with a lot of stuff if I didn't have a conscience but I think the conscience is the God within me it's the thing that creates the discomfort on the shoulders of the road that I walk on I can go over here but it makes me uncomfortable I can go over there but it makes me uncomfortable Sandy gave a great Sandy was a pilot Sandy Beech and he gave a great explanation for this. He said, he said it's like when he was a pilot in the early days of him flying, they used to have a thing where they called being on the beam. And he said, when you're landing a plane in bad weather and you couldn't see the runway, you would follow the beam and so what that meant is if you were right on, if you're right where you're supposed to be and the angle of approach is exactly the way it's supposed to быть, there was peace in your headphones you move a little bit off to the right and you get this wow wow wow well you move a little but off to let me get up too much in another noise down too much and so what happens is it forces you to be on the beam to be in the center where you need to be otherwise you're gonna land your plane in a in a field somewhere or in a forest on the side of a mountain and he said When alcoholics drink or they take medicine, it's like taking off the annoying sound of the headphones so they can do whatever they want. The problem is you crash your plane. And some of us, we know that painfully from our own experience. Look at how much of my life I lived based on self-reliance. Nobody tells me what to do. and look what the results of that was so i i want to be on the beam the great purpose of step 11 both in the big book and in the 12 steps and 12 traditions and it says the same thing in both books that the real purpose is to align my will with god's in other words get on that beam. I don't always know what God's will is, but if I'm mindful and I'm quiet, I can easily ascertain what it's not. Don Prince used to have this little thing he'd say before he'd go do something. He'd ask God, he'd see, would you go with me while I do this? And if it was something that was right, he get a feeling like, yeah, I'm going with you. If he was going to cheat on his wife, you'd hear this. No, you're on your own on this one. If he's going to go rip someone off or do some shady kind of deal, no, you'RE ON YOUR OWN. And it's really following that beam, aligning my will. The book says it's the proper use of the will to align my will with God's. Why? Why would I want to do that? Well, I've done it imperfectly and sometimes intermittently for all these years. Some days, sometimes I do a fair job of it, sometimes not so much. But I'll tell you what I've learned from my experience, that just to the extent that I can do what God would have me do, that I believe in my heart is the right thing. It's God's will for me. My life gets better. And you start to wake up. I woke up to this thing that evidently God's vision of Bob's life, if you follow it, is better than my vision of my life. You know, they say to newcomers, make a list of 10 things you'd like to have in place in your life when you're 10 years sober put it in a drawer somewhere and visit it in 10 years well my list would have been horrible would have been a fast car and a girl with big tits I mean that would have been you know that would have pretty much been what I wanted it would have been shallow it would have been self-serving it would have been vacant it would have been empty because I wasn't even awake enough to know the value that can be reaped out of life in here, that having people in my life I care about, having integrity, being the guy who does what you say you're going to do, that shows up where you say you are going to show up, that does what you say. To be the guy that tries imperfectly to live by spiritual principles. The guy who lives to try to help people just like him in the very back of the book there was a there's a little passage that comes from the 1940s and in the 19 the mid-1940s aa was on the radar for a lot of things in our society i mean they were just they were putting together the national council on alcoholism with marty mann and dr jelinek and those things are coming about and we were we were up for the Lasker Award, which we got several years later. The Jack Alexander article had just come out in Saturday Evening Post that painted a picture of us like we were something amazing. And so the American Medical Association wanted more information and more experience. What is this AA thing about? Because it's getting a lot of notoriety. What is it and they took this doc they asked this dr william bear to go and and investigate aaa go to meetings look at their literature just and then make a report on what you think aa is and to this day i think it's the most amazing description of us and it's written by a non-alcoholic who his insight into us must is must have been unbelievable I'm gonna read what he says and it so I think it's it's in the it's the appendix in the big book on page 570 from dr. W bear the merit for American Medical Association in 1946. And here's what he says about us. He says, Alcoholics Anonymous are no crusaders. That's really true. I mean, well, I know that for some of us, there's a phase we go through. You know what I mean? The self-righteous, we're going to sober up the world phase. But most of us come out the backside. It's like born again Christians. There's a period where a born again Christian, they're hard to be around. And then they kind to mellow out and become spiritual and lose their self-righteousness. Well, there's a phase that some of us go through with where we're evangelists fraying, but it doesn't last. And he says, so we're not crusaders and we're Not a temperance society. We're not fighting the bottle. Anybody here been at what was at the 1995 international conference in San Diego? Anybody? You might've saw this. Because it was the international conference, it attracted vendors. It attracted people that saw opportunity in 70,000 of us gathered in one city. So around the convention center, there was booths where they're selling t-shirts and cups. But there was booths of the neo-prohibitionists. And there was a movement, and I think it kind of came out of the mad mothers about trying to bring back prohibition because these people really felt strongly that we should go back to being a temperate society. It's our society should be temperate. We should bring back probation. And so I'm walking down the street and I go by one of these booths and the guy calls me over. He said, come up, please, please come over. Look at this. We'd like you to sign this petition because he sees my badge. He knows I'm an alcoholic. So he makes a fairly good assumption that alcohol probably just about killed me. And so he says, would you sign our petition? We want to bring back the amendment for prohibition so alcohol is no longer legal here. And I looked at him, eh, no thanks. I had a voice. And he said, why not? I said, I don't think alcohol's the problem. He said, but it almost killed me." I walked away and I stood a little bit away and I just started watching that every time people, that he could get their attention, the people in AA with the badges on come down the street. He'd pull them over and everybody's responding the same way. No thank you. And he, the more no thank yous he gets, the more baffled he looks like because he doesn't understand because to him alcohol is the problem but he doesn'T know what we know. alcohol is not the problem what alcohol was was a solution that turned on us but it most people can go through their life and never have a problem with it i'll tell you a little funny story when i was my first year of sobriety i worked for a non-profit organization at a treatment place and i was only sober about two three i don't know a couple months and i was I was given an order to come to a fundraiser for the non-profit and it was going to be a cocktail party well I'm new in sobriety the idea of going to a cocktail party terrifies me I don't know what to do but I have to go so I went to an AA meeting and I shared with this with an old timer and he said something that was brilliant he said well that's not a problem he said what you need to do is you need to go there and you need to find a way to be of service and you'll feel as connected there as you feel in an AA meeting when you're helping with the chairs and you're greeting and you are doing all that stuff. And he said, I will tell you a great thing you can do if your boss will let you. Why don't you offer to be the bartender? Because nobody expects the bartending to drink. Everybody talks to the bartend. Everybody includes the bartenders. The bartender feels useful and connected and a part of. Why not you be the bartended? And I said to my boss, Can I do that? And he said, oh yeah, you don't drink. That's right. That's perfect. Good. And I was a bartender. So I go to do this and I'm going to be a good bartender I'm gonna be of service. I'm gotta be helpful. This is great. And it was exactly what he said. People are talking to me and I feel good and I still useful and I've having great little patter with people in conversations, telling a couple of jokes. This is amazing. And then I started to notice something that I couldn't get my head around. I'm trying to be a good bartender and people are bringing back their drink drinks in there agra aggravated because they're too strong it's like what well you know I didn't say nothing I just make them another but I wanted to say we'll drink half of it it won't seem so strong after that but they have a different result out of alcohol than I do because alcohol is not my problem Alcoholism is my problem. And it's funny, when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and I started treating the alcoholism, the alcohol problem was put to rest. And it stays at rest. And then he goes on to say, not only aren't we a temperate society, they are people who know they must not drink. Now some of us just about died of failure trying to get that knowledge. The countless futile vain attempts to drink like normal people, to drink with impunity, to drink without consequences, to drink and control it. And we failed and we failed and we've failed. So till you get to the point where you know you must not drink and sometimes what that feels like is you know you feel like you're going to die if you drink and sometimes you feel like you're gonna die if you don't. So we know that we must not drank and then here's where he nails us. He said, so they help others with similar problems. And in this atmosphere of a guy like me seeking out people like me and trying to help them, he says that the alcoholic will often overcome his excessive concentration upon himself. How the hell did a doctor visit us a couple times and get that? I think I was three or five years sober before I understood that's what we're doing here, is to dial down my excessive and obsessive concentration upon myself. That I'm obsessively self-concerned. And he goes on to say something that's so true. He said, learning to depend upon a higher power and not play God, learning to defend on a higher Power and absorb himself in his work with other alcoholics. he remains sober day by day the days add up into weeks the weeks into months the months into years and for some of us the years into decades that we have a life here and it's all because of actions i take that are designed to help me to overcome my excessive and obsessive concentration upon myself. And I've discovered when I put the steps and the blueprint of the traditions in place in my life together, it's much more effective. And so are we out of time? God spoke. Let's take a break. We hope you enjoyed this recording. If you are interested in other speaker tapes or CDs from AA or Al-Anon, please contact us at Sound Solutions, toll free 1-877-893-2777 or visit us on the web at soundsolutionsrecording.com We are also available to cover your recording and sound system needs. 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