Emotional Sobriety and Absolute Dependencies – Emotional Sobriety – Part 1 of 6 – Sandy B.

hi i'm astrid and i am definitely an alcoholic hi and i want to thank doug and bridget and everybody else that put this on for inviting me to come speak here it really is an honor and a privilege to share my experience and strength and hope with you and um i love aa and I am a real alcoholic. I have a physical allergy to alcohol and when I drink, I trigger the phenomenon of craving and I cannot stop and I break out in handcuffs and I throw my child away and I swing from the chandeliers and I lose my underwear and my car keys and pitiful and incomprehensible things happen And like so many other people in AA, when I got sober the first time, it wasn't enough to just have physical sobriety. The main part of the disease actually centers in the alcoholic's mind rather than her body. So putting the plug in the jug is a very small aspect of treating this illness. There's a lot more that needs to be considered. And what I'd like to start out with is because this is called emotional sobriety, I'd Like to Start Out With a Little Bit of the Next Frontier Emotional Sobriety in the Language of the Heart on page 236. And I'm just going to read briefly through some of the paragraphs, not the whole thing. But this is from Bill. I think that many oldsters who have put our AA booze cure to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobrietty. how to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result and so into easy, happy and good living well that's not only the neurotics problem but it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to go to the right principles in all of our affairs even then when we go away working with peace and joy peace and enjoy may still elude us That's the place so many of us oldsters have come to, and it's a hell of a spot literally. How shall our unconscious, from which so many of our fears, compulsions, and phony aspirations still stream, be brought into align with what we actually believe, know, and want? How to convince our raging and hidden Mr. or Mrs. Hyde becomes our main task. I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I began to see many benighted one, folks like you and me, commencing to get results. Last autumn, depression, having no real rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners, which means that he almost committed suicide or he almost died. I mean, it's sort of put mildly, almost Took Me to the Cleaners, but we really almost lost one of the founders of a program that our whole life depends on. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I'd had with depression, it wasn't a bright spot. I kept asking myself, why can't the 12 steps work to release depression? By the hour, I stared at St. Francis Prayer. It's better to comfort than to be comforted. Here was the formula all right, but why didn't it work? Suddenly, I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence, almost absolute dependence on people, circumstances to supply me with prestige security and the like failing to get these things according to my perfectionistic dreams and specifications i had fought for them and when defeat came so did my depression there wasn't a chance of making the outgoing love of saint francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies could be cut away because i had over the years undergone a little spiritual development the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed upon any set of circumstances whatsoever. Then only could I be free to love as St. Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions I saw were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life plainly i could not avail myself of god's love until i was able to offer it back to him by loving others as he would have me you know and even that alone i mean well but i can't do well i want to love others i want to love all my fellows and i still can hate so deeply that you make me mad and at the end of the day i have an invisible baseball bat and somebody's going to get hurt and it's not going to be me. I play mental movies in my head of what I'm going to say to you and how it's going to come out. There's a hurt and an injured character inside of here that I treated with alcohol for a long time, and just because I've put the plug in the jug, it doesn't mean that anything else has changed. All the harms and all the hurts from yesterday and from my childhood, the way I react and the way i respond, the was neglected as a child, all the trauma that I've been through is still there, living in me. And if these things aren't treated at a subconscious level, all bets are off. You know, they say these days that only two to maybe five percent of alcoholics ever get a five-year cake. So what's not being presented in Alcoholics Anonymous? What are we not hearing? What's not Being Demonstrated? What are we applying to our lives? And so often the message gets diluted and I go to an AA meeting and I just hear the drama du jour and all the problems and blaming other people. And I feel sicker in that meeting than when I came out. You know, I'm really grateful to Doug and Bridget for having a tight format because I do believe that a format can hold a room together and not allow the people and the sheeple to stray too far out. If we only have a few hours, let's hear a message of depth and weight and let's share some real recovery. It's a personal opinion but a strong one. I don't believe that you can say anything you want from the podium. That's what sponsors are for, you know, and so many people come in and they just feel that alcoholics is a polluted, deep dumping ground, and that's not what it's here for. It's here to really share some experience. Yes, people have trauma. Yes, they're hurt. Yes, their upset, and you can save that for someone else. I don' t know that it's such a great demonstration to spew and spew and speww this emotional untreated alcoholism to the entire room. You know, I want to take you back into the history of how I arrived at the place I'm at today. And I relapsed after 10 years of dry sobriety and it's because I didn't apply the principles to my life. It's because i didn't have a spiritual relationship with God. It's Because I didn' t have any kind of psychic change. I actually got worse not better. It's a real psycho change. I think that my anger and my depression over the years and my behavior towards others and my heart got even more hardened. I was more angry before that last relapse. And so if you be a real alcoholic and the disease is not treated with spiritual principles and a power greater than itself, someday and somewhere along the line it's going to be me and the bottle and the battle is going to win. And the disease ist very cunning and baffling and powerful and it speaks to me with great authority and it tells me that we can drink now after 10 years of dry sobriety. Go for it, you know, have a drink. Nobody will know. Chew some gum, you Know. Oh my gosh. And so that day comes where my mind starts to speak to me with great authoring and tells me that a drink would look like a pretty good idea and I drank and I ignited a huge forest fire in my home, in my life, in my personal life because things were already restless, irritable, and discontent. But now I add alcohol to the fire and things start to really speed up and get very crazy and the depression gets much more heavy. I'm laden with hangovers in the morning. I can't seem to get up. I can'T seem to function. I'M yelling and screaming. I'M very short-tempered. My nervous system becomes very fried with alcohol in it And even with just a hangover, I have really just the inability to accept any kind of frustration or bad news. You know, you might use the B word around me a lot. I'm just restless and irritable and completely discontented. And I can be that sober and I can being that drunk, but as time goes on, And what happened for me was the bottle really took me further and further and further into the psychosis and the insanity. And I packed my house up, and I gave my child away. Some people took care of my child, and i just moved out into the street. And in 2001, 2 and 3, i lived in the street in Los Angeles, like not even in a house or a back house or motel or hotel, just literally in the streets with the cart pushers and the panhandlers and the dope fiends and the alcoholics and the matted schizophrenics and just that whole carnival mayhem of insanity out there in the streets. And that became my life. And inside what was happening was there was just no bridge of safety to ever get back, the pitiful and the incomprehensible, just no way. I couldn't even see the possibility of ever getting sober again. I had tried, and I had done inpatients and outpatients and rehabs and lockdowns and spin dry and spent so much money, and nothing was working for me. And mind you, there's a 10-year-old daughter that was a witness to a lot of this who had a sober, dry mom for years and now has lost her mother to the throes of alcoholism. And the problems and the drama that happened before the drinking even starts, often for many of us is great. A lot of us come from alcoholic homes. Some of us don't. Some of use had very normal childhoods, you know? But there's often a deep pathology that's attached to untreated alcoholism. What I have noticed in my studies and in working with others is that the average alcoholic has a neurotic repetitive mind function and the mind continues to say the same story over and over and over again. And that I don't think in a linear way and most alcoholics don't Think in a Linear Way like I have a lot of neurotic tendencies, Bill calls it in the language of the heart. And these neurotic tendencies have have the capacity to get worse as time goes on. So I'm, I'm drinking and the mind is going and going and going and I really in the end just can't even put two and two together anymore have the inability to use any eye contact or really have a deep meaningful conversation you know I'll tell you a couple of stories in the street real quick of just how dark it got the obsession for alcohol is so much stronger than self will that the obsession will trump over any moral fiber we're not sociopaths we're not axe murderers that's not who we are we're actually very sensitive broken people inside with a lot of heart and a lot of empathy that want to love and want to be loved but don't have the capacity to do it run on self-will and I remember being in the street and it was pouring rain and I found this burnt out building you know that had had a bad fire and and water's pouring through parts of it, and way in the back there's this girl laying on this sleeping bag, and she's very pregnant, and she'S loaded, and she' s using drugs, and She' s laying on her side. And I just sat there and got totally loaded with this woman for hours, and every once in a while she'd take my hand and she'd put it on her stomach, and I could feel this infant just contorting and kicking in there. And I remember the feeling and the thought like, I need to get out of here. This woman needs help. But alcoholism trumps over the natural human instinct to care for my young, to care f�r a fellow, to the herd instinct, to protect a woman and her child. I can't do it. I mean well, but I can'T do well. Now that principle can also apply itself to me when I'm sober. That's how alcoholism is. It's a neurotic mind function, it's a disconnected mind function it's an deeply injured mind, it' s an injured character and in the end it's spiritual malady it's soul sickness so to get to the root causes isn't always easy because I feel that if the real problem isn't presented then how are we going to have a solution and sometimes people think just get through the steps just get into step four and five or when you get to the amends but we don't want to do things mechanically here the important thing for me was to have a real spiritual unfoldment to have a real relationship with the steps to have relationship with God to have relationships with my fellows to have an alcoholic synonymous so again so much needs to be considered in how I'm interacting and you can see that in my alcoholism I had a very, very limited capacity to do anything, you know, to help this woman to be of any kind of service. And as things went from bad to worse, I went in and out and in and Out of Jail. I've been arrested many times. I've seen and been through all of those hurts and harms and as I got sober, looking at that stuff is a horrible, horrible feeling. you know for me to have inventory that in the first few months of my sobriety would have been hell i would not have been prepared and spiritually fit enough to do it and what was given to me in my home group was to build a foundation and a relationship in steps one two and three and to really have a real relationship with god and to look at how the disease functions and how the ego operates. You know, I want to go a little bit further with what Bill says here. So he talked about these absolute dependencies. While these word absolute dependencies may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into the present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of return to me. This seems to be the primary healing circuit, an outgoing love of God's creation and his people by means of which we avail ourselves of his love for us. It is most clear that the real current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is. So even coming in and getting sober after going in and out of jail and being in and Out of Rehab, my heart's broken and I'm hardened. And if you approached me, my body language is like this and I am cussing all over the place and swearing like a lunatic and maybe I can't have the capacity to even have any eye contact. You can see in my composure and the way I move that it's very erratic and angry and hard and hostile. And this is what alcoholism does. It's not a joke. I mean, it affects us at a cellular level. It affects my mind and my emotions and my body and my muscles and the way I feel and theway I view the world. A lot of untreated alcoholism is a problem of perception. So I come into AA and it gets painful. I mean, there's this very light pink cloud phase where the plug's in the jug and there might be a little, like, phew, the monkey's off my back for a few minutes. But then often, for me anyway, my mind starts to really devour me and the problems become bigger than before because when I gave away my child and I lived in the street and turned tricks and saw all that stuff, I had something that could drown me out and I drank to oblivion. But now there was nothing between me and that. there was no buffer left. And we see people kill themselves in AA and we see people, you know, go on meds when it's not necessary. I don't really have a big opinion on med. Some people really need them. They're absolutely chemically so imbalanced that they can't live without them. And other people appear to be sometimes severely overmedicated or the wrong medication. And that to some degree is an outside issue, but it breaks my heart when I see what looks like somebody that could possibly, if some of the medication could be lifted, they could be having a higher experience, a higher interaction with the human race, a higher reaction with a god of their understanding, and yet the medicine keeps them down, down, in a fairly unconscious state. You know, and the way the steps in this program are designed They're in a logical order form From 1 to 12 To produce a new way of life Alcoholics Anonymous is only 76 years old It's such a new thing It's a revolution We're part of something so big That has struck this planet It's so unbelievable The other religions have been around for thousands of years We have this special thing going on here it's a spiritual program it's not a religion this isn't about naming your God from the podium it's about having an experience and if I'm not having an experience in the day I'm in if I'M NOT continuously having experience in The Steps then I'M not in a program of recovery then I'm NOT achieving more emotional sobriety there's absolutely no finishing point to this program I WILL BE WORKING ON GETTING RID OF SELF UNTIL THE DAY I DIE Self never completely goes away. There's always another dust bunny to sweep up. There's alway more to go for, more communication skills, more forgiveness, more love, more letting go. As Bill says, these dependencies, he even says AA for him. I get it. I get that. I get because self can even hold on to that and it's unhealthy. I'm not saying that AA doesn't have a beautiful healing property but you see, I can twist it up, and I can do something different with it. I can think that I'm an authority or I'm the boss of it or I need to be recognized in a certain way. All of a sudden you start getting asked to speak all over the place, and now again here comes a new rodent into the kitchen that needs to be monitored and looked at. You know, the thing never stops, and the disease, it's an ism. It's not a wasm. It's alive and it's functioning, and it needs to being treated, I believe on a moment-by-moment basis, but if I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm not going to treat it. I'm n�o vou saber o que tratar, voc� sabe? E para mim, realmente transmitir um mensagem de profundidade e peso � t�o importante e eu quero te dizer o que o Bill diz sobre o Dr. Silkworth And this was Bill's experience when he went to Silkworth and then when he had Ebby sponsor him. I came to Dr. Silkworth. His most recent concepts and tactics had begun to produce slightly improved results, so he was encouraged. He went after my situation with something of the enthusiasm and hope of a young doctor on his first critical case. He told me what an infernal malady alcoholism is and why. He made no promises. He did not try to conceal the poor recovery rate. For the first time, I saw and felt the full gravity of my problem. You see, it's so important that we feel the full gravity of our problem or we're not going to go for more. I learned also for the first time that I was a sick man emotionally and physically. As every AA today knows, this knowledge can be an enormous relief. I no longer needed to consider myself essentially a fool or a weakling this is not a moral thing and so many alcoholics do the most crazy things you know people have probably even raped and murdered and sold their grandma's wedding rings i mean the stuff that we hear in fourth and fifth steps my heart has to remain so open and so receptive and yes we have perverts and child molesters i mean this is aa this is the way we roll around here you know we're emotionally and mentally and spiritually sick so i've got to grow further and further and further into my open mindedness, into my open heartedness. If I want to be a real AA person, I can't work with one and shut the other one out. I want it to be open minded to the whole entire ball of wax. He says, today every AA member implants into his new prospect just what Dr. Silkworth so powerfully lodged in me. We know that the newcomer has to hit bottom, otherwise not much can happen. You see, with emotional sobriety, we can hit a bottom in sobrietry, with physical sobriery, and yet we've been in a twisted-up relationship or up to our old tricks, stealing from our boss, embezzling somewhere, way overeating, too much sex, too Much This. The mind is just yearning and turning and wanting and needing to orchestrate things. And those bottoms, we could have many of them. You know, Bill talks about pain being the touchstone to all spiritual progress. So I can look at this pain liability as my greatest asset and I can stop fearing it so much but I can just use it as a temperature taker, as a thermometer, as a barometer to go, wow, I'm off the AA beam, I'm of the mark or there's something more to go for. Dr. Silkworth, we know that the newcomer has to hit bottom otherwise not much can happen. Because we are drunks who understand we can use that nutcracker of obsession plus the allergy as a tool of such power that it can shatter the newcomer's ego at depth or even the old-timer. Thus only can he be convinced that on his own unaided resource, he has little or no chance. 1934, I was visited by Evie. He was an old friend, an alcoholic, and my sponsor-to-be. Why was it that he could communicate with me in areas that even Dr. Silkworth could not? Well, first of all, I already knew that he himself was a hopeless case just like me. Earlier that year, I learned that he too was a candidate for a lockup. Yet here he was sober and free, and his communication now was such that he Could convince me in minutes that he really felt he had been released from his drinking compulsion. he had represented something very different from a mere jittery ride on the water wagon wagon and so he brought me a kind of communication and evidence that even Dr. Silkworth could not give me he was one drunk talking to another and here was hope indeed and that's the way we roll here you know the 12th step having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps we try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all of our affairs That doesn't mean I ever do anything perfectly. Sponsies come and go, come and go. I do the best of my ability to practice the principles in all of my affairs, to bring them into everything but I fall short every day and that doesn't mean that I beat myself up. It's that I learn through the steps to check my track record, to keep on the beam, to really watch my mind, to watch what my thoughts are doing. But there's something that has to be presented, and that is the structure of the ego. For me, what was given to me were the Harry Thiebaud papers, and I went painstakingly through that work. Harry Thibaud was a psychiatrist that worked with AA, and he worked with alcoholics in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, and you know, he wrote some papers on the ego factors, and the reason why for me it's so important to use the patibo papers is because there's very little literature that we have in aa and i don't ever want to dilute my the message here i don'T ever want TO DILUTE alcoholics anonymous so I don't bring in other things I don'T quote outside people there's plenty of other stuff out there but it's very important for me that I keep it real clean AA stuff and and the people that were connected to AA, and the writings of AA. And Harry Thiebaud was one of the great pioneers and unsung heroes. And he wrote these papers, which we will go into at much depth first thing in the morning. And he broke down the ego of the alcoholic, sober, and that he was impatient, and that He was defiant, and that HE was grandiose, and HE was omnipotent. And if I don't look at these and consider these, it's very hard for me to see where the alcoholism is because the disease is designed not to see itself. Self can't reveal self to self. The disease is never going to show itself to me. So I really need a tremendous amount of human help. And when they say stick with the winners, you know, I used to think like get that lady to sponsor me that drives the Mercedes and has those big fake tits, you know? And the big diamond. And she probably has it going on. She can probably help me. She looks successful. Like my mind doesn't even have radar for what is success in a human being's life and what is not. I don't even know what I'm looking for. I need so much human help when I come into Alcoholics Anonymous. So basically for me, what happened was after I put the plug in the jug, I was given these tapes by this guy named Bob Anderson who's my grand sponsor. And he started this meeting in this group called Primetime out in the San Fernando Valley. And he just broke it down in a way that I could hear it, you know. And what he talked about was that the main part of the disease centers in the alcoholic's mind rather than her body. And like I said before, I'm the same woman drunk as I am sober and that I have a physical allergy and that it's coupled with this mental obsession. And the mental obsession is not just for drugs and alcohol. The mental obsession is for anything out there in the third-dimensional world. And just like Bill Wilson said, all of these false dependencies, even AA, I can mentally obsess about my own home group, about people in my home group. About how the format should be, about that guy that shares every single time and goes on and on. We need to get rid of him. He should drink again. Can't he go somewhere else? My mind will poop in my own nest right here in AA. You know, it knows no boundaries at all. And so I want to see, and I want to see more, and i want to seem more, but things have to be shown to me. There's no way that the disease is ever going to tell me the truth about how it operates. So Bob A left this whole great lineage of a way to break it down and he used the Thiebaud papers and he use the sermon on the Mount Emmett Fox, and he talked about watching my mind and watching the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain and that most of these thoughts are subconscious thoughts and I don't even notice them. You know, neuroscientists say that there's 46,000 thoughts that surfed the waves of an average person's brain a day, but if you look at an average alcoholic, there's probably like five thoughts that surfped the wave 46, 000 times a day and it usually has to do with those primary instincts my instinct for sex my instinct for security or my desire to be someone in society the sex for men can be the more barbaric you know penis vagina kind of sex for women it can be how do i look to the opposite my hair my nails my skin oh my god am i not thin enough that bathroom scale wing it out the window i think i'll kill myself wait betty crocker one more cake you know and and and it's funny but it's incredibly, incredibly painful. You know, Bill talks about that in here. He says, painful, painful. Let's see. Bill says, Bill's secretary claimed that those close to Bill were deeply concerned. She mentioned days when Bill would be dictating to her only to stop and break down and start weeping. God, it makes me sick inside. I love that man so much. I have so much respect for him. He had everything going on. He had started Alcoholics Anonymous. Him and his wife were together. He's just at the cutting edge of this whole revolutionary thing that was going to change the alcoholic world, and he's sitting in his office breaking down and weeping. He has so much to be thankful for. He put the cork in the bottle. Why this depression? To another old-timer, Bill wrote, many in recovery were going through the same difficulties with depression. Today, many identify with Bill when after facing their primary addiction, which is alcohol, they may find other compulsions, smoking, eating, sex, etc. These need attention too. Most alcoholics' response is anger. Oh God, not another. For some, depression. Bill writes another letter. I suppose that about half the old-timers have neurotic hangovers of one sort or another. Certainly I can number myself among them. So, you know, Bill really struggled just like the rest of us do. I believe if you be real alcoholic, you're never out of the woods. And I want quality to my life. I want quantity to my moments. I want quality in my days. But I don't know how to achieve that without first really viewing where the disease operates and watching the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain is a really important factor because that application starts to wake me up to what's really going on and if I start to watch the thoughts at surf the wave of my brand then who's watching and who's producing the thought and for the first time in my life I have an aha spiritual awakening moment where I realize that I'm not my thoughts. That there's an involuntary bunch of BS-ery rolling around in the basement, percolating itself up and saying, hey, fatso, remember your mom? She hates you. And all of these pains and harms and hurts from yesterday, problems, people that owed me money people that i think ripped me off people that I ripped off pain and harm and hurt and it never stops my mind like i said before it speaks to me with great authority so watching the mind is a really important factor you know and in the literature when it says that there's one that has all power that one is god may you find him now if i start to watch the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain right now that'll naturally lead me into a step two process because seeing those thoughts and really recognizing what is going on in my mind gives me an incredible desire to how do i stop this thing and i'll see that there's no way to stop it i'll get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and my mind was on before i even completely woke up it was talking about that thing that was bothering me all day it never stops so when we go into step two and we look at that more in depth and we come to believe that there's a power greater than self that can restore us to sanity i have to figure out how to get this power down into where the disease is and the big book on 55 it tells us that actually we're fooling ourselves for deep down in every man woman and child is the fundamental idea of God it may be obscured by calamity by pomp by worship of other things but in some form or another it's there for faith in a power greater than ourselves and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives are facts as old as man himself we finally saw that faith in some kind of god was a part of our makeup just as much as the feeling we have for a friend sometimes we had to search fearlessly but he was there he was as much a fact as we were we found the great reality deep down within us in last analysis in the last analysis it's only there that he may be found and so it is with us And so Bill Wilson very clearly makes this statement that we're going to search for the power inside of us. It's not outside. Like I said, this isn't a religion. It's Not in a book. It's NOT in a prayer. It's NOT in anything else. The power is in me and there's a power inside of me that can restore me to a sound mind. You see, there has to be something that's as accessible to the newcomer as it is to somebody with 25 years or this isn' t a program of recovery. I don't want to tell a newcomer, you just wait until you get your ninth step. You just wait till after your first year. You know, it gets really bad at year seven. Those are all real lies. There's no truth or validity to any of that. The only time I can treat this disease is right now. And I can give that to somebody that's brand spanking new. And the application for me is power. Could you please protect me from my mind? Can you help me? Can you be with me? can you help me feel okay in the moment that I'm in and you know like Emmett Fox talks about in the Sermon on the Mount the quality of my prayer is very important I want to petition with intention I want a petition like I mean it I want ask with real intention almost like I'm pleading to the judge not to send me to prison not just blah blah blah self-talking prayer but a heartfelt prayer and i ask god continuously can you protect me from my mind can you keep me away from the resentments of the past and the fear of the future can you help me have a new experience in the moment that i'm in can you show me something beautiful you know and often i'll just go to the bank and i don't know why but the bank tell her she just looks so beautiful or something shifts in my perception the leaves on the tree all of a sudden look so green everything begins to shine and sparkle. And that experience is inside. It's an inside job and it's coming from inside of me. I'm having a real experience with God on the inside. As I start to have this experience, it becomes much more easy for me to go for more. I don't have to better get the willingness, better pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I have willingness because I'm having a Real Experience with this relationship with God but like I said that if I don't see what's going on down in the subconscious mind I'm not going to really go for God so viewing my thoughts on a daily and a moment by moment basis is something that's an ongoing process I'm never going to completely master it but I can tell you that the more I watch my thoughts what happens is is that the ego backs down because the ego and god can't live together in the present moment the ego always has a story about the resentments of the past or the fear of the future it's always speaking to me with a dialogue and the god consciousness is infinite it doesn't have the answers it doesn'T have a story if the answers come they're intuitively guided they're through inspiration they're through enthusiasm, I don't have to get up on my muscle or get ready for Freddie or have a dress rehearsal dialogue of how this is going to go down, what I'm going to say to you, what I am not going to say, how I am going to present myself, what I am gonna wear, what am I gonna look like when I show up. You know that's all for me alcoholic thinking, untreated alcoholism. What the ego will never tell me is that the present moment is so beautiful and so glorious, and that is the most amazing place where God really expresses itself. The ego will say, this is so stupid. Who is this lady? What is this crap? The ego will do anything to take a detour not to hear this information. I do believe that the ego is a living entity along coupled with alcoholism and the self-talking mind, and it knows that there's a God. It knows that There's a mousetrap waiting to trap it, and it doesn't want to be trapped. It's a living thing inside of me. Self is alive and functioning inside of Me, and it doesn?t want to die. So it wears many hats and faces. And just when I think I've caught self and I've put the thing down and I'm living in humility and I?m in silence, it'll sneak in through the kitchen window or under a crack in the bathroom. It somehow gets in in another way. And it has a brand new hat and brand new shoes and I look and I just go, where did you get that outfit? It starts to speak to me about something we were never interested in this before. I never even heard this story. Now we have this kind of resentment or this view. And so I want to keep in my program of recovery, I wantto keep one step ahead of the ego, not one step behind the ego because the ego of all the people in here is learning this information right along with the God consciousness that's dying to burst out and trump over the ego. It's very smart, it's very cunning, it' s very powerful, it is very baffling. The other thing about step two is that God is never going to do anything for me that I won't allow this power to do. So in the Thiebaud papers we will talk about compliance versus surrender and we will talked about what a real surrender is like, a real wholehearted surrender not a half-hearted surrender a surrender for me is is when there's no thoughts even coming or going in my mind anymore like i'm so relaxed and i'm so okay in the moment that i'm in that we could be in the middle of a war and i'M diagnosed with cancer all on the same day and iM just not tripping and it'S very difficult for a human being to produce that the only way i really know how to get there is to continuously petition to God and to watch my mind and to not take the bait when a story comes along when an energy comes along, when a muscle comes along. When a desire comes along when a warped instinct comes along just go no thanks, not today because once I'm in a surrendered state and I take the bate of untreated alcoholism it might take hours or days or even weeks for me to get back into a surrendered stage. It's a very very precious state of consciousness for me And I believe that it can be achieved by everybody. I actually even think that there's a gift in alcoholics to get there faster than the average person because of the amount of pain that we've endured. It gets you there quicker. The more pain I see, the more people that surrender because part of the surrender that has to happen is that I don't need to be attached to my life or my story anymore. And most people come in here so hopeless that when they hear the demonstration that you get to have a whole new life with no reference to the old. Like me, they sign up, let me just get rid of it. Yeah, let's just clean this up. You know, the point of every AA hitting bottom is imperative to this process. But once I've hit bottom and I can't stand my life and I'm crying and I have pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization, the sunlight of the spirit can open up and God can really come in and expel all the obsessions and raise my consciousness up. so the pain is an incredible motivator and it's actually a gift in the end for somebody like me a great great gift and even with years of sobriety when I get into pain again I can just see it as like wow thank you thank you whoever you are for being such a biatch to me that I can't stand you and that I see that I need to somehow be more right than you and more self-righteous and blah blah, blah, and I can see where I've taken it back and I can really rightfully start to pray for those people. Start to say thank you for putting that man or that woman or that situation in my life because it's waking me up again. You know there's no way to rest on a laurel and there's no way to sit with this thing if it's not continuous action. It just vanishes. It goes away. I can even be treated at night and I can wake up in the morning and I don't know what happened. It's on and crack And so as I look into step two deeper and I come to believe that there's this power greater than me that can restore me to sanity, later on in the steps where Bill Wilson talks about in the fourth step, he talks about those three primary instincts, my instinct for sex, security, and my desire to be somebody in society. And he also talks about Those Seven Deadly Sins, Pride, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. I want to have a relationship with those words. That's Alcoholics Anonymous lingo. So I want to really have an understanding of what this sex security and to be someone in society. And I know I touched on briefly about the sex instinct, you know, being turbocharged and out of control. But my desire for security can be it can be my wallet. It can be that I think somebody at my office is doing something better than me or I can feel threatened that they might be taking something from me. My sisters are very competitive. My security instinct can be threatened there. My wallet, my home. I can even look at my car and my tires are bald and it's like, oh, my God. And I can just go into all this fear and panic. So I really want to have an understanding of how these instincts are warped and they're turbocharged and they attach themselves to the ego and untreated alcoholism. Untreated alcoholismo and those instincts, the self-talker and the ego are all scrambled up together. It's one ball of mess that we can sit here and we can pick apart, but in the end what's more important is that I want to get very clear about what it feels like when I'm with self and what it feel like when connected to a power. That's people's own personal feelings. I know some people that just feel very subdued and mellow. I can often get really enthusiastic and on fire. I mean just like so in love with life and so joyful and even noisy and silly and kooky and crazy. I just feel free inside. So it's people's own, everybody has their own relationship with God. Like it says in the literature, it's a personal relationship and it's something that I want to continue to build. And like because God is infinite, it changes over the months and the years. And what it used to feel like before, it doesn't feel like now. As time goes on, it changed. My prayers even need to change. My mind function is changing. Things are always changing. Nothing's ever staying the same. The circumstance is on the outside. The instincts get triggered in a different way. So my instinct for my desire to be somebody in society, you know, that type of instinct can be very subtle. You know, it's not like I want to run for president. It's just like, can't you hear me? Didn't you here what I said? Did she just snub me and say hi to you? What is that, you know? and then the next time I see that person I don't say hi anymore not realizing that they might have been having a really bad day and so I operate from these places when these instincts are out of a line I hear it the ego gets triggered it says danger these people aren't treating us right I start telling myself a story I get on my muscle my body language changes and the next thing you know I've pushed you away and so I don' t want to take the bait I don''t want to listen to what the disease is saying I don't want to listen to what it's doing. I want to be present, and like I said, I wantto continue to watch and watch and watch it. As I go into step three, it is so much easier for me to turn my will in my life over to the care of this God as I understood him because I understood in step two that the power is a power for my life, that he's the authority, that he is the father, that I'm the child, that there can only be one driver in the seat. And I learned to really back down. You know, throughout all of the literature it talks about we must be rid of this self or it kills us. Selfish and self-centeredness we think is the root of our trouble. God, I offer myself to thee to build with me and to do with me as thou will. My creator, I'm now willing that you should have all of me. You know? So it's all over the place. But I have to have, like I said again, a real relationship with what self is. And like I just said, it's the ego. It's the instincts. It's untreated alcoholism. It's a self-talking mind. It's that repetitive mind function, and it makes me nervous inside, and it make me uneasy. What happens through this process? The more I wake up to how my mind is functioning, the easier it is to get into a surrendered state and to stay in a surrendered stage. I become more and more willing in step three to turn my will and my life over to the care of this God because I'm getting real results. I'm Getting Empirical Evidence I'm starting to feel the grace of a living loving God in my life I'm having a real relationship with the steps this is not a race I don't believe in just hurrying and hurrying through all the steps it's a lifelong journey and it's like I said it doesn't end what I'd like to do maybe is just even open up for a couple of questions if anybody has any questions at this point you could come up to the podium and ask Is there a question in the room? Scared them. Wow, okay. Okay. Would you like to come up and ask? Okay. Am I asking the group? Yeah, just, I think because of the recording, you may want to ask from up here I'm Dave I'm an alcoholic my tag says I'm from Roseville but I'm From Modesto my question involves sponsorship I come from an area in the Central Valley where sponsorship is considered very important and it's very strong. The one problem I have is I was in a meeting the other night and this woman slammed her hand on the table and she goes, my sponsees don't do a damn thing until they talk to me first. And I'm... My sponsor and the way I sponsor people is I take them through the steps to me it's a journey of self-discovery And I think that we can work the steps and talk to other alcoholics, including our sponsors, and find out how we might do that and how our life might become more manageable. I just don't feel like I need to manage my life by waiting to see what my sponsor has to say about that. And I run into a lot of people that disagree with me. I run into people that when I voice that, they go, that's right on, Dave. I think, man, I wish you could tell my sponsor that. So the question is, what is the proper use of the term sponsor and what does sponsorship mean and how should it be done? I don't think it's being done right, and I try not to just get involved in that and try to stay back away from � it's how you feel your relationship is with your sponsor. But I feel that my sponsor runs my life is wrong. Okay. Thank you so much. That's a really great question. Okay, good. First of all, I'm not any authority in AA. I don't have all the answers, but I have an experience with that. And I always look for somebody that has something that I want, first of all. And I'm in my eighth year of sobriety, and I have had four sponsors in eight years. And I am not at all ashamed to say that because I drank from this well, and then I got a tremendous amount of application and information, and thenI went to this person, and then went to that person. And so I have definitely sponsor-hopped around a lot. The women that I work with, and I work with men also, I don't ask them to call me every day. You know, I have an interesting form. I mean, I do some of the stuff that's not really even in the literature. I want to see their disease. So if they want what I have and the way I present the message, what I do is this. I say, I want you to take a piece of scrap paper and a pencil, and I want you to write down for the next two days your most repetitive thoughts, and I don't want you call me and tell me what they are. Most people can't even get to that, you know? They can't get that far. And so now if they call and they say, You know what? I hate my brother. He always thinks he's smarter than me. I owe him a bunch of money, blah, blah. Now we have something to discuss, and I start to show them what their untreated alcoholism is. Still, even after this, when I shine a flashlight on their mind, they still, they might run and scatter like cockroaches. So for me, I'm going this way. You guys want to come this way? Let's go. If you don't, that's okay. You know, I am not here to make anybody right or wrong, whatever works for you. I have definitely seen that real tight-knit thing where alpha people will find submissive, males and females. And for some people, that works really, really well. There are some people out in the world that have been so neglected by their moms and their dads. They've grown up in foster care. They can't even make a decision, and they need an alpha female or an alpha male. It's a perfect fit for them. And there are other people, don't you put an alpha femalem in my face. Oh, no. I got to hear a suggestion. I can't have somebody dictating to me. The minute somebody starts to point their finger at me, I am so far in the other direction. So for me, delivery is very important. But I've seen people that love that buck up, man, call me every day or you're out of here, you know. And I've seeing other people that have a completely different relation. In the end is can I hear the message? Can I hearthe message? And if the sponsor and the sponsee aren't growing, then all bets are off. If the sponcee's not growing, than the sponsor isn't growing as a sponsor. I'm not feeding you. You're not raising up. Maybe you should go somewhere else. and it's real important that I even learn how to let go of these people, that they're not mine. I actually feel like I'm very, very good at that. I've had so many people come in and out of my life. I've heard a lot of people say, I've seen very few people get to step 9 and step 12. That's a big feat for any sponsor out there. I'm not ashamed to say that up here. Most people don't get to 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and sometimes I get disappointed but most of the time I try to let it go. You know, if that woman is drill sergeanting it and it's working for her and some of her people, great. You know the chances are very big that this person may wind up giving some really, really bad information one of these days if you can't make a move without the sponsor and somebody might really get hurt. But you know what? Other people's lives may be really safe too. I'll give you one example. When I first got sober my mom is very cruel and abusive And my sponsor at that time said, you can't go to Thanksgiving and you can'T go to Christmas because you're too sick and you're two twisted and you'Re just going to get thrown over the edge. And I thought, oh, my God. And he said, I'm not kidding. You're not going. And now I see that was the greatest thing he could have ever told me. And for two years I didn't go. But what that did was I pulled back the reins and now all of a sudden it wasn't like, you know, my mom's like, well, maybe we'll invite you. Maybe we won't. of a sudden she's asking, are you coming? Could you come? Would you come like it switched and it turned the tables. And I could have never seen the demonstration and the application of somebody putting the screws so hard on me. So, you know, I don't know. It's so different for everybody. It's a living program with living application and living relationships. But thanks for the question, Dave. Does anybody else right here, Greg? Yeah. Thank you very much. I'm Greg, I'm an alcoholic. You fascinated me on a couple of things here. One was in dealing with the ego, you talk about, and Bill talked about it too, with these massive obsessions, everything from sex to smoking to alcohol to overeating to you name it, all these things that we talk about. And they're coming at us continuously at this rate that is whatever the rate is we don't really know i don't think whatever it is and and i know we talked bill and i talked earlier today about the the bedevilments and i was just wondering you know um without being a total ocd person how do you put some order into your handling of that management of this crazy ego that's coming at you 24 7 like you said you get up three in the morning go to the bathroom and you've got 40 thoughts before you've finished you know wiping yourself you know i mean And that's what I'm into, you know. I mean, it's tough as it comes that fast, right? But at some point, I keep thinking that someone's got a plan that slows that down and gets it under control. And so something like that might fit. You know, for me, I believe that there are two paths with the spiritual life. One of them is to bring our instincts into alignment with God's will, and the other path is to transcend. And for me, this is a bit of an outrageous statement, but I do believe that God has called me to transcend earthly desires and I really don't want anything anymore and I don't wanna husband and I dont' want shiny things and so when I feel desire, I'm just like, whoa, back down. We don't need that. We don' need those shoes. We don'T need that house. We don''t need that recognition. We don ''t need anything. That's a very easy way for me And when I back down, I can get dialed into humility really quickly because I've built a relationship with God where I know that God is the author for my life and that's all I really desire. And I want my relationship with god more than I want anything out there in the third-dimensional world. I don't believe there's anything left in the three-dimensional word that's going to treat my alcoholism. You can't love me enough. There aren't boobs big enough. There isn't a bathroom scale skinny enough. There's not a car grand enough. There's no bank account fat enough. there's not enough now some people want to bring their own their instincts into alignment some people really want a husband and a wife and a house and a garden and there's nothing wrong with that but what is this fine line between need and greed when does it far exceed its intended purpose how many cars do i need how much recognition do i needs when is it so insatiable that i'm choking on my own instincts that's something that you can work out with a sponsor through inventory that you get self-honest about and once you see i'm crossing over an invisible line here it's just way too much out of control in this i don't need to go back and buy that fourth pair of shoes in the different color i can get on my knees and i can say power you gotta help me it's three in the morning and i just got up to pee and i'm thinking about shoes please be with me help me not want this? Help me not need this. Quiet my mind and quiet my heart, and it's a spiritual solution. Whatever it is, I'm always offering it to the power. I'm giving it to the power, you know, sometimes what I do in my mind, I have a little mental prayer that I do. I go out into the desert in my mind, and I'm naked. I have nothing left. I don't own one single thing, and I pile everything on this altar, and I just say, it's yours. Take my daughter, take my car. When I've really taken it back, you know, when I've taken it Back and everything's bothering me again, it'S like, oh my God, I got to get rid of my life again. I got To clean everything off my plate. And this can even be daily. Take My boss, take My bank account, take MY charge card, just take all My stuff, put all My jewelry, everything on there. And I just stand there in My meditation and I'm like, okay, you can have it all. Please just keep Me safe and help Me feel okay in the moment that I'm in. I don't want this stuff. I don'T want to hold on to this stuff I want to just be okay I want To be free from the bondage of self and my sincerity in that prayer really helps to maneuver me into the fourth dimension And stay there, but again It's a living application with this relationship with the power in step two and through all the other steps But thanks for the question right there I'm John. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, John. And Astrid, I'd like to maybe ask you what you do on a moment-to-moment basis. I've heard things like turn my watch upside down, put a rubber band on my wrist. These are things that, you know, my normal day, I'm like probably you and others. I'm thinking a few hours ahead. You know, I've got sort of a day planner, and I'm either tracking or I'm not tracking. And when I'm nichtracking, I'm figuring out what my next move is. Just the other day, I had a number of errands to run, and it seems like � I don't know about you guys, but it seemslike some days I hit all the lights just right. You know? They're turning green, they're turninggreen, and there's parking spots. And then other days they're turning red and there's no parking. And so the one thing I did the other day was as I came to a red light, I thought, okay, got a moment of meditation. And it happened to be one of those days when there was a lot of red lights. So I just kept connected. I just said, okay if you want me to sit here for a moment, I'll sit here from a moment. If you want to sit her for a minute, I'll set her for more. And that day I actually had a good day running late. So I don't know. Maybe you have some other thoughts on that thing. So the question is, how do I remember to practice the moment-by-moment meditation with the power? You know, for me, first of all, everybody's mind is a little bit different. Alcoholism is a self-talking, repetitive mind function, but it has a different story. So your story and your dialogue, because your history is different, is going to be different than mine. My story is so painful that, for ???, when I go into the disease or when I'm with self, I'm in pain. I'm really disturbed and I'm hateful. So I'm not just like, la-la, daydreaming about going skiing and then I'm going to do this and that. It's like, oh my God! I'm like, I am a mess, you know? And so it's very easy for me to go, oh my god, I've pulled the entire extension cord out. I am not plugged into the power. Power, can you be with me? I have done all those things like putting my watch upside down, little posties, pasties, you remember to talk to God but for the most part it became a working part of my life because it's so painful for me to be with self and over the months and then over the years it's just very natural like I'll just notice that I'll get on the 405 and there's a ton of traffic and out of my mouths are oh my god be with me instead of mother effing you know like my first response now is like power I'm going to need some help here what's wrong with the freeway I need to be there in 25 minutes so the further I go into this relationship with God, and the more I continue to remain in application, the easier it is to remember. Interestingly enough, I have sponsored several people that are not alcoholics, and one of them is a monk. And, you know, monks really aren't connected to God all the time. They have a self-talking mind, but their self-taking mind isn't full of pain and harms and all of this stuff. So, you know, he'll just be thinking and daydreaming and strategizing. And he's very attracted to what I have because I have this deep moment by moment practice with God. And it's interesting because the one thing that I always discuss with him is that my mind hurts so much that I have a reference point. His doesn't hurt. he had a great life he lives a great monastic life his parents loved him he was raised in the church and so he just sort of diddly daydreams around and doesn't go to God nearly as much as somebody that has so much pain that it's the touchstone to all spiritual progress so you know I pray for people to have that gift of desperation you know I mean those principles are real truths for me and for so many others but turning your wristwatch upside down having a timer that goes off on your cell phone every 10 minutes, all of those are good things. And in the end, what are my intentions and what are My motives? My inside life has to become so important to Me that I'm willing to go to any lengths to be connected to the power in the moment that I am in. Anyway, thanks for your question. Is there anybody else? I'm really grateful to be here. There's a lot of gratitude in my heart. I've never done a weekend like this before and I did a lot of reading and a lot of preparation and I blew my God dust to Sacramento way before my physical body arrived here I have no idea what we're in for this weekend but I know somehow there's certain people in this room I'm already somehow spiritually connected to like I know that I know that because my God tells me that I found my God in Alcoholics Anonymous I don't go to a church I found it here I found it in the steps I've had a real living experience with the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous and I continue to have that today I'm always going for more you know, and I'm not perfect, I'm not a saint, I am just willing to grow along spiritual lines, it says in the literature that I claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection I claim it, I get to claim it I'm claiming it, i've had a real experience and i've had spiritual progress i've progressed along this road of happy destiny, it's a real thing AA is so beautiful. We're so lucky. We're such a great team. We're just so lucky, we're so, so lucky to have a physical allergy and a mental obsession because we get to go from that all the way to the highest heights in one lifetime. It's a miraculous thing. And thanks so much for having me here, and I look forward to meeting with you all tomorrow. Thanks. Thank you for listening.