Forgiveness and the Sick Man’s Prayer – Long Island Big Book Workshop – Part 1 of 2

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. All right. The purpose of this workshop is for a member to share their experience on five topics, surrender, forgive, amend, change, and serve. And open to anyone interested. but please respect the anonymity of anyone else attending and do not disclose anyone else's attendance without their permission or convey content linked to the identity of the speaker. Some housekeeping things real quick, once again. If you need restrooms, we have two restrooms over there for people to see where I'm going. Hospitality room right there. We have coffee, tea, water, some light snacks and some soda and we plan on breaking for lunch at about 12.30 we will be taking an hour and a half break resuming for session 3 at 2 o'clock our reminder once again this evening after our final session we will all be convening, a bunch of us at least for dinner. Anybody is welcome to join, and we will announce the location in a later session. We have a pack of readings for each session, which are available online. And to kick us off, here is a reading from our forgiveness literature. This is from our basic text, pages 66 to 67. Sick man's prayer. This was our course. We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick, but we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us. They, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended, we said to ourselves, this is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done. We avoid retaliation or argument. We wouldn't treat sick people that way. If we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful. We cannot be helpful to all people, but at least God will show us how to take kindly and tolerant view of each and every one. So for this session, we are going to have four speakers, Tim, Karina, James, and Joe. And I now invite you to welcome Tim, who has come to share on the topic of forgiveness. My name is Tim. I'm an alcoholic. Hey, Tim. And at these events, my heart always sings when I see a soul walking in through the door. You never know in AA what something you say, how it may affect someone 15, 20, 30 years later. I still remember things a London housewife told me 25 years ago when I joined AA. On the topic of surrender, by the way, my favorite surrender story in my own history was when I phoned up a woman in AA who was sober 30 years at the time. I was sober maybe a week. I phened her up at 10 to 11 at night, and at 11 o'clock the liquor stores shut in London at the Time. And so this was a critical conversation. I needed an answer. How are you going to stop me from drinking? And I phioned her up and I said, Sue, I want a drink and she said AA is for people that don't want a drink and she put the phone down and I phoned her up again and I said I don't want a drunk but I don' t know how I'm not going to and she said now we're in business one of the questions we've got on surrender is on forgiveness rather why do we even need to forgive forgiveness wasn't even a topic for me for many years in recovery and it doesn't use the word just like with surrender surrender is in the stories it's not in the basic text but the idea of it the principles of it the notion of it runs through the whole program and I think it's the same with forgiveness as well that the reason forgiveness was a topic eventually was because I realised I was angrier than I strictly ought to be at 14 years sober, 15 years sober 16 years sober I was fine when I was busy and doing things AA taught me how to be active and to engage in life and to make a contribution but it was when I stopped that's when the voices would start again um chattering criticizing the whole criminal justice system of policemen and the district attorney and the defender and the the court and the judge and the jury and the executioner and the probation services that the whole system was there and it was everybody else's fault if only they behaved better, I would be okay. And constantly arguing with people who aren't in the room and not being able to be present with people because I remembered what you did 30 years ago. And even if rationally, people would say to me for a long time in AA, about the people that had wronged me or they did the best they could with the tools that they had. So you'll just have to accept it. And what happened for many years, I mean that did help a lot and at 15 years I was better than I had been at 10, better than I had being at five, certainly better than when I came into AA in terms of emotional disturbance but i knew there was more and there was a line i've read a while ago which makes a lot of sense to me there must be a better way i'm obviously not being operated in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions if i have this amount of disturbance after this amount of work something has been missed and my problem was that i retained the negative judgments of everybody in the world but tried to paste forgiveness on top of it like I was like an act of generosity so wrapping it in lovely pink paper or something but you know what's inside there the pink paper can't hide that is sort of this lump of coal and I had to start to look at things from a completely different angle but before I even looked at forgiveness i had to look at what are my reasons for forgiving and it's all it was all there in the book they always say if you want to hide something from an alcoholic put it in the big book of alcoholics anonymous they'll never find it and as bill was saying you know i could quote pages but had no idea what they meant to me or how i could apply them it was like the george Carlin line as an outside literature I suppose George Carlin non-conference approved but there we go is trying to solve hunger um uh I can't even remember the quotation now uh trying to be satisfied with material world is like trying to resolve hunger by taping sandwiches to your legs and I tried to tape spirituality to me with no idea of what it actually involved and I needed a bit of motivation to get there and my motivation was threefold and it was on page 66 of the big book. The first one is I started to have genuine regret and remorse for the years I'd spent trapped in my own head, unable to engage honestly with the world around me because all I was aware was my own stories, my own narratives. And I thought, I don't want to be spending my life like this. It is futile. It talks about the futility and the fatality. Secondly, I had compulsions in other areas which were not yielding to a headlong assault by my willpower. And I sensed that there was a connection between my internal disturbance and my external acting out. And these areas of my life are not separate because my brain is about five inches across. There are no compartments in my life. I have one mind. If there is a problem over here and there's a problemover there, they're actually connected. They're not separate. Potentially fatal. I recognize that if I didn't deal with my persistent emotional disturbance, I was going to drink again. And all of the acting out in other areas I'm not going to bore you with, they were precursors of drinking. They were a sign that I was capable of drinking again. If I was able of engaging in destructive behavior with full knowledge of how it was harming me and others and unable to do anything about it, There was a serious problem here. I was capable of drinking again. And change was necessary at a profound level. And the last one, let's see if I can find the quotation on page 66. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. and I was walking along a canal there are lots of canals where I live and a cyclist cycled past me and a friend incredibly close a couple of inches away almost hit us and I sort of noticed it my friend screamed at the cyclist and I had this little insight about her I thought my god that cyclist is in charge of how she feels and because he's in charge of how she feels, he's in charge of how she acts. And then I thought, oh dear, that's how I'm living my life. It's not cyclists. It's the entire political establishment. It's Western civilization. It's just everything. My emotions were being controlled by the people in society, the people in my life, the people in my home group I had least respect for they were in charge of how I felt and thus in charge of what I thought and how I lived and I didn't want to be a prisoner anymore but the hardest thing and this is where my forgiveness story started was with my then 80-year-old mother. And I rationally knew that I shouldn't be resenting her still for my childhood. I'd gotten over the logical bit of recognizing what a hard life she'd had and how she had been brought up in a certain way and terrible things that had happened to her. And this would explain rationally why she was behaving or had behaved the way she behaved. But there was a knot inside me I could not get rid of. And it was the twin tools of forgiveness and amends. And I simply had to go to my higher power and say, you need to show me a different way to look at this because I have no idea how to be differently around her. I was always tense and she saw that tension within me and reacted to it and would accuse me of not wanting to be there and not loving her. And she saw through the facade. It's no good acting well if the insides are unreconstructed. It, it's better in the short term but in the long term it creates hypocrisy. And my mother saw through this hypocrisy and this is an unresolvable problem and I had to go to my higher power I had to pray for a number of weeks before I was to go and visit her for her 80th birthday which was many years ago now and I didn't know how to change I did not know how to forgive her but I was willing and I went to my higher power and I asked just asked very simply show me a different way and I knocked on the door in trepidation thinking is this going to be the same rerun of the charade of tears and recriminations with me trying to be stoic in the face of all of this, trying to work my program in the case of this? Or is something else going to happen? And she opened the door, and I saw a frightened old woman. I'd never seen her before. I saw for years this picture I had in my mind of my mother. I'd never seen the person, and I saw past it. And this is what I apply with everything. I very occasionally listen to the radio or watch the television or engage in conversations with people, and very occasionally people bring up the topic of politics, just occasionally. and the coil can start to turn in my stomach and all of the judgments and all the who's right and who's wrong and the problem is that at some level I've eaten the tree of knowledge of good and evil and I've made a list of all the things in the world which are good and all those things which are bad and I will pat you on the head if you agree with me and I'll stab you in the front or the back than which way round you are if you disagree with me. And this will separate me from everyone. What I needed to do was not eat the apple, but eat the snake, which is much higher in protein, by the way, much better for you. The snake is the temptation for me to play God and sit there at the centre of the universe handing out my judgements like candies. No one needs them. no one asked me my opinion, no one asks asked me to judge. To forgive is not to retain the judgment and to paste something on top of it. For me to forgive is to withdraw the judgment in the first place and to recognize my own harms against other people have always come from my stupidity and my ignorance and being irrational and driven and selfish and negligent and malevolent on occasion and these are not new characteristics in humanity. These are age-old characteristics in humanity whereas I will respond when I see that in someone else like it's a surprise that someone is selfish. Well why should it be a surprise? Why should people be any different than me? Why Should People Not Have the Full Complement of Challenges That I Have? And so I've had to identify with them and say I am just like them but those defects are not who I am. I'm spirit housed in a human body, and the human experience seems to come with a few challenges. That is literally all that is going on. And if I and my heart can retain a connection between me and the spirit in you behind all of that rubbish, then there is a hope that something else can be built. And over the last eight or nine years in my relationship with my mother, since the day everything changed whenever she tries to play the old game I've looked past it to the spirit within and there have been times when she's actually provoked me she says you're not going to react are you and I said no and she has laughed at herself now the first time she laughed at her self she didn't know what was going on I knew what was doing on I refused to accept the invitation to the dance because those are the actors on the stage who've got an argument with each other. The spirits, the actors have no argument with each other, they're just playing roles. As soon as I stopped playing the role, I stopped engaging in my mind and in my heart and in our lives, and retained a connection with her as another actor presented with this basket of challenges. the game was over because it took two to play that game i was at the horns in the head of the alcoholic match the holes in the ahead of the alan on in all sorts of different ways and as soon as i was not willing to play the game anymore the game is over and this has happened in relationship after relationship after relationships and with people where there is conflict i do three things i have no opinion i might disagree with you but i'm not going to argue with you and I love you, what are we going to do next? And the game is over. That's all I've got. Thank you. Good morning, family. My name is Karina DeLeon. I'm a recovered alcoholic. And I'm privileged to be here with you this morning and with everyone. I'd love to share this forgiveness. this. This is such a beautiful way to surrender, you know, this is a place where it's an entering point, where I'm going to enter my will and make a decision whether I'm not going to, whether I am going to forgive the person or I am not going forgive the person. That's the act of the will, and I've had a lot, a lot of work around this. This is heart surgery as far as I'm concerned. You know, it's not about the drink any longer. You know once we get past that physical part of the drinking, it is about how am I willing to show up in relationships? And am I going to continue to hold on to old stories that linger in my mind. Do I love my own forgiveness more than I love God? And that's really what's at stake here. And how do I need to be right? And so, you know, for me, I've had a seven year long run in regarding making my offering to God, my sixth and seventh step. I felt my unforgiveness. I rolled around in it. In my case, I had the whole judicial system and the accuser just tugging at my thought system, my thought process, and just constantly in that tense step every time I would have the thought. And this happens to be my sister. She's my sibling. And it was like the last hook that the devil had in my thought process. And it was one, it was going to take a few washings. It wasn't going to be an overnight matter. I can tell you at 10 years sober, I had a summer, an entire summer where my sister owned me. I would wake up and, you know, I would do my prayer, my offering to God to direct my thinking. And the moment I put my foot on the floor, you now think, Oh, maybe I'll go around the corner to see my sister. And then boop, I went on the train. She's around the counter. Why doesn't should come to see me. She didn't ask if I needed any help, and on and on. So the snowflake turned into a big mountain of snow, and the entire summer was ruined. I could not be present for anyone, let alone my sister. I would still go visit with the charade of, you know, I'm showing up, I're the better person, and, you know, to see my little nephew, but there was always a running theme in the back of my head. And, you know, I grappled with that for a long time. And we're talking about emotional sobriety here. And that's the aim. You know, do I want these emotional disturbances? Am I going to allow other people to, you Know, their actions to dictate my actions, you know, and, youknow, once I made this surrender, and I step into a place, this interdependence with God, and I made my offering. And it took me a long time to really recognize that I was being unforgiving, you know, because I was rolling around in justifiable anger for a little while, you Know, and wouldn't you? And I want to talk to some people that are going to back that, you You know, going to support that, You know. And I would do the inventory. I'd cry, and then I'd come to a place of forgiveness, and, you You know, then we'd be in each other's company at Thanksgiving Day's table or whatever. And just one word and all of the old resentments would just come back. You know? And there I was again in unforgiveness. And this, you know, and my sister is in the program also. And we've disclosed to one another. We make amends and then we go in our corners and we lick our wounds. And, you know, I have to say that, to our credit, we were trying to the best of our ability. I was trying in my own strength. And it wouldn't be until I finally realized, you Know, what that step, seventh step fully meant in my heart. That God was going to need to have all of me, the good and the bad. You know, because I just want to push away the stuff that I don't like. I don' t want you to see the ugly. I want to show up here like I'm all spiritual. I want to say I forgive my sister, you know, and I would make prayers like this to God. I'd say, God, oh, in my morning meditation, please help me to love her the way that you love her. And that sounds real good, doesn't it? You know, but that's not the way I was showing up. You know that was like an emotional set of my prayers were emotional. They weren't really, you know, then any time one of my emotions got threatened or one of my basic instincts got threatened, I would step right back into the resentment and I was all up in my head again. And the unforgiveness would show up and there would be blackness in my heart and my heart would become a stone again. You know, and when I finally was brought to my knees with this grappling with this unforgiveness Last year, I decided around Easter time that that was what I was going to give up. You know, I wasn't going to do the ordinary things with what ordinary people were giving up, the physical stuff like sugar and more exercise and all these things. That wasn't what I Was struggling with. I wanted to grow as a person and to be right before God. That was the most important thing to me. And so I went on this 40-day journey with, you know, telling God that, you know, I am not willing to give this up or give this out, but I'm sitting here and I'm going to ask you to put that willingness in my heart. And a chain of events started to happen after I did that. Went to my mom's house that week and was looking in her cabinet and I saw pictures of my siblings and I with our communion, you now, communion pictures And I saw my sister with her hand prayer, and I looked in her eyes in that picture, and I thought, oh my goodness, she's me. She's struggled with the same things that I struggled with, the same torment of my mother being our, you know, the person that really destroyed us when we were children, and we suffered at her hand, and all of the things that i suffered for. And, you know, perhaps she's spiritually sick just like me. Like, she deserves everything that I deserve. Like, I want to be happy. Why can't I just let her, not let her off the hook, but let her off my hook? Right? My hook. And it wasn't that I'm going to forgive and forget. There's no such thing. But in the long run, after doing this for the 40 days, what the fruit of the tree of that was, was that, and it wasn' t only the 40 days because I kept coming back but this particular season was um that when I thought of my sister there was no longer anger attached to it and pain God had walked with me through the process of grieving sisterhood and grieving the things that I was wanting from my sister and my heart started to soften and open up a little bit towards her and forgiveness started to enter. And, um, and so there wasn't this anger attached to it. And now as of late, as of over the seven years, this is a seven year process. Um, the tail end of that is that when I think of my sister, there's now just a little sadness. I'm still not quite there as far as I have a little sorrow and I'm wishing, you know, that, that we could be better in our sisterhood, but that's going to be, that determination is going to be up to God. My responsibility is to keep bringing my heart to God and offering that to him, and remaining in a place where I allow him to wash away the darkness that's in my heart so that I can become free. And the reason that I want to be free is so that I can be free to love. That's the whole objective. Not only to love my sister, but to love the people about me. And this is the antidote, one of the questions, and I'll close with this. I believe that the antidote, what is forgiveness? What is forgiveness, the antidope to hate, a hardness of heart. And when we have that, we can't live. We really just can't live. And God put, God reached down in the grave of my heart and dragged me up into the light, and I feel a sense of lightness, and I could actually love my sister today, and accept that this is what it is. And I'm going to pass the mic. Thank you. My name is James. Tim has talked about his mother, and Karina has talked abut her sister, and And I'm now going to talk about my father. It's got to be one of them. Yeah, when I came into alcoholics, the principal requirement that I had in the world was towards my father and I was sharing yesterday that I was very much a solitary drinker and one of my favourite occupations, indeed it was my only occupation in the evenings, was to sit at home on my own and drink at my father. I drank at him. I resented him for the control that he had exercised over my life. I resisted him for his fear which he had instilled in me. And I resented him for the fact that he had never, in my view, been able to show me that he loved me. I resanted him for all of those things. And if you'd said to me when I first came into AA, will you be able to forgive your father? The answer would have been no. And it may well be that there are some people here who are relatively new in recovery who have people in their lives who they think they will never be able to forgive. And what I would ask you is to hold that thought until you've done your fourth step. My fourth step was a complete revelation to me. I'd never done any form of self-analysis. I'd ever been in therapy. I didn't really know anything about myself at all. I didn't understand what motivated me, what made me tick. I had no conception of it. And suddenly I come across Alcoholics Anonymous and I come cross this fourth step. And for the first time in my life I actually understood myself. For the first in my life, I understood that I was utterly dominated by fear. And as I came to understand myself, I actually started to understand my father. And the more I delved into my fourth step, the more i realized I was pretty much a carbon copy of him. I was pretty much a carbon copy. And you know, I started at last to feel sorry for him and to feel some compassion for him. Now, my situation was slightly odd because my father, God rest his soul, he died eight months after I came into the fellowship. He was killed in a motor accident. And so I never got to make my amends to him, not face-to-face. But my relationship with my father has continued to develop in the however many years since he died. He died in 1995. And when I think of him now, and I find this difficult to say, I think of him entirely with feelings of love and affection. And before coming here to this convention, I'd been in Manhattan just on a little vacation. And my father and my mother took me and my sister on vacation to Manhattan in 1978. And I hated every minute of it. I was 17 years of age I did not want to go and see Annie I didn't want to Go and see a chorus line Thank you very much I hated the whole thing But I realise now That he was doing his best for me And so when I was In Manhattan I went to various places Where I had been with him And with my mother I went into St. Patrick's Cathedral Where I'd reluctantly gone to church with them in 1978, and I lit two candles for them and put them side to side. I went to ground zero because I'd been up the trade centre with them. And it was really just an act of love. And that has been my experience with those close to me, those in my family, because I've had problems with my sister as well. I've got two sisters. But what this programme has given me is an understanding of myself and therefore for the first time an understanding about the people. And so I am able to say, as it asks me to say in the big book, when people harm infants, fortunately they don't very much, but occasionally they will I am able to say here's a person who is perhaps not spiritually at the top of their game and I am able to forgive them and to love them it's possible to do that there's just one other thing I'm going to change the tone now very dramatically because there are some things which are very, very hard to forgive. And I have increasingly in AA come across people who have suffered the most appalling abuse in their lives, particularly as children. Now forgiveness is the ideal. It's the ideal, it's the perfection if you like, But sometimes it's very hard to go there. And Tim touched on it, because it's in the book, when Bill says that we came to realise that the world and its people dominated us. And the object of step four is to stop that from happening, is not to allow events in our lives and the behaviour of other people to dominate the way that we feel. And whilst forgiveness may be the perfect ideal, and love may be a perfect ideal sometimes it's not possible to get there. And sometimes the right thing to do is to prosecute people. And I've been in a position to say that to people in AA. The right thing to do here is to go to the police and to make a statement to the police if you feel up to it and able to do it, and to prosecute them. And, you know, I think sometimes, it says in Step 4, the Step 4 prayer says, how can I be of help to this person? And sometimes, you don't know, that's the best way you can be of help to them, you now? It's the best to confront them with things that they have done. And it may be that in time, over time, you can let go of it and possibly reach the perfect place where you can forgive them. Possibly. But I think it's important to touch upon this subject because it's one that arises and I think it gives rise to misconceptions sometimes of AA and people saying oh well my sponsor has asked me to make amends to somebody who behaved poorly and I sometimes wonder if that's true, if the sponsor has actually done that or if this is something that the person has cobbled it together out of a misreading of the big book the big books doesn't say that as Paul would say show me the page so you know yeah I think those are the two things really that I wanted to touch upon so I'm not going to prolong it thank you very much you're an alcoholic I want to share two things experiences I have very recently I didn't want to forgive two people in my life because they didn't deserve it and my sponsor said if they deserved it it wouldn't be forgiveness that stuck with me and you know, I don't have sobriety most of the time, I have slow sobrietry sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly and the two that I've had that I want to share with you where I grew up I'm a product of a rape I grew up with a mother who was mentally ill who had me when she was 14 she would be in bipolar and things would happen to me I will not speak about but things that have been spoke about happened to me and she would wake up and what happened is she wouldn't know and I hated that woman's guts and an alcoholic synonymous were taught to go beyond where it says on page 63 our little plans and our little designs. We are to go beyond facts and evidence to the truth. And the truth is we have access to a loving, powerful hand of God that all men and women are God's children. Now if she's not or he's not, then I'm not and none of us are. and it takes a lot of grace to forgive my sponsor asked me have you ever done anything you wish you could be forgiven for but they're not forgiven and every by virtue of being an alcoholic the answer to that is yes by everyone here so he says when we hold hands at the end of our meeting we say forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us. And you'll hear a lot of crap in AA where they say, I've got to forgive myself. That's a horseshit. If you want to forgive yourself according to the Lord's Prayer, forgive others. And what I did is I was in 2009. No, I had suffered from suicidal depression eight years in my sobriety. There wasn't a day that I didn't wake up with self-loathing and that big word I looked up it means extreme contempt and hatred for oneself. I hated my guts and the only thing keeping me alive those eight years of sobriete was the thing I hated the most about myself is I was too much of a coward to pull the trigger I suffered from crippling debilitating depression and one day we were in a meeting in Bastrop Texas at the legacies group at seven o'clock and it was on steps six and seven and I realized I had a resentment against someone I didn't know I had and I told him I said I have a resentment Against the man who is my father who gave me birth and my real name is Joe Baker not Joe McFadden and that was a big secret I couldn't tell anybody and I lived with that as a kid and I said but I'm willing to forgive this person now I didn't know where he was I'd never talked to him or anything and I told the group and we all held hands did the seven step prayer and I gave that away I swear to you the next morning at 9 a.m I receive a phone call this lady says Joe and I said yes and she says is your mother and I said yes I thought she had died she says well you don't know me you never met me but our father Fred Otis Baker has been dying of cancer the last two years and he's been trying to find his boy Joey and he wanted you to know that he was wrong he's sorry and that he loves you he died last night and we want you to come to the funeral I went to the funeral reluctantly I was ordered by my sponsor and I have to tell you honest to God when I walked into Humansville Missouri to see that cactus, or casket. I didn't know if I was going to spit in his face and tip it over or what. But I walked in there and I looked at this body and two stepsisters and a brother came and told me, said, you know, daddy was crying. He said he should have went and looked and found you. Because I grew up in some of the most horrific childhood abuses you can imagine. and I always hated that SOB for not coming and saving me from that and I was unlovable that even he wouldn't even come get me and I took that on and they told me you know daddy was an alcoholic how could I hold a grudge against one of us now here's the deal I went to the funeral and I went back home and I haven't had a day of depression since I'm going to go a little bit longer I'm sorry and so if you have anyone the experience here is you have anyone that you cannot forgive your job isn't to be able to your job is to be willing God's job as it tells us in the big book is to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves the second one that I want to share very briefly is my mother. She's still alive. I hated that movie. Things that happened to me as a child shouldn't happen to anybody. And I was up there on Christmas, and Bill's my sponsor. And I called Bill. I said, it's on my heart. I don't know what it is. But I need to go. I don't want to be attached to her in my next life I'm willing to set her free and we prayed about it and I hadn't talked to her for decades and I called her up and she said I said I'd like to come over and see you I don' t want any trouble I just want to and I go over there the next day, her and my stepfather who I hated because he had two kids and he loved them more than he loved me. And I was just part of the package and we were really poor. And when we would go out to eat on the way up to Des Moines, we'd be in a restaurant and I'd embarrass him because I'd order some orange juice and that costs 25 cents and we didn't have it. And they'd make the wait And when I went over there, they handed me a glass of orange juice. And I sat down and I wanted to set her free. And I told her, I said, I've been a shit. And you see, the problem with my childhood is I've seen pictures in my childhood where I smiled, but I could tell you. and I would tell Bill and Patty's wife and my lovely Lucy I don't have a single happy memory of my childhood it was black and I hated it I tried to hang myself when I was nine years old and I went there and she started crying and she hugged me and she goes you know I always loved you she goes I was 14 when you were born I didn't know what to do and that man I hated started crying and he came up and hugged me. He goes, let me tell you something. He says, when I met your mom, she was 15 years old and you were starving. She couldn't get any milk out of her. And I went over there to the deli and I said, that boy will never go hungry again. Every Friday when I get paid, I'll pay milk and diapers, anything he wants. He goes... And when Betty and I decided to get married, she goes, I didn't want you to have a different name than your brothers or sisters, whatever we had. So I went and I found your father and I told him that we were going to get married and he goes, listen, does this mean I don't have to pay child support or worry about you having you guys in my life anymore? And then he said, yeah. And he said he signed the papers and he goes, I didn't want you to be around a person that thought that little of you. And for all those years I punished him and I hated his guts You see, after I left there, AA gave me a completely different childhood. Nothing had changed, but everything had changed like in an instant. I cannot remember the bad things in my childhood. my life had been changed and they were in a really bad place and it was good that I went there and I talked to Bill, I didn't want my ego they'll never have to worry about another thing the rest of their life I'm a good son and on the way here my mama called me and she said thank those people in Alcoholics Anonymous for giving me my boy back thank you alright everybody so now we will open up floor for Q&A session again. If possible, please try to keep it on the topic of forgiveness. Yeah? This is where we come back home. I was just telling you a story that I'm emotionally touched by every one of you. And it went through my head. Forgiveness, you get. It went through my head. It wasn't on my smartphone. Please tell me stories. I want to ask you a question at the end. Let us forgive and forget evil if we do not embrace forgiveness. Then an invincible set in will be tormenting the mind of the people who are in war. The biggest other thing is nature versus nurture. You know, we all have different upbringings. We're all not one kind of person. There can't be a credence to that though. You don't regret the past when you shut the door on it. You're not going to do that because one of the other things where the Lord originally . Real quick, the question is regarding forgiveness and forgetting and nature versus nurture for feedback from the speaker. I'd like to speak today. There's really no such animal. There's no forgiving and forgetting. it's a process and it's a grieving process and in my own experience it is that what happens is is that when we open our heart and we align our will and our heart and mind to God we allow him to come into that grieving process with us and over time what happens is that when we remember it's not attached to pain anymore but we don't forget So that's been my experience with that. Tim, alcoholic. A couple of things have occurred to me. Thank you for the question. The first one, some terrible things happened to me in my childhood. And regarding forgiving and forgetting, of course I haven't forgotten what's happened. What forgiveness has meant in relation to those events in my childhood, is recognising that because I'm spirit, and that is who I am, I'm not my body, I'm no material experiences of my life, I've got my past, I know the ideas I have about myself. I'm none of those things. I am a spirit. I, the real I, which is a little bit of God as it is in everyone, has never been harmed. That I have always been safe at some level. And so the events are the same, but the story has changed. The second thing with looking at the universe now and being upset as an adult about the things that go on around me, the only reason I'm ever upset by anything is because I have a blueprint for the universe and the universe isn't matching my blueprint. and i'm only ever upset when i'm frightened because i'm placing my happiness on something in the material world going a particular way um it talks on page 68 about wasn't it because self-reliance failed us himself that small s sub it's when i think i'm my job i think I am my family, I think I'm my nationality, my ethnicity, my sex, my gender, my sexual orientation, my political beliefs. Those can all be threatened. I can't be threatened so I get to still see everything that goes on in the world but if I'm spirit and my primary concern is my integrity, the integrity of my relationship with God, my relationship with others and my actions today, I can see everything but remain unharmed by anger. That's what I've got. Thank you, James, alcoholic. Yeah, I agree really with what Tim and Karina have said that you don't forget harms that were done to you in the past. It's just that those events take on, if you forgive and you genuinely forgive, those events just take on a completely different significance. They become neutral. I can think now, I can think of an incident where I was defrauded by somebody in AA at the time of some money. And subsequently that person came to me and made a step nine amend which I was happy to forgive him. He's a person I love and I was happy to forgive him and i can think back to the fact that there's some time ago he had some money off me and it's of absolutely no significance it's no significance so it's just a it's just a fact like the fact but that door is brown it has no more significance than that and so it's you don't forget it's just that it doesn't matter anymore if you forgive it just doesn't I could go into quantum theorem, I could go into quartz I could go really really really deep metaphysically and answer that question but this is Alcoholics Anonymous and I'll stick with my experience even though that is a lot of experience that I have with that I will say this is um a i was taught when i came in that a fool forgives and forgets a wise person and our book instructs us to forgive and remember and i'll tell you where it says it in the big book is our dark past becomes our greatest asset with it we can avert death and misery for others now I go on a lot of vacations and I go stay at Club Med or the Four Seasons I don't ever go stay in the library would anybody here like to go live in a library well let me explain what I mean until I forgive I'm living the rest of my life in a library watching reruns of my life I'm locked and frozen self-pity rots the soul it is the most we were talking on the way over here i believe that is the most rotten of every emotion we're locked in it i remember sitting there i remember in my house saying god i'm stuck i remember driving being in las vegas looking over at a bmw dealership and say there isn't any car there i can't ride in a check for there isn t any rolex in that jewelry store or I can't go write a check for. There isn't anything in the world that I don't have that I want, that I'm not wanting for nothing. And I'm stuck. And nothing is going to change it. And living in a library, let me connect those dots for you, is your dark past is a library you go to for reference. You don't live in it. Alcoholics Anonymous, you do not find sympathy. If you want sympathy, you go between. I won't say that in the dictionary. Ifyouwantsympathy, we don't offer that. Sympathy is a really good definition of sympathy and empathy, and you'll get plenty of empathy here. Syempathy is if you're on a cruise ship and you have seasickness and you are puking off the side someone with sympathy will go put his arm around you and puke along with you you don't get sympathy here you get empathy and they'll go put their arm around you and give you some pills and the pills here is the 12 steps to forgiveness and they will say I used to feel like that and this is what I did we share our experience strength and hope I justify resentment is that belongs to other people our book says I can't have that I gotta spray on some spiritual Teflon every day you know like Gotti was the Teflondon I want to be the Teclondon of alcoholics synonymous in resentments I've got one tiny thing to add on forgiveness um my we've talked a lot about forgiving people who we hate and people who've done the most terrible things but there's also room for forgiveness of the people that we love and respect but who we can't help seeing could improve in all sorts of important ways that would make life much more convenient. About 11 years ago, I was doing the dishes noisily in order to communicate to my other half that it wasn't really my turn to be doing the dishes. And this very clear message wasn't getting across, so I verbalized the idea that it really wasn't my turn to be doing auditions. And my other half looked very pale and left the room, and I knew I was in deep, deep trouble. And about ten minutes later he came back in and he said, I have never, ever criticised you. I can make a list also. and the truth is I'm deeply flawed and I live with someone who's deeply flawed but the job is not to see the flaws and then overlook them it's to change the way I perceive the entire person so whatever flaws he may or may not have are his business and to respect that boundary of privacy so I don't even see them in the first place and it's changed that whole relationship. Thanks, Tim. Thank you. If I was told that I had cancer, do I want to be a cancer patient? Do you have to accept it? Is that easy to do? No. How do you look at the ground? I'd like to answer that. My favorite guitar player is a gypsy guitarist named Django Reinhardt. When he was young, that he was living in a gypsy caravan caught on fire and he burned these three fingers. But yet I always said, but yet in spite of that, he became the world's greatest guitar player with just two fingers. and I listened to a man who accompanied him on his albums and he said, everyone says that. Django Reinhardt did not become the world's greatest guitar player in spite of only having two fingers. Now get this. This is a paradigm shift that changed my life. He became the world'S greatest guitar player because he only had two fingers I've got an enviable life I'm the guy when I knew I when I was new who came into Alcoholics Anonymous I hated not not in spite, but because I'm an alcoholic. Thank you. Any other comments? So we will be resuming, I believe, at 2 o'clock. So would you all please join me? Let's form a circle and have an extended moment of silence.