Higher Power Did Not Whisper Go Straighten Those Bastards Out Tonight Myers 🤣 – Myers R.

It now gives me great pleasure to introduce Myers R. A little slip there. He's going to share his experience strengthening. Thank you. Give you one little job to do. That's it. That's just one. Amazing to me. I've got to get this thing to sit someplace. There it is. My name is Myers R., and I'm an alcoholic. My home group is the primary purpose group in big-time Dallas, Texas. I wish I could say that every group in Dallas and Texas and the United States was like our home group, but it's not. We sort of steeped in the bowels of middle-of-the-road solution in a lot of places, and it's fairly bizarre sometimes, and we'll talk about a little of that tonight. There's a couple of things I want to do first. I especially want to thank Vic and David and his buddies that took all the time and effort to put all this stuff together, having done my own set of conferences before and whatnot. It's an amazing amount of work, and it's a thankless job, and we owe these guys a great deal of gratitude. I want to thank the sickest addict I've ever seen, Chris Cross, for coming to spend some time with us yesterday, and it was a fun day, fun stuff. Barbara, thanks for your share. It's funny. Some of the stuff that she's talking about on this stuff, this thing of saying, I don't know, I don't know. The two most freeing things I ever learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, especially as a sponsor, is I don't know, and I'll have to get back to you. Those two things are so freeing, it's not even funny. Don't we always say, well, I've got to have an answer every time somebody's got a question? It's not true anymore, man. It's not true. Thanks again for that stuff. I feel like I owe it to everybody that's going to listen to this thing on a CD, that if you've not experienced this room, you need to. For those not here, this room is sort of like, it's kind of like a melting of Liberace and Boy George. It's just kind of, it's an extraordinary, it's an extraordinary room. And if you come to London and you don't see this room, I think you're missing something. It's just like, every time I've been at this podium, I've looked up and expected to see GI servicemen walking up here like this. It's like 1940s. It's just the weirdest feeling in here. I've talked in some strange places, those guys. This is good. I love this. I want you guys to understand something real quick. Believe me when I tell you this, that I didn't wake up this morning with God whispering something in my ear to the tune of, I need you to go out there and straighten those bastards out tonight, Myers. I just need to... God didn't say that. And believe me, it is not my intent or my job to come over here and straighten you out. I have been blessed time and time again, and I've had a hundred conversations with men and women here, who I could learn immeasurable amounts from. I'm no guru, and I'm no man with all the answers. I'm just a busted up drunk that's been around long enough that I've seen good and bad in AA, and we want to talk a little bit about that stuff. If your experience in AA was that you came to a bunch of discussion meetings, and you dug them, and you stayed, and you love them, and you're still happy today, God bless you and keep coming back. I'm glad you're here. It's not my place to judge you. If you came and sat in those same meetings, and loved everything, and then day by day got sicker and sicker and sicker because the solution was not there, hopefully we can talk about some of that stuff. And I am here specifically to talk about some of that, and I want you to understand. Most importantly, I want you to understand that I realize on a gut level how badly I need to be here carrying this message. How badly my recovery needs you. I'm simply a lost drunk without you, and I'm so grateful that you guys took the time to travel, I'm always caught off guard on these internationally kind of conventions when we're over here, how many people travel such huge distances to be here, and sometimes at great cost financially and other ways. And we're blessed that you're here, and thank you for that. For you guys that I've met and talked to, you understand, a lot of you guys I've already met before. I'm a third generation drunk, and you guys have met my illustrious bad seed, Chris. Um, who is the evil twin? Um, sometimes there seems to be some debate about who that is, but I can assure you, Chris is the evil twin. Chris was my guy who I always, every one of you have a guy just like this. He's the guy I looked at and said, if I get as bad as that SOB, I'll quit. You see? And here he was, man, I'll tell you. Chris saved my life twice in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. He 12-stepped me and brought me to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and then seven years sober when I'm suicidal and unraveling in our meetings, he scooped me up again and got me plugged in with a bunch of big book thumpers. And, um, that's two saves in one lifetime. That's a pretty good deal. And if I haven't told him lately how much I love him and appreciate what he did for me in this deal, because I would not be here, nor would my wife and nor would my three precious daughters. Thank you. Um, somebody asked me one time why I mentioned my old group if it was such a tragic deal, and I'm not going to spend a bunch of time, but, um, there's also been this perception in AA for a long time that as long as there was a circle and triangle on a door, that God was there and everything was fine. And I truly believe, and this is an opinion not out of the book, I truly believe from a personal standpoint that at one time that was probably true. Um, unfortunately what has happened in a lot of cases is that our meetings have gotten so toxic in some places. Again, not here. I'm talking to a lot of guys here that are from some wonderful groups. But over the years, we've talked to some phenomenally volatile situations that just kind of blow you away. And we'll talk a little bit about that stuff. But it is possible, indeed, likely, that you can come to some of our rooms and day by day get sicker and sicker until it becomes so painful that you have no choice to do except to go and do what you've done all of these years. You see? It's crazy. It shouldn't be that way. And some people take huge offense when we talk about that stuff. And please don't. This is my personal experience. Based on my personal experience on this thing. And I want to make sure that you understand that. If this is not your experience, then tomorrow you can blow me off and just, you know, tell the guys in your wonderful, warm, fuzzy discussion meeting how what a vile man I am. And it's okay. It won't bother me in the least. Scouts on it. But I might say as a postscript, a year from now when you're so painful in that meeting where you can't stand who you are and who they are anymore, you may want to look some of us up. That are doing this work out of the book and see if you can't gravitate to what the solution is that was guaranteed. It'll be a good deal. It's a funny thing. I'm a bookbinder by trade. I can remember being 19 years old sitting at the Mason Jar restaurant in Houston, Texas with Chris and we're both drunk as a skunk. We both know clearly that we're alcoholics. Everybody else knows it too. And I remember Chris looking at me going, we've got to stop. We've got to stop this. We've just got to stop. And I'm going, yeah. We'll have another beer and we'll talk about it tomorrow. But you know the drill. At 19 we knew. At 34 I finally stopped. But in the meantime, things would get fairly desperate around the old R. household. I don't get into a bunch of drunk-a-log stuff because it's not really important. Suffice to say, I'm just a badly behaved drunk. And as I get drunker, I get more fearful. And as I get more fearful, I tend to do things that put me in a position to be hurt. Like touch you. And say stupid things that make me get whipped up. And I've been beat up in bars left and right. I cannot go. Towards the end of this deal, guys, do you ever know what it's like? I can't go anywhere without being drunk. And yet I'm so afraid to go someplace because my big mouth gets me in all kinds of trouble. Let me drink six beers and go to a party. And it's moments before I have my hand on your date, which thrills you, gentlemen, doesn't it? And it's just... Do you ever know any guys like that? I mean, it's just... And why is it that the scrawniest guy in the room, and I'm it. I've been looking at you. I know, I'm it. The scrawniest guy in the room has also got the biggest mouth around stuff that he has no business talking about. And so every time I turn around, somebody's wanting to take a swat at me or take me outside and kick the crap out of me. And it just gets painful. It just gets so... Somebody said, Myers, what made you finally want to sober up? I got just tired of getting beat up. I got tired of getting beat up. And I got tired... of doing crazy things. I got in a fight one night at a pizza place because it was taking too long. I don't know really what the reason was. All I remember was this 19-year-old kid with a black cowboy hat about that big around standing in front of me and he said something to me I didn't like. And the next thing I know, they're beating me off of him with a beer pitcher. And I'm choking the living you-know-what out of this guy. I'm trying to kill him right there in the middle of this stupid pizza place. Oh, I forgot to tell you that the bad part about this is is that my four-year-old daughter is watching the whole thing. She's there while this goes on. Six weeks later, I tried to beat up a liquor store clerk in Lake Dallas because he called my house to have him because I gave him a credit card that wasn't good. And he happened to get my wife and she's looking at me going like, what's going on? And so I go back down there to kick his rear. I mean, this is not good. This is not the way we're supposed to live our life. You see? Being the scrawniest man around, I'm also real sensitive to bullies. It's a funny thing. The things that we hate the most, oftentimes we become in this deal, don't we? I hated a bully with a passion. And yet here I was at almost 34 years old pushing my wife around, pushing my daughter around, getting to be like a... Is there anything more detestable than a guy that's like that? Did I want to be that way? No. No. No. No. No. No. I just simply couldn't figure out where it was all going. Why was I like this? So fast forward to a point. Chris comes in one day. He has a blackout. A guy that works for us at the bindery 12 steps in. Carries him to a meeting and his life changes. He'll tell you about this stuff in the morning. Well, I'll save him. I'll tell you... No, I won't. He'll tell you in the morning. But Chris never spent any time trying to jam me up about being drunk. He never tried to drag me into AA. He never said anything He just lived his life a day at a time living there and working in that bindery. And I watched his life change. I watched him get up, go to work, do a good day's work. Go to a meeting at 6.30, do the deal. Come back, work at night, go home, go to bed, get up the next day. No booze, no fights, no weirdness. Just doing what a man is supposed to do. I watched him do this. And I remember back there one night I was watching him in the dark like some sleazy punk while he was working and I'm just watching him. I'm watching him like this and I'm going... And I go home and I remember staggering into the house and I told my wife, I said, buddy, I tell you, if there's anything I can do, if there's any way I can have what that man has, I'm going to do what I have to do. And I called him and I asked him to take me to one of those stupid meetings and he said he would. And he did. And I'm one of these guys that came and stayed and I loved AA from the very first smoke-filled breath of that room. I loved Alcoholics Anonymous. I loved drunks. I loved... I loved... Everything about that room I loved. I loved being in a room full of people that understood me. It was just... God loved it. And I was going to stay. And for two or three years it was the coolest experience that I'd ever had in my whole life. I wasn't really working any step guys and I had a sponsor that was a friend. We wouldn't, you know... But I'm proof positive. I'm the poster boy of Middle of the Road Solution. I like the concept and idea of hanging out and being here. I like the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. The problem I had though was that I failed to find and failed to understand that there was another side to this deal called the program of Alcoholics Anonymous but nobody told me about the program because we were all too busy doing this stuff. I don't know if you come up through the same ranks. We got 21 meetings a week in that group. 20 of them are open discussion meetings. We just discuss. I got a bad day, I discuss it. I got a bad job, I discuss it. I got a bad girlfriend, I discuss it. I got... You know the drill. Some of you guys have come up through the same ranks. Nowhere in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous did it tell me that my sobriety was going to depend on the meeting. It didn't say that. It said that my sobriety was going to depend on a spiritual experience as a result of doing the work. But nobody was holding me accountable to do the work. So you guys that are smart, I can see your eyes going and you're already connecting the dots. You know what's going to happen. Almost like clockwork, I started to unwind. I started to get twisted around my own axle. And it was not a pretty thing to see. By now, Chris has moved to the hill country. He's gotten married. Got a great life. He's doing the deal. He got hooked up with a big book sponsor that was jamming through the work and they were having a great time with it. It was lots of fun. And I was still going to this deal. Now, you guys understand this thing about allegiance to a home group, right? I mean, most of us to a fault. Guys, I'm telling you, scouts on it. If I had found out that my home group was full of child molesters and... and Satan wannabes, I'd have stayed there still out of the allegiance to that home group. That's where I sobered up. That's where my allegiances were. And that's where I was going to be. And I'm watching you day by day and I'm watching your lives and I'm watching my life and I'm watching how things are just disintegrating at my feet. And I'm getting day by day more fearful. I'm getting day by day more afraid that this is not going to work. See, I'm not totally stupid. I just look that way. I'm not... I'm not so completely... I'm so completely out of it that I don't realize that Alcoholics Anonymous is indeed the only house on the block for me. It is the last deal for me. I have to have this work. And all of a sudden, it's not working. Three years drifts into four years. Four years drifts into five years. And the last year and a half I was in that group, it was the most painful experience of my entire life. Excuse me. People say that before you sober up, you'll have the most painful time in your life. Guys, I can tell you from personal experience, the most painful time that I had in my entire existence on God's green earth was the last two years that I was in Alcoholics Anonymous removed from booze and those other outside issues for five or six years. I was simply a nutcase. The spiritual malady was kicking my rear, but I had no idea what a spiritual malady was because we didn't talk about that. I'm being taught that if I managed well, smiled at work, treated my wife with respect, blah, blah, blah, that everything would just fall into place, that I would be okay. I'd have the nice car. I'd have the nice job. I'd have the nice girl. You see what I'm saying? Yet the book's not telling me this stuff. The literature never said this stuff. Things just got hugely painful. We voted God out one night, which was a thrill. It was a wonderful group conscience meeting. I'm always embarrassed to tell you this story, but I'm telling you it because it serves to show how sick things can get and how we, as weak individuals in this deal with no book to back us up, can simply go with the flow and do, do whatever a group says do. So the group came in. We had a bunch of guys come in on a group conscience deal and they said they thought we were talking about God too much in the meeting, that we probably shouldn't do that, that we were going to scare off the newcomer. And in the group conscience of which I was a voting member, we voted God out of that particular meeting. And we took a meeting that was hugely sick already and turned it into an absolute cesspool. It was horrible. The inevitable happened. I finally got sick enough that I almost drank. I got scared. I called Chris. Chris could expo and puts me in touch with Krusty Cliff. And Cliff... You guys got to meet this guy. Put me in touch with Cliff. And Cliff, I went over to see him. And if you've heard my talk, I'm not going to get into a bunch of this stuff, but I want you to understand that in 45 minutes sitting in Cliff's room, his front room, he showed me the book for the very first time. Now, people that hear my story will go, Myers, I can't believe that for seven years you sat in meetings and didn't know anymore about the big book than that. Okay? You can believe whatever you want to. I'm telling you the absolute God's truth. I had no idea what a spiritual experience was. I had no idea what my primary purpose was. I had no idea what my responsibilities to AA were. I had no idea that the steps were what were supposed to get me clear of the work. I had a vague idea. We talked about it some, but mostly we talked about Jim's bad day at work and Sally's shitty divorce. That's what we talked about incessantly. You see? Do you ever wonder why this is? It's always as an observation looking back on these men and women and they love me to death and I love them too. To this day, I still love them. But do you ever wonder why it is in those meeting settings like this that you can come in and be so excited about the dumping situation for about a year and then after that, those same people that you love, you want to choke the living crap of out in the parking lot? I mean, it's an amazing deal. When you start doing inventory with some of these guys, the guys that I sponsor, a lot of them have come up through the ranks of that kind of meeting and it's amazing to see on their fourth column inventory stuff how much wreckage is around the meeting. Got it? Got it? Hate that guy. Got it? Got it? Jeez, do you realize we have 20 pages of resentments and all of these are people from your home group? Let me make a suggestion, Slick. Get out of that meeting! I will. I will. But I understand it. And you've got to love the guy, man. I was there. I understood exactly. But let me tell you what happened. Forty-five minutes sitting in this room, Cliff Bishop starts carrying me through this stuff and he starts telling me all this stuff about the book. And I'm going, slow down! Slow down! You're going too fast! And I'm writing just as fast as I can. And I'm just going, and none of it sounds familiar. None of it. And he takes me to the part about the bedevilments on 52 or 53 when he's talking about all this stuff. And I'm going, yeah, yeah, that's me. And he's going, it ought to be you. You're dying of untreated alcoholism. And there's the perfect description to it. I'm going, oh, no kidding. And I'm thinking, you know, I haven't had a drink for seven years. Cliff doesn't have to count for something. He goes, I don't know. How happy are you? And I said, not too happy. And he goes, well, there's your answer. You see? You see, I'm convinced, like a lot of people, that as long as I don't drink, I'm okay. That I'm a winner if I just don't drink. The funny part about it is is that if you'll look, if you'll start asking those personal questions we talked about earlier in the workshop stuff, and you start looking at the experience of the guys that you know that are doing just that. They're not working any program. They're just not drinking. And look at the quality of their lives. And when I did that to my home group and I started looking at them, I'm not coming from a point of judgment here, guys. I'm just saying, this is what I did when I had to look at the truth there. And the truths were indicating. I've got a room full of men who cannot keep their hands off other women. I've got a room full of men that cannot keep jobs on the square and straight and level. They're always fudging around the edges. They're not paying this. They're not paying that. They're trying to jam somebody up here. They're trying to cheat somebody here. You see what I'm saying? We're living our lives like this big hypocrisy. I'm a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous and yet my life is in total shambles over on this side. That's desperate stuff, guys. It's horrible. You see? And I didn't want any part of it. That's the reason I'm so uncomfortable in my own skin. The spiritual malady is kicking my rear end. Remember on page 64 there's a line there that says, if we deal with the spiritual malady, we'll straighten out mentally and physically. They're talking about the mental obsession that Chris is going to talk about in the morning masterfully. Nobody does it better than he does on this stuff. And we're talking about the physical allergy. Stop and think about this just a minute. All you guys understand the physical allergy, don't you? I'll spend three seconds on this because it's important for the rest of this talk. Everybody understands once they get started they can't stop stuff. The physical part is the easiest part for everybody to see. It's easy for you to see and understand. It's easy for your family to see and understand. God, once he gets started, man, he just can't stop. What I never understood because we're not reading the book was why Bill spent so, I do understand it now, why did Bill spend so much time from the doctor's opinion straight forward to page 44 or if they stop at page 43, the bulk, 95% of everything that they talk about is about the mental obsession. Why is it stone cold sober I would pick up a drink knowing what it would do? It's the craziest crap in the whole wide world. And every one of us in here has experienced it. Stop and think about the craziest thing you ever did drinking. Driving over somebody, falling off something, doing something else, getting arrested, getting raped, you pick it. Whatever it is, fit it in there. And I'm telling you right now, the craziest thing you ever did you may not have even thought of. It was the fact that stone cold sober you came back and picked up a drink after all the wreckage and drama that it had caused in your life. And then you want to sit here and argue with me when I tell you that you're an insane person. You're an insane fruitcake. You are. We are. It's an amazing thing to see. And yet that's what we do. The mental obsession. This inability to manage the decision to not pick up that drink. If we could just do that we'd be great. And this is the part, the mental obsession, that separates us from the heavy drinker. The problem drinker. This is the stuff that our meetings were full of. I can only speak for Texas and I can only speak for our meetings in the local area there. Primarily. Primarily. Because there's where most of my experience lies. But to watch these guys, let's look at this thing realistically. When you came to AA, how did you learn about AA? You learned about it from the guys in your meeting, didn't you? And so it's like we're parrots. They say something and we say something. And they say something and we say something. And pretty soon their doctrine becomes our doctrine. Now, that's all great if they're in the big book and all they're talking about is big book stuff. But history has shown us our reality, our reality in AA has shown us because of the success rates or lack thereof that what's happening is is we had a bunch of people that decided to set the big book and its clear-cut message down and pick up a bunch of discussion stuff. We call it just disco rhetoric. Discussion rhetoric. Just stuff. All meant well. All coming from loving hearts. And yet, and some of it was good stuff. I'm not saying it's all evil. Some of it was horrendous. Take a step a year. Now, there's something that has the power to kill a few alcoholics, huh? And if you happen to be somebody that's involved in another fellowship like crack addiction, wait a year to get into the work? See you, dude. You'll be fried at the end of the year. You know? And you know you will. So, this is the crazy stuff. And so what we have to do is it's like somebody said one night, said, Myers, you make it sound like you're the only right one and everybody else in the fellowship is wrong. And I said, well, I don't know. It depends on where we are. In this room, 99% of you guys are walking the same path doing exactly what I'm doing. You're already in the book. But let me tell you something. I've been in rooms with a thousand men and women where there was only maybe 10% of the room that was on the page. And everybody else was coming out of these dark tunnel meetings that they talk about. Meetings that have gotten so toxic that nobody can recover. And I know it makes people grindy to hear this stuff, but guys, let me tell you something. As an absolute God's truth, I can name you at this particular moment two groups north of me in Dallas where they ask you not to bring your big book to a meeting. Now, I'm not talking about... Please, understand this. I'm not talking about they suggest you leave your book at home because we're going to have the meeting, we'll have it something printed or we'll... They're saying, don't bring your book to the meeting. There's nothing there we want to hear. You think that's fun? I can name you three groups I know of in the Dallas-Fort Worth area right now where they charge you to hear a fifth step. Charge you. How much do they charge you? Well, it depends on how good a fifth step you want. Please, don't tell me we're not off the beam. Don't tell me that AA is not getting sick. Statistically, when worldwide we're doing 8%, 5%, sometimes less than that, and we were doing 75, 85, 95, depending on where you were, percent success rates, how arrogant of us to stand there and say that we're doing what we're supposed to do, that everything is okay. Guys, somewhere this apathy has got to stop. We have to be to a point where we can take this thing back and see it for what it is. And it starts with us individually. It starts with each one of us asking the question, is my own personal program of recovery out of the book? Is it what it's supposed to be? Is the message that I'm carrying these guys when they ask me to help them, is the message out of the book or is it my opinion and idea about how they need to live their life? Oh, my God. Let's talk about arrogance. Mine. It's what I know best. We're three weeks into a big book environment at this new group I'm going to. We have no discussion meetings. They're all big book studies. And I keep wanting to share my experience, strength, and hope. I keep wanting to share all of these wisdoms that I've picked up in seven years of discussion stuff. Now, keep your finger on that thought, guys. There's nothing wrong with me wanting to share this stuff except for the fact that I'm suicidal. I can't keep my hands off other women. I'm writing hot checks all over Denton County. My life is a freaking mess and yet I want to share with you the wisdom of my seven years of recovery. Now, you tell me that's not arrogant crap. And yet I watch people in our meetings do it incessantly. Incessantly. You see? That's why I am so... I hate the discussion meeting format because it breeds all kinds of disaster. Would it be cool if you could sit in a discussion meeting and talk openly about certain things? Yes. Does the big book talk about talking about your problems on certain things? Yes. In the Oxford group stuff in the back of the 160-161, it talks about that stuff. But they were talking about a newcomer bringing his problem to the meeting so that the old guys who had the experience and knowledge could fix it, could help them see the path that they needed to be on. This crap of dumping stuff. I got a friend of mine. You'll love this. I got a friend of mine that sent me an email from Boston. And she said, she said, you'll think this is funny, Myers. There are two new groups in the Boston area on the intergroup record. One was called the Shake Hands with Feeling group. And I thought that was funny. And the next one was called Dump It Here group. I don't know about you guys, but that makes me squirm so bad I want to just, I can hardly stand still. My head wants to explode when I hear of a fellowship of men and women coming up through the ranks who think that their sole purpose is to walk into a meeting and be a part of a dump how crappy their life is and how absolutely bizarre things have been. Let me tell you a story. One little aside then I'll get back on track. Scout's on it. I'll try anyway. This group that I left that got so sick, and I'm now three, maybe four years into this big book study. I've now had a spiritual experience as a result of doing the work. I know exactly what my primary purpose is. I know what my responsibilities are. And I had the urge one afternoon to walk into a six o'clock room or six thirty meeting of that old discussion group where I left. It's real close. It's like it's like sixty yards from where my shop is in Texas. It's really I have to I have to pass eleven AA groups to get to the group that I go to. It's a haul to get over there. But it's where I go. So I go into this sick meeting and I'm sitting there like this and there was a girl named Barbara. Barbara's not her name but I'm just going to use it for just right here in front of me. You're too sweet. Maybe I ought to change that name. Her name so I'm sitting in this meeting and nobody I recognize is in the room that I knew from when I was there except Barbara. And we start up and Barbara was always one of these girls that always shared how bad her deal was around her employment. She never had a good job and it was always the boss's fault and she never had a good relationship and she never had she was always just this pathetic mess and it never got any better for seven years. It was always the same deal. And so we're sitting in the meeting and I'm looking around like this and I'm looking around 20 or 30 people around this circle like this and okay well it's now 15 minutes past the time to start the meeting and nobody started it yet and finally somebody says well I guess somebody's got a chair and somebody says okay yeah I will does anybody have a problem and they started like that. And I look around and all of a sudden I went oh shoot there's Barbara. And we're getting around the room like this and we get right up to her she's the third one in line and she shares. I would I would I would love to tell you that she was a spiritual giant and she saved lives in that meeting that night. But you know what she did? She said you know I got this situation going on at work and there was an audible oh you could just hear the air being sucked out of the meeting and I'm sitting there going and the sweat underneath my arms I just go bam bam like this and I got sweat running off my face. I am so emotionally entwined with this woman it is not even funny. For so what is that 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 years now she has been suffering through this same thing. Am I mad at Barbara? No. I am so angry at a fellowship of men and women sitting there in that room that would allow her to sit there all those years and nobody would step up and say Barbara shut the up come on hush let me suggest a novel idea Barbara why don't you work the work so that you can have a spiritual experience so that perhaps God could move you from this place of being a pathetic victim to a place of power. Lack of power is your dilemma that is what you are wanting but you want it by dumping stuff. You want to treat this like it is some kind of therapy session that if you just process it out for enough years you are going to get better. Well how many years is it going to take Barbara? I am a much more gentle and kinder Myers now thank you. Forgive me forgive me I simply um I am a much more as I get older I get more sensitive and I tend to get more sensitive to people's pain and when I see somebody suffering sitting here watching somebody walk in earlier and they were kind of uncomfortable when they walked in and they were looking around like they didn't know and I am thinking I got to go get this guy I cannot stand the pain of somebody feeling uncomfortable in a room and before I took two steps three of you were on them I mean it worked fine you guys are great but you understand what I am saying did I scoop Barbara up after the meeting? You bet your sweet you know what I did me and Barbara got nose to nose and I said sweet pea please come study with me please come do this work please get you a good strong sponsor that can carry you through this stuff and show you what you need to do in order to recover. Did she? No she didn't. She is in that meeting tonight sharing the same crap that she was sharing and it is my fervent prayer that one of these days the pain will become so immense that she will say hey I remember what Myers said and she will scoop up my number and call me. And I will go get that gal in a heartbeat and I will have her butt in a meeting and so fast it will make your head swim and there is indeed hope there. You see? That is why our deal here is to slowly change the perceptions of what we are doing in our meeting and pay attention to what we are doing and know that the things that we say can indeed hurt and harm and that we need to be real careful. That is why the big book is my constant companion in a meeting. I would never walk into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous without a big book because I want to make sure that when it comes my time to share something it is coming out of the book and if people groan so be it. You know what? There is a world of people in Alcoholics Anonymous that hate my guts and do not want to be in the same room with me with a big book. However, comma, there are a lot of young guys getting their butts kicked out there that gravitate to me like I am made out of gold when I share a message out of the big book because the new guy I don't care how new he is understands a message of depth and weight. In the same way that I inspire I instinctively knew that Cliff was telling me the truth sitting in his living room the new guy instinctively knows and that is the reason why the young lady that was talking about starting a new meeting and stuff trusts me on this. The guys that I know in this room there are four or five of you that are in the process of starting new big book studies all over Great Britain. And I am telling you right now guys in the beginning it always starts out the same. Rough. You are getting your heads handed. Let me read you this. You are going to get a kick out of this. This was sent as a carbon copy to me from Cliff from one of you and I don't remember who it was and I don't have a name on it. But the comment it was a friend sent this to Cliff from the UK. They started a big book study and this is a message that he got on his cell phone. My group in accordance with intergroup discussions will not be promoting your extreme cause. A few of my members have already had bad experiences with your method and relapsed. Leave us alone and do your recovered program elsewhere. I wish they had sent me that message. I would love to have faced those men in that situation. They make this sound like these precious men and women that were going to start this group. They make it sound like these guys were evil. Like they were starting some kind of Satan crap back there. Like they were going to cut some cats tails off and do some kind of weird satanic crap. That's crap. These were absolute wonderful children of God who were sitting there wanting to do something to carry some hope back into a fellowship that is getting the crap kicked out of it. And they had the guts to stand there and take it. And then some coward who wants to write it on an email or write it on a cell phone deal sends this kind of a message. Unfortunately, I have three letters just like this from different parts of Great Britain. Exactly like this. All from different people. All attacking people because they wanted to start something as absolutely innocent. It's a simple attempt to get a man and a woman back into a clear cut set of directions that was guaranteed to change their life forever. Sometimes I think that people think I'm trying to stir people up and get them to go into meetings with big sticks and kick the shit out of people. I have to tell you it is one of my favorite fantasies but I don't want you to do that. And it would serve no purpose if you did and all of a sudden people would think that they were right and we were wrong again and don't do that. I don't want anybody getting brutalized or bloodied because of the work. It's not necessary. What we're going to do is we're going to do what we found a long time ago. We won't try to make sweeping changes of anything. Change in Alcoholics Anonymous is going to come when one strong sponsor talks with another individual and that individual becomes a strong sponsor and he comes out and he sponsors somebody and that girl turns out to be a strong sponsor and she goes out and sponsors somebody. You catch my drift? We've been doing this long enough now to see the legacies spread out before us. I was in a meeting the other night and there were five generations in that meeting of people starting with Cliff Bishop that sponsored me and then I sponsored this cat and he sponsored a couple of guys and they sponsored a couple of guys and then they sponsored a couple of guys. Now, I've got to tell you, the funny part about this is that the guys that were below me on this deal, none of them had been sober longer than two years. One of the guys that is sponsoring three guys has only been sober six months and I know that's I know some of you guys are going, no, that can't happen. I'm telling you right now, if I had a daughter and I have three and they needed AA and I may have one and when she calls and says, Daddy, I need help, I'm not calling some crusty old son of a bitch. I'm calling that kid with six months sobriety that can relate to her and help her and this kid is so full of the book and so full of the power of God and the endless ability to help her love somebody. If you're taking cheap shots at the young guy, stop it. Don't do it. I don't care if you've been sober a week, you have a responsibility to carry a message of recovery to somebody else. You have a responsibility to step up to the guy after a meeting and say, you know what, you can indeed get up in the morning and not drink. I know, I did it ten days ago. I can do this. You see? You've got to do this. There's no starting point in AA. There's no starting gun, guys. There's nothing. Some of us sit back and wait. Right now, I sponsor, I sponsor probably ten or fifteen guys that are older. Some of them are hugely educated, lots of PhDs. And it's amazing to see how many of these guys that have been sober for a long time are not doing any work in the work and haven't sponsored anybody. I've got a guy I'm sponsoring right now that's twenty years sober and hasn't sponsored a guy in eleven years. Why? What piece of misinformation did he pick up someplace? What piece of selfishness did he glom onto that dictates who he will help and who he won't help? My book said that the moment I draw a sober breath, I'm ready to go out and try to help somebody else do this deal. Could you sponsor somebody at ten days sober? I don't think so. Could you sponsor somebody at the end of a month if you worked the work and had a spiritual experience? My book says you can. You see? Would you still need some help from a good strong sponsor above you to help you? Sure you would. Half the calls I get are from guys that I sponsor that are now sponsoring other men and they're calling me saying, hey, I've got a piece of inventory, I don't understand what to do, can you help me? Sure. You bet. I've got an amends thing that came up here that just caught me completely off guard. I don't know what to do. That's why we stay so plugged in, guys. That's why it's so important that we never let go of our sponsors. That we always have a good strong sponsor there. If you have a sponsor today and you guys are not working together and he's just a sponsor in name only, guys, tell him you love him. Tell him you want the best for him. But tell him you got to go find somebody else that you got to get to hold you accountable. Because accountability is the thing. If I have a sponsor I can walk all over, if I have a sponsor that I can just dust off as some kind of disposable name, where's the power in that? I need some crusty guy looking at me in a meeting like this and when I walk in he goes and I begin to sweat. And I know that within five minutes we're going to be in the little room off the big room having to talk, you know. I know that. But it's, you know, you got to have it. Things worked great at the group. I recovered. Everything worked wonderful. I'm doing everything but 12-step work. Finally I started getting sick again. Even though there was lots of big book around guys, I began to get goofy again. The spiritual malady had reasserted itself. The mental obsession was setting itself back up, telling me the problem didn't exist. And I'm waiting for a disaster. Finally Cliff said, you know, we need to talk about this 12-step stuff again. And I'm going, I know we talk about it all the time. He said, I know, but you trivialize it. You do 12-step work when it's convenient for you to do 12-step work. Yeah, I do. And he said, but what did the book say? The book said we need to be face-to-face with these guys every day. We need to be out carrying this thing. You need to have a regular place to go. And so he sent me out to Salvation Army. I did my deal. You guys have heard these talks and I won't bore you with the details on it. But let me tell you what happened. As a direct result of being on the firing line again, carrying a message of recovery to these guys at these wind-up joints. It's wind-up, W-I-N-D-U-P. It's where we wind up when there's nothing else to do. That's where it came from. I'll get five emails every time I talk someplace going, tell me what a wind-up place is. It's where we wind up when there's no place else to go. It's a treatment center or a jail or wherever the deal is. And going to these things will prove to be the coolest and slickest thing you've ever done in your whole life. And the book is clear on it. It's interesting. Remember chapter 7, working with others? If going to the meeting, which is emphasized so much, was so important, don't you think Bill Wilson and those cats would have read? Step 12, go to meetings. It wasn't in there. Why? Because the power was not in the meeting. The power was in the steps we took which put us in a position to help somebody. There's where the power was. And then he gave us a whole chapter, chapter 7, that talked about why we do what we do. I recovered. Why? So my wife would come back in the same bedroom with me? It's part of it. So I could have some friends? It's part of it. The biggest part of it is, is that so I could be a benefit to somebody else. So I could give this thing away. So you guys that are holding 12-step work at some distance, basically what you're doing is, is doing what I did for all those years. It's like, it's like picture AA, picture AA is a big bonfire. And we work the work and we get all better, but we're still kind of dancing around the edge of this big old bonfire. Now we know, because it's in the writing, that we have to go through the fire to get to the other side. But in order to go through the fire, it gets real hot and it's real, real uncomfortable. But we've got to do it to get over there. So one day the pain and suffering of being a middle of the road kind of guy in AA becomes so great that we simply say, okay, I'm willing to do what I have to do. And somebody's going to carry me to a 12-step place and they're going to say, okay, it's your turn and I'm going to go, oh, okay, I'll get up. And you get up and you do a little 10 minute share and you sit down. And all of a sudden you go, damn, that 10 minute share is my fire and I've got to go through it. But once I go through it, I come out of the other side all charred. My hair is all like this. But I am different. And the cool part about it is, charred hair and all, is that the gut stuff is not hurting me anymore. I'm not twisted up. The spiritual malady which has begun to rekindle itself and hurt me is no longer there. Can I stay at that point? For a moment. The book says that I have to continually do this stuff. It's clear on it. My arrogance and my ego says, no, I did it once. I don't want to do it anymore. And the big book says, you've been getting it. You've been getting it. You've been given the power to help others. Go do it. And so I do it. Day after day after day. And I get healthier and healthier. The mental health comes back and the squirreliness goes away. It's a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about. Right after I got to a primary purpose, I had not worked any work yet. I loved to garden. If we've got any gardeners in here, you're one of God's own. I love you to death already. And I'm kneeling in this garden. And I'm thinking, in a few minutes, I've got to go back into that house that I hate and see that beast of a woman that I'm married to. And I have to be faced with these three daughters that are not bright enough and not smart enough and not just, I hate my car. I hate my job. I hate you. I hate, I'm just a hater again. This thing of bigotry and jealousy and I'm just consumed with this stuff. And you understand that some of you guys live with this stuff. You see? And these are the things that are kicking my rear end. These are all manifestations of a spiritual malady that have not yet been dealt with. And so what I do is, I go work the work with somebody who had the experience. And I have the experience myself. My own personal, here it is, spiritual experience. I'm not living off somebody else's experience. It's mine. Fast forward a year. I'm now talking in some treatment centers on a regular basis. I got me a whole little gang of guys I'm sponsoring. My life is just amazing. I'm sitting in the same garden, kneeling in the same place, doing the same, picking the damn worms off the tomatoes again. And I'm thinking, I can't wait to get rid of this last worm so I can go in that house and see that woman that I absolutely adore. I cannot wait to be in the same room with those kids so they can tell me how their day went. I cannot wait to get to that job in the morning. I cannot wait. Guys, realistically, let me ask you the question. What changed in the picture? Did my job change? Did that woman change? Did my kids change? No. My perceptions changed based on the fact that the spiritual malady was no longer kicking my scrawny rear into the gutter. I knew I had a solution. And I knew I had a purpose. My primary purpose, as it were. That others would look at and say that it was pathetic. Those guys that don't know me and don't know anything about me, they'd say, well, you do this AA stuff all the time. It's just sort of pathetic, isn't it? And I'm going, God. Let me tell you something. Being a busted-up drunk and not knowing what you're going to do hour to hour to hour, that's fairly pathetic. Knowing exactly what I'm going to do when I get up in the morning is the coolest thing I've ever experienced in my whole life. Because there's a host of drunks out there that I haven't even met yet that are waiting for a message that I have to carry. And I need to be there for that. I'll tell you a fast five-minute story. Some of you guys have heard this story about Terry, but I want to tell it because it illustrates our 12-step stuff so dramatically. And the guys that have heard this story, you can just put your head down on the girl next to you and go to sleep and we'll wake you up when it's done. But I want you to understand this deal. A place called Homer Bound in the Hood down in South Dallas. It's like your Bowery here, I think, maybe. I don't know if I've got that right. But it's as rough an area of Dallas as you can get. And Homer Bound is my home away from home. And there was a guy sitting in a meeting there one night. You guys ever sit in a meeting? It's full of men and you're kind of looking around the room and you see a guy that's particularly sick looking, particularly deranged. And this guy is looking at me and he's giving me the eyeball and I'm going, oh, God, please, please don't let this guy come over here. You know? I mean, I'm supposed to be a healthy saint in AA and I'm praying to God that this man will simply vaporize in front of my eyes and that I won't have to deal with him. But he didn't. Terry had red hair that was sticking all out like this and he had green eyes and he was just like this and he'd been living on the street and he'd been living in somebody's pickup in the back end of this pickup parked between two buildings and during the night one of the street gangs had come by and they had pulled him out of the pickup by his ankles and he had smashed his face on the ground. The first thing that hit was here from pickup level high and he was one screwed up unit. It knocked all of his teeth out and broke his nose and pushed his big skin placed that went all the way down like this. It was a mess. Well, sure enough, Terry walks up to me right after the meeting and said, you know, I'm really interested in what you had to say. And I said, can you say that again? He was drooling so bad from his busted up teeth and stuff. And I finally understood what he was saying and he said, would you help me? Yeah, I will. And I turned around and went, oh. So we go through this stuff, we get through this work, Terry's so messed up and his head's not real clear yet and so we start working. I'm reading the work to him. It's going fast. I mean, I met with him a couple of times and we did it. He's taking a bus, he's still living in treatment down here and he's taking a bus all the way to primary purpose group. It's a hall, guys, by bus. And he's taking it, showing up at our meeting every time we're there. He walks in and he asked me one night, he said, Marcy, can I borrow ten bucks? I said, Terry, you know I don't loan money to guys that I sponsor. And he said, I know, but it's real important and I'll pay you back Thursday night. Okay, here, gave him the ten bucks. I believe sometimes when we loan money to people like this, we stand in the way of God. I mean, we got out of the way, he may have had another deal to do there. But I loaned Terry the money. Thursday night, Terry comes walking in and he's got a bucket and a squeegee. And he walks right up to me like this and somehow he's standing a little taller and he hands me this business card and it has T&S window cleaning on it or something like this. Some little thing he had made at an office supply place. And he had gotten another guy in treatment and they had gone out and they're just knocking on doors. And what they're doing is leaving treatment early in the day and they're walking out in the rich areas around where our meeting is and they're washing windows. And he hands me the ten bucks and he says blah blah and we're talking about this stuff and I'm just like going. Guys, this guy is still living at the treatment place and he's already got this little job put together scraping together this cash, right? And he does this week after week after week. We're working the work. We're doing this stuff. It's time to do our inventory. I've got to tell you this because it's amazing how your perceptions of people begin to change. We're sitting in this park like this where I did all my inventories in those days from that treatment center because it was right around the corner and it was real quiet and we could sit out there. And we're going through this inventory and I'm just blown away by the stuff this kid's seeing. He's going, oh, oh, don't forget the selfishness here. Don't forget, see the part right here like this? I mean, he's two steps ahead of me the whole way. It's like one of those kind of deals where you siphon the water and it's just flowing and there's nothing I can do to stop it. And in like 40 minutes, we're through 30 pages of his inventory. It's like nothing, man. And I'm sitting there looking at him. It's kind of overcast day and the sun comes up behind me. The sun's coming up over my back, shining right into Terry's face. And his hair is on fire. It looks like he's got this bright red hair but it looks like somebody just torched it with a blowtorch and he's got these unbelievable green eyes and they're like looking right through me like some kind of space. And I'm just going like golly. And the hair's standing up on the back of my head and I'm thinking I'm in the presence of greatness and I know that I am in a way. It was just an amazing experience. And so he gets up and he goes and does the deal and I've got to tell you, the point of this whole story is that he got his driving license back within about a month, his commercial driving license, which in Texas after you've had it taken away from you is a mother to get. But he got it back. And he got this job driving long haul. And I'm kind of worried. By now this guy's been sober four months, five months, I'm guessing because I really don't remember. Not long. And he's going to go long haul across the country and I'm scared. Terry is now one of my favorite guys in the whole deal and he's already sponsoring cats there in our group and he's already a part of me. And he's doing this deal. And I watched him just make the decision to go do this driving thing. And so he's fine. And I don't see him for a few weeks at a time. And I get this call one night and he's in Tennessee someplace at some little podunk place and he said, Myers, I may have screwed up. I said, oh, Terry, what did you do, buddy? And he goes, well, I just, I got to this meeting and we were sitting in this cafe and what I usually do when I go through these little towns is I ask if there's any AA meetings and they didn't know of one. And so there was another guy in the cafe that said, hey, but we always wanted one here. And Terry said, well, I'll start one. And I go, well, I'll start one. Well, Terry, what's your point? And he said, well, isn't it stupid for me only five or six months over to be starting a group? And I said, I'm having a hard time, you know, casting this thing out. It sounds fine to me. Just do what you're going to do. And he did. They gathered up some big books and they started this little meeting there in this deal. And he was there and then when he came back through, he'd stop there and he'd work his route on this truck thing so he could come back through and check on these guys and they were building this group. And so he calls me like six weeks later and he said, hey, I'm in Maine. And I said, Maine? Really? That's way up there. And he goes, yeah, yeah. And he said, you remember that deal down in Tennessee? And I said, yeah. And he said, well, I'm in kind of the same kind of situation here in Maine. And I said, Terry, what are you going to do? And he said, I'm going to do what I did in Tennessee. I'm going to start a group. And I said, okay. So he goes and gathers up these big books and he gets these guys on track like this and he's like Johnny Appleseed starting these meetings and these places that he goes. Now, guys, hold your finger on that thought. I'm now at the same time sponsoring 40 men that I cannot get to go to a 12-step place in town to do 12-step work. Dig? And Terry is out there kicking butt and taking names wherever he goes. He's a fearless carrier of a big book because he knows that it's not Terry's message he's carrying. It's the big book's message that he's carrying. And he understands that it's a message of depth and weight and he understands that it's a message that can change the very lives of the men that he touches. This is just... And I am surrounded by people in the fellowship that make excuses. We make announcements. Our group does 32 meetings other places other than our three meetings that we have a week of 12-step places. And because the group is so big and we have so many people transition through there, I'm always asking, okay, we got to cover meetings here, here, and here. I need somebody. Can you go over here to this? Oh, you mean this Friday? No, I couldn't this Friday. Perhaps another Friday. Who's next? And I'll get somebody. We fill it always. But I am absolutely caught off guard by how many people reap the benefits of our fellowship, reap the benefits of recovery, reap the benefits of everything that this program has to offer and still holds 12-step work at a distance and trivialize it like it's something that I'll do once I get the job to grow in the car back. Once I get everything lined up, let me tell you something, guys. The job, the girl in the car, the AA Trinity, it's an illusion. You'll never get it all lined up. It's like herding cats. By the time you get one thing straightened out, she goes away. By the time you get her back, the job goes away. It's always something. If your recovery is based on the external circumstances you think you're going to do, you're woefully mistaken, painfully mistaken. Don't do it. This is an internal deal we're going to deal with. I'm done. At the end of the day, guys, there's an accountability. There's a moment at the end of the day sitting on the edge of your bunk when you just smoke that last cigarette or drink that last cup of tea or do whatever you do at the end of the day. When we are accountable to ourselves, when we have to look at ourselves and go, did I do today what I'm supposed to do? Am I a carrier of a common solution or am I a producer of confusion and disharmony? Did I do something today to help one of God's kids? Or am I a selfish SOB? These are questions we need to ask ourselves on a daily basis. And guys, as you do this and as you submit to a program and as you submit to the 12-step work that we so desperately need you doing, and you take a deep breath and know that God is good and know that you have a purpose, you will never once question your purpose again. Once you realize it, once you see it for what it is, everything in your life will change. That perceptual shift that we talked about will be there. There's nothing sweeter in God's green earth than to know that when I get back I'll have a wife that doesn't duck when I walk into a room, that I'll have little daughters hugging me and wanting to be in the same room. You see what I'm saying? That I'll have a host of friends calling me asking me how my trip went. And were those English guys really as crazy as we hear? And I won't lie, I'll tell them yes. I'll tell them the truth. I'll tell them you're the sweetest bunch of people I've ever been around. And it's been my great pleasure to be here. Thank you.