How Steps 5 and 9 Deflate the Ego – Blind D.

About This Speaker Tape

Blind D. is ten years sober, blind, and absolutely convinced there is a Higher Power running the show — not as a belief, but as a documented fact he keeps in a gratitude journal. This talk is about what happens after you get sober, when the steps stop being a checklist and start being the mechanism by which every crisis becomes a Higher Power experience.

The stories here are specific and wild. A handful of Vicodin lands in his palm from his wife's sister — who didn't know he was in recovery — and he spends the next hour pacing his kitchen, pills in hand, arguing with himself, until the phone rings at the exact second he's walking past it. The guy on the line says: "I'm about to go use, man. Talk me out of it." Then there's the roof that needed $5,000 in repairs, the $35 amends he owed to Seeing Eye from 1982 that a radio program confirmed the very day he tried to talk himself out of paying it, and the cobalt blue Honda Civic that didn't exist in the state of Texas until he stopped signing papers and gave his Higher Power a chance. He also describes the moment in his kitchen — putting up groceries, dip in his jaw — when the presence of Higher Power hit him like a match thrown into gasoline, and he quit Skoal on the spot.

The AA content is dense and Big Book-specific. Blind D. walks through Steps Five, Nine, and Ten as a continuous ego-deflating process, quoting page numbers, reading from Bill's Story, and making the case that the promises aren't decoration — they're instructions. His formula: willingness, honesty, and humility let the Higher Power in; self-centeredness pushes it out. The steps are the mechanism. Service work is the maintenance.

If you've been sober a few years, doing okay, and wondering why the Big Book keeps promising something that feels just out of reach, Blind D.'s ten years of documented Higher Power moments will show you exactly what you might be leaving on the table.

Topics

Timestamps

• 5:00 Blind D. reads from Bill's Story — the hospital, the quicksand, the broken man — then pivots to his theme: sobriety is not the pot of gold, it's the beginning of the rainbow.
• 13:00 Step Five story: the one thing he planned to leave off the list, the sponsor's prayer that stopped him cold, and the moment the dark gray bubble popped into the sunlight of the Spirit.
• 21:00 Step Nine as a mountain of amends — and why asking the Higher Power for guidance turns that mountain into the mountain of Higher Power, with the first mention of intuition appearing right there on page 79.
• 29:00 The Vicodin story: wife's sister pours a handful of pills into his palm, he spends an hour pacing and arguing with himself, and the phone rings at the precise second he's walking past it to go swallow them.
• 36:00 Putting up groceries at midnight with a dip of Skoal in his jaw — the presence of Higher Power hits like a match in gasoline, and he hears: spit that out right now and I will free you from this addiction.
• 42:00 The $35 amends to Seeing Eye from 1982: he tries to talk himself out of it, turns on the kitchen radio, and the first words out are a story about a blind man and his guide dog.
• 47:00 The cobalt blue Honda that didn't exist in Texas, the XM radio installed for free, and the voice that says: see there — no consequences to sticking to spiritual principles.