If You Try to Meditate You Are Meditating — Step Eleven’s Best-Kept Secret — Steve P.

About This Speaker Tape

Steve got sober on April 6, 2009, at 48 years old, after close to fifteen years of trying to repair a broken relationship with drugs and alcohol. He grew up on Atlanta's south side near Stewart Avenue, a street with a seedy reputation he knew from the inside. By twelve he was already deep in pills and barbiturates — opium having entered his life legitimately through childhood surgeries and painkillers. He was a mathematically gifted kid who, at fifteen, got pulled into a package store that fronted for professional bookies, where he helped build a betting model for dog and horse tracks. The money funded his college education and full entree to a world of clubs, Cadillacs, and women who were, as he puts it, generous with their affections.

He was also a working bass player and an underachiever with security clearances at nuclear power and aerospace firms, a résumé that looked nothing like his private life. Chasing respectability, he moved to Geneva, then Paris, then London — ostensibly to work for the World Health Organization or UNESCO, actually to outrun himself. He flunked out of all three, cured himself of drugs in London by drinking instead, and came back to the United States in the late 1990s with his tail between his legs. The incomprehensible demoralization hit hard. He tried physicians, psychologists, psychics, and celebrity-style rehabs where you make pottery and ride horses. None of it worked. By 2009 he was a waste case with no capacity left for consuming anything.

The real body of his share is a patient walk through the twelve steps in plain language. He talks about having the brain of a goldfish in early sobriety, about a first sponsor named Knox who told him to tell the truth or at least entertain him, about a Step Nine amends to a ventriloquist ex-roommate who called out of Vegas needing to make his own amends. He calls Step Ten the everyday step he still underutilizes, and says the secret of Step Eleven is that if you try to meditate, you are meditating.

He closes with his mother, who died two months before this share. He did home hospice — diaper duty, medicine duty, spiritual duty — and was in the room for her last breath. His mother was one of us, as was his father, as is pretty much everybody in his family, and most of them never got to this program. He suited up, showed up, and was there sober for her passage. That, he says, brought him his eleventh year in a way he hadn't anticipated.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Tim R. opens the Monday Night Leadership Speakers Meeting on NabaZoom; Tinsley reads page 29 of the Big Book
• 2:30 Steve introduces himself, sobriety date April 6, 2009, and talks about why speaker meetings feel sacred to him
• 6:00 First sponsor Knox: tell the truth, and if you can't, entertain me — ideally both at the same time
• 9:30 Growing up near Stewart Avenue in Atlanta, music scene, Tommy Rowe's jam sessions, and playing bass because nobody else wanted to
• 14:00 Age twelve, already using quaaludes, LSD, and barbiturates; childhood opium exposure through legitimate medical use
• 18:00 Fifteen years old at Brothers Three Package Store, running a betting model for bookies on dog and horse tracks
• 24:00 Flunking out of Geneva, Paris, and London while chasing respectability through WHO and UNESCO jobs
• 30:00 Hitting bottom in 2009; detox, a spiritual experience, and meeting his first sponsor at a Cocaine Anonymous meeting
• 36:00 Walking through Steps One through Seven in plain language — the brain of a goldfish, sarcasm as a character defect
• 48:00 Step Nine amends to a ventriloquist ex-roommate and closing with two months of home hospice for his dying mother