M Louisville KY Living in Sobriety Workshop – Part 1 of 2 – Don L.

Welcome to the Fifth Tradition Group's quarterly workshop. Please help me open this meeting with a moment of silence, followed by the serenity prayer. God, grant me serenety to accept the things I cannot change, encourage to change the things that I can, and the wisdoms know the difference. All right, we were running a little tiny bit behind schedule this morning. The Delta Airlines wasn't cooperating 100% with us, but we're all here safe and sound and fed, and I've had our coffee and our sausage biscuits, and we're ready to do a workshop. Don has been good enough to come this morning from Louisville, Kentucky, and he got up real early this morning to get down here for this 10 o'clock workshop, and We're awfully glad that he did. When I was trying to get speakers for the workshop together, I called a few folks and we've had a couple already. When I talked to Don, I said, Don, here's the kind of topics we generally like to do at our workshops, but if you have a suggestion, then please just let me know. He said, well, you know, John, we go to these big book workshop weekends and we go through the steps over the course of the weekend and we're always rushing through steps 10, 11, and 12 on Sunday morning and trying to cover it before Sunday at 11 when the thing needs to end and everybody needs to get on their planes and fly home. So he said he thought it would be great if we could do a workshop just on living sober, steps 10, 11, and 12. And I agreed. I thought that was a wonderful idea. So I'm not going to talk anymore. And we're going to turn it over to Don M. here who's going to take us through and talk about steps 10.11 and 12, and we're gonna have three approximately 50-minute sessions with 10-minute breaks in between. So, Don, I guess we'll take our first break right about 10 till 11, something like that. It doesn't have to be right on the minute or anything. So without any further ado, Don take it away. Thank you, John. Good morning, everybody. My name is Don Major and I'm an alcoholic. And I'm very grateful to be here this morning. And by the grace of God, I do have a sobriety date, and it's April the 9th of 1981. I was telling John on the way here that has a historical significance that many of you may not know about. April the ninth is Appomattox Day. It's the day that General Lee surrendered, so I gave up 116 years to the day after General Lee. I have a home group. My home group is the Calm Down Group. And when that group was started 20-something years ago, I named it. It meets on Wednesday, and by Wednesday I normally need to calm down terribly. So that's how that happened. I actually have two sponsors. Because of geography, I've had two sponsors most of my sobriety. How that happened is I got sober in Nashville, Tennessee, having sort of been—well, not sort of, having been on the street and having drank and drugged my way out of Louisville, Kentucky, which is where I've lived most of my adult life. I got over there, and Cherry Carpenter was my sponsor beginning five days after I got sobre. And then I'm a lawyer, much to my surprise, at about a year and a half sober, my law license got put back in order. And I had a choice between staying in Nashville and starving to death or going back to Louisville and trying to practice law. So I took the choice that God gave me and went back to Louisville. And I didn't want to give up Cherry, who was my sponsor there, but I also needed somebody that I could be physically closer to and sort of get in their pocket if I needed to. So I got Bernie, and both of them are dead now. And I now have Tom Burns from right outside of Cleveland, Ohio, is what I call my authority sponsor. And a fellow by the name of Hoot Ebert, who did live in Frankfurt, Kentucky but recently retired to Florida, is my buddy sponsor. And I'll talk about sponsorship when we talk about Step 12, but great difference in those two kinds of sponsors to me. Bernie or Hoot, if I'm all, you know, torn up about a financial thing, making a big deal out of some financial deal, those poor fellows would be so sympathetic that if they could afford it, they might offer to loan me a little money. I have often wondered what would happen if I had asked Terry Carpenter to borrow a dollar. It would have been a hideous thing. It would just absolutely have been an emotional and spiritual bloodbath if I'd asked him to borrow $1. But I'll talk about the difference in sponsorship when I get there. And I really am excited about having some time on 10, 11, and 12. John told you about the conversation we had, and that's exactly true. And when I do the steps, I always start out saying, I'm going to save time this time and really spend some time on the maintenance steps. And it just never works out that way. It always winds up getting compressed at the end. So you all may hear me run my mouth more on the maintenance steps than you even want to this morning. But before I jump right into them, I want to just talk a little bit about the step process and what it's been in my life and what it means to me I believe with all my heart that the steps are the only program of recovery it was explained to me early on and when I look back on it I don't understand why I had so much difficulty grasping the difference between the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and the program of Alcoholic Anonymous but I remember that I did and I can't imagine why I did. Bottom line is simple. I can grab hold of this fellowship, and I'm a full-fledged member on any day I've got a desire to stop drinking. I don't even need to call myself an alcoholic. I do not need to do a thing with regard to the steps. I am a full fledged member of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous on any day I've got a desire to stop drinking. Right on the other hand, if I grab hold of this fellowship without getting into the step process it's a whole lot like having cancer and going to the hospital and they get you all comfortable and give you some pain medication and you start feeling a whole lot better and you think well why shouldn't I go through all that surgery I don't need to do that, I'm okay If I do it that way, you know, if I just grab hold of the fellowship, I might stay dry a week. I have seen people, it appears to stay dry 30 years without getting into the steps. But I believe if I do het that way I won't have any healing of what's really wrong with me. You see, the bottom line of my alcoholism is an ego disorder. The book says that selfishness and self-centeredness are the root of our troubles. And what that means to me is the first thing wrong with me is that ego disorder. And on account of that ego order, without, and you can call it divine intervention if you like that term, which I do, or you can called it the magic of the steps if you don't like the term divine intervention, take your pick. I'll probably use divine intervention more than magic of steps. But without the divine intervention, I'm so obsessed with myself. I'm så obsessed with how I believe I stack up against other people in the world. In fact, I'M SO OBSESSED WITH HOW I FEEL THAT OVER THE LAST NUMBER OF YEARS, I'VE BOILED THE BASIS OF MY ALCOHOLISM DOWN TO ONE SENTENCE, AND I THINK IT'S VALID. I THING IT ALL RESTS ON THIS ONE SETTANCE. Without divine intervention, I will always wind up letting how I feel be the most important thing in the world to me. Now, without the divine intervention or the magic from the steps, I can give some lip service to something being more important than how I feels. I might even be able to act for a little while like something is more important that how I felt, but it's all a smokescreen. my default position is letting how I feel be the most important thing in this universe to me and all that obsession with myself and that obsession with how I feels has always created so much pain and so much emptiness down inside me that I've never been able to stand the way I feel inside myself without either stuffing something in there for 37 years of my life until I got sober it was the booze and the things like it for the last 29 years it's been the magic of the steps of the divine intervention but without stuffing something in me or and or running as hard as i can i can't stand the way i feel inside that obsession with myself just just causes so much disease so much fear discomfort inside myself without the magicof the steps i have no peers i have absolutely no peers It's weird. My ego disorder creates an egomania with an inferiority complex. I'm perfectly capable of feeling too good for something or somebody, and at the same minute knowing I'm not nearly good enough for that same person or that same thing. But what I can't feel without the magic of the steps, I can feel just okay for anything or anybody on the face of this earth. I don't have anything that I can look right in its eye and say, this is okay. That only comes to me these days through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Cherry Carpenter always said that if we were not supposed to do the steps in order, they would not have been numbered, which I thought was pretty profound. and he also made it clear to me that they weren't called the steps by accident. They could have been called the 12 propositions, the 12 principles, the 12 tenets, whole bunches of other things but that by design they were called the Steps because in a conventional staircase the second step actually rests on step one. Step one is the base of that step. You really can't have a second step in a conventional staircase without the first step. And also, it doesn't make any sense to have a staircase with first step, a third step, an eighth step, and no steps in between. They're built on one another. Now, what we're going to get to, which is our main thing today, the maintenance steps, I was taught early on that that's an absolute exception to that. There are things in steps 10, 11, and 12 that we can do and use on the first 24 hours that we're sober. But with regard to the first nine steps, I was taught that they are the program of recovery in their entirety. They are the process of ego deflation. And probably the most effective way anybody ever put that to me, Somebody explained to me that the 12 steps are the prescription for alcoholism. And they explained that if I've got an infection that's going to kill me, if it's not treated, I don't need to explore the width, breadth, nature, and origin of my infection. I don'T need to aggravate my friends in the medical profession going on about the nature, breadth, origin, etc., and so on of my infection. I don't need to understand one single thing about how penicillin works in the human body. I don'T even need to believe that that little bottle of pills can take care of all these things wrong with wonderful me. And here's the real kicker. I DON'T need to want to take the pills. If I've got the infection and I take the pills as directed, I'll get just fine, thank you. And I was taught that those steps are not there for me to understand, memorize, argue with, distinguish, or anything else, or study. Those steps are simply there for мне to do the action. I was told that recovery is not a learning process. I was sold that I'd had enough information for over two years to stay sober a day at a time the rest of my life. That what was killing me wasn't what I knew and didn't know, it was what I was doing and not doing. And that I better get on with the steps. And by the way, throughout our two or three hours today, and those of you that are gluttons enough for punishment to come hear me tell my story tonight, you're going to hear me talk a lot about taking action in spite of what i think feel and believe and sometimes people go away from having talked to me or heard me and and i know they go away with uh well with the impression that i'm saying stuff your feelings your feelings don't matter uh and this is not a knock in any way i am a huge fan and supporter of alan on but about 50 percent of the time when i'm doing the steps or speaking someplace. It's an Al-Anon coming to an open meeting that comes up and calls my hand on discounting the way they feel, and I understand that. And the truth is, I'm not saying in any way or not suggesting in anyway that we ignore our feelings. In fact, I found that these 12 steps are the most effective vehicle I've ever found to identify my feelings and look them straight in the eye and say, there you are. What I am saying is that for 37 years when I had a feeling, I built a shrine to it. When I had a feeling there was no thought process involved. It was automatic. My behavior fell in behind my feeling and I went to work on you to get your behavior to fall in behind mine. I went behind my feelings. Well, newsflash, maybe the way I feel is not the most important thing in the universe. And when I look back on all of the destruction of my alcoholism, and any of those of you that are here tonight will hear a little bit about that, and there was a world of destruction. Everything in my life, lost my law license, lost all my family, didn't see my only child for over three years, lived on the street for a year, terrible automobile accident, lost bodily functions, half dozen major surgeries. None of those things were caused by what I thought, felt, and believed. They were all caused by what I did and what I failed to do. And my recovery is the same way. Thank God my recovery is not based, and we really do, we're really going to talk about this when we get to the maintenance step. Thank god it is not on how I am. It is based on what I do. Another thing John and I were talking about on the way from the airport this morning. We were kind of chuckling about sponsees who are really obsessed with taking their spiritual temperature. I've got two or three that want to call me every morning and ask, how am I? Well, the truth is, whether or not we get our daily reprieve hasn't got a thing to do with how we are. What it's going to depend on is what we do today. And we'll talk about that when we get into that. But at any rate, I'm not saying stuff your feelings. I was also told about the first nine steps and them being numbered and the fact that the person might all do them in order. I was told a story that I absolutely love. This alcoholic was out on a dark country road late at night and had a flat tire. and the alcoholic got out and looked in the trunk and the alcoholics had a spare but did not have a jack and this was before cell phones so the alcoholic thinks what in the world am I going to do you know and looks way up in the distance and sees a tiny little light and starts walking toward it and of course the committee starts meeting in the alcoholic's head and says you know what if that's not even a house what if it's an outbuilding or something What if nobody lives there? What if everybody's home? What if they won't answer the door this time of night? What if I answer the doorknob and they don't have a jack? What if the answer to the door and they've got a jack and they won' t let me borrow it? What if i answer the dorkknob and i borrow the jack and they let me bar it and i walk all the way back to that car and it won't fit? And about that time the alcoholic had knocked on the door an old farmer came to the dooknob half asleep and said, can I help you, sir? And the alcoholic said, I didn't want to borrow your damn jack anyway. And over the years, I've had loads of folks tell me, I can't do this inventory in the fourth step. I can make amends to Joe or Jane or whatever. Well, my God, they're five steps from making amends. It's not, of course they are not ready to make amends. They won't be ready to making amends until they've worked through step eight up to the process of actually making the amends, so I think doing the steps in order is very, very important. The steps have not only have changed my life, they're what lets me live in conjunction with the fellowship today. So I've talked a little bit about this there. And by the way, I was taught that the step process is a process of ego deflation. And that having done one through nine the way the book says to do it, when I complete that, my ego will be deflated. Now, Terry Carpenter made it very clear to me that his best estimate in my case was that that would last approximately eight seconds. The human ego is the most resilient entity that I know of in this universe I honestly believe when one of us dies in a gutter They are not usually thinking about what a terrible mess they've been made of things But they're thinking about how What these square johns and these mercedes-benz driving by How limited they are And how much less intelligent they are And how they don't see things more clearly and feel them so deeply that they're wounded by their own understanding, you know. So soul just too big for the body. It is amazing how the ego jumps in. I don't know why this little event from my life came to pass, but I got back to Louisville into my law practice. I actually got back in town when I was 21 months old because I had absolutely nothing. and I came back to Louisville in a borrowed 10-year-old car with everything I owned in the passenger seat of the car. And I got there, and I'd been there a month or so, and somebody had referred a client to me. I've always been a criminal lawyer. Somebody had a pretty good-sized criminal problem, and they had a civil lawyer who was an old man who's been dead years now, an oldman Sam Stallings in Louisville. And they were talking to me about hiring me, And it turned out that they did not hire me because old man Sam had suggested that I might not be totally stable. Well, it had been two years since I'd been in the asylum and I was only there 18 times in two and a half years. And I was just so hurt and incensed that that old man would suggest that there was a question about my stability. the human ego comes rolling back on us also something that I was taught and this is not anything that was made a big deal of to me and I certainly don't make it a big deal with folks that I sponsor and by the way that's all I've got to share with you folks today is what my sponsors and other folks in Alcoholics Anonymous have shared with me and what I share with the people that I sponsor in Alcoholic Anonymous. We're just kind of compacting that into a couple or three hours instead of the months that it would normally take to get it all droned out. But Cherry would call my hand very gently, but he would call my hand and by the way let me say something about harsh dictatorial sponsors there never were nearly as many of them as you get the impression that they are that is a phenomenon among circuit speakers we don't want to be emphatic about anything and act like we are telling you by George it is extremely important you must do this, so we lay it on some poor old fellow that's been dead for 20 years and claim that he told it to us that way. The fact is most of us wouldn't have put up with being treated that way, and many of those people that get painted as so harsh and dictatorial were really gentle, loving people, and Sherry was kind of a combination of harsh, gentle, and loving, but when I would refer to myself as a recovering alcoholic, which when I got sober in 81, that was just kind of the order of the day. Everybody referred to themselves as a covering alcoholic. And if somebody said, I'm a recovered alcoholic, it just bells went off. You thought, oh my God, they're egotistical or they think they're cured from alcoholism. You know, it just didn't sound right because the order of the day was so much recovering alcoholics. And Cherry would stop me and I remember the first time he ever talked to me about it. He said, Don, you are aware, aren't you, that the big book talks about recovered alcoholics rather than recovering alcoholcs. So by that time I was really a fairly erudite big book scholar. I thought I knew a great deal more about it than Cherry. So in some wording or the other, I basically asked him where they had hidden that in the big book. And he advised me that they had first hidden it in the subtitle of the book. I didn't know a book had a subtitle. You know, How 100 Men and Women Have Recovered. And then he said they also hit it two or three more times in the first paragraph to the foreword to the first edition. Now, I've already told you that he made it clear that that process of me being recovered would last just a very brief period of time if it didn't go ahead with what I needed to do in order to keep that recovery. But he told me that, and he also took the position which I have taken, and I don't get on soapbox. I will gently mention it to my sponsees, but truth is as long as they do it, I don' t care what they call it. But Cherry did not believe that you did steps one through nine but one time. Now, the kick in that or the hook in it is that absolutely everything that's involved in Steps 1 through 9 is included in 10, 11, and 12. An example of that as part of my morning meditation for decades has been to read the Third Step Prayer and the Seventh Step Prayer. But in my mind, I'm not redoing my third step, and I'm Not Redoing My Seventh step. I'm doing eleventh-step work. Over the years, and I really and truly have no idea how many there have been, but I suspect there have been 10 or 12 full written inventories that looked just exactly like my fourth step inventory. You know, the format was taken precisely from the big book, pages 64 through 70, where it talks about how to do a fourth step. In my mind, I was not doing a new fourth step, I Was Doing Tenth Step Work. I was continuing to take personal inventory. And it finally dawned on me, I think I was five or six years sober because Cherry never explained why he told me those things. And I thought, well, it's just semantics or something, you know, it doesn't really matter. And finally when I was 5 or 6 years sober, it hit me that Cherry knew who he was dealing with. If he had let me grab hold of the idea that I was a poor little limited crippled alcoholic who would never be okay. You know, I'd always be my whole life mired down in this process of trying to get better. You know I'm a sick person just trying to get better, he knew I was perfectly capable of being sitting around an AA clubhouse at 20 years sober, playing euchre, not working and whining about not being able to deal with those earth people that they didn't understand me and they might get me drunk. He wanted me to understand that once I've done those first nine steps the way the book says do them, as long as I'm living on 10, 11, and 12, I should be at least as well equipped, at least is well equipped to deal with this world on this world's terms as a person who never had alcoholism. And that has served me well over the years to realize that I am not limited. That really and truly, you know, very early in the book, I think it's page 19 or 20, it says that basically what it says is, you don't be in all shot in the butt about this AA thing around meetings and with the other people in AA. That's really great, and that's necessary. But a far more important demonstration is in our vocations and in our family life. And I believe that with all my heart. If you want to know how somebody's application of the AA program, and I'm being very careful not to say somebody's program because Cherry made that one really clear too, my program, he would make it clear that my program got me where I was, destroyed everything in my life. There's not my program and your program. There's the program, and it's numbered 1 through 12. But at any rate, I took myself off on a tangent there and kind of lost my train of thought. So I expect if it's important enough, we'll remember it back, won't we? It goes today. But having done those first nine steps, we are left with steps 10, 11, and 12 on which to live our life. To me, they are, in fact, the design for living. Now, I want to start out talking about it by talking about me and reading the big book. I have tremendous trouble reading the Big Book. And the reason I have so much trouble reading The Big Book is that I already know what it says. and if you already know what something says opening up that page and glancing down at the print letting your brain record oh yeah I know what that says and going on to whatever's next on your agenda probably not going to get a whole lot out of it but every once in a while God's grace God through God's race will give me will give my the ability to see what the ink on the paper says instead of what I think it says. And that's what happened with the maintenance steps and the maintenance of mass sobriety. And I already mentioned this briefly, but for the first two or three years I was sober. If you had asked me, Don, on what is your daily reprieve from alcoholism contingent? I would have said my spiritual condition. And I really thought that that's what it was. And I want to tell you, that was terrifying because that would have meant that my daily reprieve was contingent on how I am on any given day. And I know lots of guys, and I've got my tongue in cheek, but I know lot's of guys with long-term sobriety have reached the point where it's just never-ending serenity And, you know, their eyes fly off every morning. They feel at one with God and the universe and, you know, totally accepting of everything, no fear, no obsession on things, that sort of thing. It hasn't happened that way with me, okay? I still wake up sometimes with the old brain just spinning and carrying on, scared and obsessed on something. And when I get down to pray, sometimes I'm so scared and upset I can't remember the last word They just tried to pray. You know, it seems perfectly obvious to me the words are bouncing off the walls and ceilings. It seems like they couldn't possibly be doing any good whatsoever. So if my daily reprieve were indeed contention on how I am, there are a lot of days when I would be in mortal danger of being struck drunk because I am not very good. But thank God. Now, what that book actually says is that our daily reprieve is contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Difference in day and night, difference in going over and flipping that light switch on and off. I've got a car at home. There's nothing I can do to wave a wand and immediately change the condition of that car. on the other hand the process of maintaining that car is all action over which I have a hundred percent control and what I mean by being the difference of flipping the light switch is this until I realized what the book really said I really had no control over whether I got my daily reprieve or not because I thought it was contingent on how I am But once I realized that it is only contingent on what I do, I all of a sudden had 100% control over getting my daily reprieve. What it means to me today is that I can wake up on one of those mornings I'm talking about feeling cut off from God, cut off form you. I can make myself get down on my knees and say the words of my prayer even though it doesn't feel right, even though It feels like It's bouncing off the walls And let me take another side trip here with you, and I hope we get back on path after this one. But after I'd started acting as if, and when I tell my story tonight, I'll tell a little bit, I'm sure, about the second step was just, I made a monster out of it. I very nearly died on kind of the second steps. But afterI had finally started actingas if, the miracle of that step had begun to happen, and I had begun to come to believe, I got concerned over the fact that my prayer didn't feel right a lot. Maybe I wasn't praying right, wasn't saying the right thing. So I went to Cherry about it. And in essence, Cherry said, Don, I still think your ego will kill you. He said, You are amazing. He said let's examine that. Are you under the impression that God is unaware of your needs unless you properly list them? he said or maybe you think god is so limited that god is sitting somewhere wringing his or her hands thinking oh my goodness i hope don words that a particular way so i can do it and it's so limited i can't do it unless don words it right uh he said actually don in your case i think it's more malignant than that he said in your case i thank you believe you may stated so eloquently that you will sway God into doing something that God would not have done otherwise. He said, you dummy, there is absolutely nothing psychological or intellectual about prayer or for that matter the step process. And he said if you approach those things from a psychological or intellectual standpoint, you'll have precisely the same results that psychology and intellectualism have always had on alcoholism. In other words, you'll have a zero result. What those things are are an exercise in humility and action. And he said the only thing of value about your prayer is your willingness to humble yourself before your God and say please and thank you. So I'd wake up on one of those days see I got back on track that time. I'd awake up on one of these days with the old brains spinning feeling all cut off and I'd make myself get down and say the words as best I can and get my meditation books out. Some of you may not be able to remember the last word I just read and may not make a bit of sense to me, but you know, I've read one of those things now how many thousands of times now? It's not a matter of me learning anything reading those things. It's a matter for me doing what I'm supposed to do. Then I can sit down and make my morning gratitude list, which is part of my meditation. We'll talk about that in the 10th and 11th step. even though I may not feel grateful for a thing. I may have sat there and think about five minutes before I can come up with something like my eyes or it may be one of those mornings where I have to just start thinking about things that a fellow would be grateful for if he had any sanity or any sense and write those things down and then I can do my list of things too and then go on into the office Now, I'll talk in probably the 12th step about big dealism because my alcoholism has always been a disease of big deals. Cherry told me that very early on. And what it is, on account of my ego, anything that I can make have anything to do with me, I blow up into a great big deal. Now, here's the character, though. You let something go wrong with my health, with my kids, with my money, with my sex life that sort of thing and it's just awful. On the other hand John can come to me with the same problem and I said I'd be St. Francis and sit there and tell him oh John don't you see this is such a little thing and God has got you in the palm of his or her hand get in your spiritual helicopter John rise up above it quit trying to figure out the pattern son Our job is to listen to that little spark of the divine and take the stitch. And God will lead you where it's at. John can go on away, and I can wonder, why would that poor fellow be so distraught over that? Same thing happened to me in five minutes. Oh, my God, it's the end of the world. For the simple reason it's my money, it' s my health, it' , my kids, it'' s my relationship life. and you know there are things that big dealism applies to things that it's just un-American not to make a big deal out of like your health, your kids and that sort of thing but here's the bottom line when I make a big deal out of anything anything kids, health whatever even having when I make a big deal out of having made a big deal out of something anything no exceptions When I make a big deal out of anything other than God and these 12 steps, what I'm really making a big bill out of is me. And when I do that, I'm back into ego. And I'm black into my alcoholism. But believe me, I have big deals just about every day. Some days, multiple big deals. So on this day I'm talking about, this day when I woke up with the brain spinning, I'm scared and I'm all cut off from God and you. I go on down to the office, and I'll be eat up with big deals on that day. I guarantee you it will all be big deals. And about 10 o'clock in the morning I may get a call, and I don't think I'm sponsoring a guy named Joe now, so we'll call one Joe. And it's Joe. Now just like I've told everybody that I ever started sponsoring, I have told Joe that for me to give advice on either finances or romances This really ought to be a felony, you know, based on my track record. And that I'm not a counselor about relationships or finances or employment. I'm a guide through the 12 Steps Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, with regard to being sponsored. But I've told Joe that. But despite that, he's called me eight times in the last 24 hours to talk about the girl. I could care less about Joe and that girl, you You know, and I eat up with these big deals. And I'm not going to be able to tell him anything that will do him any good. And I've explained to him that we do not talk ourselves well, that there ought to be more emphasis on listening to our sponsor instead of talking to our sponsor. But and every fiber in my being wants to tell my receptionist, oh, my God, Katie, take a number, tell Joe I'll get to him later. But instead of doing that, I can pray those magic 11-step prayers. that I will be done. I'm no longer running the show. And Lord, please let me seek to love, comfort, and understand Joe rather than to be loved, comforted, and understood. And I can keep running those through my head. And I could make myself say, put him through. And I couldn't pick up that phone still running the prayers through my head. And I coudl say, good morning, Joe. How are you, buddy? What can I do for you? and I can keep on running those prayers and they do loads of miracles in my life well we'll talk about that in the 11th step but one of the big miracles they do is they make me into something that I am not by nature they make be a listener you see without divine intervention without the magic from the steps when you are talking to me my brain will be going on probably four or five different levels a couple of them will be on what I'm going to say and how good that's going to sound in response to what you say. A couple of them may be totally unrelated to what we're even trying to talk about, okay? But if I run those 11-step prayers through my head, magic happens. And the first thing you know, the magic that Chuck Chamberlain talks about happens. i am giving my entire interest attention and love to joe and do you know when i can succeed in doing that joe when that stupid girl will become for that moment the most interesting thing on earth it's just amazing chuck says that that whatever i give my entire interest attentionand love to even if it's dressing or shaving actually the actual examples that Chuck uses. It will become the most interesting thing in the world. So I can get through that conversation with Joe, go right back to my big deals, which is probably what I will do. Come noontime, there's a meeting of the Jeffersonville Token Club every day at noon. I've been there hundreds of times. I know everybody that goes there. I can't hear thunder anyway. I mean, we have, I really do have a tremendous hearing problem. I got hearing aids now, but hearing aids are just marginal. And the acoustics in that room are terrible. And it's a great big old discussion meeting. And I know that I will literally not understand 20% of the words that are said. But it really doesn't matter because I know everybody in there and what they're going to say anyway, you know, on that. And, and it's, it's obvious that it can't possibly do me any good to go to that meeting. It's obvious that i am too busy to go to that meeting and that it would just be irresponsible to leave what i'm doing and going over there and i can make myself get out of that chair and i can make my self i can bring myself to that wonderful spiritual paradox and we'll talk about it more when we talk about 11 and 12 you know the question what am i getting out of this is just the wrong question for me. And here's why it's the wrong question. I don't care what I ask it about. I don't carry if I'm asking it about my life in Alcoholics Anonymous, my marriage, my children, my profession, my friends. You let me ask what am I getting out of this and study about it for about 30 seconds and the answer will be in some form or the other not quite enough so that's just the wrong question that's the spiritual paradox if i approach anything any situation any relationship in my life with the question what am i getting out of this it is an absolute spiritual law that i will not feel like i'm getting what i'm supposed to get out of it the only time it's possible for me to feel like I'm getting sufficiently rewarded for anything is when I'm trying to lay aside whether I get anything at all out of it or not. And when I am praying and asking rather than what am I getting out of this, when I' m asking what can I bring to this? And I can make myself go to that meeting but I don't have time to go. That's another paradox. You know our knee jerk is we don't have time to go to meetings, and the truth is I'm too busy not to go to meetings. There's something about going to meetings that magically expands time and energy. I have no concept of why that happens or how that happens, but it magically expands times and energy and I make myself go to that meeting. Long story short I can get through that day. I can still feel cut off from God. I could still feel a cut off from you. I can still be thinking it's all a bunch of crap, but I am absolutely guaranteed by this book that I won't pick up a drink alcohol that day because I have done the action. The action that is the process of maintaining my spiritual condition. Now, let's flip side to that coin. I can wake up feeling so centered and so at one with God that I just feel like I'm going to go floating out through the ether and merge with the towel. And after all, my whole life is a prayer. So why should I bother getting down on my knees and saying those simple words? I am so attuned to my God. And then when I get down to the office, I do the same thing by reading those meditation books. You know, compared to the spiritual level that I'm approaching now, those are trite and shopworn phrases. And when I get down to the office and Joe calls, I can really feel extremely warmly toward Joe, just be filled with spiritual love for Joe, but be so involved in moving myself to a higher level of self-contemplation and realization that I just cannot be interrupted in my spiritual ascent at that moment. And I can tell Katie that I'll have to get back to Joe, and I can make the decision not to go to that meeting but rather stay involved in my Spiritual Higher Education. And I am vulnerable to getting drunker and cooter brown on that day, even though I feel like I'm so centered. I feel like I am so good. I am in such a good spot. I'm not doing the action that day that is the maintenance of my spiritual condition, and that's what gets me the daily reprieve, not how I am, what I do on that particular day. And by the way, trudging has got a really important part in my life. When I first became open to spiritual things, after acting as if for long enough that that magic happened, I had this idea, I think, that spiritual growth or spiritual life would be like a gentle but steady incline going upward as long as I stayed on the path and tried to do the best I could. Here's what it is. Right today, nearly 30 years or so, there are days when I have to start over between 50 and 100 times. There are days where I get knocked over by self-will when for some period of time, whether it's five minutes or five hours, I effectively forget that I ever did a third step, that I never did a seventh step, that there's any such thing as an eleventh step to work on. I start going back trying to out-think, out-perform and out-maneuver and I wind up where that takes me every time I wind up in the snake pit. And I have to dust myself off after I've got self-will knock me in the dust one more time. I have dust myself off and say, Mom, Dad, I'm sorry. You know, I've done it so poorly but I'm going to try to take that next stitch in the right place like I was doing in my kind of comical the imaginary conversation with john here i'm gonna try to take that next stitch and get up and take another couple steps in the right right direction getting knocked over by self-will again and i thought for a long time that every time that happened getting knocked over by self-willed that it was an interruption of my spiritual growth but i found out that that process of stumbling and getting up and keeping trying to stumble in the right direction is the only spiritual growth of which i'm capable and i've also found out that my god seems to be perfectly all right with that my god doesn't require perfection from me he or she doesn't even really require consistency my god is okay with persistence just keeping on stumbling in that right direction and sometimes i'm stumbling so much it doesn't feel like to me it's working but when i look back over the days and the years of my life it is working uh i don't let the i don'T need to go back to letting how i feel about things be the final judge of everything because me acting and me letting how I feel and what I thought about things be The Final Judge has been nearly fatal to me the truth is every day of my life. I'm an ant floating down the river on a log. Now, if the ant wants to drive himself crazy running back and forth, thinks he's steering the log, then that's up to the ant. And many days, I'm my aunt running back-and-forth on that log trying to steer the darn thing. And the fact is, the log's going on. I just need to take care of my little ant business, is that next right thing that's in front of me and quit worrying about the log because I'm never going to understand where that log's going anyway and I'm not going to be able to have direct impact on where that logs going and I love it I'm going to digress going to take us on another side trip well no I'm gonna break it's time to break for a gift