Nobody Can Teach You Conscious Contact — When You Get Quiet Enough It Just Shows Up – Karen S.

My name is Karen, I'm an alcoholic, and my sobriety date is September the 8th.
Last Monday, 1988, celebrated 37 years of continuous sobriety.
Didn't really celebrate.
It was raining to the point where my ceiling fell in and water came up off the floor and,
you know, you got to call your person and he's sick and nothing went right for me.
It was all about me.
So I recognized it, but we didn't really celebrate, but it's all good, it's all good.
We also went out to dinner like a few nights later with friends of ours who are in the
room tonight and I didn't eat very much at dinner and I ate it tonight, which was a big
mistake.
So you may be hearing some of the dinner from Saturday night, that's all I'm saying.
Anyway, it's good to be here.
You look good to me.
I need you to be here tonight.
I need you to be here tonight.
We're going to talk about the 11th step.
But I want to remind you, I'm going to talk about the 11th step.
I want to roll back, I want to roll the tape back just a little bit and just do a tiny little
recap.
A lot of people here tonight I don't recognize, a lot of you I do recognize.
So I just, I think the most important thing that we can start out saying tonight is that
the first 10 steps is not a permanent fix, period.
Can't do the first 10 steps and think that that's it for you for the rest of the time.
It doesn't work that way.
As a matter of fact, if we don't keep practicing those steps, that obsession comes back.
I don't know why that is either.
You know, it's not a question of like, I have to do the steps again.
I have to do the steps again.
It's what I'm saying is that if we don't put them in our lives, take them off the wall
and put them in our lives and keep practicing these things, that obsession comes back.
And what we lose is we lose that freedom from thinking about alcohol.
And I don't know about you, but it's my thinking, which stayed with me long after I stopped
drinking.
And eventually the thinking gets so bad is that we have to drink.
I mean, everybody knows that.
That's not a big secret.
Why do you think they take that?
Think, think, think sign and have it upside down because that's who we are.
So the 12 steps in total are our plan for living.
And we got that.
And the only reason why it's our plan for living is because it worked better than my
plan.
My plan didn't work for me.
You know, I drank.
I thought I had a good plan.
But at the end of that plan, I drank, I drank or I used.
So it didn't work.
But in step 11, the interesting thing is, is that we come to understand how important
the first step is.
I didn't really see that for a long, long time.
But I now know that, you know, we weren't looking for spirituality in step one.
I can tell you that we were looking to stop drinking.
We were looking to feel better.
I want to be a little less crazy.
You know, I wasn't even concerned with in step one, what kind of a person I was.
Everybody else was concerned about that.
But I was not.
I just wanted to stop using and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
So the thing is, is that the most important thing about step one, we've already we've
already discussed this a hundred times, is that, you know, I was powerless over alcohol
when I was drinking it.
My life was unmanageable.
And I wasn't.
But I wasn't looking for any kind of spirituality.
But here's the thing.
In order to stop that insanity of the first step, I pretty much realized fairly soon is
that I'm going to need something else other than me, that I'm not going to be able to
be the one that actually makes this happen.
But here's the real interesting thing about this.
This is why I love AA, because we can't convince you that there's a higher power.
We don't have that.
I don't have the authority to do that.
I can convince you.
That I have a higher power, but I can't convince you that you have a higher power.
The only thing I can convince you of is that you're going to need one.
That's the only thing that I can convince you of.
After that, step 11, by the time we get there is an extraordinarily individual step.
As a matter of fact, people want to kill me for saying this, but if you have a great sponsor,
they can't help you, can't help you with step 11.
It is so personal.
It is so individual.
It's like getting married, which, you know, I know.
A lot about, it's like getting married.
And when you're going up there and you're about to say your vows, some of a guy walks up here and says,
I think I'm going to take you through these vows.
You know, who are you?
It's just, I'm just sponsor.
I'm going to take you through this.
It's between me and God.
It's between you and God.
Nobody can help you.
Sponsor can't help you.
They can tell you how it helped them, but they can't tell you how it's going to help you.
But here's the thing.
When you get to that point that you recognize that you need a higher power.
And that no one's going to be able to show you how to get that higher power.
A higher power shows up.
I don't know how that is, but that's how AA works.
You look up one day and you're not alone anymore.
You're not alone anymore.
You've got something there that you didn't have before.
So I say all this to say, um, I usually don't tell this story this time of year because it gets to me, but tonight I promised that I would.
So I will.
So on September the 8th.
Uh, 1993 for five years, almost five years, four years and 364 days.
Um, I was sober without God was sober without a higher power.
It can be done by the way, which is why we agnostics.
It's such an important chapter to read can be done.
It's easier with God.
I can tell you that, but it can be done without God.
And I faked it through five years.
I had an excellent sponsor at great AA posse.
I went to meetings, I sponsored people.
I was sponsored.
I did all the things they said to do.
And I had no God in my life.
Whatsoever.
And I was, um, married for the third time and after the first two times where I was drunk, I got sober in the third marriage and, uh, and I actually, it was the only marriage I got married in that I wasn't afraid, you know, that I fell in love and this guy was the guy for me.
And by the way, I gave away this guy over a bottle of wine.
So that tells you how great he was.
You know, I know how to make my choices, but the re but I stayed with him.
We loved each other.
He was my person.
He was my person.
You know, he understood, uh, he wasn't one of us.
He was a very spiritual guy.
And, um, we decided to get married because that's what I do.
That's, that's my solution.
I decided to get married.
We got married and, um, he had a son and I had a son.
His son was, um, six weeks younger than my son.
Um, what else did we have?
We were in a, we were interracial.
He was black.
I was white.
His kid was black.
My kid was white.
I wound up raising a little black child, a little white child.
And it was.
It was fiercely fabulous.
Um, but I didn't have any God in my life at all.
And we decided we wanted to have a baby ourselves.
We thought that would be a good addition, you know, like a weird little
Brady bunch kind of family that we're just going to make this happen.
And we tried for three years, um, three years of, of not succeeding.
And I really couldn't understand it because we both had kids with other
marriages, so we knew something was wrong.
And, you know, we just decided that we would go to our respective doctors one.
Day and come back and give the report.
And I went to my doctor and they ran all these kinds of tests on me.
And by the way, you know, my doctor was the one that delivered my son as a drunk pregnant woman.
So my doctor knew my background.
You know, she knew my alcohol background and she knew my drug abuse background.
And she said, well, we're going to check you out pretty good.
And we're going to see, maybe you're the problem.
And she said, you've got a clean bill of health.
You're good.
So that night we went to dinner and we're in a restaurant and I said, you know, um, everything's good with me.
And, uh, doctor says, I'm good to go.
He says, not so good with me.
I have AIDS.
Um, and we had been having, uh, we'd been trying to have a baby for three years, you know, um, I don't know.
I was only a couple of years sober, one year sober, something like that.
And all I could think of my first thought was, God, I have no idea why you gave me this life.
If you're just going to take it away now, because if you remember in the eighties and the nineties, we had AIDS, 100% mortality.
No.
Nobody lived.
It's a different, different scenario today, but nobody lived.
And so we went on this spiral really of, you know, drug testing and hospitals.
And every time he got sick, um, we went to the hospital and they would wrap us in plastic because nobody knew how you got it.
And everybody was scared and they were scared of what his own doctor died of AIDS.
And this is, I'm doing all of this with my family and not recognizing.
How far down I'm sinking again, how far down I'm sinking.
He's the one that's sick, but I'm the one that's dying.
And the only thing that is going right in my life is that I'm not drinking and I'm not using, and there is nothing else that is going right.
Anyway, towards the end, it got so bad that I remember walking down the streets.
We were in Brooklyn by then.
And I walked down the street and I, I didn't know it was like spit in my mouth or something.
I don't know, but I'm in New York.
I'll spit on the street in a skinny minute.
You know what?
I turned around and I spit on the street and I spit out a mouthful of blood and I thought you got a problem, girl, you got a problem.
I looked down at my hand.
My hand was bandaged because he kept wanting the window open and the window closed.
And finally I lost my patience and I put my fist through a plate of glass.
I mean, I was going down, he was sick and he was dying, but I was going down anyway, um, on the eve of my fifth birthday.
And I just actually had this conversation this afternoon on the eve of my fifth birthday.
We had a fight and I'd like to say we had a fight, but you need two people to fight.
And at that point he was no longer able to have a conversation with me.
He was talking to people on the walls and, uh, he had very few lucid moments.
And then we had these two kids and I had to watch the kids.
And we had this person who was coming in from the state to try to help us.
And the house was a wreck and, you know, nobody wanted to see us.
His family abandoned us.
My family abandoned us.
I had a couple of people in AA who used to come over, but they were afraid to walk in the door.
Yeah.
You have to remember the younger ones in here.
You don't, don't think about this now, but for the older people in here, you didn't go near anybody that had it because you had no idea what was going to happen.
But try taking two four-year-olds to the clinic to have them tested for AIDS every three months.
You know, that's what we had to do.
I had to do it.
I had 16 AIDS tests within four-year period.
And I went with my sponsor every time.
We used to go to Harlem.
It was, um, what do you call it?
Anonymous testing.
Because in those days, if you tested positive, they took your kids and I couldn't chance that.
And on top of that, it took three months to find out what your results for.
And, you know, we're alcoholic.
That's not, you know, my best asset is not waiting.
I can tell you that.
And so they would test me and I would wait three months.
And three months later, Albert and I would go back up to Harlem and they would tell me I was negative.
And they'd say, just one minute, we need to test you again.
And they did this every three months for four years.
I was.
I never got it.
The kids never got it.
I really, I don't know because the doctors had told us that his medical condition when they diagnosed him was so bizarrely low is that they figured he'd have had it for about 15 years.
And so, you know, medically, who knew what was going on?
Anyway, at the end, you could tell, you could walk in the house and tell something was desperately wrong in the house.
You know, we were all going down.
The kids were getting crazy.
I was getting crazy.
And he sat me down one day and he said, I'm ready to go.
And because I am who I am.
And because I had no God and because I thought that I could control this, I said, you're not ready to go.
I'm not ready for you to go.
The kids are not ready for you to go.
Everybody's ready for you to stay.
Let's just have some dinner and everything will be OK.
And then later on that night, we had a horrendous fight and or I had a horrendous fight.
And I screamed at him with such veracity over everything that was wrong that he fell to the floor.
He just fell to the ground and couldn't get up.
And.
And somewhere in that in that scenario, I croaked out an apology, which I'm so grateful that I managed to do that because we went to sleep that night and I was pissed and didn't sleep in the same room with him.
And when I woke up the next morning, he was gone and the front door was open and he hadn't been out of the house in years.
Front door was open and he was gone.
And on the piano was his wedding band, his wallet, his watch and some other.
And I began making phone calls and I called his family and started calling the neighbors and called people in AA.
And, you know, I'll tell you, if you get into trouble, just call AA, skip everybody else, just call the people in AA.
And they all came over to the house and they started making Xeroxes.
You've seen this in the movies of his face and they're all over the streets putting his pictures up.
And, you know, I wanted to go out looking for him.
And the police came and they said, you have to stay here because if he comes back here and doesn't see you here, he might get distressed.
And so I stayed.
I stayed in the house and I walked outside for about, I don't know, maybe an hour or two later and it started to rain.
And I've got a thing about the rain.
I've got a thing about water.
I've got a thing about the ocean.
And we'll talk about it later.
But as soon as it started raining, I thought, these are God's tears.
He's gone.
Anyway, about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you know, there was a knock at the door and the police were there.
And I had scoured the house.
And, you know, I got a little crazy.
I was a little crazy.
And I looked all over the house for him.
And I remember reading some kind of an article about Karen Carpenter.
And she went to kill herself.
They found her in a closet.
I went through every closet in the house.
I went under the beds in the house.
I went everywhere.
And he was, you know, nowhere.
And the police came about 3 o'clock.
And they said, you know, were you Mrs. So-and-so?
I'm like, I am.
And they said, you know, was this person your husband?
I said, he is.
I said, why are you talking in the past tense?
And they said, you are.
And then I realized what they were saying to me.
And they said, your husband is at St. Vincent's Hospital.
He jumped in front of a subway.
He got.
He got hit on impact.
He died.
And we need you to come and identify the body.
And, you know, there's nothing that prepares you for that.
There's nothing.
And the next thing I know, you know, his relatives were throwing themselves on top of me.
And everybody's screaming and crying.
And the police are there.
And they're like, you know, we'll take you down.
And I remember distinctly saying to them, don't worry about it.
I'll get a cab.
And no, no, no, no, we're going to take you down.
And they took us down.
And I was in the back of the car with his mother and his brother, his younger brother.
And we got to the hospital.
And they took me down, you know, down, down, down, down to the morgue.
And I had seen way too much law and order, I have to tell you.
I mean, I really would have done better without that.
You know, but they brought me in there.
And I was, you know, waiting for, I don't know what I was waiting for.
But when they brought me in there, they left me in there alone.
And he was already on the table.
And I walked over and I began to feel strange.
I began to feel really strange because I realized,
that I couldn't put my finger on it, but he had waited for me.
I could feel it.
I could feel it.
And I had more fear after he was dead than I ever had waiting for him to die from this horrendous disease.
And I went over to him and I put my head on his chest.
It still had pieces of glass in it from the subway.
And I started to talk to him and then I turned my face to him and some type of essence came out from him.
And I can't explain it except that the room got very bright.
And I started to breathe in this essence.
And the only thing I can tell you that it felt like was that I could breathe underwater.
It was like I had put my head underwater and taken a deep breath and I could feel this.
And I knew exactly what it was, even though I had never felt anything like that before.
But I knew that I was breathing in the essence of God, as sure as I was sitting there.
And because when I breathed it in.
And when I breathed it in.
And when I breathed it in, I felt a sense of God.
I couldn't hold my breath another second, the voice of God came to me and said,
with great God comes great love. And with great love comes great responsibility.
And then there was nothing. And then there was nothing. The doctors came in, the police came in,
his family came in. I couldn't speak to anybody. I couldn't possibly tell them what had happened
to me. I was still so filled with this. And 32 years later, I need to tell you that when I need
to, I sit and I get quiet and I breathe in and it breathes in all over again. And it has been like
that for over three decades. So I've heard the voice of God for years and years and years.
And I can't explain why it's me because I'm almost a godless, soulless woman out there on the street
after the war.
After 25 years of drinking and drugging, they used to find me on the streets of Broadway eating
out of garbage cans. How did this woman 32 years later breathe in the essence of God with this
message as I'm breathing it in that you have to do something about this? You don't get to get me
without giving it away. And that's pretty much been my life in AA. That's been my life.
So I go back when I work with people and they say to me, how do I find God? Well,
you sure as hell don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't
want to find him the way I found him. But it's when. It's not how. It's when. So I can tell you
what happened to me, but I can't tell you how it's going to happen for you. I just know that when you
get quiet, it'll happen. You have to be able to pay attention to see what is going on here. So
my conception of God was zero. I had no conception of God. And by the way, I teach that to people
that I sponsor.
Figure out what you want in God. Let's make up your own conception of God. I never had that.
I have no idea what my conception of God is, except my God is so big and so strong that there's
nothing that my God can't do. And I'm a hard leaner. I lean hard. And it tells me in the book
that I've been to human help and human help has failed me. So now I had a God. Now what do I do?
I have a God. And I've always heard this voice.
But he never told me what his will is. And when I would get to this 11th step with people and they
would say, well, if you've had this experience, and by the way, I don't speak about this anymore.
Like years, really, that this comes to mind. And mostly because this year on the anniversary of
his death, it was 32 years. He was 32 when he died. So he's now dead longer than he was alive,
which is unimaginable to me.
At the same time that I'm 37 years sober. And, you know, for 32 of those 37 years,
I've been giving God away. I've been trying to tell you that if you close your eyes and hold
my hand and breathe with me, you're going to feel the essence of God. Open your mouth. Don't breathe
in through your nose. There's not enough room. Open your mouth. So I want to talk a little bit
about, in this step about, they talk about prayer and meditation. I'm not good at either.
Haha.
I'm not good meditator, not good prayer. Done it. I do it. I do it all the time. I,
you know, a very famous man used to say, pray without ceasing.
And I do. You know, I don't get on my knees and pray. I don't have a set prayer. You know,
the 11th step tells me that I have a relationship with God and it's a conscious relationship with
him. And you think about how you develop a relationship with a human being and that's
talking.
I've loved in my whole life that content began with a conversation, you know, and nothing else.
And so I talk to God all day long. Um, I had a conversation last night with somebody at, uh,
one of the meetings I go to in Delray. He's a lovely guy and he's all about, uh, breathing
and, you know, this and, and that. And I said to mom, I'm all about the crime.
Okay.
Cause I don't understand. I said, I cry all the time. You know, I'm a strong woman. I'm
a faithful woman. I have a God who, who resides within me and I cry every day. And sometimes,
times a day and I'm not sad. You need to know that crying has nothing to do with being sad.
You can be sad and cry. That's okay. But because you're crying, because I'm crying, it doesn't
mean I'm sad. It means I'm getting rid of something. I'm getting rid of something and
I'm making more room for God. We did it in the fourth step. We do it in the ninth step. We did
it in six. We did it in seven. We're constantly unloading, unloading so I can make more room
for God. And if you don't understand your God, it doesn't matter. Nobody wants a homeless God.
Everybody wants God within themselves. You know, Chuck C., Chuck Chamberlain, one of the founding
fathers of this organization used to say, if you're looking for God, what you're looking for,
you're looking with. He was pretty clear about that. You know, he used to tell a story. He was
a weird old guy, but he was a deer hunter. And I guess deer hunting,
it was acceptable wherever he was, you know, living. And anyway, he was coming out of the
deer hunting place. Guys, you can correct me on my vernacular later. I don't really know what
it's called, but the deer hunting place, you know, whatever that is. The what? The woods.
Okay. Oh my God, that's so sad.
I am such a New Yorker. The woods. Coming out of the woods. And he had a truck also. I know it's a
truck.
I don't know what kind, but it was a truck. And he was coming out of the woods with the truck.
And in the back of the truck, he had two dead deer that he had, you know, shot or bow and arrowed. I
don't know what he did. And this guy came over and he said, you know, I'm here. I also want to go
into the woods and kill some deer. And, you know, and where are they? Where are they?
And Chuck looked at him. He said, you see them where they are. You don't see them where they're
not. And he says, oh, oh. So the guy goes into the woods. He had no idea that.
Chuck was sending him on this spiritual journey because you see them where they are. You want to
find God? God is where he is. He's not where he's not. He's not where he's not. Some things I knew
up front, I was pretty certain God wasn't in the bar. I was pretty certain that God wasn't in the
shooting gallery. You know, but now I know that, you know, what I'm looking for when I'm looking
for God, I stand in front of the mirror because God lives within me. And by the way, I don't know
if it's good and I don't know if it's bad, but I can tell you, I don't have any choice about it.
I don't have any choice about housing the size of the God that I house. And I've had tried to
have this conversation. Bizarrely enough, don't do this. I've tried to have this conversation
with clergymen. Don't do this. Don't tell them that you have God living inside of you
and that you don't need to be in a synagogue or in a church to be able to find God
because they just want you gone. And please don't tell anybody else what you're telling me
because they want their pulpits filled. But my God lives within me. I don't need to be in church.
And if you want to look around, you know, everybody's in here with their concept of God.
So praying for me is a little controversial because I don't pray for anybody. And I know
that it pisses people off and it pisses them off to the point when I tell them I don't pray for
anybody because it tells me I don't pray for anybody. I just do what the step says to do.
And it doesn't say to pray for anybody. And the reason it doesn't say to pray for anybody,
and this is the controversial part,
is because that's a tacit acknowledgment that I know more than God. You know, your mother's sick.
I'm so sorry she's sick. Oh, I'll pray for her. That says, I know you're busy over here, God,
doing something else. So don't worry about it. I'm going to take care of this guy's mother
because you're too busy. It's not how it works. It's not how it works. I have to have enough faith
in my God and faith in the universe to know that everybody's got a higher power, that I can hope
that your mother's okay, and I can have faith in you. And I'm going to pray for everybody.
I have faith that God will help her. But I'm not God. And my prayers, you don't want my prayers.
You want God. You don't need me. And I have said this a million times, and many times I've said
this from the podium, people will invariably call me and write me and discuss with me how wrong that
theory is. And that, you know, this gives me respect and this gives me this and this is not
about me. It's about God. Because what it takes is God to help me. And I'm going to pray for everybody.
And that's what God tells us in the 11th step as we get the power back. It's about God. It's not
about me. So what do I pray for? I've said it before. I pray for clarity. Just let me see this
the way it is. I had to do it, you know, today. Let me see him for what he is and who he is and
not for who I want him to be. And I pray, pray, pray all the time. And then I pray for courage
to see if there's anything I'm supposed to do. And the most courageous thing I can do
is nothing.
Absolutely nothing. And leave it to God. You know, I don't know what it is. You know, I would
tell you back for a second that Albert, my sponsor, made me talk about this story about what happened
in the morgue for years. He said, I want you to go to every AA meeting you could possibly go to.
And I want you to talk about it all over the place because people need to know that this can
actually happen. And that you're walking around like a regular person still making mistakes and
still cursing.
And, you know, you're not on some kind of a pedestal anywhere. Anyway, you know, after
after he died, we got back from the morgue and I didn't know what to do. I made a phone call to my
friend Michael. I always say Michael in case he listens to this at some point. And Michael
celebrated 45 years the other day. I mean, I love this man. He's been in my life forever. And
he he's the only person alive, actually, who remembers me drinking and using. He used to
come to my apartment in Manhattan and sit on the couch to make sure I didn't OD. I mean,
that's a friend. So he got sober. He was sober when he came over. And, you know, when I didn't
know and he said, I said, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. And he said, go to an AA
meeting. I mean, get there and the speaker hasn't shown up volunteer to speak. And so I went to a
meeting in Brooklyn. I'm a real snob. We were living in Brooklyn, but I only went to Manhattan
meetings. So I didn't know anybody in these. Sorry for anybody from Brooklyn. I didn't know
anybody in the Brooklyn meetings that I showed up and they said the speaker's not here. Will
someone volunteer? I volunteered to speak and I walked up and there's my my upstairs
sitting right there. You know, and these are the neighbors that I lied to for years about what
was going on with us. I would say he's going to Atlanta. He's going here. My husband was in the
entertainment business. So they were you know, he was he was in the music business. So he traveled
a lot. Anyway, so, you know, they were there. And so years and years later, and I'm telling
this story to everybody who will listen. This woman calls me up and she said, you know, hi,
Karen. You know, this is Lucy from the whatever meeting. And I said, hi, how are you? She said,
I'm good. I'm just calling to let you know that my husband, John, died. So I said, oh,
I'm so sorry that that happened. You know, when did it happen? And she said right now.
But I heard your story and I knew that you made a call. So I'm making the call.
You know, the 11th step is not for everyone. I need to tell you, once you get there,
there's no turning back. There's no turning back. It's exquisitely individual. It's a
relationship that's beyond your wildest imagination. And it's the longest,
running relationship I have in my life. It is the longest, certainly lasted any longer,
longer than any of my marriages, for sure. You know, that I can't turn around and tell
people I'm married to God. They'll think I'm a nun. But it's the longest relationship of that
type that I have had. So that's what I do. That's how I pray. I don't pray for anybody. I pray for
clarity and I pray for courage with the understanding, by the way, that I know
from breathing this in that God doesn't make anything happen.
He doesn't make good things happen and he doesn't make bad things happen. I grew up in a house,
you know, where, you know, we would say, Daddy, what are you doing this weekend? And he'd say,
God willing, we're going to the movies. I now know that God doesn't give a shit if we go to
the movies or not. God does not make anything happen. Stuff happens. Good stuff happens.
Bad stuff happens. What God gives me is the strength to deal with whatever happens.
Whatever happens.
I have my God. And if you're an alcoholic and a drug addict like me,
it's more important for me to have a God when the good things are happening.
Because my tendency was to use when I felt euphoric. Because when I felt bad,
that's my default setting. I know what that feels like. But when I was feeling good,
what am I going to do with that feeling? When things are going well, when I have the man of my
dreams, the job of my life, I'm going to have my God. And if you're an alcoholic and a drug addict
like me, it's more important for me to have a God when the good things are happening. Because my
tendency was to use when I felt bad, that's my default setting. And if you're an alcoholic and a drug addict
The house of my dreams, the house of my dreams, I know I better get rid of all of it. I better get
in the car and go. That's where my head goes. But that's where my God says, it's time to just
sit and look at the water and breathe me in. Just take a big breath. Everything will be okay.
And the thing is about having a God in your life, if you really sit down and think about it,
all it really, really means is if you close your eyes, you know that everything is already,
okay. It's already okay because God's got you. That's it. So there's nothing I have to think
about it, nothing I have to do because I've prayed for clarity and I've prayed for courage
and the rest is up to God. So that's my prayer. I don't do it in the morning. I'm not recommending
any of this, by the way. This is just me. I do it all the time. I do it all the time because
I need it all the time. I work with a lot of alcoholics. I work with a lot of
crazy people who are not alcoholics. I need prayer all the time. I need conversation.
I don't start, you know, anything else out. I have conversations with God all the time.
And that's what keeps me strong. So I want to talk a little bit about meditation while we're
on things I don't know how to do. I clearly do not come off as a person who meditates. I
make no bones about that. Meditation was always hard for me. My feeling of meditation is put me
in a dark room with a chair, make me meditate, make sure there's a 45 in there so I can shoot
myself in there. I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that.
I had no intention. I mean, what do I do with my life for 60 seconds when my sponsor says,
just take 60 seconds and do nothing? You know how long 60 seconds is? To do nothing,
to think about nothing. And I said, how do you think about nothing? He says, it's your thoughts
that got you into trouble to begin with. It's your thinking that gets you into trouble to begin with.
It's like your thinking is waiting for you to wake up in the morning. And as soon as you wake
up and says, I don't make enough money, as soon as you wake up.
Or you wake up, he's going to leave me. Oh, my God, my thinking is there. And so meditation. And
that's why, by the way, that's why the majority of alcoholics pray and meditate in the morning.
It's not that they're so spiritual. They can't stand the thinking, the static, you know, because
when you look at the 10th step, by the way, where we just came from, when it talks about, you know,
when we're disturbed, there's something wrong with us. What is wrong with us? We're disturbed. How do
I know that? Because I'm thinking about it. I can't stop thinking about what is because nothing,
what's disturbing me, because there's nothing physically happening to me at that moment.
I'm just thinking about it. And so I had to find a way for me to learn how to meditate very hard.
So I have a special relationship with the sea. Everywhere I've lived, except in Manhattan,
I've lived by the water. And I look at the water and I think the answers are in the water.
You know, I'm good for getting in my car and going to the ocean,
or going to a lake and disappearing for a couple of days and just staring at the water,
because that's it. I think that's where the answers are. I see God more clearly in the water
than anything else. But this goes back to, you know, old habits. At the end of my drinking,
I was, you know, I was drinking in the shower. There's more water. You know, I cry all the time.
There's more water. You know, I have this sort of unusual relationship with water that I love.
But my relationship with God is all about what Step 11 is talking about.
Okay, so, my God, I had all these things to say, and I didn't read any of them. So there we go.
In the old days, they used to talk about if you want to clear out a room of AA,
just talk about God. People just walk out all the time. You know,
I don't know who those people are, but I know they walked out. People walk out. It's hard to listen
about God. It's hard to listen to somebody talk about God. I either feel like I'm playing catch-up
or they're just like, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing.
There's some kind of a competition that I'm not as good as you, or I don't have a God,
and what am I going to do? But the reality is you do. You do. And the reason I know that
is because I do. And I've worked with enough men and women, and I sponsor men and women
to know that it's there. You just have to get quiet enough to listen for it. It's all you need
to do. The other thing I want to say is that,
as much as I loved my sponsor, when it came to the 11-step, I sought help from an old-timer.
He's a kind of famous old-timer, Sandy B., Sandy B., who lived up in Tampa, but he was an
old friend of mine. And he was really wonderful, and I was so distraught when he died. Because I
used to go to him with these problems, because the reason I went to him with these problems is
because his daughter died when my husband died. And his daughter died badly. She was murdered,
and the guy that murdered her,
pulled her up in a rug and put her in the back of the house like the garbage, so nobody
knew where she was for a very long time until they found her. And I had gone through that
because when they found my husband on the tracks at West 4th Street, he didn't have
any identification on him. And so they went through a whole big thing of trying to figure
out who he was. And the police had given him a ticket for jumping the turnstile, like two
stops before. And if they had not given him the ticket, nobody would have found him. Nobody
would have known who he was. And so Sandy and I used to talk about that.
And he would say the most important thing that you can remember, two things. And one we just
talked about, that God doesn't make anything happen. God didn't kill his daughter. God didn't
kill my husband. God didn't give my husband an AIDS. God didn't make me not have AIDS.
God didn't do any of those things. He said, no matter what happens to you in this world,
it should not change your opinion of God.
Or anything at all. No matter what happens to me, what happens to my family, what happens
to my loved ones, it does not change my opinion of God. It's the same opinion I had before
anything bad happened or anything good happened. So the conscious contact is the point of this
point. It's not just like knowing God. It's knowing God on a conscious level all the time.
That's why I talk to God all the time, because that's the thing that tells us, you know,
tells us if I'm talking all the time that everything is already okay. I'm the only one
who didn't know it. And that's important to remember. You know, when it looks very dark,
everything's really okay. Everything's really okay. I just don't know it yet. And Albert
taught me that when I would get my results from my AIDS test. And I would say, I can't
wait any longer. I can't wait any longer. And he would say, you don't have to wait at
all. The results are in already. You just don't know what they are. And I thought that
was harsh.
So I want to finish up a little bit and talk about the 11-step prayer. And I'm glad Pat
is here because we're very different on how we look at this 11-step prayer. It's very
important for me, who I am, to understand that the 11-step prayer is about peace. It's
about peace. It's about becoming a channel. So I had to look up what a channel is. And
a channel is a body of water, a short body of water between two places. That's it. It's
not going around the bend.
It's not going through towns. It's just this little thing of water going between two places.
The problem is, as an alcoholic, with things that have happened in my life, each one of
these resentments or terrible things I did, I put a rock up in that channel. And so it
was impossible for that water to go from that short space here to the short space here because
of all the rocks that I had put in. So it was explained to me by the greats, by Sandy,
by Clancy, by Albert.
Your only job here is to do whatever you need to do to pick up a rock one at a time and
get rid of it. And one day you will look up and that channel is just whooshing back and
forth, and it's water! So you know I love that. I love the channel and the water and
that's all that it is. But now I look at it, and this same prayer, I've removed all the
rocks so I can do this channel, is for peace.
So I shouldn't be too afraid to outer tilt around it and say that to myself, and be more
am peace is the most important thing in my life right now I don't know how else
to explain it um you know we we look at the world today I look at the world
today on a daily basis on a daily basis I don't feel safe I don't feel wanted I
am I feel threatened most of the time I do everything I possibly can to dispel
that I'm not a good person to dispel that I'm going to hurt you to dispel all
of these crazy crap that goes on out there I just want peace so I'm not an
activist not running around not doing anything I'm swimming in the channel
that's what I'm doing I'm swimming in the channel and in this channel I'm
doing the right thing I'm helping another alcoholic I'm showing you where
God is I'm taking you through the steps I'm going to meeting I'm sponsoring
people I'm being sponsored I speak a lot because that's how I do service and
that's how I stay in the channel with no rocks that's how I stay in there so I I
also want to bring up one more thing about conscious contact with God which
is bizarro but it's right there on the step I didn't write this is that you
know we don't know what God's will is I mean maybe there's you know some sin
stuff here in the room I don't know but I don't know what God's will is
I'm pretty sure I'm doing it right now.
I'm pretty sure staying sober a day at a time
and trying to help another alcoholic
is what God's will is for me.
I don't know.
When I die, he can say you wasted 37 years.
You know, I don't know.
But that's what I think that it is today.
But it tells me the 11th step.
Look at that.
I got the power back.
I worked all this time.
I did all these things you told me to do.
And what was my reward?
I got the power back.
What am I supposed to do with the power?
Not Karen.
Not Karen.
Karen, whatever God wants me to do with the power,
what am I supposed to do?
I don't have the directions.
Oh, AA has the directions.
What I do with the power?
I work the 12th step.
That's what I do with the power.
All of it gets channeled into the 12th step.
And we're going to talk about the 12th step next week.
Not so much how we do the 12th step,
but why we do the 12th step.
It's good night to be sober.
Thanks so much.