Prayer and Meditation Built from Seven Books and One Rule — Help Others, Harm Nobody – James H.

It's good to be here. Good to see everybody. And I wanted to say about James, I really have really learned to respect and really love James in the last couple of years. I didn't know him the first couple of years I came to Napa. I don't know that we ever spoke. He's not like me. He kind of stays below the radar, but he was the caretaker here for many years and did a great job. And last year he had some, and still has some, really, really serious health concerns that caused him to give up that job and move out. And, you know, everybody loved him and said we're with him. We didn't expect James to do anything. James, when he was here, was always the first person here on any special event, the first person in the kitchen working, the last person to leave. And he had to move out. He no longer gets a dime from Napa. You know, he has an apartment. He and Jerry. And yet, everything we have done here, as far as for the members, for meals or whatever, since he moved out, we get here, and without being paid, living off the premises, James is still the first person to get here, works harder than anybody else, and he's the last person to leave every time. And that says a whole lot more to me about somebody than anything they can say in a meeting, personally, to me. And I really appreciate him. He is incredibly upbeat. I really look forward to seeing him every time, and he's a great asset and a great friend of Napa. So, I welcome our speaker, James. ...more than most people. Can everybody hear me? Okay. Well, listen, I am James, and I am an alcoholic. Hey, James. And I did something different this time. I've told my story two or three times. But I did something different. I actually made some notes in preparation for this one. Although I'm not sure that I'm going to follow it, I decided that I would come up here and I would tell you about me. And like the literature says, tell you a little bit about how I developed my relationship with what I now call God. And he is my higher power. And I'm glad to be here. I'm very fortunate to be here. Like Tim said about this business last year, I was told I had a month to live. And they said, do you want to take the chemo and try to live, or do you want to not take it and die? And I said, hell, give me the chemo. Like I had an option. But I'm told that some people... Do, in fact, refuse to do the chemo. Because, you know, a lot of people that have that kind of cancer are a lot older than I am. And if you're in your 80s or something, and you are invited to take something that might kill you, you might be afraid of that. So, at any rate. But it's hard to follow that good an introduction. But I'm sure going to try. I just... I had a reading. I had a reading a couple of days ago when I first started doing my notes for this. And the reading went something like this. Well, first of all, I was born in January 22, 1945. And my sobriety date is July 8, 2000. And I really am just very proud to be here. And fortunate. But at any rate. I said I was doing some reading. And the reading said to me, and I'm going to quote here. It says, Remember who you knew you were when you were a child. And I thought about that. And so my outline is going to follow more or less that. I was, as a child, first of all, if I'm an alcoholic, I came back. The real way. I had alcoholic parents. My father was an alcoholic. All my brothers ahead of me were alcoholics. And so if there's anything too hereditary, alcoholism, then I fit it. I don't think there is. I don't go along with that. I think environment does an awful lot. But I don't think you have hereditary in your genes the thing that's going to make you an alcoholic when you grow up. At least I don't think that. It may be. One of these days they might find a little thing in there and say, Hey, this person's going to be an alcoholic. But I don't think so. At any rate. So what kind of a child was I? I considered myself first and foremost a hustler. And I mean that seriously. Because at five years old, I built myself a shoe shop. And I went downtown on the streets in Chattanooga to shine shoes. To make some money. And most of that money would come right back home to my family. That meant that I would be out late at night at 12 or 1 o'clock. It was nothing new. Get up in the morning and go to school. But I also was competitive. And I was a winner. When I was a child, I was a winner. Now this went on really between. I mean, ages of from 0 to 15. I did play the normal sports. Enjoyed what everyone enjoys growing up. Often you hear that some people give you this story about they didn't fit in. Hell, I didn't want to fit in. You know, even back then, coming up, I was kind of like a leader organizer. And when I was seven years old, they had a little mint sale. And all the kids were selling mints. I don't know who the hell sold them to. But I sold mints too. And I sold most mints in the city of Chattanooga. So, starting out early in life, I was a competitor. And I was a winner. And, for some damn reason or another, back then, I don't consider myself now, but back then, I was smart. I was fortunate. I went to school. I never took any books home or did any homework at home. I did all my homework at school before I left school. Now, how did I do that? I don't know. I was one of those, while everyone else was following and writing and taking notes and all this shit, I was twiddling my thumbs. Because I knew what was going on. You know, that's the way I learned as I was growing up. I watched people. And I became a people-watcher and a people-size-er-upper, you might say. During that time, zero to fifteen years old, I got drunk for the first time. Well, first of all, let me say, I used to go down with my older brother to the Moonshiners there in Chattanooga, and he would pick up moonshine. I didn't drink then. But one day, when I was eleven years old, a friend and I were walking through a park, through a parking lot up there in Chattanooga, and we spotted a pint of liquor in this car. And I don't know what it was. We just decided we were going to get that bottle of liquor and drink it. And we did. We got the bottle of liquor out of the car, sat on the curb, drank it. It was a pint of harvest grain alcohol. And I think that's about 189 proof. So, we drank it right there on the curb. And I woke up the next morning, middle of the night rather, asleep on this little grassy mound between the sidewalk and the road there in Chattanooga. And that's the first time that I ever got drunk. And you know, I don't think I really liked it. But when I woke up, I just hustled on home, got home. That was the first introduction, personally, to alcohol. I'm not going to sit up here tonight and give you an alcohol, I've drunk a lot, by the way. But that was when it started. I, at the age of 15, there was a bad accident involved in my life. There was a single car accident. And at that time, at the time of the accident, they were saying there were five people killed. And that I was one of those five people. However, they pronounced me dead on the scene of the accident. Later, when they got me back to the, what is Chattanooga's Grady, up in Chattanooga's Erlanger. But when they got me there, somehow or another, I started coming back. You know, I woke up in the middle of the night, in the hospital, don't remember a damn thing about the accident or how it happened or anything. But I lost my mother in that accident. Okay. So, at that time, when I got out of the hospital, our family just kind of broke apart. And because my father was an alcoholic and he couldn't hold anything together. I'm sure that everybody in here, some people in here may be familiar with that. But I was farmed out to a cousin. And I use the word farmed out because that's basically what it was. Okay. But at that age, at age 15, I was independent, I was stubborn, and she just couldn't deal with me. She wanted to put her thumb down on me and try to control everything I did and everything I thought and everything that went on. And so I only lived with her about three months. So, to begin with, I grew up real fast. I moved out from her, and I started living by myself. I got a job. Quit school. Just started having a big old time. I hitchhiked all over the country. Wound up. I was in Washington, D.C. And for a whole year, I didn't do a damn thing but work, party, and sleep. Didn't have anything going on but that. However, when I came back to Chattanooga, I had a brother who was in the Marine Corps. I went down on my 17th birthday and voluntarily joined up for the Marine Corps. Not too many people do that. Not at 17. But I did. I went to Parris Island. And at Parris Island, they decided that I had something wrong with my left eye and I wouldn't make a very good Marine. But I enjoyed the time there. I enjoyed the time I was there because I was still a competitor. So I left there. Left the Marine Corps. Again, started moving around. Hitchhiking here. Working, etc. Still drinking. I started drinking pretty heavy when I was 15 years old. And for the next five years or so, that's what I did. But I wasn't drinking to run away from something. I was drinking because it was the thing to do. And all my friends were drinking. Now, you might say, well, what kind of friends do we have? Well, we've got a room full of alcoholics and we know that when you are drinking, you kind of congregate together. So most of your friends are drinking. That went on, as I say, I quit school in the ninth grade at Red Bank High School. I remember that. So for the next five years, six years maybe, all I did was party, get drunk, and have a good time. When I was 21, I moved to Atlanta. That was 65, 66. Met this young lady. Her name was Nina. And we decided we'd get married. We got married and we had our first child in December of 66. Well, this woman was a big inspiration to me. And she inspired me, kind of pushed me, you know, sometimes to go to school and get my GED. And directly after getting my GED, I started college. And again, you have to remember, at that time, I was smart. I went to college for four years. Drove a cab. I drove a cab three nights a week. Back then, you could make some money driving a cab. Nowadays, it's not that easy. But I worked three nights a week, went to school full time during the day. I finished four years of college in two and a half years. So, like I say, I was smart. But I wasn't so smart in the sense that when I got out of Georgia State in August of 72, with an A-B, in psychology, you could take that A-B in psychology and stick it on your bathroom wall. Because there wasn't any jobs around here for an A-B in psychology. But somewhere along the way, I picked up some experience as an accountant. So I went to work for this company, a mid-sized company called Walker, Toome & Dye, out in Fulton Industrial Area. Maybe some of you remember it, maybe you don't. But anyway, went in there, and you have to remember, I'm still a competitive, cocky little guy. And went in there, and my starting salary was $800, $8,000 a year, rather. And within a year and a half, I had doubled my salary to $16,000. And I did that by not asking for a responsibility, but just taking the damn responsibility for everything that went on. You don't see that too often nowadays. But again, it was the drinking, it was the... I was married at the time, living in Villarica, Georgia. And my wife and I, we just thought, you know, the best thing to do with this shitty little marriage is just have another baby. You know, that was a smart thing to do. So my daughter was born in January of 74. And in December of 74, this company that I had a pretty good job with, they went bankrupt. But back in that time, economics were about like they are today. You didn't have any kind of guarantees. So, what we did, guess what? I decided to call in my psychology thing. It was so bad back then that the state was hiring up social workers, welfare workers, all over the place. So I went to work for the state as a welfare worker. And I got the bright idea, well, I've got this degree that's sitting here doing nothing. Why don't I go back to school and get another one to do nothing with? So that's what I did. I went back to Georgia State, took their, let's see, it was a Master's in Counseling and Psychological Services. I finished that degree in 77. But in the interim there, my wife and I decided that since the baby didn't make our marriage any better, we might as well split up. And so we did. In 76, we were divorced. And I had two children and an ex-wife. And oh, by the way, the reason I divorced her is because I thought she was pretty crazy and she had papers to prove it. And she wanted me to be crazy with her. And I said, no, I don't think so. So anyway, we divorced. That should carry us through probably 77, 78. By that time I had my Master's degree from Georgia State. And I decided that I was going to do some work in the professional world other than the social work that I had been doing. And so I started doing some work. And I was, of all things, I don't know if too many people might not know what a psychometrist is. A psychometrist is that guy, that does psychological testing. Batteries of tests for this and that people, you know. Most of the people I dealt with were in group homes. They were kids, children from 0 to 18. And you talk about uncooperative. Most of those folks were uncooperative. But part of that deal of doing those psychological evaluations was that I got to go to the prisons and do pre-release psychological evaluations. And you want to talk, those guys knew when I came in there whether they got out or not depended on what I put down on that paper. And they were very eager to please. Cooperative? Yeah, they cooperated. But I may be getting all alone here. After in 1980, anybody remember the snow gem of 1980? Yeah, okay. The interim there was another marriage. This marriage was one that I concocted myself. It was a contract marriage. And I put in some pretty decent things in there. I said that it was a one-year renewable marriage and if we decided after a year we didn't want to renew the thing, we didn't have to. Basically. And that lasted for about five years. Actually, if you want to know about that, I'll tell you more about that in private. But from that time on, from the 1980s until 1997, I was just pretty much a drunk. I wasn't concerned about getting anywhere or doing anything. I was still a hustler. I was what I considered self-employed. I'd do little things. I had business cards made up. Said, Mr. Fix-It Man, give me a call. He'd make it down what you had broke. Call me and I'd come and fix it. And did pretty good for a while. I was so busy in the drinking then. You know, I got fired from the job one time in 1986. No, 88. And I just couldn't understand why those folks fired me. I came to work drunk every day and drove a forklift around some mighty expensive equipment. And, you know, I just couldn't understand why they fired me. I considered myself doing a good job. Yeah, right. Well, if you've ever been an alcoholic, you know that you can think that shit about yourself, but it just ain't true. But anyways, between 97, between 80 and the early 90s, I was living with another woman and I married her. And in the early 90s, we decided we'd split up again. So, I'm not a woman-a-logger either, but I will say I've been married five times. And back then, it was real simple, you know. I was an egotistical alcoholic and it was either my way or the damn other way. And that's the way I worked with it. Now, 94, open heart surgery. Again, I'm 49 years old and I have open heart surgery. That's not real good. Most people don't have open heart surgeries until they get in their 60s. But some do and some don't. At any rate, so I had the surgery. I just busted up with my third wife. Decided... No, I didn't decide. Actually, I started getting some DUIs and I don't know how many folks have had DUIs, but DUIs are cumulative. Once you start getting the damn things, you just keep getting them on. So, started getting some DUIs and got the third one. They suggested, the court suggested that I go to an outpatient chemical dependence group or alcohol... A and D groups, they called them then. Alcohol and drugs with GRN. Anybody familiar with GRN? Okay, well, that's where I went. And also, that was the first time that I came to NABBA. And believe it or not, I came down here... I only for about six months, I think. But... Came in. I enjoyed the fellowship. I remember... I walked up to Jack downstairs after I'd had about two months clean. I said, what do you do to get... join this place? And he said, well, you gotta have 30 days clean. I said, I got 30 days clean. He said, no, you don't. Dammit, you're lying. And I said, well, I really do have 30 days. So, I joined the club. I enjoyed, like I said, the fellowship. I remember coming here to a Halloween dance party that year. And my daughter had helped dress me up as the Joker. I don't know if anyone was here then, but she made good a good deal. And I looked almost exactly like the Joker. Had the lapel and purple jacket and all this stuff. The face really made up and the hat. The whole nine yards. I looked like... the Joker did. And I won that Halloween costume party that year. And it was good. Like I said, I was enjoying myself. But one of the things, when I was doing that outpatient therapy out there, I told my counselor that I had a pint of moonshine on my dresser at home. And she says, well, you better throw that thing away because if you don't, you're gonna drink it. And I said, shit, are you kidding? No. I'm not gonna drink it. Well, guess what? She was right. I drank the thing. Went back to drinking. Decided... Let's see, no, they... Again, they... I didn't decide. The courts decided in 99 that I needed to go to jail. Wasn't the first time, but there was a couple of times I went to jail. But this time, what had happened, again, I think I'm the smart guy, but by then, I'd had a bunch of damn brain cells all burned up. So after, you know, 20, 30 years of drinking, that happens. But so I went to court and convinced the guy that I needed residential treatment. And the judge looked at me and said, yeah, I understand that you're an alcoholic. And you need that treatment center. He said, but you also need to give me a year. And I said, oh, shit. Another way, I was just trying to ease in under the radar, as they say. But, so I went to jail for a year. When I got out of jail, they said that I had to go to the treatment center. Well, smart-ass me, I'm gonna try to get out of that, too. And I did for about six months. I went to a lawyer out there in Snowville who knew the judge that had sentenced me. And he says, well, I know this judge and he's not gonna rescind, he's not gonna modify a sentence or anything. He's just not going to do that. And I said, well, but he said, if you want me to, for $1,500, I'll go talk to him. Well, I wasn't that damn dumb. You know, I burned up that many brain cells. You may remember that. It may be there now. The turnaround program. It's right here. A lot of people know about them. I went into the turnaround program. But again, at the time, I was drinking again. But I was on a limit of three beers a day. So this was a Friday. The first one took me over to the turnaround. And I went in there for an interview. And of course, I'd already drank my three beers for the day. It was about 12 o'clock. And they looked at me and they said, you know, you can't even come here right now. You go home for three days and come in on Monday. And we'll get you registered and signed up and all this stuff. So I said, okay. And I did that. Came to the turnaround on July the 8th. It was Monday. And by that time, I'm familiar with AA. And familiar with the fact that I had a problem. The turnaround started in, like I said, July of 00. And made in my mind that at that time that I was going to give AA I haven't said all along along with so-called being smart. I was stubborn as hell. So when I came back to Napa for the second time through turnaround, I didn't want to stop drinking. Didn't want to stop drinking at all. But I was stubborn and I had made up my mind that I was going to give AA a shot. And I did. At turnaround, I don't know if any of you guys know this, but they used to have 52 rules, written out rules, 51 actually, for all the participants of their program. And rule number 52 was that they will add the other rules as we go along. I see some smiles so you must know about it. At any rate, I'm in turnaround. I'm coming to the meetings and I'm doing exactly what I'm told to do. Right behind that curtain over there, every morning at 7.30, they have an early morning study group. After some time, I made that my home group. AA is pretty much an atheist. You know, I didn't believe in God, didn't want to hear about God, didn't do anything like that. But I got fortunate because you guys told me that I could take the group as my higher power. And so that's what I did. I realized that there might, there's a certain number of people in a group, but there's always, at least in AA, there's always something else going on. And I think mathematically, they say that the sum is greater than its parts. The sum of the whole is greater than its parts. I believe that. So, for a while I took my group as a higher power. And I knew that, let's see, I'm getting ahead of myself. In November 2000, I was at the VA, they decided that I had colon cancer and that I needed to do something about that. And when they saw the colon cancer, they said, well, we're going to take you in right now, take you upstairs and do that. And I said, no, we're not going to do it that way because I need to get my affairs in order. And I did. I had to get funding from somebody to cover my fees at turnaround, living expenses, and et cetera. And that I needed 30 days to do that. They said, okay, go and do it, come back in 30 days. So that's what I did. And part of what was happening with me was that somebody at something, somebody, something out there was pulling some strings and they brought together a whole lot of stuff on my behalf. I started thinking, you know, that might just be God. And it was. Nobody else, I couldn't have done it. And nobody else could have done it. So, I started reading about it. I started reading about it and looking into this thing called God. I'd been in turnaround, let's see, at that time it was a six to nine months program and I stayed there for 14 months. Why? Because I wasn't prepared to come out of there. I didn't think that I could come out into the world and live without that structure. But fortunately, this job of caretaker here in September of 2001 opened up. And I took the job as caretaker. It was only later that I understand that there were about seven or eight people running around here trying to get that job. And guess what? I didn't even have to ask for it. It might be that same kind of job. Somebody up there is looking out for me. After having the kids, after having the cancer surgery and the chemo that followed it, I came to work here at NAVA as a caretaker. I was very fortunate again. Like I said, I'm fortunate to be here tonight, but I was fortunate to be here as caretaker. And I'm sure that not everybody at NAVA knew that at the time, but when I came here, I again started taking responsibility. You know, if something needed to be done, I jumped in there and helped do it. And I completely restructured the caretaker position here. I was the guy that you didn't see. I was the guy that changed the lights and fixed the toilets and mopped out the bathrooms when they overflowed. I don't know if you guys remember when the old bathrooms, they were always overflowing. And I started working in the kitchen. I volunteered for two and a half years right here in the kitchen every Thursday night and any other time they needed anything. I was always involved in functions. And one of the biggest things about NAVA or any AA function is that it may start out like shit. It may not even look like it's going to work. It may not. Everybody just looks like they're totally disorganized. But it always works out in the end. They always have for me. And we've had a lot of functions around here. But every time we start one, it starts out like it's just a bunch of damn drunks trying to put something together. And guess what? They normally put it together. I was here for six years. And I enjoyed every minute of the time that I was here. But let's get back to this idea about God again. I started reading. There's a lot of stuff going on. And I read people like Copeland. He's the guy that wrote The Dialogue of Physics. Where he interrelated certain tenets of Buddhism. I like that because I've always had the idea that yeah, there's a God. Any concept, conceptual thinking, any concept for me had to be, I had to be able to connect it to reality. A little nail here, a little nail there. And if you're trying to nail down the concept of God, that's kind of pretty hard. This fellow Copeland, for example, he says that the subatomic particle of, uh, damn. Subatomic particle in quantum physics. The actual particle, even with the most sophisticated microscopes, they cannot see the particle, but they can see where that particle has been. If you think about this concept of God, we can't see God, but we can see where God's been. Especially when you see people come in this program and they see him change, and see him put on weight, change color, start smiling. You know, I normally, I like to call those miracles, but you can see where God has been. Quantum physics says, yeah, this subatomic particle, which is our basic building blocks, our reality, involves something just like that. It's something you can't see, but you can see where it's been. Another fellow that I read, read a lot about was, uh, a Vietnamese Buddhist priest, monk, about, there's no such thing as good, better, best. There's no such thing as higher or lower. And if you think you're higher than the Chinese who are on the other side of the globe, you might be thinking wrong. So there's nothing good, better, best. There's only right now. And in this present moment, what about that is, it is true. If I want to take care of tomorrow, I have to take care of right now. So that's another little plug. Another guy was Kierkegaard. He wrote a book called Power of Now. And again, he's talking about living in the present moment. Going along with that, I read about some things called, oh, well, this guy Han, he's a Buddhist, a Buddhist, talks about the miracle of mindfulness. And mindfulness is being present, thinking about the fact that these plastic chairs involve a particle of oil. And how do these, and oil comes from where? And how do you make that chair? You know, all these processes. We look at that. I looked at that. And over time, I really have gotten into, what's our time looking like? It's looking good. Prayer and meditation. But, how many of you heard of Deepak Chopra? Everybody. He wrote a book recently called, How to Get to Know God. And if you haven't read that book, you might want to pick it up and read it. Because he also talks about living in the now and developing in the now. It's very present. It's a very good thing for this alcoholic. I do prayer and meditation in the mornings. Now I have about seven books that I read on a daily basis. And I say my prayers. My prayers are prayers of thankfulness. Especially, you know, after this last little charing over at the hospital. What I wanted to say is a couple of things in closing. I pray a serenity prayer every day. Because acceptance, for me, acceptance is where it is. Because anything outside of me is what it is. I can't change people. Can't change places. Can't change things. But I can change me. On a daily basis. A couple of things. I'm going to finish up here. We've heard of the old saying about optimists and pessimists looking at a glass of water or a cup of water. Say it's half full. One's going to say it's half full. One's going to say it's half empty. And then somebody's just going to come along and drink things. But lately I've been thinking about the fact that the cup is always full. If you drink water out of the cup it fills up with air. So the cup is always full. The other thing is thinking about concepts. Look at the Earth from say an orbiting spaceship. You really don't know anything about east or west or north and south. And yet we take those ideas and we take the ideas that turn in space and we believe every damn thing to be true. And sometimes it's just not true. Also, the concept that and I read this in my books too. In the far reaches of space there's no such thing as the concept of mind. Though, one of the concepts is that we actually think that there's a difference between us and them. Or you and me. Caretaker and even now I've helped a lot of people. But I help those people because I'm actually helping myself. Another way of thinking about things. In a book just recently today I asked for direction. I asked for God to give me direction guidance so that I can stay clean and sober today. And to serve other people. And to be an ally to those who are suffering. And I do that on a daily basis. I say it in the morning and then I go out and I live my life actually as if I believe He will do that. Thank you James. That was helpful. That was helpful. One of the prayers that that I say is that was taught to me in this program was God help me help other people. And if I can't help someone please let me not harm them. But James that was great. Thank you very much.