Sponsorship and Transferable Experience – Bb Workshop – Part 10 of 10 – Local AA Speakers

When Katie was talking this morning, you know, about being on the fire line, which hopefully we're empowered to maybe sponsor people a little bit better through the work than we were before we came in here on Friday. I was thinking about this story, you Know, all along in any of my life, you know I knew in my gut what was good, what was bad, what I should be doing, what I shouldn't be doing. But it was like, oh no, I'm drinking or I'm rolling a joint or whatever I'm doing. And it definitely was not listening to that gut instinct. And in the middle of this, I went to school. I wentto Boston College, and I'm up in Massachusetts. And there's this beautiful place that used to call me all the time in Rockport. And you'd walk out on this big, long pier. And I think someone told me once that it's the most painted point in the United States, this place in Rockfort. It's absolutely beautiful, real eclectic. You know, there's these little kiosks of people selling their homemade wares. And I was really drawn to the place, so I would go up there quite a bit. And I wasn't like a rocky relationship that I stayed in for a long time because I was going to make it work. And I met this fisherman one day, and he's along the pier. And I've come to find out that this is an old AA story, but I didn't know that then. And this fisherman is sitting there, and I'm watching him. And he pulled his little boat up to the side, and He's got that rugged face, you know, that sea face that's real stiff and leathery And a real bright-eyed guy. And he's taking his pot of crabs, and he took the pot, and he put it on the side. And I'm looking at him, and here I'm this girl from Wisconsin. You know, I really don't know much about fish or fishing. And I am looking at them, and I said, hey, aren't they going to, we're just talking, hey aren't you going to like climb out of the pot? And he is like, oh man, Missy, call me Missy. Missy you do not know anything about crabs, do you? And he said, you know, it is kind of like life, crabs in the pot. He said, just watch that. As one tries to climb out, you know, the others will go home right back down there. So you watch out who you hang out with. Ooh! Here's Chris. Thank you, Karen. Thank you so much for putting this together. You know, so often these things are like a leap of faith, you know, especially giving me free reign to, you know, pick some of the speakers. I mean, you Now, who is he going to get? And thank you so much. We've all really, really enjoyed ourselves. We've met some new friends and hopefully we're carrying a message of depth and weight from our personal experience and the philosophy that we've developed working with others. I'm going to close today talking about working with Others. Why this working with Other's thing? There are so many people in Alcoholics Anonymous that find it convenient not to sponsor, find it inconvenient not to take on commitments at detoxes or rehabs and find their comfort level, you know, just in the meetings. And I don't know that everybody should be doing rehab or detox commitments. And maybe everybody, you know, aren't totally capable of sponsoring. But so inherent in the recovery process is the development as a recovering individual to get to a point where you've had an experience that really needs to be transferable. For its survival, it really needs to be transferable. I'm hooked in with some people in an organization that is all about helping the most people they can who suffer from addictive illness. it's basically a think tank of top clinicians, top people and they get together and they brainstorm about what can we do to make available more help to more people who suffer from alcoholism and who are affected by people who suffer from alcoholismo and there is a theme that goes through these people during the discussions we have our board meetings and we have professional meetings But we also have a lot of downtime where we, you know, go to barbecues or whatever and we talk. We talk about the current state of recovery in the world. And there's a common theme that everyone seems to talk about. And it really is an indictment of Current Alcoholics Anonymous. And what that is, is we don't do 12-step calls anymore. were not out there doing the wet drunk work that they used to do when the book Alcoholics Anonymous was written. They actually sought out the wet drunks, the people who really, really needed help and they tried to find if there's any of them that want to get better. You know, it was a qualification process. Do you want to go to jail? Do you get over this? Because there's a lot of people that are out there drunk that don't. But they were actively searching around for the people who really, really wanted to not live like this anymore. Because alcoholism is so corrosive and so aggressive and we're caught up in it so much, it's very, very possible that if you see five drunks staggering out of the bar, two of them really don't want to live like that anymore. And in the early days of AA, we were all about trying to find these people and tell them our story. Tell them that, you know, we used to drink just like you and we've found a solution. Are you interested in this? And, you Know, this was very, very important. In the early years of AA before it was even AA, before the book Alcoholics Anonymous was written and it was a group of drunks that participated in Oxford group processes, here's what it would look like during the week. There'd be maybe a meeting where people would get together, you know, and we would form a common bond, common solution, and everybody would get zusammen. And then they would strategize where they were going to go to look for drunks. And so Monday there's a meeting. Tuesday, you're out looking for drucks. Wednesday, you'RE out looking FOR DRUNKS. Thursday, you'Re out looking FOR DRUNKS. Friday, you're in the hospital because there's a bunch of people who found some drugs. And you're telling your story to the people in the Hospital. Saturday, you are back at the hospital again, telling your Story again. And then on Monday, you met again. Now, we've taken the emphasis off of this for a number of reasons. You know, when the American Medical Society said, Okay, alcoholism is a disease. This was in 1956 or 7. that kind of made it incumbent upon the medical establishment to to offer treatment processes for alcoholism so all of a sudden there's treatment processes all of the sudden now it's it's becoming incumbent on the insurance companies to pay for this if it's a disease they can't discriminate and they need to pay so all the sudden treatment centers start started popping up all over the place detoxes started popping off all over place you got to understand there was a period of time where there was no place for us to go. The hospitals did not want us because here's what we would do. We would show up at the hospital and we'd go, oh my God, it's horrible. There's demons. There's maggots all over. Help! Help! And they'd go okay, come on in. They'd find them a bed and they'd fill them with peraldehyde or something to just knock them unconscious. They'd wake up. They'd go what the hell am I doing here? You know, nurse, nurse! And they'd start complaining. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? I need a phone. And then they'd storm out of the place and not pay their bill. Okay? And then they'd be back the next week. Oh God, you've got to help me! It's horrible! Now, would you want to put up with this week after week after year in the hospitals? No! So they wouldn't. You know? You'd go to a sanitarium back in the day. and I got to tell you the sanitariums were grim okay they were grim now with with the advent of the American Medical Society saying okay this is this is a protected class this is disease we need to pay the insurance companies all of a sudden it became a big business and detoxes started popping up all over the place and you know what a 12-step call became a 12 step call became oh there's a guy who wants some help get in the car we'll take him to a detox. That's what a 12-step call became, all right? You know, let's let these people do it, you know? I don't want them puking on my shag carpet at my house, you know, and all of a sudden we started abdicating our responsibility for 12- step calls to the professionals. Now, it says in our book, we favor hospitalization for the befogged, and what I take that to mean is if someone is in serious alcoholic detox, you know, they can go into convulsions. Their aorta can pop like a garden hose. You know, these are all not good things. So we favor hospitalization. We favor professional treatment for the people who are, you now, really critically alcoholic and, you know, going into DTs and everything. But a 12-step call back in the day used to be qualifying yourself telling a little bit about your story explaining how you drank and and then kind of waiting a little for the person to start talking to you you know yeah i drank like that yeah i wrecked some cars yeah you know i've been four marriages thrown out of the house you know and you know you get you engage them a littlebit okay now you kind of hold out the bait well i don't drink anymore. You know, and you want to get them to the point where they're going to say, well, how'd you do that? Well, I'm glad you asked. And then you start talking about not the home group meeting. You start talking about the 12-step process. That's what they did. Well, you know, I had to begin to have a conscious contact with God. You You know, the God consciousness and basically how this happened was through the step process. And they didn't get everybody back in those days. They didn't give everybody. They probably had a very small percentage of people that actually said, OK, I'm in and we're in. But the fact of the matter was is in our book, it goes over some statistics on how many people recovered. You can read it in the forwards, the second edition and some other things like that. 50% of the people who said I'm in stayed sober, at least for a long period of time. 25% sobered up after a couple of relapses because we're alcoholics. We don't buy everything. We love the cafeteria style. I'm going to take this. I'm not going to takethat. We love that. So some people relapsed a few more times and said, OK, I'm really in this time. And they came back and they were really in 75 percent of them sobered up. This is in the Akron area. Cleveland, Cleveland area had a 93 percent recovery rate. And when I mean recovery rate, I mean at least long periods of sobriety that these people as long as they were involved in the deal, as long as they were doing the actions so you know what what's happened without Alcoholics Anonymous there's a lot of things that have happened with Alcoholics Anonymous and not all of them are good now listen I'm not knocking AA, AA saved my life I love AA anybody that knows me knows my you know almost my whole life is about AlcoholicsAnonymous and the things that revolve around my life. And you come over to, if you would have come over to my house on Thursday, there was like three newcomers over there who were really in bad trouble who were coming over just to rub up on us because we've got some recovery and we're about the business of helping people. Now what I want to do though is I need, I'm compelled to share some of the things that i think are going on today that are really not good for us people are dying that don't necessarily need to die people that that if they were exposed to a recovery process might have the willingness and the determination to engage in that recovery process and might survive and the message is no longer really let's let's you know i'm a recover You know, I've experienced recovery. I'm recovered. This is how I did it. I went through the steps. The message has kind of been, kind of gotten lazy. The message just gotten lazy and the message is, you know, here's some meetings that I go to, you now. These are the meetings that i'd go to if I were you and that's sometimes our message. Now, Bill Wilson himself always used to say, I love this statement, the good can sometimes be the enemy of the best that's a wonderful statement you know when uh when the 12 and 12 was written is the 12th of a good book the 1212 is a wonderful book i adore the 12 12 but the 12 and 12 became the enemy in the big book because it shifted our attention away from the basic text of alcoholics anonymous to a series of essays more philosophical and not really instructional covering the step process now that's a great book that's a great but it's not a good introduction to recovery all of a sudden it became everybody's introduction to recovery because step meetings started everywhere so something that was very very good became the enemy of the best when I first came into AA everybody had a step book it was highlighted and underlined out the gazoo and every once in a while if there was a big book meeting I went to this one meeting that they had a big book meeting at the last week of the month and they read the whole book so if you look at all the pages in the book Alcoholics Anonymous that means three months out of four they were reading the stories they weren't even on the recovery process you look most people didn't have big books the meetings had to have the big books to pass around to everybody because no one would bring them so there was a group conscience let's buy big books for the meeting because nobody has them you know i mean this is like like think about this this is the 12 and 12 became the enemy of the book alcoholics anonymous now was that was that a calculated uh you know change in in in you know in a no no i mean everybody liked the 12-12 it's a good thing to have the 12 but the situation changed the situation changed another thing that happened to us came from some outside influences when the american medical association all of a sudden changed up and said yeah you know i guess it's a disease and all of the sudden insurance companies are paying guess what's happening in in uh in the treatment processes it's very difficult to treat for addictive illness Because addictive illness is cunning, baffling, powerful, deep-seated. It's so ingrained in our personality that simple therapeutics are almost ineffectual on it. But if you're going to be charging for it and bringing people in, you've got to do something with them. Okay? So group started. Anybody ever been in group in rehab? that's when they can't really afford a lot of counselors so they figure we'll hire one counselor and he can sit everybody in a big round group and everybody just share all your problems what's going on how you feeling tell us how you feel are you happy, mad, sad or glad you know and the real alcoholic is like how am I supposed to pick one of those You know, if you take every negative emotion and put them in a blender and put it on 10, you know, whatever pops out is how I feel. I don't know. I want to kill you. That's how I do. What is that? And, uh, you know? So anybody who's been in group here, I am 1989. They put Chris in group. Oh, I really loved the hot seat by the way, where everybody, where everyone was, you know, you're not honest. You're not being honest. I don't know about you but I don' t know if I had the capacity to be honest at that time but here I am, I'm sitting in the circle and there's this horse's ass sharing something and he's going on and he' s going on I'm thinking like why don't you shut up why don' tyou drink just get out of here I want to share it' s my turn and all this stuff is going through my head. Trying to treat alcoholism with group is like going to a gunfight with a penknife. You know what I mean? I don't know what you're going to accomplish. It's therapeutic. There are some good reasons to have it. But alcoholism is a runaway freight train. You know What I Mean? You're going need a whole lot more in your arsenal than to put somebody in group where do you think the closed-minded discussion meetings came from they started popping up like crazy because the treatment centers were flowing all these people into aa because you know that's where you tell them to go and so people are showing up in meetings hey you know in rehab we had group we had we sat in a circle we talked about our problems so now is this bad to do this no sometimes it's really really good to get your problems out on the table to share what's going on in your life so that we know where you are okay but the discussion meeting became the enemy of the big book meeting or the experienced speaker meeting where someone would get up and tell their story about how they recovered from alcoholism so something that was good became the enemy of something that was better a lot i could go on you know the rest of the the talk talking about some of the things that have impacted the effectiveness of alcoholics anonymous over the years the fact of the matter is is there's not a problem in aa today that can't be solved through one thing, experienced sponsorship. If there was more experienced sponsors out there or spiritual advisors, however you want to put them, there would be fewer problems in AA and more people would survive. This is like a matter of survival. now my own my own personal experiences is this um so i'm i'm sober about eight months and all of a sudden this guy comes up to me and goes chris i want you to be my sponsor i like what you're sharing i learned how to give good share okay and here here's how here's how i would give good chair i i would be a little bit self-critical you know i need to throw some humor in there. Talk about, you know, how much I fell short this week, you know, and ha-ha-ha, and you know how humble I am about it all, and that's how I would do my share. And there were some people who would respond to that, you know, oh, this guy's humble and funny. I want what he has. Well, humor and and, and humbleness are not going to keep you sober. But anyway, this guy comes up to me and he talks me into sponsoring him. Now, back then there was a rule. It was like an unwritten, you can't find it in the big book anywhere rule that you had to have a year to sponsor somebody. I don't know what happens to you on day three 56 or whatever, you know, all of a sudden, but no, I'm ready. You know, I don'T know what that magic day is. You KNOW, You've got people lined up. I can't sponsor you until now, you know? I mean, I don't know what that is. But I only had about eight months, and this guy goes, you know, and so I said, no, no. I can' t. You know, I heard in the beginner's meeting, you've got to have a year. But the guy kept pestering me and pestering. Finally, you know, I went to my sponsor, and I go, he really wants me to sponsor him. You know? I don' t know what he wants. Something I got, you know? So my sponsor said, all right, well, go ahead and do it. And and I started to I started sponsoring. And at that time, you know, he's still alive, by the way, you know, and and he's like he's like a good friend of mine. But but but anyway, you know, I passed on what I had. I gave back what I had, which was activity, man, activity, you know, go to meetings. I don't care what your wife says. Just go to meetings. You know, I don' t care if your family needs you. Just go the meetings. You know? I don''t care what you boss says. You got to show up. Go to meetings." So he went to a ton of meetings and, you know, he definitely survived. But that's about all I could really pass on to the guy. Now, I get involved in some of the big book work and all of a sudden that fundamental shift in perception, my attitude and outlook on life changed. You know?, all of the sudden I knew a new freedom and a new happiness. This power flowed through me. I mean, you know, this was a process. This wasn't something that happened overnight. But all of a sudden, I had started to have a message of depth and weight. If we have a massage of depth, depth and wait, it's going to be much better for the individual that we're carrying the message to. Because, you Know, I'll give you an example. I'm sober three months you know I've got ADD so if I've told this story everybody just start waving their hands but anyway I'm over about three months and I'm an electrician at this time a bad one I'm at work and I tell everybody I'm in AA, I'm not drinking I'm INAA listen if you're new or just coming back don't tell anybody you're in AA we need one more black eye like we need a hole in the head anyway um anyway uh i'm an a.a i'm in a.e and uh and this guy goes well why don't you tell me about this a.i thing you know i've got i've gotta i know some people that are alcoholics you know what do you how does a.u keep you sober i go well you you show up at the church and you go down into the basement you know and you get yourself a cup of coffee and you and every you know you sit down and they say the serenity prayer and then they pass the basket and somebody will raise their hand they'll have a resentment and they'll say i've got a resentment and then everybody will raise their hand everybody will say they have a resentment and then at the end we all get up we stand in a big circle we hold hands and we say the lord's prayer the guy's backing away from me you know what i mean he's doing okay okay and i'm thinking he's right this doesn't make any sense at all now is is that a message of depth and wait, you know? Is this guy ever going to come to AA after I told him that? Now, after I've gone through the steps a little bit, now I can talk about the transformational spiritual experience of recovery. That I've grown from someone whose mind was very, very sick. My mind would suffer with obsessions, and the obsessions would drag me into the alcohol, most of the time against my better judgment. And I had, you know, my physical craving, I would physically be addicted to alcohol. So however much alcohol was in me, I would crave more. And the first drink would ask for the second. The second drink would insist on the third. The third would demand the fourth. And by the time I had my 15th drink, I wanted that more than i wanted my 14th it just created a craving so so you know uh that's really that was really my problem and you know alcoholics anonymous has a series of spiritual principles and exercises that if you engage in those they can they can help help you overcome that obsession of the mind your body's never going to be healed but your mind can be to a degree and it's it's a very spiritual, very therapeutic type of thing. And it gets you to a type of God consciousness that keeps you safe and protected. Now, that makes a little bit more sense to somebody than you go to meetings and you hold hands. Now, to some degree, I think we've all become complacent with this work. I think that there are alcoholics out there dying That don't need to Because I work both professionally around this And I'm very, very active in my own recovery process We get a lot of real 12-step calls Not only that, we get a ton of calls We get quite a lot Of the family calls You know, so-and-so is insane You know I mean, you know And we heard about you two Can we come over and talk? And we'll do the 12-step calls like basically with the families. And it's my job to educate them a little bit about the illness, alcoholism, and then to tell them a Little Bit About the Unorthodox Recovery Process. It's difficult to understand because it's an experience. It's not a theory. But I've gotten fairly decent at explaining it. And we've become pretty successful at some of these 12-stop calls. We're a valuable commodity in our community because of this, because there are a lot of people dying. Now, if a family would have come over in 1990 to talk to us, I don't know what I would have shared with them because I was inexperienced. I didn't understand the things that I understand today. In spiritual disciplines, let's talk about martial arts. Let's say you want to learn a discipline and it's martial arts, What will happen is you'll be a novice, you'll be given certain exercises, certain things that you need to do. And if you do them well, you will get to a point where you will be put in charge of some of the novices. You will be teaching the white belts or whatever they are. And there's a reason why these masters will do that with their protégés. And the reason is this. If you really want to learn teach it doesn't make much sense but if you really want to learn teach i did the best i could do going through the steps with the joe and charlie tapes in my big book and the headphones and and the pencil and paper you know i did i did the type of a job where i wouldn't let anybody get away with if i was sponsoring them but that's the best I could do but then when this guy said you know i had a i had a bunch of sponsees by this time because i was blowing a lot of steam in in the discussion meetings and uh and here's what happened you know we're motivated by different things i'd love to tell you you know how virtuous i am and everything but this is the motivation for this i had like four guys and they were drinking on me you ever sponsor people who drink on you they make you look bad you know what i mean do you know harry's drinking you know he's hitting on the new women and he's borrowing money and causing trouble yeah harrys mine you know i'll have a talk with him yeah you know i mean this was happening to me because because you know some really sick people were attracted to me. I don't know why, you know, opposites attract, I guess. Anyway, anyway, this was getting tedious hearing about this all the time. So here was my thought. I'll bring him over to my house. I will sit him down and we will open the big book and we'll go through the big books just kind of like Joe and Charlie do. And when it comes to an instruction, we know we'll all stop and we'll do the instruction and then we'll move on and i'll do it with them i'll participate with this with them can i tell you what that's when my that's When my recovery exploded it exploded because all of a sudden now um i really need to know what the hell i'm talking about because they're asking me questions and i don't you know my ego doesn't want me to say well i don' t know you know i've got to kind of know you so so now i'm really paying attention to this because I'm teaching it. If you really want to learn, teach. Isn't this true? Now, a bunch of these guys get through the work with me early on. They're all still around, the ones that went through. Now, if you look at the recidivism in Alcoholics Anonymous today, it's staggering compared to what it used to be. It's staggering. Do this next time. Let's say you go to a home group and you ask is anybody new or coming back and count the hands now if everyone was staying let's say there's five people new almost every week at your home group if everybody was staying 250 new people would be in your group every year you'd have to find a new place to have your meeting you know what i mean but is that what happens no your group sometimes doesn't grow. Sometimes it shrinks. What that means to me is we're losing as many people as we're getting. Something's wrong with this picture. Somethings wrong with this picture if you look at the statistics in Alcoholics Anonymous, you'll see that our growth rate has pretty much plateaued and some statistics say that it's shrinking okay so where you know we're at a critical mass but there's still a billion alcoholics out there that need help. We're not doing a good enough job, you know, and I hate to say that, you Know, because I include myself in this mix. You know, we're not doing a Good Enough job getting to these people or our message isn't attractive enough or we're saying the wrong things. You Know what? You hear a lot of things that just aren't true in meetings And one of the things that I heard early on was, you can't say anything to get anybody sober and you can'T say anything and to make them go back out. You know, you're powerless. Well, I don't believe that's true. Our book basically says that if you make a mistake, you could kill somebody. If you handle this whole thing wrong, you CAN kill somebody! And, you know, I swear to God there's some meetings where you really wonder if some of these people don't have check marks on their big book for all the people they're putting in the grave with the stuff they're saying. But I think it's incumbent – for two reasons, it's incumbant upon us to learn how to carry a message of depth and weight. It's incumbent upon us for, I believe, two big reasons. one of them is is just for humanitarian reasons there are people dying of an illness out there and if we have access to a treatment and a solution to that illness you know by all rights what will be more important in our lives than trying to transmit that and trying to help people survive that's one reason the other reason though is our welfare depends on it our welfare depends on us continuing to carry the message nothing keeps me more firmly planted in alcoholics anonymous than the newcomers that i work with you know i've got i've gotta keep showing up there if i stop showing up they're gonna say well if chris is not going to meetings anymore why should i you know I mean I've got to be showing up therefore I have to be setting an example If I tell them I want you at five meetings a week and I'm going to one, what kind of a message am I giving? If I'm telling them that you need to do the step work, yet I haven't opened my big book in 10 years, what am I telling them? If I're telling them you needto have commitments at rehabs or detoxes or anywhere where there's still suffering alcoholics and I'M not doing it, I'm a hypocrite and I don't want to be a hypocrate. so carrying the message and engaging in this 12-step work keeps me firmly planted on the ground that i need to stand on so that um um i have access to the sunlight of the spirit the sunlight ofthe spirit can shine down on my butt and keep me safe and protected and help me with with all my other problems i mean one of the great promises in the book alcoholics anonymous is you know it'll solve the drink drink and all your other problems i mean you know uh alcoholics anonymous is going to solve my relationship problems well if you pay attention to the practices and and the the spiritual exercises yeah it's may not you know may not make it squeaky clean but you're certainly going to move forward with some you know real hope so so this this working with those now you know i've had i've Had periods of time where I've had challenges working with others. One of them was, you know, Chris's ego got to a point somewhere in 1998-99 where I thought I was the guy. Okay, I'm the go-to guy. Now this is very, very dangerous place to be in because here's what happened to me. I started attracting some lunatics. I mean, some psychopaths, psychopaths who, yeah, I'm an alcoholic. Would you sponsor me? Yeah, I guess I have to. You know, you're such a tough case. You'll need me. Okay. Now, here's what happened. I went into what I look back on and call sponsorship burnout. One of the guys was just a twisted, twisted psychopath who ended up threatening me and my family. He was going to come over and kill us. What he did was he started having affairs with like four home group women in a week. You know, he'd go up to me and say, look, you know, I don't have a year yet, but I'm like really interested in you. You know what I mean? I think we can, you Know, like maybe we can go around and, you mean, you know, and he pulled this off with like for home group with it. They're all sleeping with him and then they all find out. And now I look bad, you Know, because I've been sponsored and you know I'm honing in on him, I'm honing it on him saying you can't do this you know and he's at Elevenworth Kansas Prison you know so he's like I can't well you can go screw yourself you know so I bear in more you know like he was robbing people, he started a business and got everybody's credit cards and ran them up and got accounts, you know credit accounts bought all his stuff and he had no jobs you know I mean he was just robbing everybody. And you know, that really made me look bad. So I'm like honing, I'm like honed in on this guy. Not only is that happening, but I sponsored this other guy who just goes back out and discovers speedballs. Okay. This guy never even got into drugs. He learned about drugs in AA, you know where everybody told, Oh, you mix heroin and cocaine, man. It's, it's awesome. You know? So he goes out and he discovers speed balls and he's, he's doing like 10 grand worth of speedballs a week or something. So he's got to start robbing banks. So I've got like a bank robber that I'm working with, alright? He robbed four banks in an hour and a half. All different towns. The first bank he gets to, the teller is so scared she can't even open the drawer. So she's got leave. The second one he goes to, the tear gas and the dye explode on him, you know, in the bag. She's got it taken off. The third place he goes too, he's running out with the bag and the cops are running in and they're hanging onto his neck as he's driving away. Finally, he gets to a bank that he can rob, you know? And he finally, he finally arrives. You know, I'm working with this guy. There's a guy who is absolutely constitutionally incapable of being honest that I'm workin' with. Like, I know now what constitutionally incapable means, okay? This guy, this guy was importing psychiatric drugs through Canada and he was, He was his own pharmacist. It was his own psychiatrist. He's leading a beginner's meeting. He nods out and just nods out and everybody's got their hands up there waiting for him to wake up to call on him. And he's you know Chris you need to have a talk with your boy. You know like I could go on and on and on and I'm working with these guys. These are not the kind of people that if you have the slightest qualifications for working with somebody, you wouldn't touch. You know, but I grabbed them because of ego. Now, I'm fizzling out. I'm like burning out. I'm chirping like a squirrel after all this. And, you know, I've got some guys who went through the steps and they're doing the right thing. You know? Guys like Dave in the back there who recognize, you know, Chris doesn't really have a lot to offer now. You know we better leave him alone for a while. But they were on safe footing. When you get somebody through these steps, it's not about them calling you as the sponsor. It's about them working with newcomers. If you're calling your sponsor more than you're talking to newcomers, there's a bad part of an equation there. because what we do is we get someone fit and ready to carry the message. And you know what? Then we kick them out of the nest. Go! You know what I mean? Yes, yes, you can always call me. You can talk about, you know, if you're in the barrel, if something really big is coming up. I am always available. But that's not what happens when you get through the steps. That's not how it works. That's just not what happened. you are not dependent on your sponsor at this point in time. You are dependent on God because all of a sudden now you have a God consciousness. There's all kinds of Alcoholics Anonymous out there. There's the type of AA where they really want you to have your sponsor as an authority figure like for life. You know, you got to run everything. Who are you marrying? you know well bring her over let me check her out you know i mean i mean you know they're they're like every single major decision needs to be run by that sponsor for life you know and i i don't know where it says that in the book in thebook it basically says you are hurting a man if you allow them to be dependent upon you and not get to a dependence on god you know another thing that I've learned, another thing that I've learned just relatively recently is Alcoholics Anonymous is a worldwide home group. It just really is. I've done a lot of traveling now and that's really broadened the way I view AlcoholicsAnonymous. I don't need to be dependent on a home group anymore. You know, three or four years ago, I was constantly, I had trepidation about are we going to make a bad decision in the Spiritual Awakenings Group and will it blow up and disappear you know because i don't know what i would do without my home group well that fear has kind of left me now you know because what i see now is i i see now as there's like this macrocosm called Alcoholics Anonymous and we're everywhere there are people in the fellowship of the spirit everywhere you know and i could move tomorrow to texas and i would be hooked in you know what i mean like that or i could go to minneapolis or maine or california or anywhere and me immediately be engaged with people in the fellowship of the spirit and that's something that's that's nothing that's changed relatively recently for me so you know now i'm really not dependent on my home group do i love it and support it Absolutely, I just don't have that anxiety that something's going to happen and my people are going to disappear and then I'll be in trouble. Another thing that's happened in my life through working with others is the whole perspective, my whole purpose in life has changed. um practically any spiritual man well any spiritually enlightened master is going to tell you compassion charity forgiveness all of these concepts go through every single discipline every single philosophical tradition all enlightened spiritual masters that's their message when you cut away everything else and that's really the message of alcoholics anonymous us to. And when you live your life in a charitable, compassionate way year after year after year, some things are going to change in your life and some things that you thought were very important are not going to be so important. Things like, you know, your career will be open to options. You know, things like where you live will become optional. Things will change because you'll be moving into a broad, roomy, and all-inclusive spiritual realm. Now I was very attached to what I was. I got sober, and when I got over it, I was a bad electrician. You know, that's a really bad trade to have when you're an alcoholic, okay? You're forever electrocuting yourself, you know, or drilling holes accidentally into people's clothes closets and pulling suits up into the attic, you know, I mean, you know, accidentally drilling right up into the middle of a beautiful hardwood floor and figuring, oh my god, I better move the kitchen table leg over that hole real quick, you know. I mean you know just it was absolutely brutal but because I started to become more effective these principles, these steps make you more effective in everything. You just become more effective. You start to become the type of person who will tell you what they're going to do and then you do what you tell somebody you're going to do. And that breeds integrity. You know, all of a sudden you're not so concerned about your own little acre that you're involved in a lot of different acres and people see that and want you to, you know, that you become attractive to them in all kinds of different ways and they try to invite you into their world. So all of a sudden, you have invitations coming from all different directions in the world to become part of this or become part of that. And now your options are opening up. Now I went from a bad electrician to being put in charge of subcontractors, from being put in charge of contractors to being put incharge of school systems, from being put in charge of school systems to being put in charge school districts, okay? And you know, because I was effective, they could count on me. I had at least some integrity. You know, I would really, I'd be honest with them. If I couldn't do something, I wouldn't tell them I couldn�t do it and why and what kind of resources I need to get that done. And they could just count on me so I kept going up the ladder. Now, in 2006, I was in charge of 80 New York City schools. Now, you want to talk about a high-pressure job working with some egotistical people? Go work. Go do that. Okay? Oh, my God. But I was very, very effective with it. I did a decent job. I'm not saying there weren't some problems here and there, but I did an efficient job. um all of a sudden an offer comes out of the blue um how about getting involved in a startup where you actually run around and and interview people in the addictive illness field uh if this thing gets if this things starts up and you're actually able to start to produce some shows you know we'll find some funding for it through our organization so i took a leap of faith we just bought a new house we just we had just quadrupled our mortgage just around this time and i had a i had a nice i had nice manhattan money you know coming in and uh and i thought about this and i thought keep boilers going for these horses asses or jump into this where maybe i can use some of some of the talents and so some ofthe experience that you know god has given me oh boy this is going to be tough because you know we're going to have to live on savings for about six months before any money comes in I talked to my wife about it uh any serious decision like that you really have to involve the other family members hopefully you know like honey I just sold the house you know I mean I mean you really you really have involved them and uh and my wife is also on this spiritual plane so so uh so he said yeah you know you know she said you know you really should do this. You're really good at this stuff. You really should do this, you know, you're going to make some difference out there. So I took this leap of faith. Now, I now have a whole nother appreciation of, you know, going from the bridge of faith to, I'm misquoting it, bridge of reason to the desired shore of faith, the bridge or reason would have been to keep my job you know uh but the desire chore of faith i really saw a bunch of dominoes like fallen in this direction and god doesn't call me up on the phone and say hey chris i got this thing i want you to do you know it doesn't happen like that there's there's very subtle situations and circumstances that happen for you to you know be kind of pushed in a certain direction and you know, I'm open to that. You know, I'm in the realm of, you know, intuition. Intuition is knowing without conscious thought and I just kind of knew that this was the right direction to go in. And a little over a year ago, I jumped in and got this startup thing together. Now, not only am I meeting the best and the brightest in addictive illness, which is completely bizarre. I'm not even from that field. You know, I've been thrust like into a position where I'm basically on peer level with these people who just had huge careers in addictive illness. And, you know, my Rolodex is unbelievable today. You call me up, you need a rehab. Well, which county? You know what I mean? It's unbelievable. And now I have a whole other thing to offer, a whole another level of my existence and my activity that I have to offer. That has led to more offers of different kinds of things. Twice this year, I was asked to consider sending in an application to be the CEO of established, I'm talking established treatment centers. I'm like, what? You know, have you heard my tapes? You know what I mean? Like, oh man. And, you know, I am taking no personal credit for this. You know God gave me some talents and some gifts And I paid very strict attention to the details in the recovery process. And I'm not only here to tell you they work, I'm here to bear witness to the miracle of recovery. The miracle of discovery. One of the promises that people overlook in the forgotten chapters, that's not even a good name for them, is that God will give you better things than you could have arranged yourself. I'm misquoting it again too, but that's a promise. You could design a life just the way you wanted it. And if you practice these principles and pay attention to the spiritual signals coming at you, you're going to end up with a better life than one you could've designed yourself. And I got to tell you, I never would have designed the type of life I have today. That's not what I would have put down on career day, you know? You know what I mean? But I can't think of a better place for me to be standing on this planet today than where I am. You know, I've got unbelievable friends, just a network of individuals that's absolutely extraordinary. because of one of my gifts which was the gift of gab the gift gift of share uh and my experience in the book uh i started to be asked to do workshops you know like this spiritual workshops like this and you know to be to be part of a team that would put something like this together that would uh that would offer something so fundamentally trans transformative in somebody's life than this particular process to be, to be able to be part of a team member involved in something like this is unbelievable. It's an unbelievable honor and it's something that I so totally enjoy. I also love alcoholics. We are twisted in different ways. You know what I mean? We are, you know, the Bhagwan Rajneesh was asked one time, you now, why are you hanging around with a lot of alcoholics you know what's that what's the deal with that and he goes I like them because they're interesting you know and and we are we're interesting you know when the phone call comes you know I hear my wife saying on the phone that I really don't think they're surrounding your house you know I mean let's see who is that But, I mean, it's just interesting. Dave is a beautiful example of getting to a point of enlightenment where he shifted his whole objective in life and started turning it toward what could he give back instead of what can I do over here so that I can get? What can I give back? And I'll tell you, he's happy. A lot of people who have huge careers are going to him and to me to look for some kind of answers to life. You know, some of the things that we think are going to make us happy are not really the things that are going to make us happy. They're just going to offer us more problems. You know sometimes great wealth comes with great problems And, you know, the carpenter once said, don't build up your treasure here on earth where robbers can break in and steal it. Rather, build up Your treasure in heaven. And I think that's what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous. I thinkthat we build up our treasure on the spiritual plane. And that really is the greatest, most valuable gifts that we can have. Are the gifts from the spiritual plane. You know, that's it. We're at the end. I want to thank Karen again for putting this together. Katie, Charlie, you guys were awesome. You guys were also. So, Dave, thank you for coming. You always bring wonderful things wherever you come. Oh man, I got to tell you, Jane, thank you so much for coming, you know, could we ask you, do you still sing Amazing Grace? We would love, we would love to have you do that and Glenn, Glenn, thank you so mucho por hacer esto, ¿sabes? What Glenn does can't be underestimated what these two do by going around i gotta tell you the tapes saved my life but if it wasn't for the people who taped them i never would have heard them so really thank you guys hi my name is jane i've been asked to close this with amazing grace if you'd all like to stand and hold hands Please join in if you'd like. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me I once was lost, but now I'm found Was blind, but know I see T'was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved. How precious did that grace appear The hour I first believed When we've been there ten thousand years Bright shining as the sun We've no less days To sing God's praise Than when we'd first begun Amazing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me I once was lost, but now I'm found Was blind, but now I see.