Stopping the War in the Mind by Surrendering to a Higher Power – Chris Raymer.

That's my kind of introduction. Here he is. Big old room. Hi guys, bye-bye. I can't see you. Y'all were so nice, y'all were sitting up on this side. I said, I know where you were doing it. You know, that's okay. I've said it a thousand times. Y'all could be naked and on fire, and I wouldn't see you. My name is Chris R.. I'm a very grateful recovered addict. And I think I'm on? We don't ever know. This theme for the conference is the name of my home group in Ingram, Texas. We're good for all of Drug Addicts Anonymous, and it's pretty cool. I am a member of some other fellowship and have been for a long time. I don't know, just ages. I finally got sober in 1987. I'll tell you a little bit about that, but a bunch of years ago we started DAA in our little hometown, little Ingram. There's a bunchof treatment centers in the area, and they're cranking out them little dope fiends faster than we can get them cured. It's amazing, and we want to talk about some of that this weekend. I'm going to get the chance to do a little workshop in the morning. I think it's 10, 1045 or something. We'll do a Little First Step stuff so if any of y'all are around we'll come see us. I know that's a little early for some of you. We can always tell how many meth addicts we got in the room because they never go to bed at night. They'll be here first thing up. I got to mention real quick, I introduced myself as a recovered addict. No matter where I speak in the world, I get a chance to do this some and there's always somebody who'll come up after and take exception, especially in Florida. The land that we want you to get sober but not too sober because you're a much better patient if you come back about 1,400 times. So Bill Wilson was really clear when he was doing the big book, guys. He wrote it on the title page of the book and he wrote it dozens of pages. He was crystal clear that we have a program that absolutely allows you to recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. It doesn't mean that we're not going to continue to be goofy. I know some of y'all. I know a bunch of y'll in here, and some of you are goofy as the day is long. and but you're as recovered as you're ever going to get okay because y'all keep waiting betting on a come your life will get better maybe I guarantee it your life Will Get Better but I'm telling you guys this idea I had a lady in Alabama lady once said at one time she says God's God's grace is continual you know this idea that we're going to tiptoe through this thing and one day at a time struggle to stay sober man if you're trying to do that, I don't care what fellowship you're in. I know some of you little AA knuckleheads snuck in here too, so that's all good. I don'T CARE WHAT FELLOWSHIP YOU'RE IN. BLESS YOUR HEART. IF YOU'RE TRYING TO STAY SOBER THAT WAY, YOU GOT MY PRAYERS. GOOD LUCK. AND THAT'S MY STORY. I WANT TO SHARE A LITTLE OF MY EXPERIENCE WITH YOU TONIGHT. I'M GOING TO SHare SOME WITH YOU TOMORROW DURING THE LITTLe WORKSHOP. GUYS, AND I ALWAYS WHEN I GET A CHANCE TO DO THIS, I GOTTA GET A chance to tell you, I'm going to share my experience. Your experience may be a little different. If you're sitting in here with your sponsor and I say something that contradicts something that he's been telling you, he's right. I don't want to get in the middle of that cauldron of debate unless he's telling you to go slow through the steps. And then he's a murderer. You can tell we're in DAA, because you couldn't get away with that anyplace else. Y'all know I'm kidding. I mean, I've been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous a whole bunch of years, folks, and none of those folks out there, I got, well let me tell you I got there son of a gun let me just tell you that but just I want you to understand from my perspective I got sober in 87 and that means if I don't do anything stupid this November I'll have 31 years of sobriety and 26 of those years I've worked in the treatment industry is clerical work I've done alumni stuff I'm not a counselor or therapist I'm way too I'm just you don't have enough money to pay me to listen to you ramble on for an hour. I don't have the patience for that, and I know those that are, I have my hats off to them, but watching the cats come into treatment and watching these folks who have been to multiple treatments and been around our fellowships for years and still can't get sober, and then you sit down and start talking to them a little bit and find out they don't Have a clue what the 12 steps are about and what this fellowship can actually be. There's just so much, we call it mixed messages. We call it this water down solution. And in the rooms that I was trying to get sober in, there was not a single one of those people that were trying to hurt me. Y'all need to understand that. I'm not taking a shot at anybody, truly. I just, I'm a big book thumper and I'm coming from what I know that finally worked for me after all those years so anyway i um i grew up in texas and uh spent some time traveling around uh ended up in curdle texans which is about 60 miles the other side of san antonio up in the hills you listen real close you can hear banjo music lots of sheep anyway yeah it's kind of it's it's pretty back when we were growing up guys back and i'm a kid of the 60s And I know I look every bit of that, too. I just turned 65. I was laughing with some of you guys earlier. I mean, I just turn 60. They send me a little AARP. I can't even open my computer and they got Medicare and AARPs. And hell, I need help getting out of a chair after reading all of that. You know, I'm just like, I never intended to get this old. We used to sit out in Kerbal, Texas. Kerbal is, as the crow flies, it's less than 200 miles away from Mexico. And so there was a period of time there where it was a big, you know, all those ranches around Kerrville. It's a big farming community and every one of them, these big ranches had a, had airstrips and on every, damn near all of them they had these low flying planes coming in at night. We'd sit out there on the river and listen to those planes coming and they'd come in under the radar bringing mountains of dope into the hill country and then from the hill county they'd go every place else from Austin, San Antonio, Houston. It all came through Kerrille. I mean, there was day you could go to the bowling alley in Kerrville, Texas. I was 17, 18 years old, and you could buy dope easier than you could by alcohol. I wasn't old enough to buy alcohol, I'd have to get somebody, some old geezer to go get me a bottle of Boone's Farm if I wanted to get drunk, but if you wanted mescaline or heroin or pot, you can just go to the Bowling Alley, it's just, it was everywhere. But I need to tell you going in the door that i wasn't doing it because drugs are illegal this is this is i was gonna change my mind pretty damn quick i gotta tell you but at the time i wasn'T gonna do that you know it was but i'm still gonna drink uh my father was an alcoholic he was the nicest man in the world please don't ever think i'm i'm you know he was not the stereotypical alcoholic we hear from the podium you know i was robbing liquor stores and running around naked and all that he was he he never missed a day work i mean he went to work he raised us we were on the front row of the baptist church every time the door opened and i've got an identical twin brother some of y'all know myers and and we were just i've Got two sisters never had a problem with alcohol they still to this day freak me out i don't know we raised in the same family same gene pool they just didn't catch the bullet my twin brother and i did and uh we've got a bunch of Indian blood in us, and then there you go. So I got to tell my, my, I've seen my little sister do it a thousand times. I watched her get sick one time at a sorority party, and I was fascinated. Do you know that at sororities parties, it's free? It's like, I don't know if they do that at fraternity parties because I've never been. I don' t know, but we just free booze. I mean, oh my god how cool and i'm drinking my little butt off and and uh i watched her get sick that one night she says i'm never going to do this again and i gotta tell you folks i worked with her for a long long time and she was in retail up in dallas and i said we'd go out and have dinner have a couple of cocktails so you got time for one more and she says no no no no, no, I'm starting to feel this one. It's like, hot damn, me too. I'm thinking we go get some cocaine and then we'll go back to work. She's an absolute sweetheart. She lives over in Portland now. I miss her. No goofy stuff in my family. Nothing crazy going on. We just raised what good and that was all it was. I went to Houston to be in an apprenticeship program. I wanted to be a cook forever. I was a little busboy at a big hotel there in Kerrville, and you know, busboys, we weren't getting very far in this world, y'all follow? But the cooks, they could drink on the job and there was rumor, there's no kids in here, is there? There was rumor that some of those cooks were actually having sex. Guys, y'll think I look messed up now. You should have seen me at 17. Little skinny guy. He was still having it. I just. Thank God there was cocaine. I don't think I would have ever gotten laid if I hadn't. Probably shouldn't have said that, but I'll throw it out there. And I got a chance to get it. The guys started training me and I showed some aptitude for it. And he got me a gig in an apprenticeship in Houston, Texas at a big hotel. And I was off to the races. Guys, it was life in the fast lane for the next 15 years. Food business, I would imagine that a room full of young people like here, we've got some foodies in here. But if you're working in a big hotel at 9 o'clock, they have a chef's meeting. Everybody gets together at the chef's table and we go over the schedules of the day and figure out what we're going to do and function sheets and make sure all of our bases are covered. And there's beer on the table 9 o'. in the morning and right before the dinner rush everything's ready waitresses everybody set up bartender everybody's ready we all gravitate to the back dock out there behind the dumpsters we have a little moment of moment of silence we some of them are smoking pot some of them are doing cocaine some of us are drinking alcohol it's welcome to the food business you know we were getting right because we're fixing to get hammered out there you know and that's it's just and guys i got to tell you when alcohol and dub was working for me i it was great we're just live in life large work till 11 o'clock at night get off go hit the after-hour bars stay up all that damn night get up in the morning do a little bump and go get on after it was working great. Until it wasn't. And then, oh my God. I got married in, I don't remember when it was, early 80s. There's a whole decade I'm having trouble remembering. But I was trying to kind of get it together. I had a counselor. I was seeing the therapist and the depression kicking my butt, and he's trying to help me, and I got married. He said, you know, if you'd get married, put some roots down, maybe have some kids, that'd be a good idea. Oh, that's, some of y'all tried that, and it's, it's more expensive than a geographical cure, I can assure you, but I'm looking for something external to fix what's wrong with me inside. Y'all understand? It's just, I wear that little issue man button I always have on my little lapels, and that's what it's about, that little dark inside. That's what I'm trying to get treated, and I'm still convinced, like most people that come to treatment, that if I could just change my external world, everything would be okay. If I could juste get rid of that girlfriend, if I can just get that girlfriend. We're moving around, and... I got married, and God bless her, she was a sweetheart. She deserved better than me. A few years later, literally a few, maybe two years, I moved up in north texas to be closer to my twin brother and i came home one night late i'd been doing a little bumpy poo and a little alcohol and uh i wasn't wasn't drunk well it's not true i mean yeah i was drunk with six kinds of skunks but i um i came back home we had a little pushing match i don't remember what it was we came back in a few hours later after i'd calmed down a little bit and sobered up a little bit and came back and she said what the hell was that about because i I mean, I'm an old West Texas boy. Guys, we don't do that. I mean I was raised just scared me to death and scared her to death. She said, if you're going to stay married to me, you're gonna have to stop. And I said, I will. Done. Oh, you do it. I know everybody laughs when I say that. You know, alcoholic's mouth's moving, he's lying. I need to tell you there's a couple places in here I will never not tell from the podium and this is one of them. When I looked her in the face with tears in my eyes and begged her to forgive me for shoving her against that wall, I promise you I meant it. And I got up and I poured the alcohol out and I got rid of the dope and I was going to stay sober. Our families don't understand as much as we don't understanding. I didn't have the power to manage that. There's a thousand people coming to treatment today that believe if they want to stay sober bad enough or they need to stay sore bad enough, they'll stay sober and I'm telling you if you're an alcoholic or an addict that is not true the want to do this is it's beneficial i suppose in early sobriety but it's it's not going to be enough to get you downtown and that that's just the nature of what we call the the uh the illness of alcoholism and drug addiction and two weeks later the executive chef asked me for a couple of beers after work and stayed and talked about some scheduling and and i had a couple of beers and went home, patted myself on the back. That's pretty good. I had two beers, you know? But see, my deal with her wasn't that I wasn't going to come home drunk. My deal with her was that I wouldn't going touch another drop. And she smelled it on my breath the minute I walked in the door. She's done. She packed her bags and left. We split the sheets, divorced. I had five more years left in me blaming her. Unbelievable. This whole time I'm seeing doctors, therapists I'm on all kinds of medication I'm changing jobs but you know because it's always the job it's all this I mean how many times you're gonna move to try to fix something I still drive a pickup today because you never know when you have to move you know I just I don't know always be prepared I guess I started going to alcohol synonymous that the next day when I was trying to get well went to some NA meetings they were all full of loving people there's like I said again there's nothing wrong with those cats but III just I couldn't I'm in an area where we just don't be there's no big books in the place they got the steps and the traditions on the wall that's it but but that's that's you know okay well who's got the problem chick-peek me I got the problems and then you're going to talk about your bad day and and how if you're in a halfway house and somebody stole your baloney and you're so frustrated you're gonna have to get in the place of acceptance about okay we started that we say hey we started that says you know you come with a problem and you leave your may drink over that problem y'all understand what people don't understand is if you don't get into a situation where you get well you're going to drink over anything I I mean, I've got to do it, this group. How many of you guys drank and drugged when everything was absolutely great in your life? How many you drank and drunk when everything was absolute crap in your live? How many went in the daylight? Nighttime? Rock and roll music? Country western music? Some fine rap? Come on, we could do this all night long. When you had a great woman? Satan's sister? or brother yeah we could do this all the time okay but we laugh about it i don't care where i'm at here europe wherever we're talking about that we do that we still talk about it till the cows come home everybody laughs and think that's funny but we go right back into therapy and that's all you want to talk about i'm not saying we shouldn't talk about it folks i'm saying we we got to get somehow get away from connecting that stuff to my drinking and drugging. We'll talk about it more in the morning. I don't want to get on that soapbox. I do, but I'm not gonna. 1987, I'm working for my twin brother. I'm on a whole bunch of medications. I've been to treatment. I've up to my butt in it, and I can't stay sober. I'd been to meetings. I picked up, I don'T know how many hundred desire chips. I'M A CHIP PICKING UP FOOL. I COME IN, pick one up get some hugs hugs not drugs oh my god and it's any wonder that people roll their eyes when we start talking about the 12 step stuff because because of that crap right there you know 90 meetings 90 days all that cultish crap in the world and i just like oh my God why are we doing this i'm not knocking meetings please okay but i've quit going how many of you guys can relate you don't have to raise your hand but i mean how many guys can relay do you pull up behind the the the ca club or the na club or the eight twelve step aa and pull up the guy who got your little pickups in there smoking a butt listen to some crap on the radio and people are getting ready and they're going inside putting their butts out and at eight meetings at eight o'clock and everybody's going in and you sit there like that and just look at it for a minute like that flip that butt out crank the music up a little bit roll the wind up just take off out of the parking lot just the idea of going back in that damn room and listen to somebody talk about their cat one more time I actually got guys I get emails from all over the world I've actually had people have you actually really been at a meeting where they talked about their cat you damn right oh my god everything else under the sun everything except how to recover from alcoholism anyway i uh november 13th it was a friday the 13th i'll never forget it and i went home i was particularly depressed and obviously the meds are not working and i'm miserable i stopped and bought a 12-pack of beer and went to my little apartment, had some hot dog for dinner and did a bunch of return checks. I'm about to die and I'm just miserable. My life sucks. Y'all understand that? I'm living in a town I don't like. I'm working at a job I'm no good at. There's no girl in my life. There's not a girl or there's no friends in my wife. I'm driving an old beat-up pickup truck that you wouldn't be caught dead in and I've just... Guys, I'm 35 years old and I live from paycheck to paycheck and I hate my life. Forget the drinking and drugging. I don't like who I am. And when I stop drinking and when I lay the dope down and I start to get sober, it gets worse. It gets worse, not better. Your families don't understand that. Y'all all nod your head. Your families don't know they don't understand that the counselors don't understand that so many people professionals in the industry don't understand that. Well if you just change some things in your life you could get sober. yeah it's called the 12 steps asshole let's go sorry I fed the little ferrets I had two ferrets in there and watered the little ivy and and I stacked the checks up and I just took a bottle of pills two bottles of pills that's a couple volume bottles of Valium Docs are giving me for anxiety and and and for for sale i mean you know what the hell i took everything i had in the medicine cabinet and laid down the bed and got ready to die nothing romantic guys i'm gonna tell you i'm so against just i can't keep living like this i'm tired of hurting people i'm tired of being an embarrassment to my family i'm Tired of telling you I'm going to quit and then letting you down and not being able to do it. I heard a voice that night say, don't do this, go back to AA. And I'm arguing with the voice. I'm not going back to AAA. I've been to AA, I've picked up all them chips. I'm proof positive that meeting makers don't make it sometimes. But I heard the voice a couple of times. Guys, argue what it's about. I don't care. I believe God was trying to save my skinny little butt. And I made myself sick and laid down on the bed and calmed down. And ended up the next day, I went back to work because I have to work or I'll end up on the street. And 6 o'clock that night, I was on the back door of that AA meeting that a friend had showed me one time. I'd never been to this meeting before. A lot of you all heard me talk about it. But I walked in the door, and it was back in the day we could smoke in meetings. We absolutely ruined it for you guys. you know although can you imagine if we could still smoke in meetings with those freaking vapes oh my god it's like i was laughing with some of you guys because you know i've got a guy at the club right now literally it's a fact if you come to the outpost club where we go there's a guy who's got a vape the size of a fucking toaster and you imagine being a little sharp room you know talking recovery with that toaster going off all of that i've laughed about it from a podiums if you've got hold your vape with two hands it's too big come on you are not cool that poor little guy nobody seems to want to talk to me they can't see you and I walked in there all smoking and you know and I'm not I'm dipping I got a mouth so full of dip you can't hear me you can understand what i'm saying you know but but i'm not smoking oh my god and i walk back in there and somebody's laughing real loud and i'm real self-conscious god damn guys big old full beard and nasty looking always got food in it just wearing a fruit of the womb t-shirt and a pair of dirty levi's and i i'm so self-conscience it's not even funny i know they're laughing at me i vividly remember that was 31 years ago i vividLY remember looking down to make sure my zipper was straight and my patch was straight. And I'm just double-checking everything. They're not even laughing. They don't even notice me. Y'all understand? They're just busy having fun in a meeting, mark of a good meeting. If you walk in and they're laughing, stay. If you walk into a bunch of sourpuss old bastards sitting around in the corner and frowning on them, go someplace else. Would y'all agree with that? That's why I love drug addicts I've never been to a DAA meeting that didn't feel like it was 220 charge plugged in. Everybody going, and that's the way it should be by God. I absolutely agree. Anyway, this meeting was pretty wild. I got too self-conscious and started backing up. I was heading to the coffee pot and couldn't even make it in there. And I says, I'll come back. Monday I'll comes back. If I had left that meeting, I don't think I'd ever come. I'd have died. I'm convinced. There's a little girl snuck up there between me, and you all hear me talk about it all the time, stuck her finger in my belt loop and sat me down in a chair and said, sit down, cowboy, you're not going anywhere. I hope she's okay today. I don't know where she's at. She stopped me from leaving the room. Her sponsor was across the way, couldn't get to me, and she's kidding. And this little girl finally understood the traditions, I guess, because she understood her primary purpose. I get e-mails from all over the world. Well, you know, in Scotland, men sponsor men and women sponsor... I didn't say anything about her sponsoring me. I asked her out one time. She said no. Wah, wah. That's one thing about a black eyepatch. You're either... Never mind. Never mind。 She sat me down in a chair like that and got me a little cup of coffee and I spilled it and got these paper towels and it's just, you know, chairperson got around there and had seen me years in coming in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and he's still sober up in North Texas today. And he said, buddy, we got a newcomer coming back in. He says, why don't we go around and tell her how our lives have changed as a result of working the steps? Now y'all need to understand, if they'd have said, let's tell Chris how we got here, I'd have died. Because I'm so sick and tired of hearing that, I could puke. Y'all follow? Well, I know this makes your hair catch on fire because you believe that's a first-step meeting. But you see, these groups that do that, they don't ever talk about the symptoms of what alcoholism and drug addiction is. That's what we're going to talk about in the morning. What they talk about is the drama, and I can't relate to that drama. We're killing people by the thousands out there because they can't related. One-on-one, if you want to tell me of your story, if I sit down with Kenny and we tell some stories, I can relate to it. that but just sitting in a meeting where there's no discernment whatsoever you're going to talk about this or that or this or it becomes confusing i got to tell you real quick i did a a radio show a radio skype talk uh with a lady in russia and um they were some of the nicest people they've got some fine recovery over there i gotta tell you and this was a skype deal i wasn't pretty good at but they can see you and you can see them and i gave my little story and And then they did a little question and answer afterwards. It was pretty cool. It was about a 30-minute question and an answer. With the translation, it took longer than it probably should have. But this lady comes up, and she's dressed to the nines. I mean, she's looking sharp in I Know Fashion. This lady had some money behind her. And she walked up to the mic, and She said, How could you figure out if you're an alcoholic or not? This was an AA deal. She said how could you figured out if your an alcoholic or not if you can't relate to these stories? here's what was a classy lady living in some big old house she wasn't hooking on the street or doing something crazy or robbing liquor stores or y'all see but that seems to be what it always at go to an AA meeting and start talking you'll listen to this guy share and then I've had a date FBI well you think that's bad I've got three DWIs and by the time you get down here I've had 16 DWIs I was in prison for 10 years and chopped up 15 people and put them in plastic bag i'm doing and this y'all what have we done we just one-upped everybody okay but the poor little guy sitting in the back just questioning whether he's an alcoholic or an addict or not we've just killed we there's we gotta stop trying to scare people into recovery we can offer them the solution show them how cool this is and then see if they want it but the bottom line is we should pull them with a vision of hope i get people jamming me all the time you think aa ought to be a damn pep rally one opportunity that's why i will never not introduce myself as a recovered addict from the podium i want people to understand you can flat get well and go do cool stuff the rest of your life if you do a few things that you're supposed to do i don't know guys i'm years I'm seven years in Alcoholics Anonymous and never heard that. I've heard this horrible, one day at a time, we struggle to stay sober. Every day is a day we could relapse. Oh, my God. Is it any wonder that we have people leaving the fellowships by the thousands? We've got to start getting these folks in with a vision. We'll talk about it some tomorrow. tomorrow. After the meeting was over, these old geezers got around me and there's a couple of them got together and they're both long since passed away. They both died sober, good folks. And they said, Chris, would you sit with us for a few minutes? Let's visit. Let's find out why you can't stay sober. And I said, buddy, I know why I can't say sober, you know, you know, money, women. I mean, I got a thousand, I've got a laundry list of reasons. And they said, no, no. And anyway, they showed me the circle triangle and they asked me some specific questions and they qualified me that night it took them about 20 minutes to qualify me physical craving mental obsession and i got to tell you guys i drove home that night with tears in my eyes because i knew for the first time that what was wrong with me was not this long list of psychiatric disorders what was right for me was untreated alcoholism and they promised me if i would get off my butt and actually start doing some work I'd get sober and the next day after the little 10 o'clock AA meeting we got in the back room and we did a little third step prayer and we sat down they gave me a notebook and we started working on a fourth step boom, boom y'all follow? two weeks later I'm sitting on the tailgate of my truck I've got a written fourth step I have not done a fifth step yet two weeks in but I'm standing on the taillgate of the truck and it dawns on me that the obsession to drink is completely gone my cocaine dealer lives in the apartment complex where i live folks i'm surrounded by everything that i want to stay away from and the obsession left and i that was all those years ago i come and go as i as i the 10-step promises have come true folks i've been placed in a position of neutrality safe and protected if i want To go to vegas i can go to Vegas i want to go live music venue i got a guy i'm sponsoring from up in ohio today so down some music festival here in florida sinning mightily i'm sure having a great time but i guarantee he's sober kicking butt taking names that's what this is about clarence snyder said one time i was just reading rereading a book i'll get you the name of it uh it's it's called how it worked the story of clarenced Snyder, but it's in its second edition. If any of you guys want it, the original sells for a ton of money if you can find a copy of it, but this second edition he's done some pretty cool stuff with it. In it, Clarence says he was one of the original 100 that got sober and started AA in Cleveland. He's an amazing guy, but he said at a certain point we've got to stop running from something and start running towards something. It drives me crazy because every time I turn around, I'm listening to somebody else telling the newcomer what they can't do. And it's kind of a soapbox of mine. It's like, guys, this is opposite what they did with me in 87 because they started telling me what I could do. You want to start a business? Go start a business. You wanna go back to school? Go back to school. The party line bullshit out there in the recovery world is simple that, well, you're getting new sober, so what you need to do is you need to treat that as your job. So you go sit in a goddamn halfway house and just get bored the tears. Don't do anything like video games all day and go to one more god dang stupid meeting and then you wonder why you want to go shoot yourself. Oh my god. Life's passing you by, you know. I don't know why I don'T have a new car. Because you DON'T have A JOB! I'm not knocking halfway houses. I'm a huge fan. I'm saying it gives us an opportunity while we're there to be in a protected environment to start figuring out once and for all what the hell you wantto do when you grow up. What do you wanto do? It just breaks my heart to watch people that are sober for a period of time and they just hate their life. It's got nothing to do with being an alcoholic or an addict. It's Got To Do With Some Decisions You Made As An Adult That's Placed You In A Situation To Have This Boring, Glum Godding Life. But we've got too many people reiterating that and reinforcing it. Just go to another meeting, just go to Another Meeting, just Go To Another... I'm Sorry. I had a, we started that little DAA meeting a few years ago and we've got this big AA meeting. We've got the largest AA meeting in the Hill Country over at the outpost, our little AA club over there. And there'll be 100 people, 120 people in there on a Wednesday night. It's pretty cool. and we're all studying the big book, reading the book and slinging some solution and the little guys sit behind me all the little halfway house guys they sit behind us on our side and we listen to them and they very seldom share you got some of the older guys will share and some of new guys but these little guys won't share and on Friday night I go to our little DAA meeting and you look in the room and it's just them and you got a few old boss backs in there like me wanting to come see what was going on and see check it out see if i could be of assistance and help out and watching these little guys pick up the big book start slinging solution watch these little guys start sharing hope god dang it i tell you i gave me a cup of coffee go sit outside you got one of those little guys sitting over there and got his little big book open and he's oh my god you know he's he's he's up this little new guy's butt you know listen let me help you out here let me show you where's your notebook you know i'm gonna show you how to do this four-step and i'm sitting there thinking yeah yeah exactly what we're supposed but they wouldn't do it in my aa meeting because a lot of those little guys are not alcoholic they're little dope fiends from hell they're welcome in our group they're welcomed i'm not saying but they don't they can't identify in that little group full of dope fienes they can damn sure identify and they feel responsible these little guys coming out of treatment oh they got they got two months sober they're chair in the dead then meeting two months sober they're out there working with others we sign up for H and I's oh she picked me I want to go to that treatment center and carry that message watch these little guys catch on fire to be a part of that We've got an opportunity in Drug Addicts Anonymous. This fellowship, some of you didn't know, has been around 20 years, 21 years. I think we were 20 years last year. Started in Sweden. And some of the guys that will talk this weekend and give you some better history of it. Got real big there for a while in Sweden is big huge in england and a bunch of the little nut legs in dallas finally started a little meeting in in d Dallas you ought to hear drew and some of these guys share about that that history that story damn near run out of town by the narcotics anonymous excuse me i shouldn't have said their name guys if you want to offend anybody in the 12-step fellowships do anything I mean, come on, guys. How many of you guys have been ridiculed because you're excited about recovery? I mean I've got people out there still betting that little one-eyed son of a bitch but he comes off that pink cloud and he's going to bust his ass. You know, people that are not happy, they don't want to see people that aren't happy. I mean that's just human nature. They'll punch holes in it every damn time. I don't know. We've got an opportunity with this fellowship to do it the way we want to get it done, to have a literature-based fellowship where we know exactly what the solution is and how to get well without all the peripheral watered down grapevine living sober. Oh, I could just go on and on and On, but I'm just not going to. I just think that God has absolutely blessed us with the opportunity. I need to mention this real quick because I was talking about this not long ago, and having just turned 65, it's kind of heavy on my heart. We're watching a lot of the old-timers pass away, a lot of the Old-Timers. We just had a guy named Gary Kay who was a Southwest Area trustee over in Texas for a million years. This guy was spectacular. If you email me, all of y'all can get my card if you want to with my little email address on there. I'll send you a copy of this article. It's phenomenal. He wrote this thing 20 years ago. And it's – our membership in Alcoholics Anonymous has flattened since the early 90s, just flattened. A lot of it's because we have fellowships like DAA where people are going to get to go and do cool things, CA, and some of the other fellowships out there. there's back in the day there was two fellowships there was aa and na and and today there's close to 312 step fellowships out there for i mean for everything we got chicken molesters anonymous but you see we're laughing but if you have problems with chickens y'all understand you'll see that identification thing how that works oh my god I was walking the other day. We've got a facility down in South Padre Island, and I'm walking. I've got arthritis real bad. I have a tendency when I was out there drinking and drugging to walk off curbs sideways. Any of you guys ever do that? Who knew that your ankles weren't supposed to go that way? you know they'll go this way but they won't go that way i've broken my ankle so many times and i'm just like if i don't move i'm a big cyclist and i i if i stay active and move they don't bother me so much but anyway i started walking a bunch and they it's i feel a lot better because of it but i'm down there worried about work and this that and the other and i got my mind i'm walking five miles a night you know so i'm humping pretty good and i've got my head down and talking on the phone and you know i'm taking care of business worried you don't know how it is when you when you're in charge of the world and it takes lots of hair nobody's doing it right everybody's you know what i'm walking and i'm walking down this road uh padre islands some of y'all see this in florida the road you can see from one end of the island to the other it's just one long i don't know and i walk i see this mama and her little kid down there and i've kind of taken a little little evasive action i'm moving off to the side pretty pretty far when you get a little black eyepatch you got to pay attention to the kids because they'll either come at you like you know pirates of the caribbean ruined my life especially when i'm in florida they'll neither come at your it freaks them out it scares them and the mom was you know and i just i just moved off to the side a little bit and i put my head down and because i didn't want to bother the little kid and freak him out and this little kid i get better close just i mean close me of that post and this kid makes a beeline for me i'm looking down like that he runs from the mom and runs straight to me and the moms not sudden seem to be too worried like that and i slow down and pat him on the little head and he's talking to me he's in spanish she's a little mexican kid and he he's talking to me in Spanish, and he keeps pointing back over my shoulder. What he's trying to get me to see as I turned around and looked right off to my right is this double rainbow. Come on guys, I'm 65 years old. I've seen a million rainbows. This was special. This was as bright as I've ever seen a rainbow to be, and this little kid wasn't having it that i wasn't looking you know what i'm saying he grabbed hold of my pants leg and pulled me around and started pointing and i'm looking like oh and the mom just said he wants you to look at the rainbow and i said yeah i got that you know he's like you know scrape him off my leg he's blessed his heart and he's laughing his butt off of course i'm laughing because he's laughin y'all got it guys when i got sober my sponsor said my one job in this thing was to stay spiritually awake so many people in there believe that the 12 steps is what gets us sober let me be the first to tell you unapologetically it's god that gets us sober there's a thing called a spiritual experience and i don't care if you ever darken the doors of a church there is a spiritual entity there that wants us sober kicking butt and I watch yeah I'll do that my old sponsor used to say Chris on a daily basis you have one responsibility one responsibility and that's to stay spiritually connected whatever you got to do to stay spiritually connected it's the steps that get us connected when I get all that gunk cleaned out All of a sudden, I start feeling things. I start seeing things. How many of you guys have ever sat in here early in sobriety and started crying about just something? You know, it's like, and it could be sadness. It could be happy. All of the sudden, our spirit's starting to wake and we start seeing what this is really all about. And this, God damn, guys, if we've got to do this thing called life as tough as it is, we better be enjoying it. And I want to be connected to it. The point I'm trying to say is, guys. It's really easy, even at 31 years, for me to get disconnected from that. And if I stop, it's to assume that everybody in the room, no matter how long you're sober, is going to stay connected. This is why Bill Wilson talks about our daily reprieve. He talks about when he's saying one day at a time, he's not talking about staying sober a day at the time. He says we have a daily repieve based on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. What we're supposed to do is we're exposed to having our spirits wide awake so we can see what's coming down the pike. I need to say this real quick, some of you. You can see the audience. When the smokers get ready to smoke, buddy, everything shifts. That's why I wait until the very end to give the secret handshake. This is to keep you here. I've seen it a thousand times from people in treatment. I've seeing people have spiritual experiences. I've see thousands and thousands of them have spiritual experience sitting in treatment If you talk to the wrong people, they'll poo-poo that. You know, talk to wrong people. They'll medicate it. You know? Oh my God. There's a psychotic. No. He's waking up for God's sakes. What do you want to do? Put more drugs in his body for that? And then you go to a meeting and start talking about something you saw. And they say, oh yeah. It's just a pink cloud. Don't worry. It'll pass. Why should it pass? Guys, I'm not even painting a picture that we should have a happy day every day. should be. But guys, if we keep doing what we're supposed to be doing and understanding what our primary purpose is, I'm going to tell you something, folks. The guidance continues to come in the morning when I get quiet with God. Not a big old formal thing. When I get quite, all of a sudden I get guidance about what to talk about, what to share with, what do something about work. If you think for a second that we're not going to get guidance from a power greater than ourselves, you haven't experienced it yet. And I want you to experience it. That awakened spirit is what we're supposed to be taking out there in the universe and seeing what we could do. This is why I've got to say it. Every one of us in this room have got something that we're suppose to be contributing to our life, to this fellowship. I'm going to tell you what happens in these rooms. It'll happen this weekend. I absolutely love conferences because I get a chance to come. We were talking with Zach on the way from the airport and Drew was with us and we were talking about getting in a situation where so many people don't ever come to conferences You know, they don't ever take the time and spend the money and take the effort to come to these deals. But when you get in a room full of like-minded people and you start sharing the good juju, you start showing the cool ideas and the thought, you can't help but be excited about the possibilities. When we start to see what Drug Addicts Anonymous is doing in this country right now, how many people are getting sober and staying sober in this fellowship, it's breathtaking to watch. But the people in Drug Addects Anonymous, the people in AA all of us we're battling the same spiritual warfare that everybody else battles out there you come up to the little newcomer and says okay why don't you come early and I'll show you how to chair a meeting and then the little you can hear it I'm not sober long enough oh who told you that okay but you're listening to it somebody says man you're not going to believe this thing I just got this grant to go to school maybe you should consider going to the university with me You could go, no, I'm too stupid. I'm two old. I'm to messed up. I don't have any money. I don' t go shit. Shut up. Oh God. That's spiritual warfare. Somebody dropped up, walked up, hand you a thousand dollar bill. You'd start arguing. What do I wonder what they want? You know, you start arguing about it. You know what? What is this? It's like, if you come at this with the idea that God wants the very best for you, forget the drinking and drugging. If you come up to the plate and you just understand that, and now because we're sober and we're connected spiritually because we'RE doing the work, God's going to show you what to do. Bill Wilson says we can't possibly survive certain trials and low spots ahead unless we work with others. He says, unless we grow spiritually through work and self-sacrifice for others. Up in Bill's story, he's telling us what to do. Guys, we need every person in this room. We need the young people like a big dog. I'm going to tell you point blank right now what's happening out there. There are literally thousands of treatment centers that have opened up in the last two years. The great majority of those treatment centers are non-12-step facilities. Advertised online. We are not a 12-step program. Y'all follow? How many of those poor people do you think are staying sober? It's tough to watch because they're coming back into our facilities. Well, maybe I have to give this 12-stepped step another shot. Yeah, maybe so. Come on. But these cats that are out there in trouble and they're going to these places where they're playing guitars and learning how to smoke pot responsibly and all this crazy shit that's out there. Oh, my God, come on. no more making leather big book covers you know now they're out there with the kilns making bongs with a hospital's name on there it's like what the hell is going on all right but when these guys get in trouble and they want to come back in where are they coming they're coming back into rooms just like this one they're going back into our little friday night daa meeting and if we don't have some cats in there excited about we've armed with a bunch of big books showing them these little guys don't having a chance staying sober and i can't just say young guys i can tell you how many older guys got wrapped up in all these opiates and we've got a lot of little dope fiends out there needing some help. We've got a beautiful fellowship that can help them. There's a solution, last page on there's a Solution, there's a little line in there that talks about each of us in our own way carry the message. Guys, you're never going to carry the big book just like I do, nor should you. This is how God works it. God's going to drop somebody in your lap. Have y'all ever seen that? I'll end with this patty and i've done it a thousand times it's happened at the outpost until the cows come home i sit in the same place every time and uh because it's against the wall nobody can come get me you know some of y'all still don't realize i can't see out of that eye if you're going to tap me tap me here don't tap me i'll jump but and i'm sitting over there like that and i shared and some other people shared in the meeting it was pretty good like that i'm looking across the way and there's this little guy making goo-goo eyes at me. Oh, shit. You know how it is? You can sense it that he's eyeballing me, you know, and I'm just, okay, all right, I'm looking down. And Patty says, yeah, it looks like he's looking at you, all right. You know, they're reading the announcements of the deal and we've just given out the chips. I said, is he still looking? Yeah, yeah. He is. Damn, no. Listen, I am really busy. I am a vice president of a big old company. No, I've got a whole bunch of guys I sponsor. I do not have time for a knucklehead like that. No. And she's looking at me like I've Got Two Heads. Okay, I support you. Y'all follow? We get up and do Lord's Prayer at our group like that, and we don't say, keep coming back. We say, stay. I mean, stay, and I look over at Patty and I says Patty is he coming she said like a skin cat he's making a beeline we were laughing about it you know that sound on Jaws the music dun dun dun dun dun oh shit and he's coming bee bopping through the crowd like that and I was like oh man okay alright all right, all right. I'll help him. And this kid gets right up on top of me. I swear it's happened dozens of times. The kid gets Right up on Top of me and pushes me out of the way. I sponsor a little guy right behind me. He sits behind me because he's I don't know cuz I tell him to because he freaks me out. He's got he's got them spacers in his ears and he got these got bones in his nose and he's Got tats from y'all. I ain't kidding. Nobody wants to be near him in a rainstorm. I'm telling you, because if it lightens, you're going to die. That's all there is to it. He's like a one big lightning rod with a vape. And this kid, he's good. He was working the steps and he sounded pretty good. This kid pushes me out of the way like that and comes up and says, man, I need a sponsor. Can you help me? I looked at Patty and said, what the hell? I mean, I did. I got my feelings hurt for a minute. I thought what I shared tonight was particularly pithy. He didn't want nothing I had to say. He wanted this little knucklehead behind me. That's how this works. Stop thinking you don't know enough about the big book or haven't been sober long enough or not smart enough or you don't have time, when some little knucklehead comes up to you and says, could you sponsor me? Say yes. Amen. And then call your sponsor real quick because your life is fixing to change forever. That's a fact. Guys, thanks so much. I'll see y'all later.