The Danger of the Misconception That You Only Work Steps 1-9 Once – Paul M.

We'll get on with it. Thank you, Erlene. Good evening. You probably didn't think I was going to be this good looking. Could we close the doors in the back, please? I don't want to keep anybody awake out in the hall. My name is Paul Martin and I'm an alcoholic. Through the grace of God and the AA program, I haven't had a drink or a pill or an impure thought since August 15th, 1947. Judy and I appreciate the hospitality here. Judy and I met in a travel agency. She was looking for the last resort. Getting a little old, I was 25 when I came into AA. I was 76 last May. For years... For years I was worried about dying young and now it's too late. A while back I stayed in one of those motels with a mirror on the ceiling and I woke up in the morning and looked up and I thought I was being attacked by a giant prune. Actually, I'm only 11 in dog years. I'm an adult child of an Amway salesman. I got to be so old this year I hid my own Easter eggs. I go to the gym three times a week As you can tell, I'm in superb condition. I'm a lean, mean, senile machine. I want to say thank you to the folks who worked so hard in setting this up. It's a lot of hard work that goes into putting one of these together. And I have had nothing to do with this except to sit around and eat too much. One thing about talking at these things, you will never suffer from malnutrition. but I've suffered a lot in my life I'm a Cubs fan have we got any Sox fans here? your magic number this year is 9-1-1 had a lot of interesting things with El Nino and the weather it rained so much in Florida it ruined spring break for Teddy Kennedy got a friend here who goes to our meeting I'm a member of the Wednesday night step group at the LaGrange YMCA meets at 7.30 on Wednesday night we have a meeting there at 715 on Friday night 1 at 10 o'clock in the morning on Saturday if you'd like to come we'll be happy to see you it's a working step group we don't talk philosophize or think about the steps we work them and it has a tremendous effect in our lives one of the men here Harris comes in from Marengo Harris' story is in the big book it's called Growing Up All Over Again it's hard to believe Harris turned out pretty well it's harder to believe that when he was a kid he was so ugly his mother used to tie a pork chop around his neck so the dog would play with him. When I was sober less than a year in the spring of 1948, I heard Paul Stanley talk. Paul Stanley was the number five AA and in his talk over and over and over Stanley said, AA is of itself sufficient. I didn't quite believe him at that time because I thought that perhaps I needed more advanced things in the AA program. Today, with 51 years of sobriety next Saturday, I believe that completely. I think that AA is of itself sufficient. It is a spiritual way of life and the 12 steps will treat what's wrong with you and me if we don't drink. Going to meetings and not drinking do not treat my alcoholism. Working the 12 steps treats my alcoholism. If all I do is go to meetings and not drink, eventually I suffer from untreated alcoholism and it comes out as depression, anxiety, fear, hostility, apathy, boredom and sometimes drunkenness and the answer is to use the answer which was here all the time. Work and rework every one of the 12 Steps. there was a Zen master who was in New York City and he went up to a hot dog stand and the hot dog vendor said what do you have? he said I want a hot hot dog make me one with everything so he got his hot dog and he gave the vendor a $20 bill and the vendor put it in his pocket and the Zen master said what about my change and the vender said change must come from within and of course that's how the AA program works I belong to a home group and I show up there every Wednesday night and I go to the meeting on Saturday morning I go there because I would very quickly forget what has changed my life and what has changed my wife my life is not therapy or Prozac what has change incidentally they're mixing Prozack with Viagra now so if it doesn't work you don't worry about it I suppose you've all heard about the Valium diet you take four Valiums for breakfast and the food falls out of your mouth the rest of the day but ours is a working step group it's a step group where incidentally can everybody hear me in all the corners Good. At my age, I never know when I'm going to get a chance to talk again. But ours is a working step group. Each week we take one step, we start at 1, we go up to 12, then we go back to 1, then we do this over and over, and we continue to work the steps in our lives. I took my most recent fourth step about six weeks ago, and I took five fifth steps with it. For the first 16 years I was sober, I suffered from that familiar misconception that we work the first nine steps once and then we do 10, 11, and 12 the rest of our lives. And I'd never heard any different. And when I was over 16 years, I ran into a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Dr. Hobart Maurer. And Maurer said that there is great benefit in letting everybody know all the truth about us. That depression, anxiety, fear, and all of these kinds of problems are a result of dishonest, irresponsible, secret living. So I thought, well, I took a fifth step when I was sober about a year and a half, and I haven't taken one since, so I did an inventory. And then I started doing fifth steps with people. I had through the years worked 10, 11, and 12, I felt very diligently. But I very quickly found out that by doing these written inventories and then opening up with more and more people, some things changed in me that had not changed before. And then I found that when I worked with other alcoholics on this basis, that people who had not been able to stay sober started to stay sobre with not just one fifth step but a number of fifth steps. Then going on, of course, and making amends. And then I thought, boy, everybody's going to want to know about this. And then i discovered a lot of people didn't want to know about it. I found that some of the places I got the biggest arguments was from people who had never taken even one fourth and fifth step, much less repeated them. I had thought that for a long time I could conquer my defects with my willpower because I was able to use my will power for exercise and these kinds of things it turned out I was wrong you probably heard that old Myron Cohen story about the lady who was chiding her husband because he had no willpower she said you're disgusting she said Goldberg has willpower she said Goldberg smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for 20 years five years ago he said I quit he hasn't smoked since she said that's willpower you haven't got any willpower she said Ginsburg has will power Ginsburg was drunk every day of his life for 30 years, six years ago he said I quit, he hasn't had a drink since she said that's willpower and her husband became incensed he said I'll show you what willpower is from now on I'm going to sleep in the guest bedroom forever six months later he was awakened by his wife shaking the bed at three in the morning he said what do you want she said Goldberg is smoking The alcoholic who still suffers the alcoholic who still suffers is not necessarily one who is just fresh sober. I've run into a lot of people through the years with fair amounts of sobriety suffering from untreated alcoholism Eight years ago one of the members of our group got a call from a man in Madison, Wisconsin who was sober 22 years. He was also an alcoholism counselor and he had been cutting a loaf of bread. He was going to a psychiatrist because he felt so bad. And he was cutting a load of bread and he thought seriously of sticking the knife in his stomach and he though that might be a bad sign. So he called somebody in our group and he came down from Madison which is a two and a half hour drive to our meeting and we showed him how to do a fourth step and he did some fifth steps with some of the people in the group. We helped him write his eighth step. Very, very quickly he lost these symptoms of untreated alcoholism. That's eight years ago. He's sober 30 years and he's in great condition. And I think that we have people ask me from time to time how does AA differ today from what it was like when you came in? Well, we have a huge amount of therapy that we didn't have when I came in. We have all kinds of pills that are answers and I think that unless the person is an epileptic or a schizophrenic or a manic depressive he or she in AA can find his or her answers in working and reworking every one of the 12 steps. The answers are here. I ended up working or writing for a living. I did a lot of things before I got into that when I was Well, it was actually 1966. I was 44 years old. Some time back, I was in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador where Darwin got the idea for the theory of evolution from the giant tortoises and the finches. And I learned that tortoises get to be 500 and 600 pounds. And I found out that they're not as big as a tortoise. And I also learned that during mating season, the male tortoises get so excited they try to mate with large rocks. It's pretty much like your average AA picnic. I sobered up and started looking for honest employment, and I couldn't find any. And wrestling was big in Chicago. This was about 1949, and at that time I was bigger and the wrestlers were smaller. And I spent several years as a professional wrestler. Some of you may remember the shows at Rainbow Arena at Lawrence and Clark. Ray Fabiani was the promoter. he was the most crooked human being I ever met in my life when he died they had to screw him into the ground they said that he they claimed he was from Philadelphia they claimed that he had been a violinist with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra I don't know if that's true or not but I know that later on he got in trouble with the IRS for fiddling with his income tax but we had a lot of unusual people we had a lot of Indians at that time and some of them were real Indians a couple of them were bohemian they got their feathers in bourbon and they looked like dumplings but these were all like the boy next door provided you lived next door to the Brookfield Zoo but I found when I went to New York I had a friend who knew Bill very well and in the spring of 51 I went back to Newark and he took me over to Bill's home I was fortunate to be a guest in Bill's Home on several occasions and go with him a couple of times when he was going somewhere to talk, but it turned out that Lois Wilson was a great fan of the wrestling shows that came out of Rainbow Arena. And she kept asking, you know, I kept trying to avoid telling her the truth when she wanted to know if wrestling was fixed or not. There is a certain amount of cooperation that you may have noticed. But I finally got out of that. I went to work on construction. When I was drinking, they told me that I was a smart young man and would go far. And with four and a half years of sobriety, I found myself working as a laborer in northern Greenland, 850 miles from the North Pole, which was quite a bit farther than I had planned to go. We worked ten hours a day, seven days a week. I worked four contracts up there. I worked in Iceland. I worked at Point Barrow, Alaska. in 56 and 57 when they were building the dew line up there. Most of the time my AA came out of the big book in the 12 and 12, though we had a man in Greenland, Nick Gray, his father was Jewish and his mother was Eskimo. And Nick always used to say that to his knowledge he was AA's only Jewskimo and I suspect that may be correct. But I got a great benefit out of reading that big book. I've written for years, and I've sold a lot of magazine articles. I've ridden some books. There is no way in the world that I, with 51 years of sobriety today, could write anything approaching the power and the sanity in that big book, Alcoholics Anonymous. It's sometimes said if you want to hide something from an AA member, the best place to put it is in the big book. And I'm afraid that might be at least partially correct. but I came back around Chicago then in 1959 and I became a hyperactive AA I wanted to be very important and I become a banquet speaker and I ran into some strange problems with people who didn't understand God's will when I explained it to them I ended up with a lot of very bad relationships that had nothing to do with my being an alcoholic or a disease. It had something to do mit defects like dishonesty and greed and pride and hostility and trying to get my own way, which still happens occasionally. But I ended up with some very bad relationships with people in AA, and when I was sober, well, this would be 1968, I went to a meeting and I wasn't feeling that good I was sober 21 years I know this is a surprise to my friends I've had a considerable problem with resentments and after a meeting several of us were talking and I said, you know, I don't feel as good as I should what should I do? and one of the men that I sponsored who was sober 3 years said, why don't you write out a new 8th step and go around and make amends to these people and I thought that was pretty ridiculous to tell to one of AA's leaders but I went ahead and did it and I made amends to these people everything is connected to everything else in my view if I lie, cheat and steal over here it corrodes my life over there if I make an amend over there it helps my life because everything is interconnected though I may not see the connection until I have done the work which would give me the understanding So I made amends to those 12 people, and I started out growing up in Oak Park. My father was a Lutheran minister. I come from a long line of Lutheran ministers, but in spite of that fact, I believe in God today. My father wasn't a Lutherans minister, he was a Christian minister, and he was also a Lutherian minister who became a fundraiser, and he was also a very badly behaved alcoholic. My father was listed in who's who. My grandfather was in who is who. He was a doctor of divinity and another grandfather who was a medical doctor. I'm the only professional wrestler our family has ever produced. But I had been, my father I grew up in a little town down in southern Georgia. My father when I was 12 left Oak Park because my mother wanted a separation and it's 1934 I was twelve years old and he went down to south Georgia where he had a sister and came back that fall and he picked me up coming home from school and drove me down there and entered me in the school. The town was so dull that if you took LSD you'd have visions of Lawrence Welk. But it was a very confusing time of my life and alcohol became a very good friend. Now, that didn't make me an alcoholic. I would have been an alcoholic no matter what happened because when I was eight or nine if somebody left some beer or wine in a glass and I found it, I would drink it. But I got drunk the first time when I was 14. My life was very confused at that time. I had been a very good student at Oak Park and became a very bad student down there. All of my energy went into sports. I played every sport there was with varying amounts of talent. My favorite sport was boxing. I wanted to be middleweight champion of the world. And I would have been, except I had a bad handicap. I couldn't whip anybody. I've had my nose broken in three places. Georgia, Illinois, and California. But alcohol became a very good friend. I mean, it really changed everything. You know, we talk about how it glues us together. And I knew I didn't have to get smart. All I needed was the price of what was in that bottle. When I entered a college near Atlanta, I lasted there a year and a half. And then when I was 19, in 1941, I came back to Oak Park where my mother was living. and entered college and was boxing for a club on the west side of Chicago and drinking more and more World War II had come along and I decided to be an aviator I went into the Navy I had this act that I had glued together it was the genius and the sophisticate and the lover and the athlete and now I was going to be a naval aviater and I went to the Navy and I took flight training I got commissioned, which was good because then I could get drunk all the time I had two decorations in World War II one was a linoleum rug I won in the late radio quiz program I can't remember the other one I destroyed two aircraft in World Wars II they both belonged to the United States Navy a friend of mine pointed out if I'd gotten three more I would have been a Japanese ace I flew single engine sea planes that were catapulted off cruisers and battleships you went from 0 to 60 miles an hour in the space of about 40 feet it wouldn't cure a hangover but it really took your mind off of it for a little while but these were the kinds of things that I brought into AA and after I'd made those 12 amends to those people in Chicago in 1968 a business trip to Miami worked out and I went to see my father who still lived in this little town in South Georgia now he had gotten sober on his own and I used to call him and suggest we get together and he would always say no and I could make an honest case and think I still can that 99% of the harm in that relationship had been done by him but I went to see him unannounced in October of 1968 and I rang the doorbell and he came to the door and I made an amend to him and then I told him who I was and said, I'd like to come in and talk with you. And I talked to him for perhaps half an hour and then went home and in March of 1969 I got the feeling I should go see him again. Unannounced and we had another good visit. After that second visit I was home several days later having a quiet time. everything is connected because by improving that relationship that critical relationship in my life I saw ten more names that went on my eighth step from before sobering up everything is connected and if you have something in your life easy does not do it, do it now because two weeks after that second visit he died and I went to his funeral keenly aware that had I not been to see him when I did a very important part of my life would have never gotten straightened out I think that one of the big differences between the 12 steps and any therapy I know anything about and I know a lot about therapy not from having it but from being close acquaintances with some very well-known psychiatrists and psychologists who say that people break down not because they had too strict toilet training but because they've lived dishonestly, selfishly, secretly, irresponsibly. But what happened from healing that relationship is some scar tissue within me that I could never get at disappeared. I think we can reach back into the past and change it so that we live better in the present. And if you've got anything like that in your life, I would say go do it right now because next week the opportunity may be gone forever. Tradition 8 says that, the long form says that Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional. We define professionalism as the occupation of counseling alcoholics for fees or higher. It's probably the most completely ignored tradition in our fellowship. Now we have issues. We don't have problems. We have issues, issues or deep psychological difficulties best resolved through overpriced therapy or counseling if you have a problem and you're an AA in my experience what you and I need to do is work the 12 steps you know it's sometimes said used to hear that alcoholics are smarter than other people I don't know where that came from it was certainly never started by anybody in Al-Anon but in AA we used to have slips now we have relapses and something called relapse prevention a relapse is a slip that happens to an alcoholic who has insurance that will pay for generally useless treatment and the best way to prevent a relaps is to work and rework the 12 steps as it says in how it works if we do these things we're not only going to stay sober but we're going to be healthy in all respects and the 12 and 12 on page 15 it says AA's 12 steps are a group of principles spiritual in their nature which if practiced as a way of life will expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole and that's been my experience in my own life and with many, many alcoholics I've come to know through the years a lot of strange things happen to alcoholics I heard about a one armed man who went in to get a shave from this barber who had a bad hangover the barber was shaking so badly he cut him on the nose and on the chin and onthe ear he said haven't I shaved you before the man said no I lost this arm in a sawmill accident you know i heard gary talk last night it was an exceptional talk when gary was drinking he was sitting in a bar and there was a beautiful lady sitting next to him and uh they were chatting and he said what do you do she said i'm a professional entertainer he said well what's a professional retainer she said well i entertain she said I'll do anything you want for $200? He said, anything? She said, absolutely. He said how about $100? She said no, $200. He said anything? She said that's right. He gave her $200 she said what do you want me to do? Gary said paint my house. But I continued to drink After I came back to Oak Park, I went on the service, dragged my way through it. When I was 23 in 1945, I got pneumonia, which went into DTs. I was drunk the last—I was in the hospital four weeks, and I got drunk the last nine out of ten nights. I got out of the service in the fall of 19—in December of 1945, December 8th. I got separated at Great Lakes. I traveled for three days and three nights in Katok Park, where I was living 50 miles away. And in February, I decided to go, or rather over New Year's that year, I decided TO GO TO CINCINNATI AND GET DRUNK. I ENDED UP DRUNKY IN MILWAUKEE FOR THREE DAYS. AND I DRANK MYSELF SOBER ON NEW YEAR'S MORNING. AND I HAD A KIND OF TRANSFORMING EXPERIENCE. I EINDED UP WITH WHAT HAD TO BE THE WORST-LOOKING WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE WEST. she frightened me into six weeks of sobriety she reminded me of my judo instructor except he didn't have a mustache she looked like a million dollars and the only reason I say that is because I've never seen a million dollars and she looked like something I never saw before so I figured well I gotta do something about this drinking and I went on the wagon. I stayed sober for maybe six weeks and then a friend of mine and I got drunk and I bit, got bitten by a dog and I had to take rabies shots just to be on the safe side. I made out a list of people to bite in case they didn't work. I always drank and I drank in sophisticated places. Does anybody here remember the backstage bar on Wilson Avenue? It was very sophisticated entertainment was provided by ladies who danced on the bar while removing various articles of clothing and performing a selection of various stimulating movements While the dance steps were not too skillful and the choreography was clumsy there's no doubt in my mind that many people in that audience experienced physical awakenings as a result of those steps but if you were worthy they would drink with you and a friend of mine and I were worthy and a couple of them drank with us and then our money ran out and they ran out because we weren't any worthy anymore and from that and similar experiences I concluded that if a lady who drinks with you and says she loves you don't trust her she might not be sincere but I kept trying to find ways to control my drinking to stay sober I've had a continuing problem trying to be smarter than I actually am I'm of German ancestry and the problem with being German is every time you have two beers you want to cross somebody's border and I began to make various experiments and I would drink only on weekends and drank only beer I knew what an alcoholic was from living with my father, and I began to make a variety of experiments. I began to read everything I could get my hands on, and they all had one thing in common. They didn't work. I went on the wagon in the early part of 1947. I stayed sober for three months. I got drunk and I couldn't get sober for months. I knew I was an alcoholic but I didn't realize that if I'm going to stay sober where that knowledge is not sufficient. And then finally in August, an interesting thing happened. You know, all the usual things happen to me. I had automobile wrecks. I was always losing my car. There was really nothing more beautiful than an alcoholic who has been reunited with his lost automobile. I would stumble about and there's my car, I'd say, my car and wipe away a tear and drive off and run into something. It was a lousy life, it wasn't funny at the time. When I worked if I took more than half an hour for lunch they had to retrain me. Finally I got a wonderful gift. I got drunk in August of 1947 and I sobered up and I couldn't lie anymore. I've gotten in more trouble in my life lying to myself and you and everybody else. I couldn't lie. I had lost the ability to lie, and that continued for a week. And I kept thinking, I'm going to quit on my own or I'll do something else, or I will drink successfully. And a voice would always say, you never did it before and you won't do it now. And on Saturday in August, I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I talked to a lady named Grace Cultus, whom some of you may have known or heard of. And I said, I want some information about your organization. She probably thought I was from the FBI. She said, are you home? No, I said no, I was calling from a drugstore. I didn't want anybody at home to know I had a drinking problem. And so she said, well, you go home. And I had about 97 places I had to go before I went home. I hadn't been invited anyplace for months. And she said, this means a lot to you, doesn't it? I said, absolutely. So I went home and a man called me. And I went and talked to him for two hours. And that was a Saturday. The next day he took me to a meeting at the old Austin YMCA on Sunday morning. I went into that meeting and there were maybe 60, 70 people. And he said they're all alcoholics. And I didn't feel a bit different when I walked out. But I haven't had a drink since. there are many miracles in AA and it certainly was one for me I'm sure I've had many since 1961 in April we had a conference on the northwest side of Chicago and the last speaker was Dick Breen from Memphis he started talking at 2 o'clock on Sunday afternoon and he talked about 10 minutes and a man and his wife came in and they were ushered over to some seats and after the meeting he came over to me and he said I don't belong to this but I had to quit drinking does this work? I said sure he said how long are you sober and I told him and he and his wife had come in there to look at the hall because his daughter was getting married and they were thinking of using it for a reception we always called him the accidental alcoholic after that but he said that for 30 days before that he had been praying to find some way to stay sober. And so he blundered into that meeting. Accident, I doubt it. But I came out of that meeting in 1947 and I began to go to meetings and I talked about God and prayer. I became quite spiritual very quickly. I wanted to get good before I got better. And when I was sober a year... Now I think Gary and I were talking about this earlier. I think what we do in our group, Bill got worked into the first, the equivalent of the first eight steps. In the first week he was sober by Abby Thatcher and then Bill did the same thing with Dr. Bob right away up to step nine and the same thing when Dr. Rob started sponsored Earl Treat who started AA in Chicago. Earl's story is in the big book The Man Who Sold Himself Short but if you look at the story Dr. Bob took Bill or took Earl up to step 9 in the first three weeks and then he came back to Chicago and started AA so that's what we try to do in our group and I think if somebody had done that with me it would have changed things which caused a lot of trouble for me as my life went on sober because I was sober and I started to make money and that was very bad for me and with a year of sobriety I got into a great deal of trouble from some very very dishonest business activities and I was talking to some friends of mine I'd done nothing with the steps and this friend said you know I said I think I've missed something in this program they said my boy you missed the whole program and I said you kept such an open mind that the whole program just blew right through and I said okay and I did an inventory and then I did a fifth step. And then I started to make amends and then my life began to change because I began to understand I didn't believe in anything when I came to AA, I believed in God. I believe in God and I believe en you and I belief in this fellowship but I couldn't separate one from the other. And I began t understand that I do have here those things that I need. So when I sponsor somebody I work with him on the basis of those 12 steps. and I take him right up through one, two, three. Two, we look at that on the basis of sanity equaling honesty because if I lie about anything, I lose the ability to see the truth about everything. And we take step three aloud as Gary talked about last night as it says on page 63 in the big book. And then I help him do an inventory. We don't use the Hazelden Guide. If I'd ever used the Hazelen Guide, my few remaining hairs would have gone plunging to the floor in confusion. We have a book called Alcoholics Anonymous and a book call The Twelve and Twelve and it suggests resentments, dishonesty, selfishness self-pity, fear to seven deadly sins and I help him write that inventory and then he and I swap a fifth step I take a thorough one with him and he takes a thorough on with me In our group we believe that men should take fifth steps with men and women should take fifth steps with women. We believe that working on that basis, there is less tendency to generate new material that requires additional fourth and fifth steps. And then we talk about steps six and seven and we pray to have our defects removed. I do that every morning. I take step three and seven with myself every morning before starting meditation. And then I help him write his eighth step and encourage him to get right to work on the amends. And Gary again talked last night about how important these amends are if we don't do them. I was never able to sit and meditate until I had made all of the important amends I could find. And I keep finding them as a result of doing additional fourth steps and fifth steps. And I think that if I were not writing inventories, I would not continue to have looks in the past that enable me to change my life in the present I think that the readiness to have the defects removed is indicated by my willingness to work and rework all of these 12 steps I think if I'm really ready and interested in doing this then I'm going to continue to do this work with the steps I think that you know we don't talk in our group, we don't talk about making amends to ourselves. We don't put ourselves on that eight-step list. Many years ago, it was 1964, a man who was sober about four years at that time was talking with several of us and he said, I've got something that bothers me because when I was going to prep school, several friends of mine and I framed a kid to make it look like he was stealing. He said it wasn't true, but he got expelled from school and the night before he left to go home he hung himself. And he said I don't know what to do about that. I said well I don' t know either, but you better figure out something because it's going to get you eventually. And 12 years later he went back to drinking and he never did sober up again and I think there is a one-to-one relationship with the refusal to face that grievous amend and the inability finally to stay sober. So we're very serious about the program in our group and our whole effort is to inspire other people to work the steps. I mean, the message is certainly not picnics and banquets and bowling. We don't have any hierarchy in our groups. We're all thumbing our way along trying to wake up spiritually with, as you can tell, very slow progress. But when I take step one, or step ten, excuse me, which I try to do every day, when I do that, I try and look at my entire life. Obviously, if I've harmed people, I'm aware of that. If I've stolen something, I know I've done it. I'm sure I'm always aware of it. And that's obvious. But I try looking at my whole life on the basis of how am I spending my time and my energy? do I really believe that the spiritual life is important and if I believe that then I'm going to be doing all of these things that the program demands as I say, I go to the gym and that's part of the thing to stay in as good physical condition as I can Harris is a tither and I've been a tether for quite a while I give 10% off the top to what I consider to be good charities I heard about that when I was over 2 years and my income was terrible and somebody said well if you tithe it will help your income and I thought well that's pretty easy because 10% of nothing is not too tough but I have found that very important because I think that's a measure of my sincerity when you talk to people about making amends and sending back some money then they very often get very skittish we had a guy in our group Dennis O'Brien very good guy and somebody was telling him that he couldn't find somebody that he owed an amend to and Dennis said, if he owed you $1,000 do you think you could find him? And the answer of course was yes. So I tried to look at step 10 in relationship to my entire life. I started meditating when I was working up in Greenland in the 50s and I worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week and before that I had experimented with half an hour a day, 45 minutes a day. And up there I started doing an hour and a half a day and I discovered that the difference between 45 minutes a day and 90 minutes a day is not that 90 minutes is twice as good. It's probably four times as good and I discovered if I double that this again becomes four times as good, not twice as good. I do a lot of other things in my life. I travel a lot. I was thinking I was talking to somebody Clinton's been in office about five and a half years and I've been to 14 different countries in that time and all these people have had some interesting things to say about Clinton incidentally Hillary is selecting his next intern it's Lorena Bobbitt but my work has given me an opportunity to travel. I heard about the man at the beach in Fort Lauderdale and he kicked a bottle and a genie jumped out and said, I'll give you any wish you want. He said, I want to spend the night with three famous women. And he woke up in the morning and he was in bed with Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt and Hillary Clinton. His knees were black and blue. He was missing an important part of his anatomy and he didn't have any health insurance. So I work at meditation as I do my exercise. I think it's part of my program to stay in as good condition as you can at 76. And it's a very, very simple method. I read a lot of things. I knew for a while that I was destined for a lot more spiritual growth than the rest of you people. And as I said many times, I realized eventually that I had developed a metaphysical hernia I had strained myself spiritually I spent a lot of years as a retarded mystic and I finally gave up on that and I take a word or a phrase and I just repeat it for as long as I can until my mind quiets down if I do it first thing in the morning it works a lot better than otherwise and the quantity influences the quality if you haven't tried it all I can say is try it because it's a tremendous part of the program and makes tremendous changes in the lives of anybody who will do it regularly. So I think it's like exercise. I think It's like working the steps. I didn't come in here looking for God. I came in because I was frightened and I was a mess and I had no hope. And you people whom I had never seen reached out your hands and you said, How can we help? And you've helped me every day of my life since and you continue to. And for that, I'm certainly grateful. I think the message is summed up in step 12, having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. And the work I did in the steps when I was sober a year or 10 years or 30 years will not carry me today any more than the food I ate in those years will carry me. I have to continue to work and rework all of these tips. We've had a great many people come to our area from various parts of the U.S. and Canada suffering severely from untreated alcoholism and they come for a weekend and they do not one but a series of fifth steps with other people who swap as Gary talked about last night and they always go back with a new weight step and they almost go back refreshed and these are people who come in depression and anxiety and terror in the midst of everything else and their whole lives change as a result of this concentrated work with the steps. It does work. 1965, 66, 67, I was on the board of directors that Dr. Holbert Maurer had. He had two grants from the Eli Lilly Foundation. And the whole thrust was that if you're going to get better, forget therapy. Start doing what you're supposed to do and get open with people. One of the men on the board of directors was Dr. William Glasser, who had just written a book called Reality Therapy. Some of you may remember Glasser. And Glasser said a couple of things that I'll never forget. One is that when you pay a therapist, you're buying a friend. And the other was that if all the therapists disappeared today, it wouldn't make any difference because people would find somebody else to talk to tomorrow. I was writing an article for Christian Century on alcoholism many years ago, and I talked to Hobart Maurer. I said, Hobart, what about psychotherapy for the sober alcoholic in AA? And he said, if the alcoholic will work the 12 steps and develop the fellowship within AA, this will be more effective than any kind of therapy I know anything about. And what he points out is that the steps are here to deal with what's wrong with you and me if we don't anesthetize ourselves with alcoholism. It's always good for me to remember that AA is where the clergymen come to find God's help to stay sober, and AA is when the psychiatrists and psychologists come to find the kind of group therapy that will bring order and meaning to their lives. So that's the message I understand. There's a guy that I knew in AA who bounced around for 15 years. In 1972, in January, He sobered up once again. He'd gone to many, many meetings. Sobered up once again and this time he started to work the steps. He came to our meeting and he never drank again. Guy came to see us in 1984 sober 24 years from Toronto in terrible shape from untreated alcoholism. He did a series of fifth steps went back with a list of amends. He had one amend that involved a lady who had become pregnant before he came into AA and he had abandoned her and he wanted to find her and he didn't know how to find her and we said well make the amends you can find and it'll work itself out. He made all the amends he could find and he was an artist having an exhibition in Brampton near Toronto a lady came up and tapped him on the shoulder and it was this lady he'd been looking for. AA works if I will simply start wherever I can so that's the message I understand. It summed up as I've said many times before in the experience of a man who was in AA for maybe 12 years and never stayed sober. And in January of 71, he came back once again, this time with a difference. He began to work the 12 steps, came to our meeting. He had three boys, the youngest of whom was eight and was in a class for retarded children because he couldn't learn because the father was such a badly behaved drunk. And as the father stayed sober and worked the steps and changed, his son went from a class for retarded children to a regular class doing average work. And, as the Father continued to get better, the son continued to get better. And I had lunch with the father when his son graduated from high school. I said, how'd your boy do in high school? He said he made the honor roll every grade period but one he was a varsity football player he said none of this would have happened if all I had done is quit drinking and not work the 12 steps and that's the message I found with you and I'm here because without your help I could not remember it because I think if we work and rework these steps we change. This change is reflected in the lives of everyone with whom we come in contact. Thank you very much.