The Gap Between the Thought and the Response – Bob B.

Hi, I'm Bob Bazans and I'm an alcoholic. It's a great to have gotten the power of AA having had drinks on the 10th of December, 1967 and for that I'm very grateful. So I want to thank Howard and Terry and the committee for the opportunity to be here. This is very cool, and Howard said he knows I'll do well, and if I screw it up, he won't talk to me again. I'm here with my wife, Linda. Would you? Yeah. I found out at the meeting this morning that we had questions and answers. I did not know that. Howard did not tell me. I think it's really neat that the lady who has 50 years is here. One of the things I loved when I came into Alcove East Nile, we always want to be with the big guys. And I like it when people stay active all the way through their sobriety. Maintaining a lifetime relationship with anything is difficult. Your children, your spouse, your community, your church, Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's important to do, and I love it. My sponsor just celebrated 50 years last August, and he's been a great example to me. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what it was like, what happened, and what it's like today. from St. Paul, Minnesota I started drinking when I was 13 I went to a military when I entered high school I was 4 foot 11 and I weighed 95 pounds it was mostly mouth I mean I was just insecure wanted to belong thought everybody else got to school an hour early held a meeting decided what to do for the day and I always missed the meeting it looked like everybody else knew what to doing what to with life and I didn't know what to do with life I was looking at my insides and your outsides, and we all know about that. When I found alcohol, that sense of dis-ease dissolved. I mean, it was just the magic. I thought I found what made you look so comfortable. It just, I don't know, it's just wonderful. I didn't feel like a member of the group. I felt like I owned it. I mean it was not an improvement. It was a transformation. I mean there really was anything that worked that well you'd go after, and I went after it hard. By the time I finished high school, I was in a lot of trouble with drinking. I got arrested a couple of times, car accidents, went away to school, thought my drinking leveled out, thought my problem was being underage and my father, and drank me away out of Notre Dame middle of my senior year. In the yearbook, class ring walked out, didn't finish, and very few people in this room know about not finishing, but came home finished school got asked to leave the house lived the last year of my drinking which is just tacky drinking you know there's a lot of kind of exciting things I could tell but mostly it was tacky my last year in my drink and I was drinking about a fifth a day I ended up with an enlarged liver went through significant withdrawal I was living if not on skid row close worked as a waiter worked as a you know and I was about as sick and tired of me as I could possibly be I don't know seemed like I was reasonably well equipped in life and I just couldn't my brothers and sisters you know didn't seem to be much better equipped and they were doing a hell of a lot better in the way they lived their lives and I was the family problem which I didn't like love my parents I'm one of seven kids and it just gets old. It gets old having everybody give you the look and I finally ran my string out when I got, I was working as a waiter I got beat up, I lost my job my family let me back in the house on the condition I wouldn't drink and I moved back in and I tried to straighten my life out I thought if I could get married I'd broken up with Linda for the last year I called her about every two months just kind of like a low grade headache so that she couldn't, just about the time she started to date someone else, I'd call her and kind of stay in touch. And I begged my way back in and asked if we could seriously look at marriage and got a job, got engaged and I thought I was really going to straighten my life out but I couldn't shut my drinking down and it just, it was baffling to me. I just, alcohol was such a great friend for a long time, and then it just kind of turned on me. I ran that string out, and in July of 1967, I called Alcoholics Anonymous. Two guys came out and talked to me, and those two men changed my life. We have a lot of traditions in AA, but one of the greatest ones we have is that we share our experience, strength, and hope, and not our ideology or philosophy. Those two men sat me down in a booth in a cafe and changed my wife by sharing their life with me. I had talked to every possible helper you could talk to, but I'd never ever had talked to another person who had a drinking problem. And it was just the conversation I needed. I went to Alcali-Samos. I drank twice after walking in AA, once after a month of sobriety. I went on a business trip and drank on IT because I didn't go to meetings like I was told to and once on our honeymoon. I had about two months, three months of sobrietty and we honeymooned in Mexico. You know where the divers dive off those cliffs? I dove off those clips on my last run. And I sometimes later said to my wife, I said, that's the dumbest thing I ever did. And she said, Bob, it's not even in the top ten. It's funny how two people can share a life and have such a different view of it. But then she's an adult. my wife has more time in Al-Anon than I have in AA because they don't count slips and no I just whoa it's a tough crowd I mean just two pieces of information that happened to be lodged in the same sentence and I when I came back I didn't want to go back to the meeting I was embarrassed Linda said for God's sakes call Warren my sponsor called Warren went back to the meetings and when I came in AA and I listened to people talk about the different that alcohol my sponsor told me alcoholism was a disease physical, mental, spiritual once you cross the line from probably drinking into alcoholism your alcoholism affects you all the time when you were drinking and when you were not drinking. Boy, the thought that alcoholism could affect you when you're not drinking was like rocket science. I mean, that was like a very new idea. They said what we do at Alcoholics Not Miss wasn't to take our last drink or our last drug because we used the 12 steps of the recovery program to change, to find a different way to live that was better than the way we lived before. If you don't change, you're no longer going to be able to stay because you don' t know how to live sober. That was like the Gettysburg Address of AA. I mean, it really was. I mean that was the idea that I thought that we'd be talking about how not to drink, number one. I thought that AA was mostly about how not to drank. We spent almost no time talking about how not the drink. We spent most of the time talking about how to live so that you don't go back. And the idea that I could learn how to live, I sure as hell didn't know how to live. I just wanted to find the knobs that I can turn the volume in the station. I wanted to change some things in my life and I could change them but only for days. for weeks or a month. I couldn't change them over any period of time. And when I came back after that last drink I had in December of 1967, I was as optimistic a young guy as I could possibly be. I thought, okay, I got the problem, you got the answer. I mean, how much better could it get than that? I mean I really thought I have finally stumbled into the right room and I got involved in the steps. In Minnesota most of our meetings were closed step discussion groups. We went over the steps and over the steps, and we weren't quite as formal as a lot of what happens in Alcoholics Anonymous today, but you went through the steps. When you had trouble, you went with your sponsor. Usually they gave you some guidance around four and five and eight, but, you know, we just kept going through the steps,and I really had a sense that if I applied these principles to my life that I could, you know, my problems would be solved. I had other problems though. Horrible but ordinary problems. You know, kind of the unmanageability. I couldn't get up in the morning. I subsequently found out that it had something to do with when I went to bed, but at the time I did not I did not know that. I had money problems. I spent three or four hundred bucks more than I made per month. If you do that over a long period of time you end up in debt. I just want to run that one by you in case you don't know where that's going. I had work issues, which was the biggest area of my life. I had a little problem getting to work. I had some difficulty staying at work, and I had a hard time working at work. Other than that, I was a pretty good worker. I had... When we started to have children, I had great parents, but even great parents make mistakes and I wasn't going to make the mistakes my parents did and I didn't. I made all the mistakes my parents made in a bunch they didn't think of. I was loud, impatient, angry, immature and sometimes violent with my children. I am not proud of that fact but it's an accurate description of how I was. Our three boys are in Alcoholics Anonymous with 17, 14 and six years of sobriety. I've turned my wife in as a carrier but so far they've done nothing about it. Well, none of us were alcoholic when we met her. I mean, none of us. I don't think that's a... I mean if you were a scientist doing a sample, I think you'd But how wonderful is that to have had that problem to that degree in our home and be blessed with recovery the way we are. That was Linda's biggest fear with our third child is that we've been so blessed with two recoveries that the third might not get well. And it is wonderful to watch them, although late, blossom in their lives, to be able to do the things that you'd never expect that they ever would have done. I don't have enough time to get into that, but their lives are full. And if you would have seen our kids at their height, you would never have guessed that their lives would be full. And it is. And I had a gambling problem. More of a hobby. Four or five hours a day, four or five days a week. It wasn't a big deal. I was making five to ten grand a year playing backgammon. It was kind of like a second job. I had all these problems when I came in. none of them were on my inventory, the first inventory I took. The first inventory i took was a recitation of the worst things I had done in my life. I had very little insight into the causes and conditions of my disease. I did the very best job I knew how to do it was I wouldn't go back and change that I didn't it wasn't that I was trying to hide anything I just didn't have any insight and uh my second year I started to get a pretty good feel for my defects of character and my shortcomings In my third year, I got a very good look at them. And one by one, as they would come up, I would start to deal with them. I'd make a little bit of progress and I'd fall back. I'd makes a little but of progress, and I fall back, and in my third and fourth year, you know, really got a good list. In my fifth year, they started to bother the hell out of me. In my sixth and seventh year in sobriety, they started eating my lunch. And I felt like I had felt like everything else I did in life. I interview well, I just don't work well. She could prize us for interviewing. and I can get in school. I just can't finish school. It's nothing, you know, it's just a little problem and I felt like now I'm an AA. I start out and for the first couple of years I was the youngest guy in our group. Everybody was patting me on the head telling me what a great job I was doing and all of a sudden my life's showing up the way it always shows up and I don't know. I find myself five, six years of sobriety. I'm going to five, six meetings a week. I'm sponsoring guys. I'm doing jail work. I'm starting to be active in service, starting to give talks. My sponsor is one of the most active people in our group and we're doing 12-step work and I'm a pretty active member of Alcoholics Anonymous and for the first two or three, you know, the first year was like a honeymoon. The first year is one of the wonderful periods of time I had in my life. Nothing else in my wife worked except AA. AA was like haven. It was like my bar. I just, it just calmed me down walking in the rooms. I knew more about who I was in the room of Alcoholics Anonymous than any place else in the world. And then as I started to go through my second and third year, my life started to show up and I started To get less comfortable. By my seventh year, and I'm not, you know, I always worry about whether I'm too negative, I was as uncomfortable in my seventh Year as I was before I came in Alcoholics Anonymous. In my seventh years, I'm thinking about suicide, not drinking. I'm Thinking about suicide. I can't, I married, I can work. Everybody knows how to work. I don't know how to work. I've got as much bills as seven years of sobriety as I had at one. And I paid off the ones I had at one, but I billed them back up at seven. You know, I'm not being a good parent. I'm Not Being a Good Worker. I got this gambling problem, which is my second job. And I'm I felt like it had just gotten me good enough to hate myself is kind of what I felt in Alcoholics Anonymous. And And I knew what the answer was because I can't keep my mouth shut, number one. So I share. I was sharing this stuff with my sponsor, but I was showing about 65%. Now, I know in Phoenix you do 100. I think that's wonderful. That is to be commended. But the fact was I was only sharing about 65% of it for me. I couldn't see it all. I couldn't see it in perspective. I didn't understand it when I was going through it, and I wouldn't tell myself the truth, much less Warren. And I'm in as much pain as I could possibly be in, and I loved Alcoholics Not Much. I loved the program. I really believed that it worked. A new guy would come in. I'd get him a cup of coffee, tell him to sit down, and he'd share that bushel basket full of manure that we all bring in, and I'd say, hey, you're in the right place. If you just get a sponsor, get in the book, Try to do the steps. Don't have to do them perfectly. Just try. It's going to be okay. You see that guy over there? God, his life was a mess and now it's okay and you're going to get through this. You're going be fine. Then I'd get in the car and I'd go home and I would say, Bob, when are you going to be fine? You just bought a $400 sport coat at a store that you had an $800 bill at. When are you gonna stop spending money you don't have to buy things you don' t need to impress people you don''t like? Cecil Corrigal 1968 I heard that and I didn't know when are you going to stop gambling when are we going to learn how to work everybody knows how to works I don't know how to I knew what the answer was because I had a great sponsor and I loved old timers and I was a pretty good observer it had something to do with spirituality it had to do with finding out what God had to deal with Wednesday but I knew what the problem was As soon as I opened myself up, knock on the door and ask God for help. God says, who's there? I said, Bob. He says, what do you want? And I said I want to turn myself in. I said God I'm seven or eight years sober. My pants are on fire. I'm dying. And what do You want? Well I said that I notice that people who have a better relationship with You have a life. They have a bigger life. And I want a sign up. God is going to say fine. Then I'm going to see what all new people say. What all people in trouble say. What do I do? And God's going to say, get up in the morning, go to work, stay at work, work at work. Get on a budget. I think that's an Al-Anon word. God, that's a tough word. I mean, that is a tough Word, I think. Be kind and loving to your children. Be kind of loving to you. Be kind to your wife and stop gambling. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what God's gonna want me to do. I know what God wants me to. do. So what the hell is the use of going to God to develop a better relationship if you can't fulfill the conditions of the relationship? And I was stuck in that spot for about three years. Figured as soon as I clean my act up, I'll get a better relationship. But I mean, it's nonsense trying to get a better relationship when I can't do the deal. There's something wrong. I felt like I had a built-in failure mechanism. And out of desperation, I went back to the steps. Not like I ever left them, but I went to the stairs and I went right back to the steps with a desperation that I hadn't been had for a while. And I took step one with almost eight years of sobriety. It was about the time of the Denver, we had tickets to go to Denver and Linda's dad was dying and she had to go visit him and I couldn't go, we couldn't do to the international, so. And I, I took it and I took step one and it wasn't very hard to figure out my life was powerless. You know, I was powerless and my life was unmanageable. That was pretty easy. You know what fooled me? Step two. Step two, I believed it for us. I just didn't believe it for me. I honest to God could have put my hand on a lie detector and said, you believe that God's going to restore us to sanity? I would say yes. The needle would not move. If you would have asked me if God is going to destroy Bob Bazan's insanity, the answer is no. I'm eight years sober. I'm going to four or five meetings a week. I'm sponsoring guys, I'm doing the deal, and I'm dying. I'm going backwards. My pigeons are making more progress than I'm making for God's sakes. I mean, do I feel like God's going to restore me to sanity? Hell no. He's going take me to the top of the hill, show me paradise, and then I'm gonna fall on my backside because that's what I always do. I don't finish anything. I'm a great starter, but I don' t finish anything, and that gets old. It gets old to have skills and gifts and talents and ability and opportunity and grace and not use them. That's what alcoholism is. You don't get to have a life. You know Rudy? He went to Notre Dame. I passed through. They used my room as a study hall. I had three guys petitioned to have me removed from engineering school I mean it was I didn't have a life I didn' t get to have the experiences that other people have because I didn''t attend to my life I couldn' t attend to life on life's terms and when you're really in trouble you get more or less active I got more active and I started to see people with bigger problems with great dignity walking through those problems rather than trying to run away from them and I came to believe that God had restored me to sanity at eight years of sobriety. I took step three with my sponsor on my knees in his office. We didn't do that much in those days. But I thought, hell, this time, because I was attending a lot of conferences, I started to hear about people doing that. And I thought hell, I'm going to try that. It was a little awkward but I tried it and it seemed fine. And then I did a fourth step and I did my third fifth step with my sponsor and I had done my first two with clergy. And I went to him, and I said, you know, when you're done, be careful because whatever you recommend to me, I'm going to do. I said I feel like I'm dying of thirst lying next to a lake. I am so tired of being me. And I took my fist up. When I was done, one of the things he wanted me to do was go to a psychologist. And I didn't want to go to an psychologist. I thought that was an admission of failure about my program. hello and but I had a lot of issues around money failure and success my father was a pretty successful man and he was my hero I thought I'll never be as good as my old man that was one of my hang-ups and I had a brother who was Phi Beta Kappa in law school and a sister did graduate work at the sorbonne and I was this crap head lodged in between these two show-offs, and the, so I went to the psychologist and he said, well you get your parents involved. I said no, they've been over-involved with my life. He said, will you get you wife involved? I said, oh crap. Well they see it so differently. I mean, it's maybe more accurately, but it's... Then they wanted my kids involved. I did not want my kids in the pool. I was embarrassed by how I was sometimes with my children. We went to the psychologist and I made one of the greatest discoveries. I don't have enough time to tell it to you in detail, but what I discovered was I was swimming in fear. I had done three inventories and fear was dogs, snakes, and high buildings. Zero insight, and I'm swimming in Fear. I'm afraid of being a husband, I'm afraid to be a father, I am afraid of work, I'm a afraid of failure, I'am afraid of success. This isn't just words. I'd rather not make a sales call rather than take the chance that you drag me across the damn desk and force me to sell you something. I mean it just, I mean, I was just surrounded in fear and was unable to identify that fact. That was like a revelation to me. Eight years sober, four or five meetings a week, sponsor, steps, three inventories, had no great insight into the amount of the debilitation of fear in my life. I went home and I had a spiritual experience about two weeks after that meeting with the psychologist. That breakthrough was after about seven or eight weeks with the psychiatrist. And two weeks after that, having one of the worst days in AA that I've ever had, I had a spiritual awakening that was born out of some of the greatest pain that I have experienced in my sobriety. And I realized that I had tried as hard as I knew to clean my act up, and I had failed. And for some strange reason, rather than... You know, I used to have a mantra. My mantra was, you're an asshole and your life doesn't work. that was my when I didn't feel well I just said those things over and over again what a mantra what a thing to keep saying to yourself I don't like that language but if you ask me for an accurate description of what I regularly said about myself and how I regularly felt about myself that is exactly how I felt about myself and for some reason I said maybe you're just where you're supposed to be what an idea and I realized that I had tried pretty hard to clean my act up when I couldn't do it and all of a sudden I got down on my knees and I took the sixth and the seventh step with the program of alcoholism six steps said they were entirely ready to have God remove our defective character in a seven-step said we humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings I spent eight years trying to get rid of them I don't know the power to get I'm the pipe not the well it happens through me not by me a doctor doesn't heal he creates in a septic environment A fireman creates an atmosphere in which healing can take place and God heals, and I don't change. I create an atmosphere where change can take space and God changes me. And that night, four of the major issues in my life disappeared that night such as the power of the sixth and the seventh step, the powerof God, and the power of the program. And I had to put a structure in place to support that. I'm a guy that when I go on a diet, the first thing I do is buy a bag of cookies and a quart of ice cream. It's already been a bad day. I'm probably never going to have ice cream again. I just... Just, you know. Now if you think like that, you've probably made promises you've not been able to keep. And I knew that I was about to make commitments that I have in the past not been unable to keep So I turned the finances over to my wife, and for the last 30 years she has managed the finances of our home. And I took an allowance. I started to date my wife. I dated my wife every Friday night for about 25 years. We stopped doing that, and we probably need to get back doing that. But that was one of the best things we've ever done. I had her love and affection. It was everybody else's love and affections I was trying to chase. And she used to be on my back about being overly active in AA and not enough time, and we're spending all this time talking about kids and bills. That isn't how we fell in love. You know, I started to feel like I was going out with my mother. And so we started to... I know. So we started the shack up. We'd go to Chicago for a weekend. We started to get romantic. It was a real-life dangerous date. No one else went out on that date. We went out, we got dressed up, we went out. We did that for 25 years, and that was good stuff. I started I spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours learning how to be getting help about being a parent I think being a parenting is 125% of whatever you got I think having kids is like having a bowling alley installed in your head, it's just one of the most demanding it's one ofthe most demanding jobs you will ever have I mean it is it is one ofthemost wonderful privilege but oneofthemostdemandingjobsyouwilleverhaveinyourlife and I quit gambling that night and my life took off like a rocket ship and for the next 10 years I made enough money to burn a wet elephant and then in 1984 they changed the tax act and I went broke from I went broke from about 1985 to about 1991 I lost 8 or 9 million dollars and losing the money was not like changing my clothes it was like tearing the skin off my body I remember I went to my spiritual advisor I asked a man to be my spiritual adviser he said what do you want? I said I want to be more loving and less materialistic within about three months I started to lose everything I had I went back I said we have to talk I said, I want to keep the stuff and be less materialistic. And, oh God. We laugh about that today. I used to pray to make a million dollars. If any of you are doing that out there, I would add an addendum to that. I would also pray to keep it. if you're going to be in the program a long time, if you are going to live your life in Alcoholics Anonymous, which is necessary for most of us to do to maintain our sobriety and to have a life, you are turning the barrel. It's just life. No one is immune. I used to think, you know what I thought recovery was? I made this up, but I really thought it. I thought discovery was the absence of problems. I believed that for a number of years. I mean, I don't know how dumb you have to be. I mean we're talking about problems and meetings and it's like I just was so self-involved I just, I didn't know what. And I believe that most of us if we involve ourselves in alcoholics now must have put the principles and actions in our lives, we'll have better lives than we would have had had we never had the disease of alcoholism. I think being a drunk and finding Recovery and Alcoholics Anonymous is like a vocation. I think it's like a call. It's like an opportunity to have a life that we never would have had had we not had this problem that forces us to learn how to live and gives us the principles in which to live. It gives us an opportunity to use the gifts that we still have under the goddamn piano in the box with the ribbon on top that we never opened up. And it's not a partial deal. It's not about abstinence. It's the whole deal. It really works. And it isn't about change. It's about transformation. It's far closer to a sex change operation than an improvement. I mean, it is not a small deal what happens to you in Alcoholics Anonymous. it is and today there's an awful lot of talk about there's probably more teaching this is the last thing I'm going to say there's possibly more teaching around the steps in the program of Alkali Anonymous than there has ever been and I think sometimes out of that teaching and I mean I think it's wonderful we're getting more in the book but it's also kind of a movement towards orthodoxy which I think sometimes there's parts of that that are not so wonderful but sometimes we get the impression that it could be mechanical. If we just take the right actions, we're going to be okay. And there's something beyond action. The program is less about doing than about change in being. Once you change how you be, what you do changes automatically. Everybody wants to know what to do. All of us know what to do I never have anybody come over to my house that's got a problem and sits me down and talks about that thing that's eaten their lunch and then I say, okay, shut your eyes, quiet down for a minute and pretend I came to your house and had that conversation with you. What would you tell me what to do? They always know what to do. They just can't do it. They don't have the power to do it, their mind's not quiet enough to do it. The power is from God, it is not from us. The power is not form the information. The information is the menu There are people in this program that are starving to death eating the menu. You have to pass this through your heart. I don't know, so there's a way of being. There are plenty of times when I've got an issue that I'm working on, I can't even pray about it. I can'T get myself in the right mental attitude to even ask for help on the problem because I know I'm not going to do anything about it, right? I don'T know what. But then there comes a time where I'm able, For whatever reason, I'm more open. I'm More Surrendered, where I'm able to start praying about a problem or an issue that I have in my life. And what do I bring to that process? I don't know, more honesty, some humility, some openness, some willingness. So there's a way of being in the process, not just doing. And sometimes you've just got to do. Sometimes we're having trouble. I'm not against doing keep doing it but sometimes if you're not getting what you thought you should get out of the process pay a little attention to how we be in the process today I'm self-supporting through my own contributions I'm in love with my wife I have a good relationship with my children I'm 40 pounds overweight and I still smoke sometimes still have the ability to be a horse's ass it hasn't gone away kind of like riding a bicycle you know but life is full I mean it really is full you don't have to do it perfectly you're gonna make lots of mistakes but if you don t drink if you maintain your integrity if you stay in the process it's just the most wonderful trip you're ever going to take thank you for my life I'm done with that that portion of my talk and do we just go right into questions and answers okay I'm new at this so. Hi Shane. Shane asked me what kept me from going forward in my dry spells. None of your business, Shane. Now that I think about it, I think the process of growth in any spiritual life is a process of ups and downs, I think you get dry spells. I think most people coming to Alcoholics Anonymous would make enormous progress in the first year to two years. They take on, they identify things that they really are committed to do in their lives and they often are amazingly successful at making those changes early in their life. And then many of us plateau I plateaued around a year and flattened out for a period of time. Now, it had an upward curve. I was making progress. What I thought was lack of progress was that you were getting me honest enough with myself that I could no longer stuff and deny and lie to myself about what was going on. It looked like I was getting worse when in effect I was actually moving towards the place where the change was going to happen. So it looked like I was on the down escalator going up. But in effect, I think the spiritual walk is like that. There are times when you, when it looks like you're going backwards. The spiritual journey is like if I said to you, come home with me tomorrow to Minnesota. I mean, you've got to what? Tell your partner, if you've gotta partner, you gotta call work, you gotta get a ticket, So when you're taking a journey, what do you got to do? You run into what's in your way. You got to deal with what's on your way Most of us have conditioning and defects of character and things that we haven't even identified in the first year or two of sobriety. I mean, we've been dealing with the big issues. You know, money and jail and work and getting laid and all the sorts of things that are very important that you can do that. You don't have any insight into what is really in your way until you've been around a while, where you can start to deal with the things that are more subtle. You can't get it all done in a year or two. Hell, you can't gets it done in 37 years. I mean, it's a very big, wonderful deal. So I think my journey and my problems were not unusual. I find that most people sometime between 5 and 10 years of sobriety their pants catch on fire if you sit down and talk to them I think, and what they run into is the next set of things that they have to use the principles for to change and they were not insightful enough into the causes and conditions of their disease in their first two years of sobrietty to identify the fine line between observation and criticism the map. I go, I've had periods of my life where I went to as few as two meetings a week. I go to four or five meetings a day a week today. Maybe more. Four or five meetings is, two of them are in the morning and the others are in the evening. A couple of them are at six o'clock, one's at seven. I meditate about 45 minutes every day. I was unable to do that as a young man. As I get older, it's been easier for me and that discipline is something that I've had on and off. I started meditating 35 years ago and I think it's one of the greatest disciplines, one ofthe most productive things we could ever do and it's not an easy thing to do. About meditation, most of us don't do it because we think we're not any good If you ever tried to meditate, what you find out is you've got a zoo in your head. What you need to know is that all of us have that. All of us has that. You may think that you're not any good at it. Just do it. And what you will identify over a period of time is you will start to quiet down. It is the incessant noise in our head. it is that addictive pattern of thought and society today supports that addictive pattern of thoughts society used to support recovery not anymore baby it is out there and everything is being run to take it to an unsustainable excess you know drugs, sex, gambling you don't even have to leave your bedroom to get those things anymore I mean we used to have to go out for those things they send you credit cards you know they're stuffing them under the door for you for, oh, am I glad they didn't do that to me in my early sobriety. I mean, if you wonder sometimes when you're not making progress, you know, you're hitting the golf ball a little offline, you don't even know, there's a 30 mile an hour wind out there. If you don' t have something to hang on to, baby, you're going to drift. I mean it is, it's windy. Okay? I read six meditation books today. I'm an old man. I mean, I couldn't even read them when I was young. But I'm telling you, I have a practice. I have the ability to read. I have my own sponsor. I have spiritual advisor. I'm serious about how I live my life. I still am an asshole with regularity. But I am a serious guy about how I try to do my program. You need a practice and it's got to connect to your life. I mean, the good news is it works. You are going to find, if I ask most people in the room, what do you want? Most people would say they want to be happy. Happiness is probably more conditioned on circumstances and isn't as available as we sometimes think it is because sometimes life is painful. But what's always available is peace and joy. Regardless of the circumstances in your life, you can have peace and joy. Not a joke, not over-advertised. You can have that in the middle of all the stuff that is going on. This program will center you and give you that. I don't know. Yep? I cried. He wants to know what I did to overcome the fear that was in my life. Howard said it today a lot. I mean, fear is an illusion. You know, I mean there's two ends of the scale. God, fear. I think we swing between those two continuums. Some days you just wake up in it. I mean no requests, no circumstance. You're just in it baby. Your anxiety level is maxed, and you don't even know it's like a biorhythm thing. I don't know. That happens to me today. Today, if I had one thing that has offered me more peace than anything else, is today I'm more detached from my thinking. I used to be my thoughts. I was my thinking, thought-action, thought action, thought act. I was like a monkey on a string, okay? today I have a gap between my thought and my response. I never knew I had that gap. I think I have always had it and never saw it. But in that gap, I'm a human being. That's like being let out of jail. Fear is an illusion. the way for spiritual path is through the fire not around it the fire is an illusion all of us have had the experience that when we enter the scariest place of our lives when we get through it it's like it wasn't there it is a psychological phenomenon underneath there always is a peace and a stability and a quietness available to us most of our minds are so active they never give us access to that place. So meetings, reading, meditation some things to start to get us allow us to be more centered and connected and to know that we're not alone that we are not so different. Those are the things that just kill us. and you know fear is disabling many of us I mean the problem is we're conflicted and some of us don't even know we're afflicted we want to stop gambling but we want to gamble so when you're talking to someone you say I want to stop gambling. Saying, yeah, yeah. 38% of you wants to stop gambling. But, you know, but 62% of you wants us to gamble. You've got to be honest about that and you've got to feed the part of you that wants to get well and starve the part that wants to not get well. You're conflicted. You have to choose. And most of us, our biggest problem is immediate gratification. God, we've got the attention span of an ant. The message of society today is, poor baby, you shouldn't have to suffer. Life should not be difficult. Baloney! You can't live life without difficulty. You can'T live life with some pain. Not available. You can' t get a college degree. You can''t raise a kid. You can ''t get a recovery easy, quick. so we have to somehow develop a tolerance to be able to stay in the game without having to have immediate gratification for a new person in recovery immediacy is bad oral immediacy is the worst well you look like one I, uh, sorry, it was an opening, I understand. Mark's question was, if I'm as big an asshole as they say I am, I must spend a lot of time making amends, is that true? Yeah. I'll tell you something about change. uh first of all when i need to clean something up yes i clean it up uh i think i exaggerated a little bit to give you the idea that i am with great frequency an ass because i don't want to have to make amends i think on a regular basis i have a with my wife and my children and people i work with i don t have the conflict that i used to have but but i also wanted people to know that I still have not lost that gift. And I still am from time to time, and I do make amends. But I'll tell you the hardest thing is that the people that we hurt the most in our lives are the people we're closest to. An awful lot of single people today in the program arrange their lives so that they don't have to deal with deep relationships. So they just pick people, either put up with their crap, and they kind of, you know, most of us reduce our lives to meet our defects of character. That's one of the reasons that marriage and work and parenting is so demanding. But one ofthe greatest gifts of parenting and work and being a child of a parent is that in that process, in those relationships you run up against yourself. The universe is trying to get a message to you and I. The message is, it is not working. We don't want that message. How do you get that message? Who would give you the message? Most of us have arranged our lives so we don't have many messengers. But if you're married, you're probably going to get it from your spouse. Or a look in your child's eye when you yell at him or strike him. Or a boss. Or a sponsor. The universe is giving us a message. It does not work. Change. Most of us are afraid of change. We think these characteristics are us. It is not flesh and bone, it is behavior. You can change behavior without changing who you be. You can changed political parties without changing who you'll be. You could change religions without changing who you will be. You can changes behavior. It isn't you, it's what you do. But so many of us, are so identified with a certain pattern of thought and a certain pattern of behavior, we think it's us. And to make that change, it feels like we're dying. Nonsense. It's what is in our way. And on the other side of that is the same freedom we've experienced when we stopped drinking. It is, you know. But in those close relationships, I got to a point where when I got to my kids apologizing one more time for being angry, I needed a change. In my early sobriety, I could try and fail and try and fail and still grow. But there comes a time where you've got to change or you stop growing. And that's that middle period that I talked about. That's that fifth year, sixth year, seventh year. You've got a change. Because you either change or you build an addition onto your house to accommodate the problem. I don't think you can do anything, Mark. No, it's up. No, I... It's very unimportant how you look. Very unimportant. This gentleman. I don' t know. I don'' t... If I had any one single thing the question was most old timers have one or two or three things that they like to tell people do you have anything else that you'd like to tell if I ask, I'm not asking you to raise your hands if I asked everybody in the room to raise their hand and say how many people would like to get rid of what doesn't work in their life and hurts themselves and others I think most of us would raise our hands and say sign me up pretend for a moment that I'm working with a guy who is 35 years old, married with children and five years sober and his pants are on fire. He's trying to do a four step and he's having trouble doing the four step, the columns and all the stuff. And I say hey that's kind of complicated. Don't worry about that. I got a new thing I want you to try. Get your wife and your kids your mom and dad, your boss couple of guys from your A group, your neighbors and your brothers and sisters and bring them over to the house. And here's what I want you to say. I want to say, we have a step in Alcoholics Dynamics where we try to get in touch with our defective character and I'm having trouble identifying mine. And I was wondering if you'd help. And then pass out little paper and pencil and then I advise leaving. You can stay but you don't have to stay. you'd have a hell of a start on an inventory now you know why most of us wouldn't have that meaning we don't want to change but it's worse than that we don't wanna know I'm not kidding we don' want to know we train each other you train your wife we're not having that conversation you want to have that camera that's gonna be a tough conversation come ahead but just know it's going to be a very expensive conversation. You train your children as to what they can say and not say, you train your co-workers, you trained your boss, you're training the people in your age group, they know what you're open to listen to, what you are not open to listen to. They know you're out chasing they can't have that conversation because you're not having that conversation. Make a deal huh? The chasers hang out with the chasors, gamblers hang out what the gamblers I don't call you on your crap you don't call me on mine. We'll talk about the steps, we'll talk about the traditions, we go to meetings, we will put on meetings at the jail. Most of us are just scared, really scared about change because we think it's who we are and most of us don't know. Most of us think we want to make the changes and don't identify how afraid we are to make the changes it is what we're afraid of is an illusion and that if I wanted anybody to know anything it is how afraid we are of those types of change and what I say to you is that the process of change is different it isn't muscle it isn't effort and it takes muscle and it takes effort our program says having a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. What happens to us is we wake up. As a result of being awake, I don't strike children anymore. I still have an issue with anger, but it does not have me as much as it used to have me. I am not at the effect of it as I used to be. I usedと think it was a tool. If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And most of us show up in Alcoholics Anonymous with the tool chest full of hammers. No screwdrivers, no wrenches, no pliers, just hammers and so I would say that most of us are afraid to attend to the difficult areas of our life and that the spiritual journey is that of a spiritual warrior who has the courage to attend to the places that are the most scary for them in their own lives. And that's our business in Alcoholics Anonymous. My father was my hero, he was the most important man in my life. I worked for my father for two and a half years and it was about as long as either one of us could stand it. My father with very physical with me. have about six generations of alcoholism and about three or four generations of rage that I can identify in my family. Don't get the impression my father was a jerk, my father with one of the finest men I've ever met and a man and flawed and human and normal okay we had a great relationship I have nothing but the highest respect for my father he and I could not work together I don't know I have a middle son who I have a similar relationship with where we just reversed that dance. And it's just amazing. I hope that I've broken the pattern of alcoholism in our family and I hope I have broken the pattern or rage in our family. It is a destructive thread. And I had a wonderful relationship with my father and I was asked to speak at his funeral. I declined to have my brother do it. but I'm well integrated in my family and my children today, our three boys I think Linda and I have a great relationship with them they call her for certain things they call me for other things my one son works for me my son that's more like Linda I love you, thank you Thank you.