The Second Half of Step One – FOTS Step 11 Workshop – Part 1 of 25 – Mickey D.

My name is Mickey. I'm an alcoholic. Thank you very much, Ali, for this invitation. I'm a little overwhelmed. I am a custom cowboy bootmaker and I have this little monastery that I live in with my wife who is on this meeting tonight and we have a converted garage and uh that's our boot shop and uh six days a week i'm at my workbench making custom cowboy boots so to come in to this uh incredible presence of so many people is slightly intimidating to me but you know what uh i know this that we're all in this together and uh and that helps me open up to what i'm going to talk about tonight first of all can you hear me okay thank you okay so um Um, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous for two weeks of sobriety. I had been drinking from the time I was five years old till I was 27. And I was sick and I was, um, I was pretty much out of my mind. And, uh, I thought though, if I could get two weeks of sobrietty, you know, we all come here with a plan and that was my plan. If I could get two weeks where I wasn't that sick, where I wouldn't wake up with my hands curled up, where i wouldn't be so out of my mind, if I could just get a break for two weeks then I'd go on back out there and and get this thing finished. And in on February 12th that'll be 47 years ago. And so, you know, we live and work and move in miracle country. This is miracle country. So, you Know, if we had to define sobriety, wouldn't it be interesting to see how many different versions we'd come up with? So, You know, the absence of ethyl alcohol was critical because I'd gotten you know there when I got sober it was 1974 there was a chart on the walls you know and this was that had a horseshoe and it went like this and the idea was you you you're born and then you go along and you start drinking and you go down and down and down and then you hit bottom. And then you come up if you get help, you come up the other side of that thing. And you get to the top and the clouds break and the sun shines and the angels sing. And it goes like that. And the idea was that when you start drinking, if you're alcoholic, you get on the train. You get the train and what I was, I lived on the train for most of my well practically all my young life. I remember one time we talked about Bill Wilson going into the Winchester Cathedral and walking down and standing in that church and having a spiritual experience and when I was in the eighth grade I've done most of living in Denver. Well I grew up in europe but then i came here when i was nine anyway so i went into this church in the afternoon when iwas in the eighth grade and i walked up and i stood in front of the altar and i knew there was a god i knewthere was a God same experience that bill had but what i also knew was that train was waiting for me right outside that door and when i walked out that door i had to get on that train and it took from the eighth grade till i was 27 years old before i could get off and i got a break i got this break that i'm pretty sure we all got that god allowed me this this moment you know there was no particular it wasn't a hard drinking thing i wasn't in jail there was nothing and it was just this thing that I got an open door, and I chose to walk through it. And that started me on this journey. I went to 1311 York Street in Denver if any of you have ever heard of it. That was the mother house for so many of us who got washed up in there and I stood at the bottom of the steps and there were two levels of steps it looked like Mount Everest to me and I was going to climb those two flights of steps and I Was going to go in for my first meeting in Alcoholics Anonymous and I knew I said to myself almost out loud when I go through that door my life is never going to be the same and it turns out it was true now something happened when i reached this was an 1890 victorian three-story victorian mansion and it's still there today and it still being of service but but what i didn't know is when i reached down to touch that that knob that that doorknob to open that door there was something else happening at the same time i was opening the door to the world of the spirit now i obviously did not know that at the time but when i opened that door i was now in i had two universes i had the one that i was going to go attend meetings in and i had The One that was going to save my life not that the meetings didn't give me the tools i'm just saying i entered that dimension so i was in alcoholics anonymous for a while six months maybe whatever and um i got my whole time in alcoholics anonymous has been a sequence of surprises so here's the big surprise the initial surprise for the initial surprise was that i was in aa holy moly what is that i used to drive by york street and look at the guys on and gals on their porch like you'd look at monkeys in a zoo and i'd drive by very superior and you know here we go and the next thing i know i joined the monkeys but anyway so so i i'm the the surprise was this being sober was like for me almost like going to hell it was like i was a if you took a fish a nice big salmon and you just took it out of the tank and dropped it on the sidewalk that's what i felt like i would go to meetings and i would go home and my wife would be in bed and i'd lay down face down and my um in our sitting room and i would beg god to kill me i could not stand being sober i did i didn't know how to live i didn t know how to be a well we had a three-year-old daughter we so i i drank for the first three years of our marriage we had a three-year-old daughter, I didn't know how to be a dad. I didn t know how to be husband and I was lost. And I was suicidal. And so when I say I was suicidal, I mean every day. And had a loaded 32 automatic pistol in the top drawer of my dresser. And here comes another plan. The plan was if this doesn't work, I'm putting my brains on the wall. It's not very elegant but it it was really seriously dangerous. And I ran into all this reality and I expected like moonbeams and rainbows, and it was going to be great because now I'm in Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm getting help. But what happened was I didn't know what the disease of alcoholism was like I didn't know what it felt like and so I had I got into this group and they were a very okay they called it tough love and truly truly it was abusive it was truly abusive but they did great precision in working the 12 steps so I learned precision all right and I could do the 12 Steps and i was having so much trouble that i asked my sponsor what's going on here and he says i don't know why don't you and then i worked my way up through the chain of command until i got to the top guy in this group and and i i'm sitting out on the porch in yorkstein and i said look i man i'm dying i'm really having trouble here what anonymous do i go to and he looked at me and i told him how how i felt he says I don't know man maybe you're gonna drink so there are the jail door closed and I didn't know what to do now I have had this companion for over 50 years in my life remember the choice of topics that I have and there are many books that we can you know call on so this companion was Thomas Merton. And I got his book, New Seeds of Contemplation, and well it was so long ago it was Seeds Of Contemplations. I'm sure they edited it, came up a notch. But anyway, and I started to read it and I went from chapters 32 to 36, and I'm reading this book. Now, I have already flunked AA, you understand, and I flunk the hierarchy in this very precise group, and i'm just another brick in the wall, and I am in deep. And I started reading, and what the book described was the soul being taken into the desert to be healed and I read those chapters and I thought my god everything that he wrote about in that book was happening to me. I was right in the middle of a massive spiritual experience and I didn't know what a spiritual experience, of course there's varieties of them but but the one I got was the desert and I got this terrible crashing and burning of idols that's a quote from these chapters and all the things that I had hung on to not the least of which was booze were all being taken away from me and I didn't know how to live I did not know how to live and I started there and I hung on my book I hung onto my book. I still read that book over 50 years later. And when I sponsor people, I invite them. Look, I've worked my program out of the big book for almost 47 years. I go back through the steps every year formally with my sponsor. So I'm putting that out on the table because these other things brought me to a place where I could say, wow, because if, listen, if this was spirituality, what I got, man, where's the door? How do I get out of here? And it was, it scared me. But it also reassured me. And so I held on to that book and I started to work my program. When I found out that this program was about God. I had a sponsor, you know, and I said, man, you know, I had lost my faith. And I had to get out of here. I had to get out of here so I asked my sponsor, I said can we have lunch together? And he said sure. So it got over and not only was he in that meeting, I expected it to be me and him. It was the whole group of these guys. And they're all around the table and i said well boys i said here's what it is i've discovered that i'm not alcoholic i mean i just right i really appreciate the fact that you've talked to me but i'm not alcoholic and the head guy again looks at me and he said listen there's a bar on the other side of the room he said why don't you come on over i'll buy you a drink and and i man it was like my rear end was riveted to the chair i said i can't go over there He said, why? I said, if I go over there, I'll die. And he said, and you're not alcoholic. Then I was left with option A, option A which is the only option offered me and I began to walk this road. I began To walk this road now my self esteem was so low. Don Pritz arranged for me to over on the other side of colorado and and do a talk i mean i'm brand new and so the time came for me to go do the talk and i'm sitting in my apartment and don calls me and he says where are you i said i'm at home he says you're supposed to be over there you know grand junction at this at this pig roast which is what it was and uh and i said man they can get anybody i just didn't matter i just did not matter i got kicked out of every school i went to before i got to college um no before i went high school i got kicked out these things and you know i found a report card from the second grade and i'm looking at this thing and i've gotten all these a's and all this stuff and if you flip the report card over it says mickey does not get along well with other children he does not have any discipline and he's telling see i'm reading like the big book it's reading like a big book and i obviously did not know i had alcoholism because everybody drinks right i mean my father was all military my whole family was military except me and i was mr wrong way hannigan and so anyway I couldn't stay in school I remember going and skipping school I sat for a tree in a tree for 10 days I didn't have any place to go I just couldn't sit in that school I just could not do it I just cannot do it. I am trying to tell you where I started and what this journey has been not because this is like the worst journey and I know how competitive human beings are you know it's like i spilt more on my tie than you ever drank kid and all of that stuff it's not like this it is impossible for what i'm going to tell you about what happened in my life it's impossible you cannot get from there to here so I will say at the outset because this is one of the most important things is that my wife and I on December 31st on New Year's Eve celebrated 50 years of marriage yeah 50 years we were married on New Years Eve I picked the date because I didn't want to forget our anniversary if you can forget new year's eve may you are really down and so anyway um and uh in and we have three kids and our our oldest is a girl and it's our daughter amy and um she has eight children and she's an alcoholic and she is 21 years sober and she's 49 years old, and she just gave birth to a little baby who is now six weeks old. That's her eighth child. I used to sponsor this group of young men at one point in my time in AA, and we would discuss dating and the care and feeding of a woman and whatever and all the rest of this you know and i would ask them i'd say i wonder where the woman god has for you is tonight i wonder what she's doing tonight well unbeknownst to me she was upstairs because this guy had fallen in love with my daughter and they got married and they just have done fine i sponsored him and i didn't find out about this attachment to my daughter until i'd heard his fifth step and he's really a good man he is a good guy anyway i didn't sponsor him after that um it's very difficult for me to talk about 47 years of sobriety and make any sense out of this so please if i'm putting you to sleep just feel free to go black anyway um so so what happens is i just moved along in this deal and at one point i might as well get into this at one point um there had been a lot of us that had traveled around the country in the circuit and we'd go to these small conferences and at the small conference you could rub elbows with people and really kind of get to know them you know and the only thing we really had in colorado was our state convention which was 1500 people you know what i mean and so we wanted to have a conference that we could just make a little more intimate so um marie and i put in 250 dollars and don pretz put in two hundred and fifty dollars and we said we'll get up we'll get a venue in the mountains we'll have it in the mountains because we have these beautiful rocky mountains and we'll have it in the mountains and then because don knew everybody and had been everywhere you get the people you get the man and and women who are going to put this thing on and we'll find the venue and we started fellowship of the spirit now there were debates as to what it was going to be we didn't call it that incidentally the first conference was called the breckenridge conference out of breckenrich colorado that's where we found our hotel anyway we we finally we just we wrestled with each other and the people who are gonna do it about what it it was going to look like and how it was gonna act in all of that and I thought that this was going be for Colorado with my big view of things and because Don was involved the first year we had people from 25 states show up at the Fellowship of the Spirit conference at the Breckenridge conference and and you So what happens is God is tricky. Can we agree? God is very tricky. So you think, we think we're going to go, well, the poet Rumi said, I throw a stick right and it lands left. So I dig a hole to catch a person and I fall in it myself. Who does these things? Anyway, so I threw my stick right, and God landed it left, and we started this adventure. now because we had these people i i took a break during the conference and i went out to just get some free air and and to look at the mountains and i looked down and there was a there was a man standing down there and the tears were just slowly falling down his cheeks and um i said are you okay and he said yeah i am i said do you mind if i ask you why you're crying he said there are four of us around our big book in muscatine iowa and he said i'm crying because i've never seen so many people work the program out of the big book and there was this hallelujah chorus that went up and we're going like wait a minute what's what's going on here now we had we had people come from taos and santa fe and they they would do like for dinner they they would do enchiladas and then we had the people from Louisiana and they do the shrimp etouffee and we'd have these we just go from room to room you know what I'm saying and we would have our meal and we started the fellowship of the spirit and that's what we picked up for our moniker because um the people in Breckenridge wanted more more rich people who drank to be in their hotels so we had to kind of wander around and find venues so the conference started there now what's interesting about it i know i'm talking a lot about this and i'll get back to the 11th step as a matter of fact i'll do it right now we'll come back we'll come back to me. So for me to stay sober, I was raised Catholic and when I got into AA, I was convinced that the God of my understanding sent people like me to hell and I just felt so guilty for what I had done and what I have been and so for 10 years I did not go to church. I didn't go to Church. And an interesting little side note, I would tell people I'm not Christian and the Jewish people in Alcoholics Anonymous took me under their wing. They were so kind to me and I really loved being with them but in any event I started out now and they said Mickey you can have any God you want and I said, I want a God that understands the connection between things because to me this and this weren't put together. And so I wasn't a good prayer. I just worked my program and I worked my way up and I eventually did return to my faith. and so what Maria and I do every morning is we sit and we meditate together for 15 minutes the first fruits of our day we give the first fruit of our days back to the God who gave us the day and so we sit for 15 min in silence and then the book says you know we can refer to literature, you know, if we have a faith that we would have those practices. So what Marie and I do is we pray the Liturgy of the Hours. It's what the priests and the nuns and the monks pray in the monasteries and in their lives. And the Liturgy of the Hour has three psalms. We sing those psalmes. Marie and I sing the psalmas together. And then we pray the prayers and then we pray for you and we pray for the people we know who are having problems and our day never starts without that now i want to flip back to meditation i had this i had this notion i had this idea that meditation was you know you're going to smell roses or you're going to levitate or something you know i wanted to get drunk on it is bottom line is where we are you know and that wasn't being offered and so i gave up meditation i tried walking meditation i try this meditation whatever meditation and i just gave it all up period so i didn't meditate for 30 years and then i got a sponsor who did meditate and you may you know you guys may know gary b so gary gary was a guy that i had sponsored me for a while and i had another guy sponsor me and and uh and what they had was this sweetness in their spirit they had this thing that was just so mild and sweet and and i wanted it and i didn't know what was going on with this and so i had this other sponsor and you'll have to forgive me because i'm coming up on 74 and names and everything kind of go away anyway uh he was my kind of guy you know he was an armed robber who got a an open sentence in prison and i just loved him and he you may have uh read some of his books you know he says that he has the dark night of the spirit and he had some books that he's written in the cocktail cart anyway that was my sponsor and uh i would call him up in in the day and i was just learning how to make boots and i would like wow we had the boots and he would listen to me very kindly all the time he would not say anything and then he would end it by saying two things he would say mickey it ain't the boots did you meditate today and i said you know listen i don't do that you know i told you i don t do that and that went on when i went mickey did you mediate today and you know trying to drive me crazy and after a while i thought well i ll give it a shot and he said well because i tried things and and i tried to make elaborate like i m always technicolor i'm always 3d and so So I wanted to make meditation this whole event. So in any event, what it is, is I go in and I sit down in obedience and I sit with God offering him the first fruits. And I say, Jesus, will you heal me? And I sit with him now. Marie, when she sits, especially when we started, she said she would go to a place where she wasn't a woman anymore. She was a person. and had all this going on. And I'm in there with monkey mind and I'm looking about, hey, I got to fix that crack in the window and my car's not starting right. And I get 15 minutes of that, 15 minutes of that. So I'm going to do a reverse thing on you. But anyway, I'm being obedient. They say we're supposed to meditate, so I'm meditating. and then I had a day where I didn't meditate and within two hours I turned into a rattlesnake. I was angry, I couldn't function and I'm going wait a minute what's going on? And then I went back to meditation and I tested this a few times so I have a theory. Do with this as you will. My theory is that the meditation that I do and that my wife does, God circumvents my intellect and he goes around it right into my soul and he does soul surgery. In fact, he does heal me and he works on me and draws me closer to him. this is the world of the spirit this is the world and god is in that world of the spirit and and i have commerce with you so um so that's one of our practices is the meditation and then we pray um i also had a period of my time when i i painted um orthodox icons and so we have an icon up you know and and we just reverence it, that's all I'm saying. Now, somewhat, listen, I didn't travel through this thing like seamlessly. I went about 10 or 12 or maybe even 15 years without a sponsor, without a sponsored. And what happened to me was that, I'll spare you the whole story but what happened, would confer with my brother wizards you know about you know points in the book or whatever but i was not working it and i was um accountable so without all the details the net net was ice my my my life my spirit everything we went we went bankrupt everything stopped working and my life got narrower and narrower and narrower and options started to disappear and i ended up on the floor with a knife at my wrist for four hours and i had two things two things that i have said i said out loud as i was going down one of them was i can't breathe and the other one was can i have a cookie i just wanted something sweet my god my life was turning into ashes can i please have a cookie now uh i laid down on that floor and i had that knife and by the grace of this guy now i will say this if you picture hell as the absence of god that's the experience i had for four hours on that floor it was the darkest blackest place i ever went in my life and please god please god talk to somebody if you're ever heading that direction so i couldn't do it i couldn' do it and i fell asleep and marie did not know where my wife did not know where i was and i could see the telephone up there but i couldn't get to it so i woke up in the morning and i had met this woman in uh in minneapolis and she talked about this guy in st paul who was at like a really good aa and i i called her to get his number please give me his number and and i told her what was going on with me and she got her books, her AA books, and put them in her lap. And she started to 12-step me. And the longer she talked with me, the more I thought, God, she has everything I want. And I asked her to be my sponsor, but there's the boys and girls and all that. And said no. And so she kept talking. And I asked again, I said, please will you sponsor me? She says, I tell you what, I'll sponsor you until you can find a male sponsor and she worked with me for four years and her name was Cookie. Straight up, I asked God for a cookie and he gave me one. Is that a great story? And so I started on my way back, And I couldn't, I could not listen to AAs as much as I could listen to people who had fought in the Vietnam War. I did not fight in the Viet Nam War, but I knew these guys had been out where the wild things are, where it was terrible and I could listen to their voices. So I got all these books of group meetings of veterans. and in one of the books they said i opened the book and there was this this pen and ink drawing of a victorian grandmother you know with all the folds and the stuff and everything in their garments and they said there's also a spanish dancer in this picture you know those kind of things well i am man i'm on rocks i'm looking at this grandmother and i don't see any spanish dancer and i hold it up to the light and i I don't see any Spanish dancer and I look on the back and there's no Spanish dancer. I threw that thing across the room and I came back the next morning and opened the book and I'm looking at a Spanish dancer." The book was written for people who are suicidal to tap them on the shoulder and say, listen, there's always an option. There's always a option. And again, I would say if you're backed against a wall, there is a Spanish dancer. And so I came out of this thing and I started to work again and started to work again. We had money for a while, but we've never really had money after that. But God has provided for us for all these years. We've never missed a payment, we always have food, you know what I mean? And so we've been taken care of beautifully by this God. And I want to bring in someone else. Her name is Caroline Mace, M-Y-S-S. So during the time when I was on my way—I mean because it took a long time for me to really get down to that knife i was with some friends in taos and they were listening to me and they're going man you really need help and they gave me this talk that she gave in boulder it's never been written into a book caroline myss it's called spiritual madness the talk she gave was spiritual madness and i listened to that talk and she describes the topography of the world of the Spirit. And when I listened to that, I took 35 pages of notes from this talk and she started me off on a world of belief that was not in my faith but it just rang so true in my soul. So if If I sponsor somebody, eventually we'll get down to this. There's three things that I would like you to do. We're going to work out of the big book. I'm reassuring people don't throw a knife at me. I break easily. I'd like you watch The Matrix, the movie, The Matrix. Why would you want to watch the movie The Matrix? The Matrix I'll give you a quote out of The Matrix you know, this guy is laying on this gurney he's having these experiences and so on and so he says my eyes my eyes hurt my eyes and the boss man in this whole thing says maybe that's because you've never used them this movie is a guide to transformation now it's got enough science fiction to please anybody who's in that vein but this movie has loaded my son was on his one of our two sons was on his way to a phd in um philosophy and for his freshman class he he gave them the matrix to watch but it was for philosophy for me it's about theology and it really will break down a hardened heart if you can listen to this it will make us open our hearts once again to God and working our program. Okay, so there's two of them. What's my third one? Did I already say it? Thomas Merton. So what happens is we work our program and we are called into the fourth dimension. Now what in the heck does that mean, fourth dimension i'll give you an example we because of don god don got all these invitations to speak and now he had been in two federal penitentiaries he was a marvelous wonderful man very spiritual but he would get all these invitations to speak and he just pawned him off on other people and he gave marie and i one to go onto the pine bridge reservation and do a 12-step weekend and so we went on to the pine ridge reservation and we did this thing and it was unbelievable it was those native americans just tore my heart up i loved them and then we went we're going back we flew into rapid city south dakota and drove two hours out to the Pine Ridge then we Went back and by the time we got back to rapid city it was snowing sideways and in South Dakota I mean forget it that's bad news so we stayed in a hotel that night and i'm afraid of flying okay i don't like to be in airplanes i think it has something to do with loss of control but anyway so we get out to the flight line man and i m telling you it is like it was snowing so hard that first day we couldn't go but they've cleared off a bit we're in a 50 mile an hour crosswind on the ground we're in mild turbulence, and I'm terrified. So just hold on to your seat. So the Blessed Mother of God, Mary, started to talk to me. And she said, Mickey, I'm going to fly with you. And I'm gonna tell you when it's time to hold my hand. And I will tell you everything that's going to happen in this flight and i will see you home and she's never stopped i get in and i go to my mother and i sit with her and i fly in the airplane now when it gets rough in the air what i do is i start praying hail marys for everybody else on that airplane because i know what it's like to be really scared in an airplane so i'm praying the hail marries over and over and over, coming back from wherever I was coming back to Denver. And all of a sudden, I was walking down this road and I was talking down this road in heaven to see the Blessed Mother and be with her. Now I'm telling you, I'm in that airplane, but I am in the fourth dimension in that airplane. And there's this admonition we should be in the world but not of it. Well, I guarantee you, the longer we work for this, the more we have the intention to really be with God and let go to him. He will do the most amazing things. I even learned to play the saxophone. I mean, come on. That was my only joke of the day. But anyway, so what I'm saying is that these are things that lead me back into my program in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, have I talked long enough? Have I run out of my time? Two minutes. Oh my god. Okay, so alcoholism is not in the bottle. Alcoholism is a disease that has nothing to do with the bottle other than if we drink, the red flag flies and says this person has alcoholism, please get help. So working on this is what I do. And I told my sponsor George, I said if God lets me live I will never stop talking about the second half of the first step as long as I live because that's where it hurts that's Where It Hurts in my soul thank you so much for this invitation I love you