The Storyteller in His Head Finally Took a Nap 😂 – Jay S.

Gil? Okay, great. This never gets easy, and I hope it never does. because what I try and do is I try to share the most costly thing with you guys when I'm together doing this stuff another article these actually get published in the newspaper every Saturday she gets to write whatever she wants anyway, this is my fabulous wife The letter took 27 minutes to write, 27 minutes, 337 words. Writing it took less time than I spend in the bathtub each day, less time that it takes to make and eat breakfast, less than half an episode of The Sopranos, a nap, a lapse of memory a trip to the grocery store it took one minute to find his address the information came up on Google so quickly I actually jumped after so many years of thinking about it it should have taken longer I've been thinking about and thinking about writing a letter for 17 years I've been talking to and yelling at and crying to the phantom to whom I wrote for more than 25. I have screamed every resentment and rageful accusation and hurt lament a thousand times in my mind. I ran 3,000 miles to get away from the problem but took my idea of him with me. Rent free, the story that I made up about my stepfather lived in my head retelling itself endlessly. Eating at my life silently, becoming stronger and more lethal as I added chapters. I knew that, and I knew that forgiveness would quench the fire. I'd written other letters, righted many other wrongs, yet this one I could not do. I was too angry and too hurt and too frightened to say anything kind. I was attached to my bad memories as an old woman would be to her old, smelly, dying dog, watching it whimper and crawl but insisting it stay nonetheless. The idea of its absence too painful to consider. No amount of knowledge or judgment about myself could make me feel differently. And then, things changed. In recent years, the storyteller grew less and less loud and stopped repeating things. She wore herself down and started taking naps. She forgot large passages and laughed out loud at others. Then today, she gathered all the words and threw them in the air where they vanished. When the last vow disappeared, I turned on my computer. I have found that forgiveness is not something I willingly give. I'm not referring to saying the words, I forgive you. But feeling forgiveness through me. I cannot will that feeling or manufacture it or insist upon until it materializes when it is ready. And he's become, even for those things that the world names unforgivable. It happens when I recognize that there is nothing for me to forgive. it comes over me when I clearly see that no one is doing anything to me and I realize that we are all seeking peace a moment of it and are often mistaken at its sources nothing is personal there is nothing that need be forgiven but a story I've told myself about someone or something and stories need no forgiveness. They simply need to be seen for what they are. The letter was one page long. It said everything. it said thank you and please forgive me but mostly thank you there was no anger or fear or resentment to it I was incapable of writing it one minute before I did Seventeen years was not too long to wait for that. Now a space has opened up in my heart where a story used to live. And once again, I am reminded that nothing is impossible. my baby now you can imagine what it's like you know corollary resentments are always fun somebody who's got a justifiable one and then you take it on you know and you can image that there was a little corollary to that resentment I mentioned a guy by the name of Thomas Keating and I found out that we have mutual friend here and earlier and father Thomas he was at he was he's a Roman Catholic he's uh he was an abbot for a number years a He's a head monk and just a marvelous man. And he was out at a fundraiser in Los Angeles. And this is about six years ago, and it was at the New Cathedral, and all the big money was there. And this incredible spiritual man got up and he said that there has to be room at the table for everyone, even the pedophiles. And if there isn't, I can't sit at the table. And you could see the heads spin. People that were there because that was in the middle of all that. And I have no opinion about that statement. Except that I believe it to be true. I believe another line that he said that in this life what we are called to do is we are called to love the unlovable and to forgive the unforgivable and that each of us in the course of our lives we will run across this now I come from as we all do I come from a long line of family weirdness and I think I mentioned to you about that or maybe I didn't but I'll tell the story again when my when we had my daughter my wife then said we're not going to hit the kid and i come from i mean lots of violence and in my home it was the non-alcoholic that the violence came from and uh and one of the reasons why i left the marriage was that i saw that i was starting to play out the same dynamic that had happened in my home that i wasn't able to be honest with my my first wife about how it is that I was really feeling about the fact that we were unable to be intimate together. And you know, I knew that she wanted to be intimate with me, but we couldn't for whatever reasons we couldn t be. And every time we tried, it was very, very difficult. And it came from her being sexualized as a child. but what happened is that my frustration and my inability to work things out with her I triangulated it to my daughter and she'd just be busy being a kid and then she'd do something and I would get angry at her and I would rage at her instead of being responsible for my feelings with the person that I was not being authentic with pain that is not transformed is transferred pain that is not transformed is transformed and luckily for you and I where we are is we're an Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the greatest agent of transformation that we've seen in this era of history. There's a guy by the name of David Hawkins, there's a great book by the power versus force, very, very hopeful book. And he did some calibration on, he does this thing of calibrating the vibrations of different things, books, movements, this, that and another thing. And one of the things that he did was he calibrated Alcoholics Anonymous, and he found that it was higher than just about any other. There was more truth in the book Alcoholics Anonymous than almost any other spiritual book that he ran it through. And he said that Alcoholics anonymous is the greatest social force of the 20th century and that over 50% of the people in North America have been touched by the 12 steps, either by an Al-Anon or AA or GA or ZA. Somebody has gotten sober. Somebody has made it. Somebody has transformed. Anyway, so when I saw that I was doing that with my daughter and I knew that, number one, she was not seeing a loving relationship between my wife and I, a complete loving relationship, and that I was being angry at her that I didn't know what else to do except to remove myself from the situation. And about six months after I left the house, she and I were out one day and she was doing something being a kid and I reacted to her and I yelled at her and I was able to see myself and I wasn't able to stop and to ask her forgiveness And I told her, I hope that I never do that again. And I don't think I ever behaved that way around her again. And so I thought that I'd been a really good guy and that I had really done the deal. Then a bit later, when she was about 13, I sat her down and I apologized for leaving the family. I knew that when I left the family that I was, number one, going to scar her and her relationship with all men. And I asked her forgiveness for that. And I didn't tell her why I left the house. But I asked her forgiveness. But it was interesting. Every time that I'd start to get angry, not at her, but at something, when we were out in public or we were in private, she would always clinch as if I was about to hit her. And I kept thinking, you know, I never hit her? Why is it why is it that she hasn't changed in that? And my idea of violence had stopped. I thought we'd stopped it with me. And one of the things that I do is I go to this place called Coe in Switzerland, and it's the International Center for Peace and Reconciliation that Frank Buchman, the guy who initiated the Oxford group that Alcoholics Anonymous came out of, that the Swiss members of the Oxford were built after the Second World War in gratitude for what had happened with their nation being spared to try and have a center where people could come and talk about things instead of fight. And it's a marvelous, marvelous experience. It's an amazing place. And while I was there, there was a woman from Colombia. If you've ever been to an AA conference, our whole AA conference structure comes from there where people from different places get up and they give their talks. And then there are small groups and special interest meetings. And then we all come together and there are other big talks. And the format of our sponsorship, our work in steps, all that stuff comes out of this group. woman from Colombia got up, and she talked about that she'd been sexualized as a child and the violence that she had been raised in her home. And then she talked about when she was a mother how she treated her children and how the violence had been transferred to her children. And she said, think about what it is when this great big person is reacting that angrily to somebody small. And I saw myself, and I saw my self. And so that was an interesting experience for me. And a little while later, I had a buddy visit in the house. She was from England. And now this next story that I'm going to talk about, this is my story. And this is resentment. And it's not justified. And don't take it for it to be political, OK? But what happened is that the second time we launched into Iraq, I got a little upset. And my resentment about that, because of some experiences that I had when I was younger, were way off the chart. And I was deeply troubled. And we just invaded the second time this guy was here. And he looked at me. He was staying at my home. He was one of these Oxford group people. Initiatives have changed, we call ourselves now. And he looked at me and he said, how are you ever going to be helpful to your nation when you've got an attitude like that? He was saying that to me in my house. I mean, at least you say that when you're going out the door, right? But that's the problem when you're on the spiritual path. You get spiritual truth laid on you from all sides. And then, so he drops this bomb on me. And then a few weeks later I read all this because I'm a student of the Oxford group and the spiritual antecedents of our movement, all this stuff. And I get the pleasure of going around and talking about it all over. And it's a wonderful thing for me. And so I read all this arcane Christian literature. I actually get these books, and I don't collect them. I read them. And one of the things I'm doing is I'm working my way gradually through all the books that Bill and Bob read. And it's a lot of stuff. And it is not something you just sit down and pound through. and I ran across a book by a guy by the name of Glenn Clark with an E and the nameof the book is I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes and both Bill and Bob had this book so that we know I know that they both read it and in it very much like in Emmett Fox's Sermon on the Mount which if you have not read that it's a marvelous, marvelous piece in it there's a dissection of the Lord's Prayer because these guys are kind of out of the same explosion of consciousness. And it's a little bit different than Fox's, but it's the same. I mean, it's the same thing. And in it, it's got some spiritual exercises in it. And so I'm reading along in it and I'm going, well, this is like Fox. You know, I've got my nice historian's detachment going on it. And then I run across this. he sets it up like this read this next sentence very carefully for in it lies the secret of the failure of half the so called Christians of the world to walk with hinds feet into high places the high places God has prepared for them if you hate just one individual in the world by just that much you are separated from God himself. Oops. I did not want to read that. But when I heard that, I knew that for me that was true. and I had some justifiable resentment and it would burn me. I could feel it in my body. So I go on through this and he gives a recommendation And he says that if you want to be forgiven, we've got to forgive. Now I just shared with you the one thing of all the mistakes that I've made. that I really felt that if I ever got to sit down, and I got this image that, remember truth weed? That if I every got to smoke a big fatty with the big guy, and he'd go like, so what was it like? You know, and I know I've got to hit it, right? And so anyway, I'm reading this thing and I'm going, and so what it does is it says what you do is you write the person's name on a piece of paper and that you think about the thing that you need to be forgiven about the most. and if it was between you and them could you forgive them? And as I thought about this it occurred to me that there was no difference between these people that I resented and myself because with the most precious gift that I had ever been given what I had been is I had become a terrorist. and in the final analysis I don't want to live like that and so I put their names down I just put Bush et al make it easy and he talks about saying a prayer and putting it in the fireplace And I did that. Then it didn't work. But I don't give up. See, part of the thing about being on the spiritual path is we don't give up It's like with what Adele was writing about 17 years isn't too long So I tried again a couple weeks later. Still didn't change. But a few weeks after that, I did it a third time and it left. And it left me. And a really interesting thing came out of that. About a month later, you know, I talk about this paying attention to your life. A month or so later I'm hanging out with my daughter and I got angry about something and she didn't flinch and she hasn't flitched around me ever since. Each and every one of us has someone that we have not forgiven. When I was newly sober, I took my father out, sat him down and started to do my fifth step with him. And he got up and walked out of the room. So I waited a little while just after my first year. I went out and I tried again, gone. Tried again at five, uh-uh. And then when I talked to you about that group when I was like 14 years sober that we got together and went through the steps, when we got to my dad on my list, I wrote him, instead of calling him or trying to talk to him face-to-face, I wrote ihm a letter, and this is what I wrote. I said, Father, my marriage is now dissolved. and I have now committed every sin that I have ever judged you for. Please forgive my arrogance. Love, Jay. Called me up and he said, I got your letter. Thanks. Click. Part of my resentment against my father was he was a hip guy. He and his wife, his second wife, they were fly, man. Before they had a name, Jet Setter, they were Jet Setters, going all over, doing all kinds of great stuff. And they were fun. And alcohol wore all of that out of me. Alcoholism just tore it up. and I was up visiting him a little while about a year after this thing and I was sitting in his home bar with him and he got up to use the head and the bartender leaned across the bar to me and he said hey kid you know that letter that you wrote your old man he said yeah he said he carries it in his wallet don't give up don't give up A couple years after that, my grandmother, Marie, who I mentioned to you, who sends you her greetings, she's got macular degeneration. She was getting older. My father and stepmother had this ranch up in the Wairika area, Montague up by Wairuka, California up by Mount Shasta. I mean, it's just spectacular. And she decided that it was time to go and live with her son. And so we were going to go up, and she lives near me in Southern California. And so I was taken up there so we could sit down with the folks and have the conversation. And when we got up there, when we opened the door, my stepmother was there, and she looked pregnant. She was yellow from cirrhosis. And they hadn't told us how sick she was. I don't know if you've ever seen cirrhoses of the liver but it is a lousy way to die and so obviously Graham's isn't going to be there now my relationship with my father and stepmother from their alcoholism had not been that great you know I days of obligation I would call them you know but I just knew that you know i don't talk to my dad afternoon I never call him afternoon but I but when I saw that because I'm one of you guys because I am a member of the Hermosa Beach Men's Thag, I know what to do. They lived 10 and 1 half hours away. And every other weekend, I would drive up and I would spend a couple of days with them and do what I could because my father is alcoholic. My stepmother is alcoholic." Their way of making love at the end of her life was to sit there and eat a couple of Vicodin and drink salty dogs together. this disease runs deep in my family and here we've been recovered my sister and I for years last time he got a DUI he said put me in jail for a couple days I ain't going to those meetings so I was privileged to go and be there and to be his surrogate while my stepmother died and to show up and do the things that we need to do and this is what we do as members of Alcoholics Anonymous that we show up and that we learn to do these things and I got to have the experience of being with hospice and learning all those great things that you get to learn about changing your parents' diapers about doing the things for them that they did for you and why did I do it? because the men before me had done it There is a wonderful book that I'd like to recommend to you. It's by a guy by the name of Steven Levine. It's called Who Dies? It's an old classic, he worked with Ram Dass in The Conscious Dying Movement. Really important good stuff. Anyway so I show up, Marcia passes and I had the privilege of being there with her when she did and my dad is a mess by now. At the funeral, everybody's going, well, what are you going to do about your old man? Well, fortunate enough for me, my wife had driven me to the Antlin on family groups, and I got some skills. And I said, I ain't doing nothing, man. You talk to him. You want to talk to my father? You talk. And so he's just a mess. And I told him, you know, sooner or later, you and I are going to have to have a talk. and but I left after the funeral when I went home about six weeks later I decided to just do a little drive by you know ten-and-a-half hours and and I go rolling up the driveway and I and I walk in the ranch house and I find my father and he's sitting there in his command post at 5 30 in the evening and he is in his bathrobe covered in his own waste And luckily for me, I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I got raised in AA where we went on 12-step calls. So I know how to pick somebody up and not judge them and get them into the shower and wash them off and clean up their waste and talk to them like another human being. And on the way up there, I'd made a couple of calls because I thought he was in pretty bad shape. and I knew that there was a VA that would take him in and I said, Dad, I found a place and I'm not talking to you about going to the silly meetings or anything but I think we've got to get you detoxed. And the next morning when I got up he said, Jay, I've been thinking all night. I'm going to get detoxed I'm just not going. But I did what you guys taught me to do. I ran away and I drank a double espresso and I sat for a while and I meditated and then I made a few phone calls with the sponsor and my wife and my good friend Bill Cleveland and got, you know, and I went back into the house and I said, okay pops, that's fine. Can I go to the store for you? What can I do? And I left. And I tried to get a hold of him for the next few days or the next week and a half. Didn't call the neighbors and have them go check on him. And finally, I got a phone call from him. And he said, you know, Jay, I'm about half mad at you. Really? Why is that? He said, I had no idea it would be that tough. And my old man kicked a quart and a half of vodka, a couple six-packs of beer, in a dozen vikid in a day habit by himself. And I said, oh, my God, now. Good job. I said, Ray Milland had it right in the last weekend, didn't he? And he went, yeah, he did. And so anyway, my dad stopped drinking. And physical sobriety is a wonderful thing. Just physical sobrietty. And I got to see my old man without the mask of alcohol. And it was a wonderful, wonderful gift. At Christmas, he came down, and he spent time at his mother's house. And he was able to repair his relationship with his mother. And it was really fun. And then he went back up, and my sister was up visiting him. I used to talk to him. He'd say like when he was wanting to have a Virgin Mary, I'd say, well, this is why I don't drink Virgin Marys, Dad. You know, I'd talk to them about the physical allergy and all that stuff. And my sister's up there. She's an active member. She's getting phone calls all the time while she's there from her sponsees. My dad says, well, what's a sponsor? And so she tells him. And he goes, well I guess Jay's my sponsor. She's up there a few months later and she calls me and she says, you better get up here. The old man's pretty sick so I drove up and he was really sick and he had this really fast growing cancer in his lungs and so you let him be a cowboy for a day always let him be at Campbell then the next day I took him to the hospital when he was almost dead when I got in there and they got him kind of patched up a little bit and found out what was wrong with him. They said, what we can do is we can do this kind of surgery on you. And if we take the one lung and we give you chemotherapy twice a week for six months, there's a 50% chance that you'll live two years. And after they left, I said to him, Dad, that's a pretty shitty hand. And he said, yeah. He didn't like doctors, but he was thinking about going along with it. And I said, did you hear what they said to you? And he says, well, yeah, I think so. So I repeated it to him and he said That's a horrible hand. And he said, what do you do? What do you think we should do? And I said, I say we fold. He said, let's go back to the ranch. I won't leave you. I got skilled. And we did that. While I was there in Medford, Oregon, I went to an AA meeting. and when I was at that AA meeting at the clubhouse, horrible meeting I found out there was a meeting at the hospital the old man was in that was a better meeting and while there they didn't realize that sober man was there when I came walking in so what do you do you go over by the literature table and there was a flyer for the Rogue River Roundup And at that round up, which was the next weekend, one of my dearest friends, a woman by the name of Mildred Frank who I hope that someday you guys get to hear, one of my spiritual advisors. Part of her story is about working with her sister dying and how you go about doing that. She's the one who had given me the encouragement so that I knew what to do when I was there for Marsha. was the one who told me that if you're a sober person and you show up, the way will be clear and you will do exactly what needs to be done. And I believed her. And she's speaking at the roundup. So I get to take the old man home, brought my sister and my grandmother in, go up and get time to spend with my glorious friend, hear her talk, have dinner with her, and go back. and I got to be there with my father when he passed now all we ever want is for our fathers to be proud of us and many of us think that the way that we're supposed to do that is to be tough guys and I was able to be there for my father in the face of death and not be afraid. And while he's starting to pass, I was reading him spiritual literature, but I could see that it wasn't working real well. He wasn't being consoled by it. And so I stopped. And I just picked the sports page up. And I started to talk to him about baseball. And he started to die. and being there at those times death is just like birth some of them are difficult some of more easy but it's all just part of the process and to have the privilege to be there I believe that the holiest place that you can be is the birthing room and the second holiest place that you can be is in the room when somebody passes from this line And I got to be there when the old man died. And not only that, my intuitive voice was working. I didn't want my grandmother and my sister to see him while he was going through the throes. But when he settled down, something said, go get him. And I had to go get them. And my sister and my grandmother came in. I backed out. Then my sister backed out, and my granddaughter was able to sit there with his son as he passed. And she said all he did was look at me and smile. now I've been a spiritual whack job for a long long time but my dad chose to leave this life on the 25th anniversary of my coming to you on the second day of May in 2004 and when that happened I took the next leap because I know that there's so much more going on than I have any idea. And that everything is just fine and that there is nothing that we have to worry about. But what we get to do in this life is we get together and we get people to go and we'll get to represent. And that each of us has people that we Have Not Forgiven. And while you're here, tonight if you can write down those people's names and we'll put a little something up here and just come up and take the piece of paper and rip it up and drop it in and we will give it to somebody to take down the hill because they don't want stuff burned here and we make sure that gets given to the client but don't leave here without at least making the experiment Just pretend for a minute. And if you got more than one resentment, or if that person is you, put your name down there. Okay? So thank you very much and let's go off. Thank you. Thank you very, very much.