Tradition 10 and the Mistakes of the Washingtonians – Amy R.

Well, hello everyone. Welcome back. I'm Amy from Alcala. Hi, Amy. And we're talking about pressing emergence. That's what this is going to be. But I have to first start with a piece of irony. Detox tea. i found it in our key supply this afternoon and it made me laugh um but anyway um so my topic was joy is joy and um i kind of like well what do i have to say about joy what do I you know and i would ask people and they'd say oh gratitude no that's not it oh service no that's not it and so just this week I woke up and I went it's surrender like that's what it is it's a render we've heard a lot about that tonight or today this weekend and um so okay well what about surrender so I just thought I'd let the retreat show me and of course it did and I was sitting there listening to everyone talk and I hear um surrender and then I hear we stopped fighting anything or anyone even me like I stopped fighting me and then sit there a little while longer and go emotional sobriety surrender we stopped fighting anything emotional sobrietty so I printed off Bill's article on emotional sobretty from the grapevine printed in 1953 and oh before I get into that I do want to tell you and I'm really glad you're all sitting down for this my life is perfect and by that I mean my life is perfect for me right now like for the first time in my life I don't want to be somebody else I don' t want things I don have I know that all of the difficulties in my life are exactly what they're supposed to be. And from that spot, I can work with them. But I don't need anyone else's life. I don''t envy anyone else''s life. Not because it''s better or worse, but just because mine is mine. And to be able to really own that joy for me in a lot of ways. So hearing everyone's talk, too, I thought, you know, a lot about what we talked about here is emotional sobriety. What happens after we stop doing our main compulsion? You know, for me, I'm an alcoholic, so that meant that I would drink. But what happens if I have untreated alcoholism that manifests in other ways fortunately for me a lot of those haven't come up yet but we hear them all the time there's people who start smoking or smoking more people who gamble people who overeat or people who spend or you know whatever it is get addicted to exercise or to meditation retreats you know whatever it is, it is. And what I think is really interesting is that when the big book was written, you know, they had four years of sobriety at the most. And based on what little I know about the history of Alcoholics Anonymous and the history of alcoholics getting help over the course of a long period of time, this is really the first movement that hung around for 70 years, and where large numbers of people have recovered. You know, it's often referenced to Washingtonians who came before us, how they had a lot of success, and they grew really rapidly, and it helped a lot of alcohols stop drinking. However, they got into a lot other politics sort of thing abolitionism and prohibition and eventually they fell apart and some of our traditions speak to that particularly tradition 10 talks about but we have no opinion on outside issues and that's a direct correlation to learning from the mistakes of the Washingtonian and also tradition 5 speaks to that too that each group has but one primary purpose various message to alcoholics that still suffer. Not that the message of drinking is terrible or you're going to hell if you do it or it's illegal. It's hopefully a message of hope. At least that's what I found in meetings that worked for me. It's a message with hope and a message recovery. So when the big book was written, they didn't know what the future would hold, obviously. And they didn'y even know if they could stay sober for anywhere long, you know, 50 years, 50 years. And now I know people who have been sober 40, 50 years. That's amazing to me. You know, they were sober. They took their first sober breath before I took my first breath. So the big book doesn't really address this problem of the other things that come up. And we've learned through experience that the 12 steps can work not only in these other addictions as primary addictions, but also in these others addictions when they're secondary addictions. And that's really what Bill talks about in his emotional sobriety piece. So I want to read it to you. And I'm going to read it in Bill's language because I think that's only fair and only respectful. And you can translate however you need to. How about that? So, the next frontier, emotional sobriety. I think that many oldsters have put our AA booster to severe but successful tests, still finding they lack emotional sobrietty. Perhaps they will be a spearhead for the next major development in AA, the development of much more maturity and balance, which is to say, humility, in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God. Those adolescent urges that so many of us had for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romances, urges quite appropriate to age 17, proved the impossible way of life when we are age 47 or 57. Since AA began, I've taken immense wallets in these areas because of my failure to grow up emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible. How very painful to discover finally that all along we've had the cart before the horse. Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we've been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off of the emotional miracle round. How to translate right mental conviction into right emotional results? And so, into easy, happy and good living, well, that's not only the neurotic problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have gotten to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all of our affairs. Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's a place so many of us AA oldsters have come to, and it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious, from which so many forms of our fears, compulsions, and phony aspirations still stream, be brought into line with what we actually believe, know, and want? How to convince our dumb, raging, and hidden Mr. Hyde becomes our main task. I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see it in many denigrated ones, folks like you and me, commencing to get results. Last autumn, depression, having no real rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I've had with depression, It wasn't a bright process. I kept asking myself, why can't those 12 steps work to release depression? By the hour, I stared at St. Francis' prayer, it's better to comfort than to be comforted. Here was the formula, all right, but why didn't it work? Suddenly, I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence, almost absolute dependence on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionistic dreams and specifications, I had fought for them, and when defeat came, so did my depression. There wasn't a chance of making it the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable, endurable way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away. Because I had had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute qualities of these frightful dependencies had never been before so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed upon every set of circumstances whatsoever. Then only could I be free to love that St. Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation in life. Plainly, I could not avail myself of God's love until I was able to offer back to him by loving others as he would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies. For my dependencies meant demand, a demand for the possession and control of people and conditions surrounding me. While the word absolute dependencies may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of their return to me. And he goes on talking about when you start working with new people in a variety and you're not really attached to the outcome and how that really states Francis' prayer at work. And he ends with, Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. then we can be debt-free to live and love. We may then be able to 12-step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety. Of course, I haven't offered you really a new gimmick or a new idea, only a gimmick that is ready to unhook several of my own hexes at death. Nowadays, my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity, or depression. I've been given a quiet place in the bright sunshine. So that had come up, this whole emotional security kept kind of like a bell ringing throughout the weekend. So when I pulled it up last night and read it, what really spoke to me was this whole idea of unhealthy dependency. And this year, my life has continued to evolve and in the evolution, I've had to, or I've been asked to, give up pretty much all of the things that I had clung to in my sobriety life. a number of the meetings actually all of my regular meetings I was asked to either give up or change my relationship to uh I changed sponsors like everything changed and all of these things that I thought oh if I give them up life will get really hard I don't know that I thought it would drink I don' t remember that thought but if you had asked me two years ago So if I had changed home groups and changed sponsors and da-da-da, what my response would be is be like, oh, that was a cash drop. I couldn't do that. And it seems like there's always two ways that this can go. And one way is that I'm in the flow and it just happens. And that's kind of what the home group thing was. I had a class on my usual home group night, and so I switched to a temporary home group until that class finished. And it turned out that that was just the place I needed to be and the place that sort of holds my next phase of sobriety. And so I stayed. But what that also meant is when I went back to my old home group, my relationships with it have changed. It's not my home group anymore. And so there's some loss around that, but there's also like, there's awful not loss. There's also just a team that, oh, I don't know what it will be in the future, but for right now this isn't home and that's okay. Now with my sponsor, that was completely, that Was one of those things I was holding, holding, holding on to so hard and it just kept getting uglier and uglier for both of us. And finally, I let go. I surrendered. And I couldn't be more happy about that now. You know, I still love my old sponsor, even though we're not at a place where we really can find common ground. But my new sponsor brings me so much joy and just so much laughter. In fact, Diane told a story to the group that was about my prosper yesterday. And I was sitting over there and she was right there with me. I could almost feel her. She was so near. And so that's just really precious to me. So there's this kind of idea that surrender can happen two ways. and one is that I just kind of let it happen and the other is that I continue to resist it until it's so painful that I have no other choice which kind of is my whole story right you know summed up in ten words or less and when I got here I was so happy to be here and so happy to not be drunken I even marked this page the four hideous horsemen the hideous four horsemen terror, bewilderment frustration and despair you know I was still ready to be gone with them and my story how I got here was fairly dramatic or at least for me And in the drama of that event, those events, I call it my Scrooge experience because I got to really see exactly what my life had been, what it was, and where it was going. And in it, like Scrooges, I was transformed. And from that day until now, there has not been a desire to grow. and then there are so there are times where it's really just like you're there but two days before that experience I wasn't ready and I would still fight it and so so there's this sort of like happiness and joy that comes out of being newly sober when you're not dealing with those hideous four horsemen and the willingness to surrender completely if we're lucky stays with us for a little while. And then, of course, life gets busy and life gets good and it doesn't necessarily stay quite at that level, which I know is true for me and I see it with other people like Matt who came in when he was really new and he started a practice. You know, sitting on the mat is surrender, constantly surrender, over and over a million times, practicing surrender. And Judith talked about, when we met in Bilkacan, about working the muscle, like if you're a muscle builder, working the muscles of training the mind and so training the minds to be in a place of being more willing to surrender, has been one of the fruits that have come out of this. And I notice for people who have a meditation practice, that a lot of this stuff that Bill talks about in terms of emotional sobriety comes up and has to get dealt with in a way that is really transformative. of. And not everyone gets to have it. And that's the other thing I forget, is that not everyone gets it or gets to has that piece of it where because I have a practice, I hopefully can see some of those other things before they're full blown something and be willing to at least look at them, and maybe even be willing to let them be transformed. And so I'm grateful for that, really grateful for That. Anyway, I went on a little searching mission this summer. In part, because I was really confused about what to do about this whole sponsor thing. The new sponsor hadn't shown up yet, and even the new meeting hadn't shown up yet. And I just didn't, I didn't even know, like, I couldn't figure out how much of this do I need to own? How much of it do I needs to fix? How much of that do I needed to stick with? And I was really caught up in the drama of it all in unhealthy ways. It was unhealthy dependencies. So I found these two Rooney poems, and one of them I have listed the title, the other I don't. But I was surprised actually when this one spoke to me, and so I'll read it to you. It's a very end of a longer poem. and it says very little grows on jagged rock be ground this always makes me get this moment be crumbled the wildflowers might come up where you are you've been stoning for too many years try something different stronger and I was like call. I didn't know I needed to do that, but clearly I did and so and that was really as I worked with that in this whole I don't know what to do I don' t know whatto do all the answers started to come it started to be really clear oh no actually you just need to go and so I did very little grows on jagged rock, be ground be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are you've been stoning for too many years try something different, surrender I wasn't sure if you'd added that last comment no, that's in the poem and that was actually what caught my eye and I couldn't, I was like huh that's just really, I wouldn't have expected that, that wasn't what I went looking for I don't know what it was I was looking for but it wasn't that so so I got to see that emotional sobriety comes in a lot of different ways and in a little bit in a whole lot of unexpected ways and that the unhealthy dependencies there's a a fellow named Anthony DeMello who was an Indian, who's from India, and he was a priest. I don't know what... No, like what order he was from. But he wrote this book called, well, he wrote a couple, I think, but there is one that I've read that's called A Way to Love. And the whole book is about how our attachments keep us from loving. Our attachments keep us from seeing what is real and so our attachments keep us from loving and being in the moment. And so there's like 31 or something different little chapters about how we do this. And he talks about how that we have to be willing to walk away from everything in order to find our truth And that all of our teachers, all of our books, all the learning that they're here to show us as much of what isn't true. They can only point out what isn' t true and what's flawed. They can't show us what it's pointing to. You know, they can give us the they can set us on the path and they can point but we're the only ones that can actually go out there and do it. so I don't know where that was going exactly but um so anyway in this year there's been all of this like change and the year before there was all of this change but it was all you know I went back to school, I got in a relationship I moved in with him I got this job there was always like fabulous change and this change has been like it's been fabulous. I mean, I wouldn't go back and do it differently at all and I wouldn' t change where I am. Remember, my life is crooked. I wouldn''t change where I was or where I have at all and yet what I saw was the difference in surrender and the difference I met with Judith at one point during all of that big change and she said, you know, spiritual life isn't always like this and I said, I know, God, I couldn't do it Because it was just like, you know, this whole thing of, I'd say during that time it was all about don't sabotage it and don't say no. Just stay with it. And so that was a big kind of surrender too. And as I could tell, all of this fabulous stuff was happening. And I just had to hang on. I just hadn't hung on for the ride because it was way beyond me. um but this is much quieter you know it's much softer in a way um maybe soft isn't the right word but it's very deep and quiet and it and it's just like showing about oh yeah that no actually you don't need that you know this home group well it's a lovely home group and they're lovely people But what you need is somewhere else right now. And this woman who was your sponsor, she's still a lovely woman. But she's not what you needs right now." And watching that kind of change and watching where I was like, okay, and watching when I was, like, oh wait, no, I don't know about that. What if my new sponsor doesn't? Well, what if she doesn't, you know? What if she does something else? imagine that try something different so so that's what I have I have emotional sobriety I have surrender and I have joy as a result of surrender and the more that I can live in surrender and really the truth of step one the more than I can live in that truth the happier I am or no the more joy I have That'll do.