Unselfishness and Love – Wilson House Workshop – Part 3 of 5 – Dave F., Mark H., Chris R. – Dave Frederickson, Mark H, Chris Raymer

A little bit of a shift. Mark and I were just sitting up here talking. You guys are glazing over. The eyes kind of glaze over. You do a lot of fifth steps, you work with a lot of people, you kind of see it. Don't get caught up in that. From this point forward, you're going to have an experience, but it's muted. You've been drinking from the fire hose. A lot of this is where the real test begins. There's very little I do when I work with people that's not a test. And we're here to give you the information so that on Tuesday or three weeks from Tuesday, when you're sitting there and you pull out these sheets and go, you know, I never did finish this. Let's take a look at it. A, do you have the willingness to take a Look at it? And B, can you remember what the instructions were? Well, a combination of these sheets, which you'll have in your hand, and a set of tapes if you buy one, you'll be able to sit down and finish this, ride this pony. There's enough information here, and these exercises are given you for five retreats. You know, you could do a retreat on each one of these exercises and spend the entire retreat, three, the whole weekend on it. You know? The real shift, I don't know if you felt it occurred when we did the third step exercise. That's where the major shift happened. That's when the pieces started to fall into place. From this point forward, we're going to give you some information. There's this exercise, the four absolutes. There's a seven-step exercise and a nine-step exercises. They're all very similar. All right? Our hope, my goal, my hope is, if that's all right with you guys, is we'll give you that information then we'll go to dinner give you guys a break give you a chance to refresh and then we will come back and talk about forgiveness you know another shift will occur and then we're going to spend all day tomorrow doing no exercises we're gonna spend the day tomorrow looking at the shift and what's occurred in you and how does that apply to 10-11 and we're gonna be doing prayer and meditations to try to get some peace with the beast that has woken up inside of you and then we're gonna send you off on your own alright But your toolbox is going to be full and you're going to have a whole new series of tools and a whole news series of ways of working with those tools. What you do with it is your responsibility. Your sobriety is your responsibility. Your relationship with God is your responsibility. If you let it fall, you let if fall. I gave you the warning before we started. Don't even start down this path with me because I only know one way to do it. It's like my hair is on fire. Full bore. Lots of passion. Open the doors. Bop till you drop. That's what we're going to do it. And I've opened up the beast in here. Whether you realize it, whether you wanted the beast awakened, it's awake in virtually everybody that's in the room. I can tell because I'm looking out there. Now I'm starting to see the panic and the fear setting in and going, oh, it's like the hair is blown back and the eyes are real big, deer in the headlights. Trust the process. You'll hear me say that a lot from now on. Trust the progress. Your reliance is not on me or Mark. Your relience isn't on these worksheets. it's on your relationship with God by filling out this that you will have alright that being said I'm going to turn it over to Mark and he's going to take you guys into unselfishness yeah what our intent will be we're going to cover really I guess we're gonna cover the instructions on those four absolutes some seven step instructions a ninth and then Dave and I should be done yapping I'm thinking by I don't know maybe 20 after 4 and then what we just really want to do is hear from you different ones of you maybe about what you're experiencing so far because I was telling Dave and some of this has to do with being taped. I'm talking far more than I wanted to but that's about the will of God is the will de God and what I begin to look forward to more and more in the future when i do these is the idea of five ten minutes maybe 10 minutes of talking then literally taking an hour and really letting you sit and do some work with some things and coming back and no agenda no set you know set piece um but let's talk a little bit about uh unselfishness uh does anybody know what that is he uh definition is selflessness altruistic considered thoughtful and concerned for others it's interesting you come to the fourth step and you've been told selfishness is a root of your problem then you get to the tenth step and there's a whole shift in you and you begin to practice much more what i'll call unselfishness and some things here, it says it's the stream in which our sober life must flow greatest gift we bestow on others is the example of our life our unselfishness must include not merely that which we do for others but that which мы do for ourselves yet we know that we must give of ourselves to others to maintain our own sobriety in the spirit of complete selflessness with no thought of reward we must be unselflish even in our pursuits of self-preservation not the least of our aid to others comes from examples of our own lives those whose unselfish love guided us in the beginning and those who we in turn later guided on something we must strive for in our way of life is a spiritual cornerstone so you begin to get some thought to what you're about to do say, think or decide how will this affect the other fellow and what does it look like in your life when you're absolutely unselflish my experience is I got taken to this practice I didn't wake up one day and say I think I want to become an unselfish person you know for example being here this weekend you know I think I got up at 4 o'clock in the morning and you hop a plane in 6 hours in the air and you're here and I can't remember what time I get home tomorrow night to my luggage you know but I'll get home at 8 and then I've got to be out at work Monday morning at 8am again and it's called trust me if you'd told me even 5-10 years ago that I would be doing this I would have said oh no I'm not no way it's a weird deal I personally would rather just be sitting back there in a chair but that's not the way that is that is now the will of God has worked in my life I think Dave said something that was so true too you know, the sacrifice his family makes when he does this kind of stuff and the unselfishness in that of sharing having to share him do those things AA's so awesome too in the sense that of course you do all this for nothing nothing or you spend your own money is basically what it gets down to which is God knew what he was doing with people like us. By the way, these guys came from Texas on their own dime. They didn't get footed up here. You know, that was freely given. And you'll see people in AA try to tear people down. They'll say, well, you get paid to go speak. Wrong. You know? We're self-supporting through our own contributions. When people go and give of their time, it's because they're paying on theirown. You know. And it's expensive. It's a sacrifice. not only does it cost your time it costs your vacation days and everything else you know but you get, my experience is I got taken to this practice it's a practice unselfishness but you can't do that with self will intact the two don't fit or if you are you're doing it for selfish reasons but it becomes after a period of time of practice this woman said something I was in California doing some consulting work recently, and this woman's husband had died last April. And you could tell that they had a great marriage. She had been married once before, and her first husband was killed. She was 22 years old then. And it was a life-changing event. And what she decided to do was make a gift out of his death. And here's what the gift was. She realized that you never know how long you're going to be here. So from that moment on, she made a resolution that everybody in her life would know through her actions how much she loved them and she had a different way of saying it which I thought was incredible she said, you know Mark, I know that I love Richard but what was most important to me was did Richard know that I loved Richard? And I thought wow you see that's unselfishness complete unselflishness And again, back to the extent to which self-will is intact within you, you cannot practice that. You just cannot do that. That unselfishness becomes a practice because you're devoid of self, because you don't need anything in return, because you've experienced the joy in giving. Those of you, if you ever did like where Dave and I are sitting, there is so much joy in the giving that it's unbelievable And these kind of things impact me for two, three weeks. And it's a wide range of impact. Sometimes I wind up weeping and crying. Sometimes there's great joy. Sometimes there're great power. Sometimes if you'd ever told me that there is so much power in the act of giving and unselfishness, I couldn't have wrapped around that. But then when I think about, well, that's how love works. Love is a flowing out, so to speak. The more you practice unselfishness, see, I never concern myself with whether you love me. My sole function is do I love you and do you know that I love you through a course of action that I take? And then the crazy part is the end result of that is that I receive back far more than I could have ever imagined. If I ever reverse those two, it doesn't work. If I'm going around seeking love, that kind of a thing, right? That's some of my experience with unselflishness and the same is true of I think Dave did a great job in here in defining those. And then keep it in mind, though, we have moral and philosophical convictions. You can't self your will into these absolutes, into honesty and unselfishness and purity. But my experience has been is if you'll take the action of the steps, particularly 4 through 9, work with 10 and 11, you will be taken to a place where these things begin to arise from within you. while Mark's talking that's exactly the purpose we write a vision what does it look like in your life you know it's because when you can see it gives you something to compare to it's the reason we write a sex ideal you know is my current relationship does it match up to what the ideal relationship would look like if it doesn't there's something wrong it sends off a warning flag why because we have delusion we can't see what is correct you know I'll never forget watching a I don't remember who it was It was some mass murderer, and he was talking about being in the act of murdering somebody. And he happened to look up and see himself in the bedroom mirror that was across the room doing what he was doing. And that's what stopped him, and He turned Himself in. He finally saw what He was doing to another human being. He got a vision of what it looked like. That's on the negative side. The same thing is true for us with God. If you try to sit there and say, am I truly honest or unselfish? What does that look like? and you get a vision in your mind and the next thing you know there's one chair and you see another person and you know if I don't get over there and jockey for that all of a sudden you've got this vision and it doesn't match up to what you just got done writing. And you go uh-oh, okay, unselfish I'll wait let them have the seat. You know simple stuff like that real simple stuff. It's to give you a vision so you can be a spiritual mirror remember the mirror thing? That's what it's all about. When I get into my prayer meditation we'll talk more about this tomorrow 10-11 and I get up every morning and I think about the nine step prayer and what does it look like when I go through the tornado in my life or the people in my Life what does It look like for me to be unselfish with my kids and I come up with an example in my head of what I'm going to do to demonstrate to them my unselflishness I comeup with an exemple of demonstration of love for them there's no question you can get on the telephone call up my kids and ask them who loves them the most and they'll tell you and that guarantee they won't say mommy and daddy they'll say God They know the hierarchy. Well, who loves you nearly as much as Mommy and Daddy? And then they'll say... I mean, as much God. Then they'll see Mommy and daddy. You know? And then you watch them. It's a reverse tornado. They'll spin it backwards out. They'll go God, Mom and Dad, Oman, Opop, you know, right down the line. The kids know what love is about because it's demonstrated. They don't walk around asking themselves, does Mom and dad love me? They hear it so much that they get sick of it sometimes. But they love it. They love hearing it because the best gift you can give to your kids is to have the most loving relationship with everybody about you, even if it's your ex-wife or your ex husband. Love everybody, because love conquers everything. That gives a sense of security that's unmatched, absolutely unmatched. That and the power of human touch. Very unselfish. There's times when people, I really don't feel like touching them, particularly old people for some reason. I have this aversion, maybe I'll catch it or something. you know but what do they need the most that they need is the power of human touch to sit down and take their hand and that's why that greeting exercise is so important that's how I started with your family grab their hand look them in the eye and tell them how much you love them that means more than anything in the world I know people that would give their left arm to have that ability to do that one time with their parent right now. Because they never had that opportunity and it's what they've been whipping themselves with for years. Simple act of unselfishness and love. All built in the vision. Let me say something to illustrate that. I run a treatment center on an 1100 acre ranch for chronic relapsers. 22 bed facility. And every Saturday we do spiritual exercises. Now, we don't tell them that. We tell them it's activities. And one of those is we go to a nursing home that's four miles away, and we take adult males and females only. And what Dave said just reminded me, and this is why I do this. First of all, if they're new, if они приходят сюда, и это первая раз, они боятся. Now, they won't always act like that, but they're scared, and for the reason Dave talked about. So you walk into that nursing home, and then ultimately what we always do, the funny thing is that these older people start coming up in wheelchairs and doing whatever. Next thing you know, the clients are scattered all over and the older women, they'll grab one of the nicer-looking male clients and, you know... Oh, cutie, where were you when I was younger? And then what we do is we play bingo and so the next thing you do, we herd them all up and the clients donate up to $100 and one of them is the bingo caller and so here these people were and they were terrified when they went in there and all these old people in wheelchairs and decrepit and pretty soon, next thing You know, this damn bingo hall is full all these people and every one of the clients is sitting down because we make them sit down they got to help they got to call it out and help the board and within five or ten minutes you're seeing this incredible bond and they're getting them out of themselves between this between this alcoholic dope fiend who just all you know consume with himself and just sitting there helping this this person and they are calling the bingo and the whole thing lasts like about a half hour 40 minutes. And then the amazing thing is, is they leave there and they can't wait until they go back there again. And I just want to share that because when Dave was talking about older people, that's one of the reasons I did that because I'm doing it for another reason. I want them to see themselves. See, if you can't see yourself in every human being, it's like Dave's talking about compassion. If you're a man, it's probably pretty easy to have compassion for a 22-year-old hard body. How about a 90-year old woman who's wearing pampers in a wheelchair? You follow me? You see, can you see the God within? Can you see past what isn't real anyhow? That kind of a thing but it is such a powerful thing when you get them and they leave there and I watch them and they stay intoxicated off that two or three hours because they got out of themselves to help another human being who really, really needed their help and then they get it and then the paradox is now all of a sudden they get upset if that ever gets switched on them there's there's a uh a 92 year old black woman who lives in our town and uh the other day we were trying to get it was crazy insanity at our insanity central was my address and my my wife called me up and the kids are yelling in the background you can just tell she's having one of those days you know she said martha called i said okay she said Martha's really lonely. And I said, okay, what do you want to do about it? And I'm down at the military drawing up these sheets and I'm in, you know, she's calling me trying to talk to me and I'm too busy, honey. I'm on a spiritual quest. I got to get this stuff done. I have an agenda. So I said okay and I am really, I am counting my 20 seconds and Iam going, okay honey. Uh-huh, uh-huh. And she says, it is not really what is the best for me today but I am going to go get Martha and bring her over. Is that okay with you? And I said, sure. So when I got home, Martha had been sitting at our house all day with our kids, junk everywhere, toys, just she was the happiest she'd ever been. She just sat in our house, pure unselfishness on my wife's part. I don't have that in me without somebody teaching me how to do it. And she taught a lesson to my kids. My kids know about that now. And we had dinner with her and she went home and tears were running down her face and she's on her way home. What a difference we made in that old lady's life. And what a difference that old Lady made in my life. What a gift to come home and see that and see the whole family, you know Christmas time. We do tithing on a regular basis Christmas time this year. We decided you know what we want to do something for people who are less fortunate. So to teach my kids we said let's go shopping. So we went shopping and they got to choose what foods we were going to bring to the homeless shelters and to teach them about it. I was never taught this stuff and if I don't teach my kids and in the process of me trying to come up with ideas on how to teach my children or my kids, I'm teaching me because it doesn't come by me naturally. My natural state is selfish. Absolute selfishness. Come up with examples, exercises. I travel for a living. Now I always write a little note to the maid and I leave her a tip. I never used to do that to get out of myself. Oftentimes, I'll write a little note and I'll give a passage of the Bible. I'll read it out in a little smiley face and I'm going to leave the Bible sitting there in case maybe they want to pick up the Bible or maybe I'll touch them in some way just to give myself exercises. I talked about the beggars. That's an exercise. The more I'm sober the more I need to exercise because why? My spiritual malady is growing and if I don't grow spiritually to match it I'm a walking dead man. What does it cost me? Nothing. Just a little bit of thought. How can I do something good for somebody else? It was from writing an exercise like this, what does it look like when I'm unselfish? That's where those ideas come from. Purity. Mark touched on purity. It's the next one we have in lung. Chaste, unadulterated, ethical, virtuous, integrity, restitute, not morally corrupt. To test is if your behavior is of purity, just ask yourself, is it right or is it wrong? You'll notice that there's questions in each one of these. Test questions. On the first one for honesty, is it Right or is It Wrong? For unselfishness, how will this affect the other person? You look at how it's going to affect them, not how it can affect you as a test for unselflishness. For purity, is it Rght or is IT Wrong? Purity is the quality of both mind and heart or perhaps we should say of soul of a man. It isn't the realm of the mental aspects of purity that our main problem lies. It is in the realm of the heart and spirit that we face difficulty. We must have a determined desire to do that which we know is right if we are to achieve any measurable degree of purity. It has been well said that intelligence is discipline. In other words, knowledge means nothing until it goes into action. Until we translate our knowledge into action, our lives and the values of non-existence, We know what is right, but unless we do it, the knowledge is a haunting vacuum. In purity as in honesty, the virtue lies in our striving. And like seeking the truth, giving our all in its constant pursuit will make us feel free, even though we may never quite catch up to it. If you have turned your will and your life over to God as you understand him, purity will come to you in due course because God is good. Then from As Bill Sees It, just how and when to tell the truth or keep silent can often be revealed can reveal the difference between genuine integrity and none at all what does it look like in your life to be pure write it out you know it's a tremendous tremendous gift I guess he took off well keep right on going then last section is love couple quotes I want to read about love we've been talking about love all weekend Unconditional love Unconditional love means no attachments If you're attached to something You're expecting something in back And an expectation is a reservation for resentment Because if you don't get what you're expecting I guarantee we're going to wake up One of your characters in your head And you're goingto get mad And when you get mad You have something to defend And it's because you're afraid Of not getting what you want And it'a vicious cycle And it goes down It's one of the downward cycles Alright Bonte Wamala If we want to progress along a spiritual path, we have to reclaim the attribute of unconditional love. Unconditional love, love without any strings attached, is not based on worth and cannot be earned. It springs only from God's presence in our lives. Ultimately, self-esteem that is built by unconditional love forms an emotional, healthy, and happy individual. There's three kinds of love. Actually, technically there's four kinds of Love, but we'll talk about the main three. There's the eros, which most people, is the passion. It's the love, the he and she. That's the base root of that kind of love. That's eros love in the Greek. There's philo love. I don't know how it's pronounced. It'sthebaserootofphiladelphia, the city of brotherly love. It'sTheFeelingYouHaveForAFriend. And then there's agape love or agape, depending on how you pronounce the Greek because I'm not very good at Greek. That'sthelovethatcanonlyexistfromgod and that's the realm for unconditional love. And then there's the love that they talk about in 1 Corinthians 13 that they read it all whenever you go to a wedding usually there's a quote from 1 Corinthians 15 out of the Bible. Love is not a clanging cymbal or a banging gong and all that stuff. The translation, if you go back to the Greek of that, is charity. It's kleris is the Greek word for that which my understanding is more along the lines of a charity type of love. it's a loving in service love which if you think about a relationship with a spouse that's what it's about you can't keep score relationships are about you giving your 100% and even if they give 40% you still have to give your 110% you know you have to do you have give your all expecting nothing in return if it's going to be a happy healthy relationship and in very short order you'll either get frustrated and stop giving your all or they will start to respond and give you their all and then you grow together and the two become one. We already talked about the baby and young children. Bill Wilson wrote this in Language of the Heart from 1958. Plainly, I could not avail myself of God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies for my dependence meant demand, a demand for the possession and control of people and the conditions surrounding me. One of those words, absolute dependency may look like a gimmick They were the ones that helped me 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 the return to me. Unconditional love. This seems to be the primary healing circuit, an outgoing of love of God's creation and his people by means of which we avail ourselves of his, capital His, love for us. It is most clear that the real current can't flow until our paralyzed dependencies are broken and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is. Our problem is, we expect something in return. Mark's statement is beautiful. She calls you up and says, I want a divorce. And you say, God bless you. Go in peace. That is true love. If you truly want what's best for the other person, that is love. It has nothing to do with what you're losing. If you're loosing, guess what? The word loss means you've lost something. There was an attachment that is now removed. That wasn't love. That was a sick dependency. How many in here have had a broken heart? Guess what? Here comes some grace. Can love hurt and break your heart? No. So what must have done it? Our dependency. What we're feeling is a dependency that was removed from us and that's where the source of pain was. If we truly loved the other person, we'd say, God bless you. Thanks for the experience. See ya. Call. Write me sometime. You know what I'm saying? Wow. Now, when you write out a vision of that in your life and you take a look at it, it really, you'll have a shift. Let me tell you. You'll start to see all kinds of relationships will change dramatically. How many people here have extreme grief from somebody that died that they haven't been able to shake? Guess what? False dependency. Did you love them? Everybody will say, Yeah, I love them so much. That's why it hurts so much delusion. The reason it hurts so much is because you were so dependent on that person and until that person comes back from the dead, you can't be whole because you need that dependency back or you're going to carve the dependency out of your life and the only thing that can do that is unconditional love. That's why I saved this one for last. A vision of pure love is really important to have in your life. What does that look like when you do that to the people you love? It means in my family we have a rule before you go you say goodbye and you give a kiss when you come home you say hello and give a Kiss doesn't matter you're watching the last 30 seconds of the Super Bowl TV goes off you say hey how you doing what's more important true love that's what's important acknowledgement that's why that's what it looks like at my house love talk about love what do you know about it married and divorced four times you should know something about love. Because I'm sure he said go in peace after each one. True story. I'm the spiritual advisor for two of those women. It's just funny how it works. Love is the same thing. It was a practice and a consciousness that began to arise out of me as a result of doing the work and the steps. I don't know how else to say that. I think there's words used to describe love. I believe that it gets demonstrated as an action. You know, I think that woman's words were profound when she said, you know, I knew that I loved Richard, but I wanted to make sure Richard knew I loved him. I loved you, Richard. And I thinkthat says it all. You know AA and the 12 and 12, of course the prayer of St. Francis. I got taken to a place of not being concerned about being loved and the truth is, I'm loved more than I could even begin to tell you folks. By a lot of people around the country. It's just amazing to me. And that only happened when I stopped getting worried, stopped concerning myself with whether I was loved and began to love. And I did that in the form of service and showing up and those kinds of things. And so, you know, as I look at my life and I guess spiritual path I've been on, I got taken to being able to a state of consciousness in a practice called love. I didn't wake up one day and do that. And my practice is really much what Dave says. If you're in my life, I'm grateful for that. And if you're not, that's, you Know, I don't believe there's any such thing as any kind of special love. Um, there's, you know, Dave was talking about three kinds of love. That isn't how I experience it. There's just love. I don't know. There's not, it's not defined by anything. It doesn't, uh, there seems to me, I don'l experience any differently from a man to a woman to there's just love. That's the only way I know how to say it. Um, um, and I got taken there though. Uh, I just absolutely got taken in there. And I mean this, I never ever think about, gosh, I wonder if I'm liked or loved. Because I guess that part of me that would be concerned about that no longer exists within me. I don't know how else to say that. But you just get taken to that and then pretty soon you begin to practice this thing. and what took me there I think was a lot of what Dave's talked about too that another book calls what you and I might call love in relationships as an addictive needy clinging those words just they just stick in your craw a little because see love has no opposite see if you're in a relationship with another human being And you've experienced love and hate. It's not love because love has no opposite. It's a polarity thing. Love has no opposites, it's just love. But again, trust me, none of us can self-will our way into love. You know, I must have read the prayer of St. Francis for ten years and never understood a word. I just never did. And then all of a sudden it began to just show up in my life. If you ask me how that happened, I would say I suspect I look at a lot of work with steps four through nine. To be rid of self. So, self can't love unconditionally. It just doesn't exist. Because loving unconditionally, what does it mean? It means I just love you exactly as you are, period. With all your defects, with everything. I don't need anything from you. I just Love You. It's an act, if you will. So, that's my experience with that. That's what I believe that all of us lack so deeply. that's what I believe God is, that's what ultimately fills your heart which is God God is love with no opposite and that's why this idea of again it's this idea of a punishing God God can be nothing more than the nature of what God is and so the idea of a punishing God does not fit with any experience I've ever had. I believe it's an old idea that people have or God's punishing me or God once again I'll make this statement I don't have a clue what the will of God is It's far bigger and it's a mystery. And I don't understand this life and death and all this stuff that goes on, and I don'T have to. I know the bottom line of all of it is love. I'm not going to try and figure it out. I've got a daily life in front of me that I'M going to live. And if you cross my path, I would hope that when you left you felt better as a result of spending time with me than prior to spending time With Me. And if that's going on, then you're experiencing being loved through me, if you will. So that's my experience with that. There's a sheet that we didn't read. Let's take a look at that. It says, love, warm, liking, affection, adoration, devotion, fondness, tenderness, attraction, and beauty. To test if your behavior is loving, one may ask, is my behavior going of myself, expecting nothing in return? Am I reflecting back the unconditional love I'm receiving from God? Not to give of myself brings the desolation of a new poverty to the sober alcoholic. Fortunately for us, loving is inspiring from the very beginning. The joy of receiving can never match the thrill of giving. Love is a poor man's beginning toward God. I always like to quote and say that you can never give away as much as you get by giving it away. You're always getting more, that warmth in your heart. On the Just For Today card, those things that I handed out, one of the last things was one of those things my sponsor made me do. Just for today, I will do two things I don't want to do, just for practice. And I will be a good person and I will give something for someone else that if it gets found out, it doesn't count. That's a way to teach yourself how to be unconditionally loving. Do something nice for somebody. You're just dying inside. You want to let somebody know that selfishness. When we offer love, we offer our life. Interesting. Are we prepared to give it? When another offers love, he offers his life. Have we the grace to receive it? Some of us can give love, but we can't receive it. We don't want the connection. When love is offered, God is there. Have we received him? Love is giving of yourself. Unless we do, our progress will be lost. Each one owes the gift of the second life of sobriety to every other human being he meets in the ceaseless presence of God and especially to other alcoholics who suffer. If it is truly beautiful, then it is the way of love. It is the Way of AA. It is The Will of God as we understand Him. And then you get to write out a vision for love in your life. I'm going to hand out two sheets. First sheet is humility in the seven-step exercise. There's several quotes from the 12 and 12 at the top that specifically deal with humility. It's exactly like the third step exercise. We take the seven step prayer and we break the seven stop prayer into pieces. And we take a look and you ask yourself the questions about what each piece of the seven steps prayer looks like. at the same time I'm going to hand out an exercise on the 9 step prayer and for those of you that aren't familiar with the 9th step prayer if you go to page 83 in your big book at the end of the first paragraph of 83.1 it says so we clean house with the family interesting, we're going to clean house with our family on a daily basis this is kind of an ongoing amend asking each morning in meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindness, and love. So that's what I was talking about, about getting a vision in my mind. When I do my 10 and 11 in the morning and I'm getting ready to go out and start my day, what does it look like for God's will in my life? Well, I need to do this. What is the way of patience? How am I going to show patience in my wife today? What is it going to look like? Well, this morning when I got up, my way of patients was going to be when I'm on a break and I really want to run to the men's room and somebody comes up with that really important question and it's hurting in their life and they want to ask me, I don't just blow them off. I stop and I hold my bladder. That's patience. That's tolerance. That's kindness and love. That's being young. That's all in one. It encompasses it all. It's when you really want to run out there and be first in line and get dinner and instead somebody comes up to you and says, hey, I got a question. I've never been through the steps and I know you live near me. Would you take me through a fourth step and a fifth step and you bother to share some information and some experience and accept that responsibility and that means you get later in line and you get a position down line a little bit further. Really important stuff. This is the test for your sobriety. How willing are you guys? Are you willing to take these exercises home with you and write out these visions. How well do you want to get? Trust me on this. It's my guarantee to you. If you do this stuff, you will be a changed person, a changed individual. This stuff has the power to change lives. More importantly, not your life. It changes the lives of the people around you. It's really, really important stuff. how many of you have ever looked at a flashbulb or looked at the sun for too long and when you close your eyes you got that dot I don't know any other way to describe it but you get the dot one of the things that I like to do is to do a love light meditation I close my eyes and I imagine that dot and if I'm having a hard time imagining the dot then I look up at the light for a second and I make the dot It's a real cheap way, you know. Don't look at it for too long but you can close your eyes and get the dot in your eye. You only have to look at if for 10 seconds to get the dots. Alright? Then I close my eyes and I go into that breathing meditation that we did last night and I start breathing and I sense the air coming in through past my nostrils and down into my stomach and when the at the very bottom as the air is just about to start the exhale and start up the back side that's the place that I imagine the dot moving to and the love starts to grow And that dot becomes the love, the love light that I know is inside me that God gives me. And next thing you know, it starts getting bigger and bigger. And then I imagine that light moving up and down through my torso and down from my legs and up through the top of my head until the whole time I'm wrapped in that love. Once I'm wrapping that love, then I start thinking about people in my life. And I start sending – I imagine a hand and like little electrodes coming out of electricity. the light starts shooting out and I send the light it fills up the entire room and then I start sending it to the people that I love send it to my wife to my kids and more importantly I send it to the other people I send to the people that I refuse to forgive I send it to the people that I hate I send it to the people that I'm having a hard time with I send it to the people that are sick that I know that are infirmed you can send the love light to anywhere you want the important thing is that you just send it. You don't keep it. You just send the love out. I mean, there's a friend of mine, Carrie. I think she's here. I saw her earlier, I think. One day she called me up and she's like, what in the heck are you doing to me? She goes, every time I close my eyes and try to pray and meditate, I get a vision of you in my head. Would you knock it off? And I had been sending her these love light meditations because I knew she was in a lot of pain. I'd been sending the same thing to her fiance, to Pat, at the same time. And both of them were feeling it. It will get through and healing will take place in you and in them. So one of the things that we're going to do when we come back tonight after we start talking about forgiveness is we're gonna do a love light meditation. So I'm not gonna take the time here. We've got 22 minutes. We've covered a lot. We've been drinking from the fire hose. So we're wanna open up the mics. It's your retreat. Any shift that you've had, anything you've talked about, any questions you have, We've got 20 minutes. At 5 o'clock, the tapes are going to shut off. We're going to run up to Bill's grave and do a little prayer meditation up there and thank Bill for this experience tonight and then come back and have supper with a grateful heart. So the retreat, unless you've got something more you want to say? The retreat is yours. Hand that woman a mic. Hi everybody, my name is Stephanie and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Stephanie. And I really want to share an experience that I have had with this. I think it's important when they talk and you have had an experience. I was 35 when I had my first child and he was absolutely the greatest thing that ever happened to me. And I had a role. I want you all to know that I really understood when he was talking about That we had great attachment to a role And I had waited since I was a young teenager To be a mother And I was finally this mother And my whole life was devoted to being a good mother And when he Was 14 years And I want You all to Know that I went out and I found the healthiest, best AA man I could find and I snatched him. And he didn't know what happened. And I really, in all honesty, had such an ulterior motive. I wanted a man who believed in God. I wanted sober man. And I wanted man who wanted to have children. And he fit the bill. I mean love didn't even go into it. And that's as honest as I can get, and I've made amends to him for that. But anyway, we had this beautiful child, and I left a job, and I was the role. I was the role, I lived the role every night. I just went to bed and thanked God that I had this role of being this child's mother. when he was 14, and this wonderful man and I did not make it, surprise, surprise. And And when our son was 14, he decided he wanted to go live with his father. And he had four months of not sleeping. And the last two weeks of that four months, he didn't eat. And it was a self-imposed crisis because he was 14 and he needed to be with his dad. And he couldn't leave this mother who had made him his life. He just couldn't do it. He couldn't come to me and say, Mom, I need to leave. So he had to create a crisis, and he did. And in the middle of the night, this is the God's honest truth, Mother's Day night, he was crying hysterically because he wasn't going to sleep and he was going to have to get up the next morning to go to school and it was a nightmare. And I just looked at him and I said, Honey, life isn't meant to be like this. Is there anything I can do? And that was the unconditional love, because I had been praying, I had been working. I went to Al-Anon seven days a week at this point. And he said to me, grace of God, I swear to God, he looked me in the eye and he says, Mom, I need to go live with my father. And I'll tell you, God took over, and I was able to look at him and say, is this what this is all about, honey? And he said, I need to go live with my dad. And I said, you'll be there tomorrow night. And I'll tell you, I don't know where that came from. It came from the deepest, best part of who I was. And he's lived there now two and a half years. And I mourned like I have never mourned anything in my life, even more than booze, food, everything. I mourned losing that role of being a mother. And all I can say is that I had the fellowship of AA and Al-Anon behind me. And today, two and a half years later, we have the most awesome relationship. So I just wanted to share that experience because I know what it is to be very, very, very invested in being, you know, having this title, this purpose to your life. And anyway, thanks. Did you get the mic over there? Hi. Hi, I'm Helen. I'm an alcoholic. This may get a little emotional. Two weeks ago tonight, exactly at this time, I tried to commit suicide. As you can see, a miracle happened that didn't work because I'm sitting right here. But that's not what I wanted to share. I wanted her to go back to the first step. I got a new sponsor, and I had never worked the steps. And that was my downfall. But I get a new sponsored, and she has been working the steps with me. And she kept asking me, I'm a binge drinker, I don't drink every day. And that is the reason for my insanity of killing myself last week. because the drink kept telling me it wasn't going to kill me. And I didn't want to drink anymore, so I knew I had to kill myself. And that was it. But anyway, she said we had to work on the first step. And I have been working that first step for two weeks. And she kept saying to me, We have to find what makes you pick up the first drink. And I found that here today. Whenever I had a problem or anything, I would go pick up that first drink and I could put the first drink and the second drink down and then call people and tell them what my problems were and today I found where my biggest mistake was I should never have had the first drink and called my other sponsor and given my problems I should have went right to God and worked the steps and I wouldn't have to have been put in the situation of almost suicide and that's what I got here today and that is a miracle in itself that I know today that if I don't work those steps, I don' t stand a chance. And trust me, I will work those steps. Thanks. Can you send the mic all the way to the back to the sailor? He knows who he is. Caught you with your mouthful, huh? The cracker. My name is Ron and I'm an alcoholic. Hey, Ron. I got sharing with Dave before we started this last session. And I like to sail and I live down in Florida. It was during a time in my life when I was really totally into self. Even though I was, as we were talking for the last day here, in the program going to meetings and thinking i was on the right path anyways i uh i was at the dock one day and uh at the boat yard that i kept my boat and this sailboat pulled in from france it was about a 35 footer there's a young couple on there and all sorts of people were trying to talk to him so i waited till they get the boat out of the water because they had some damage and a couple of days went by and i decided to go over and talk up to them they were on the top of the boat doing some fixing. And he spoke back to me with a French accent, speaking English. And I said to him, just trying to be friendly, I says, where did you come from? And he says, we came from sea. And i says, how did you get over here? Did you use GPS? Oh, no GPS. I says did you use the sextant? Oh, he says no sextant. And l says well how did you come over here he says with the compass and so i said to him i says well you must have got lost oh he says we got lost a lot and then he looked at me like a look that i've never forgotten because he was i was standing down there and he says but that's the only time when we were free and i've ever forgot that i just thought i'd pass that on to you guys the times when we think we're lost as i have felt myself lost and in between things and and really not connected to God or connected to anybody is truly the only time I'm okay. I'm free. I'm not really lost. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that. Got 13 minutes. Who's next? Anybody want to share? Oh, I'm sorry. We got one. Yeah. What's the question? Okay. We have a question. Hang on a sec. So what did you mean when you said that there is no opposite of love? There is about hate, love. I kind of didn't get that. That's for you. You made the statement. Love has no opposites. Love has to be loved. Love has nothing to do with love. It has no opposite. I don't know how else to say it other than that. I'll use a relationship. If in a relationship with a person you have demonstrated what you would call both love and hate, I submit that it's not love because love has no opposite because love never asks for anything in return. So that's what I meant when I say that love has nothing to do with love. Love has no opposition. And hate is not the opposite of love because hate is just an extreme attachment. You are so passionate about whatever your attachment is that you cannot let it go. You want to put it in the terms of the theater of the lie, the character in your head is fighting for its life to be right, whatever it happens to be. It's so much so that you feel like your physical being is going to die unless you win whatever that point it happens to be that has absolutely nothing to do with love. Love is. Just is. Does that make sense? It's like evil is also not the opposite of love. Evil is very similar to hate. They run very similar to each other. Does that make sense? I see a lot of strange looking faces. True evil, if there is such a thing, virtually it's always, I don't know any example that I can think of off the top of my head that's not perpetrated by a human being exercising their self-will over whatever happens to be. To try to form a position of getting whatever it is that they want. Whether it's dominance by causing pain or control or taking a life, it's all about what their plan is. There's absolutely nothing to do with love. It's about acting out its complete form of selfishness. In the same way that the dependence on another human being, and we call that love, it's not love at all. a lot of blank stares am I making sense? experientially I think we're stirring the pot here this is a very good point for people to be looking at that's why this love vision is going to be very strong for you it's going to force you to separate the wheat from the chaff and really take a look at what love truly is any concept that you ever hear including the ones in the big book lay your personal experience alongside test them. Your personal experience has far more power than any belief system you have. So that for me is always a litmus test. Like one time I'm talking to a priest and he wants to tell me what's going to happen when I leave this body, right? And I said to him do you have any personal experience with that? And he said no. And I said oh so it's a theory he said yes and i said sorry father don't misunderstand me but i'm not interested in your opinion about what might happen to me because it's his opinion spiritual life's not a theory i have to live it now uh i sense from then i've met a man in austin texas who's had three near-death experiences i listened very intently to what that man had to say to me so anything that any concepts including the ones in the book lay your experience alongside them to determine truth. You had a question? I think you're on. Am I on? Yeah. Hi, I'm Pat. I'm from Long Island. Hi, Pat. I wanted to tell you about what I found particularly interesting about today. I have been to rehabs in the past six years, and I never put together more than like six months. I've been vigilant about going to AA, and i have friends in AA, but this year something changed for me, and this week I'll have a year for the first time in six years right thanks one thing that I found out about today is that I have a lot of work to do to keep it and I met somebody a couple of weeks ago I know somebody a long time and they told me a couple weeks ago that they had three first years so if I did this for three first years, six years each time. It'll be almost 20 years that it'll take me to finally get sober and I don't think I'll live through it. I picked a sponsor six years ago that required no work from me and I think I did it intentionally at the time because I didn't want anybody to give me work to do. I've always been very independent and I'm not very good at it and I know I don' t take direction very well and I think it was to my detriment. You wouldn't be alcoholic, would you? Anyway, after one of a number of relapses, I finally told her that I think I need to start doing step work and I was pretty sure that I had done... Well, I know that I did up to four and five at rehab. I've been at Hazelden and at the Karen Foundation six years ago and three years ago and I thought that I had admitted powerlessness we sort of I guess I thought we had done one through three or I had done one through three enough at rehab she never reminded me that we hadn't really done it together or gave me any work to do and after a very miserable relapse. I said to her, you know, I think that I better do a fourth and fifth step, so I did. And I felt better after doing the fourth and fifth step. I only started coming up here to the Bill Wilson House this year. I've been skiing up here for 25 years and drinking up here for 20 years. I came up this year for my sponsor's 19th anniversary and stopped at the Bill Wilson House to visit and went to Bill Pittman's Drop the Rocks seminar in November. So I did some 6th and 7th work with him then, and I had no idea what any of the steps meant really. You know, I wasn't given any direction, and what I'm hearing from a lot of the people here and you guys and all your sponsees that have come with you is that there's a lot of work involved and there's a blueprint and there are directions and that's what people do I go to a lot of meetings I can't tell you how many 90s and 90s I've done one thing that changed about me this year is that I was so lonely and miserable last year that I decided to make AA my life, and I left my job and concentrated on the people that I know in AA, spending all my time with people from AA. And still there was no direction for step work. I go to probably four different AA groups in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and the step work that we do is just you open up a step book and you read around the rooms and people give a little feedback and that's it. That's the only thing I ever knew about step work. So, I think I'm going to be a lot more conscientious about finding a step sponsor and doing the work and that is what I got out of this. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Yeah, you are right on the right track. You need somebody to take you through the steps out of the big book. Mark always says don't let anybody read your big book for you. Where are we getting these concepts, these 90 and 90s? That's not written in my book. It's not part of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Is it good advice? Yeah, they're not going to hurt you. But you don't know if the program of Alcoholic Anonymous is going to work until you work the program of Alcoholice Anonymous That means if you haven't finished all your amends, hate to tell you, but you haven'T worked the program of Alcoholix Anonymous You have no idea whether the program is going to work or not. That's what this whole deal is about. Once you've done all of the 12 steps, every piece of all of the 12 steps, then you can tell me whether it works or not. That's the real deal. If anybody's got a burning desire, we can do one more, or here's the deal. Tonight there's a meeting here, so we're going to have to clear out all of our books and pamphlets and stuff because there's a regular A meeting here. I'd love to turn that into an exercise and say we've all been camped out pretty much in the exact same places. We make our little nests. So why don't we try instead of brushing our teeth with the other hand or combing our hair, let's move somewhere completely different and not sit next to somebody we know and introduce ourselves and find a new nest since we have to move all of our stuff out of here anyway. And for those of you who want to meet me up at Bill's grave, we're going to go straight up there and then come back here and eat dinner. Okay, well come with me I'll give you a ride I'm Dave, I'm an alcoholic A number of people the first night were asking about Fellowship of the Spirit the thing that Mark and I did last July John drove up here specifically from Long Island to bring copies of that up So there are copies available now. They do have them here. If you're interested, there's only a couple copies. So be selfish and go grab them if you get a chance, if you really want them. The other thing is that some people asked about the Master Series. Glenn has them on 94-minute tapes which isn't compatible. He's going to have to burn them onto something different. So if you talk to him and you're really interested in those things, he can get those to you eventually. What else was I going to say? oh the 50-50 I know there's a contingent of people that have to leave to catch the ferry to go back to Nantucket I hope you wrote your name and your phone number on those tickets if you didn't come see us and we'll coordinate to make sure if you hit it we have a way of contacting you because we'll do that tomorrow morning give away the two tape sets that Glenn has offered to put up and then do the 50-50. What else? I hate being discombobulated, but I don't get a choice, right? How'd you guys do with swapping seats? Anybody find it difficult? I didn't think so. Tonight is the thing that we've been talking about all weekend is the deal on forgiveness. And since people are going to be leaving, I don't know if we're going to get to it tonight. But I want to make sure that all the handouts go out tonight because I know some people aren't going to be able to be here in the morning. So I am going to hand out the – this is something that – I don' t know if I told the story or not. There's a guy who's got a very interesting ministry and he was running a retreat for a bunch of men and for this church group. and without the men realizing it, he called a secret meeting and invited all the wives to show up and he got them all in a room and he handed out a thing and he said, listen, if you could have the perfect husband, what would you want? Write it down. So all the women wrote it down and he had a couple of women volunteers to collate the whole thing and put it together and they came up with 10 bullet statements for what women want. Then when it came time for the weekend retreat, he got all the husbands together for this weekend retreat and they thought they were going to have this powerful spiritual experience and he says, hey boys, here's what I did. I spoke to your wives, and here's what they want. And they spent the entire weekend retreat, three days, focusing on how to turn these ten bullet statements into a vision. Of course, I didn't believe it, so I took this thing home, and I gave it to my wife and said, Honey, what do you think about this? Is this a bunch of hooey or what? And she took a look at it, and she read it, and she goes, No, this is good. Where'd you get this? So I brought one copy with me up here, and I figured I'd print some. I brought a printer with me, and of course, my printer's not working, so I take it downtown, and I walk into the copying station there and there's this woman behind the counter and I said, I need 100 copies and she goes, well, I can't do it right this second but I'll, you know, I said well, would you be ready to write if I come back in about 10 minutes and she said sure. So I go off and do what I want and this time I go back and Brenda had hooked back up with me and I'm walking in and this is the first time I'm with my wife and as she looks up I look her in the eye and I say I could see something different about her and she had this little smirk on her face and I says did you read that? And she said yes I did. She goes, that's good. So virtually every woman that I have interfaced with that has read these things likes them. So if you guys want, I'll do this very discriminatory and I will only issue it to the guys and you can decide whether you want to let your significant others or if you're really men and you're fearless, I'll hand them out to the entire group. Group conscience? Whatever. All right. Could you get... There you go. Start handing those out. Give me one of those. Married and divorced four times? What would you need one for? I just want to see if it agrees with some ideas I have. so uh he passes this out and he thinks we want to talk about forgiveness you know one of the ways you can make amends to your significant other is to make this vision come true you know uh and if you want to take it even to the next level you can take this if for all the guys in the room you can talk to them and take this to your significant other and say hey honey this is what they handed out at the retreat would you tune this up is there anything that you would change about it and really get them to tell you what their vision is and then go from there one of the single largest areas in my life for emotional sobriety has been in my relationship with my wife my wife and I have been going to couples meetings for over 15 years I think now So if not, it's right around that time period. Before I got married, I did it very anally. I was sober, so I was an anal retentive. And I went to every married man that I knew. And I said, tell me about marriage. I think, don't hold me to the numbers, but I think out of every adult male that I know that was married, I think five or six told me that they were happily married and would recommend it. Virtually every other male said, biggest mistake of your life, don't do it. And it was just fear, fear, fire. and I realized there's something wrong here. Men and women have been getting married for millions of years. How could this be? What is wrong? And so I started a process of investigation. I realized I sure wasn't raised with the tools for how to have a relationship. And I certainly knew that if I was going to an AA meeting to try to figure out how to get married, how to find a way to have an AA relationship, I was coming to an empty well. That's the wrong place to go. So I've spent a lot of my sober time trying to figure our relationships. I have a lot things that have worked in my marriage. You heard me mention rule number one, jokingly. But that's really a rule. There's people all over this country that use rule number 1. No matter what happens, it's Dave's fault. Now, what are we going to do about it? I'll go to the couples meeting and people look at me and say, Dave, you're in real trouble this week because they still use it. It's Dave'S fault. The important half of that rule is getting to the second half. What are we gonna do about Let's not bicker and fight over this deal. But there's a whole series of rules like that. This is one of those areas where it's quick to be seen where other people are right. I go to wherever I can get the information from. Same with the last two pages of your handouts. It's on traditions and relationships and concepts in your relationships. I'm slowly and surely working on my wife. I think I finally got her convinced that maybe she might, if I can work on her a little bit more, talk her into doing actually a retreat on relationships. Because I can see that we've got some experience that people aren't talking about. And I think it's a ministry that needs to be addressed. Anyway, there's a lot of information that is out there to be offered if you're willing to pick it up and try it. As for the forgiveness exercise, let me hand those out too. More paper cuts, exactly. Let me give you a little background on this sucker. The reason that I wrote up this forgiveness exercise is it's been one of the areas in this past year, if I had to describe anything that I've had to work on, it's has been this. In about this time last year, my AA program changed dramatically. I was kind of in an interesting situation. I was doing workshops on a regular basis and some events occurred and that's really not the point of my discussion. The point was I ended up with hurt feelings. And because I had hurt feelings, I needed to go through and figure out forgiveness again. And I had done the standard things that you normally would expect and I didn't get the results that I expected. And a lot of the people that I had a hard time with were people in AA. And they were my closest friends in AA and I did not know how to handle it. I did know how react to it and it was starting to eat my lunch and I do not know what to do about it. and I knew I damn well better figure out how to forgive these people at a different level because, you know, that's the neat thing about your ego. You do an inventory and you learn something about your eco and you learned how to block it off. You know, if it comes at you from this direction over here, you do an inventor and you say, oh, I see the ego. So the ego realizes it can't come from that direction anymore because you build up a wall there. So the eco next time will come at you from over here and then you write another inventory and you put up a walls over there. Well, I had been doing enough inventory work that my ego was coming at me from a direction I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. So I had to go back to the very basics of the big book in the program and say, you know, what was Bill Wilson talking about? What was the foundation tools he was using for forgiveness? And go back and start from square one and define the forgiveness in my heart and be able to do that. And those exercises have carried me over so well that I'm still doing this exercise on a regular basis. I forgave those people months and months and weeks ago. I made the amends. I did the things that I had to do. Yet I've still continued on with part of this exercise that you'll see we'll be talking about tonight. Forgiveness exercise. This first part comes from a thing called Our Daily Bread. It's a newsletter. It was March 2002. It says, We don't forgive to let those we have harmed us off the hook. We forgive to turn the offenders over to God and to get the bitterness and anger out of our stomachs. If we don't forget, if we don' t forgive, our own anger will consume us. That's my experience. I'm sure if you're in this room and you think about it, That's been your experience. Especially if there's people right now in your life currently that you haven't forgiven. It's eating your lunch. You may be doing a pretty good job and you've got a smile on your face and you got the mask going, but you're submarine-ing pretty bad. There's some real stuff eating your launch. TIC, the next one stands for Together in Christ. It says many of us still regard forgiveness as a human act instead of a divine act. We all tend to want revenge. Does that sound like any alcoholics in this room? What character would that be? Hitman, right? Revenge. We like to remind people how much they have hurt us. We often have the misconception that if we forgive someone, we're condoning their actions. To the degree that we refuse to forgive, do we drag resentment around with us? If we're not willing to forgive and move beyond our anger, then we're stuck. Forgiveness is not a gift we give to someone else. It is a gift that we give ourselves. It is not just a gift we give to ourselves. Hopefully that alone will be enough of a shift for you to realize that it's a gift you give for yourself. The problem is there's a price tag for that gift. In order to get the peace and serenity it means you have to let go of the attachment you have to the person that you resent and you hate and you loathe and you despise and who you want to see burn in hell forever. You know? Or the person that you want to crawl before your altar and beg for forgiveness so that you can tell them how badly they really hurt you and make them suffer the same way that you've suffered. But what's the biggest promise in the big book? Our problems are basically of our own making. This is a gift we give to ourselves, all right? It is not something that we do because the other person deserves it. In fact, the otherperson may not even know that we harbor anger or resentment against them and may not ever be able to get rid of it. They may not care. Boy, does that get us when they really don't care. Yeah, I hurt you, but who cares, you know? But we are the ones paying the check for the price and carrying around the burden. Say to yourself, my not forgiving costs me too much. I refuse to remain stuck at this point in my life. When we ask Him, capital H, God gives us the grace to freely forgive even those who have wounded us deeply. All right? And here's what I came up with. To deal with forgiveness, I had to follow the plan that Bill W. laid out in the big book in the 12 and 12. Yes, I said 12 and12. A big book thumper talking about that other book. The moment we pondered a twisted or broken relationship with another person, our emotions go on the defensive. Let us remember that alcoholics are not the only ones bedeviled by sick emotions. Moreover, it is usually the fact our behavior when drinking has aggravated the defects of others. In many instances, we are really dealing with fellow sufferers, people whose woes we have increased. If we are now about to ask forgiveness for ourselves, why shouldn't we start out by forgiving them one and all? Before I could take my first amends on this incident that I was talking about, I had to forgive each and every one. And I had made the attempt, but I knew it wasn't complete because it just still didn't quite sit right. And until I had gotten complete forgiveness, I knew I couldn't face those people face to face. Which meant that I'm the kind of person now that I've had so much experience writing inventory. I like to write the inventory and get the amends out of the way and get them done. I don't like to leave them hanging out there. And some of these amends hung out there and as hard as I tried to self-will getting those things done, there were some of them that just couldn't be done until it was God's time. And the last one wasn't done for like eight months before the other person would see me for me to be able to go make that amend. The steps eight and nine are concerned with personal relations. Interesting. First, we take a look backwards to try to discover where we have been in fault. Next, we're going to take a vigorous attempt to repair the damage we have done. And third, having thus cleaned away the debris of the past, we consider how, with our newfound knowledge of ourselves, we may develop the best possible relations with every human being we know. That's including those people we won't forgive. All right? So the exercise is you list the people that you're not willing to forgive. You write them down. In this room, we don't have to take the time. You know in your heart they jump right off the page. They're probably right now sitting right about here in your throat. You guys who haven't forgiven, you know exactly who I'm talking about. All right? Then look what this next paragraph says. It says, There are cases where ancient enemy rationalization has stepped in and justified conduct which was really wrong. The temptation here is to imagine that we had good motives when reasons we really didn't. And in parentheses, as I wrote, we focus on what they did to us not what we did. Somebody shared it today and I don't remember when it was but I heard somebody say they were talking about having a hard time making their amends but the other person had done something to them and that's what we focus on. The freedom comes in you taking care of your side of the street. That's where the gift comes in with the forgiveness exercise. Learning daily to spot and admit these correct these flaws is the essence of character building and good living. An honest regret for harms done, a genuine gratitude for blessings received, and look at this a willingness to try for better things tomorrow will be the permanent assets we shall seek alright you notice the next thing I wrote down here have you made amends for the harms you did? I guarantee that virtually I don't think there will be a soul in this room there willbe a person in here who has not forgiven someone and who has actually tried and gone and made the amends can't be why? because we have to forgive before we can truly go to make the amends so if you haven't forgiven you couldn't have gone and finished the amens now delusion you may think you have but the reason you haven't been able to forgive is because there's still something that you haven'T there's an amend you havenT made you haven'T written it down you're not clear on the harm that you did the reason you don't want to forgive is it means you're going to have to look at the harm you caused and release that harm which means you have to cancel. Remember the emotional banker I was talking about? You caused a harm. Let's say I caused a harm to Rick but Rick caused a bigger harm to me. I can forgive Rick but I got an emotional banker that's ringing up interest against Rick. I know in my heart the exact same is true for him which means not only do I have to go to Rick I have make amends for my harm that I caused him I have figure out a way to cancel Rick's emotional banker the IOU that I owe to his emotional banker which means he gets off scot-free completely as far as the hitman is concerned that's not a very equal proposition it doesn't guarantee me that he's going to come bow before my altar you know and profess his undying sorrow for the act he caused me who's talking to me in my head it's my emotional banker that's got his IOU because my emotional banker's talking so loud I can't see the damage I caused him does that make sense that's really what we're up against We are being driven by fear. We don't have a choice. It's the fear that we have to get down to the crux of. What is it that I'm truly afraid to let go of? Our ego is telling us that it's the harm, the justice. There's no justice if he gets off and I have to forgive him. The reality is we're whipping ourselves. The forgiveness isn't for them. It's for us. As soon as we can make amends for our side of the street and it was in the amends portion that I was jammed up. I couldn't see that. Are you guys with me? There's a lot of heads nodding. I want to make sure I'm... I'm not really clear on this myself, so I wantto make sure and how to transmit this because it was something that I mean, this is fresh stuff. It's stuff that in some extent is still going on. Are you serious? Or are you just busting me? Okay. Sure. Absolutely.