Workshop: Emotional Sobriety Part 1 of 6

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Hi, I'm Astrid, and I'm definitely an alcoholic. Hi, and I want to thank Doug and Bridget and everybody else that put this on for inviting me to come speak here. It really is an honor and a privilege to share my experience and strength and hope with you, and I love A.A. and I am a real alcoholic. I have a physical allergy to alcohol, and when I drink, I trigger the phenomena of craving, and I cannot stop. And I break out in handcuffs, and I throw my child away, and I swing from the chandeliers, and I lose my underwear and my car keys, and pitiful and incomprehensible things happen. And like so many other people in A.A., when I got sober the first time, it wasn't enough to just have physical sobriety. The, the main part of the disease actually centers in the alcoholic's mind rather than her body. So putting the plug in the jug is a very small aspect of treating this illness. There's a lot more that needs to be considered.

And what I'd like to start out with is, because this is called emotional sobriety, I'd like to start out with, um, a little bit of "The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety in the Language of the Heart" on page 236. And I'm just going to read briefly through some of the paragraphs, not the whole thing, but this is, you know, from Bill. "I think that many oldsters who have put our AAA booze cure to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result and so into easy, happy, and good living? Well, that's not only the neurotic's problem, but it's the problem of life itself. For all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to go to the right principles in all of our affairs, even then, when we go away working with peace and joy, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us old-timers have come to, and it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious, from which so many of our fears, compulsions, and phony aspirations still stream, be brought into align with what we actually believe, know, and want? How to convince our raging and hidden Mr. or Mrs. Hyde becomes our main task."

I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I began to see many benighted one 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, which means that he almost committed suicide, or he almost died. I mean, it sort of put mildly, almost took me to the cleaners, but we really almost lost one of the founders of the program that our whole life depends on. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell, considering the grief I'd had with depression. It wasn't a bright spot. I kept asking myself, "Why can't the 12 steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at Saint Francis' prayer: "It is 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, 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 the outgoing love of Saint Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies could be cut away. Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been 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 A.A., indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever. Then only could I be free to love as Saint 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 of life. 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. You know, and even that alone, I mean, well, but I can't do well. I want to love others. I want to love all my fellows, and I still can hate so deeply that you make me mad. And at the end of the day, I have an invisible baseball bat, and somebody's going to get hurt, and it's not going to be me. I play mental movies in my head of what I'm going to say to you and how it's going to come out. You know, there's a, there's a hurt and an injured character inside of here that I treated with alcohol for a long time. And just because I've put the plug in the jug, it doesn't mean that anything else has changed. All the harms and all the hurts from yesterday and from my childhood, the way I react and the way I respond, the way I was neglected as a child, all the trauma that I've been through is still there, living in me. And if these things aren't treated at a subconscious level, all bets are off.

You know, they say these days that only two to maybe five percent of alcoholics ever get a five-year cake. So what's not being presented in Alcoholics Anonymous? What are we not hearing? What's not being demonstrated? What are we not applying to our lives? And so often, the message gets diluted. And I go to an A.A. meeting, and I just hear the drama du jour and all the problems and blaming other people, and I, I feel sicker in that meeting than when I came out. You know, I'm really grateful to Doug and Bridget for having a tight format, because I do believe that a format can hold a room together and not allow the people and the sheeple to stray too far out. If we only have a few hours, let's hear a message of depth and weight, and let's share some real recovery. It's a personal opinion, but a strong one. I don't believe that you can say anything you want from the podium. That's what sponsors are for, you know. And so many people come in and they just feel that Alcoholics Anonymous is a polluted dumping ground, and that's not what it's here for. It's here to really share some experience. Yes, people have trauma. Yes, they're hurt. Yes, they're upset, and you can save that for someone else. I don't know that it's such a great demonstration to spew and dispute and dispute this emotional, untreated alcoholism to the entire room.

You know, I, I want to like take you back into the history of, of how I arrived at the place I'm at today. And I relapsed after 10 years of dry sobriety, and it's because I didn't apply the principles to my life. It's because I didn't have a spiritual relationship with God. It's because I didn't have any kind of psychic change. I actually got worse, not better. It's a real psychic change. I think that my anger and my depression over the years and my behavior towards others and my heart got even more hardened. I was more angry before that last relapse. And so, if you be a real alcoholic and the disease is not treated with spiritual principles and a power greater than itself, someday and somewhere along the line, it's going to be me in the bottle, and the bottle is going to win. And the disease is very cunning and baffling and powerful, and it speaks to me with great authority, and it tells me that we can drink now after 10 years of dry sobriety. Go for it, you know, have a drink, nobody will know, chew some gum, you know. Oh my gosh.

And so that day comes where my mind starts to speak to me with great authority and tells me that a drink would look like a pretty good idea. And I drank, and I ignited a huge forest fire in my, in my home, in my life, in my personal life, because things were already restless, irritable, and discontent. But now I add alcohol to the fire, and things start to really speed up and get very crazy, and the depression gets much more heavy. I'm laden with hangovers in the morning. I can't seem to get up. I can't seem to function. I'm yelling and screaming. I'm very short-tempered. My nervous system becomes very fried with alcohol in it, and with, uh, even with just a hangover, I, I have really just the inability to accept any kind of frustration or bad news. Um, you know, you might use the B word around me a lot. Um, I'm just restless and irritable and completely discontented. And, and I can be that sober, and I can be that drunk.

But as time goes on, what happened for me was the bottle really took me further and further and further into the psychosis and the insanity. And I packed my house up, and I gave my child away. Some people took care of my child, and I just moved out into the street. And in 2001, '02, and '03, I lived in the street in Los Angeles, like not even in a house or a back house or a motel or a hotel, just literally in the street with the cart pushers and the panhandlers and the dope fiends and the alcoholics and the matted, you know, schizophrenics, and just that whole carnival mayhem of insanity out there in the streets. And, and that became my life. And I, I, in my inside, what was happening was there was just no bridge of safety to ever get back. The pitiful and the incomprehensible, just no way. I couldn't even see the possibility of ever getting sober again. I had tried, and I had done inpatients and outpatients and rehabs and lockdowns and spin dry and spent so much money, and nothing was working for me. And mind you, you know, there's a 10-year-old daughter that was a witness to a lot of this, who had a sober, dry mom for years, and now has lost her mother to the throes of alcoholism.

And the, the problems and the drama that happened before the drinking even starts, often for many of us, is great. A lot of us come from alcoholic homes. Some of us don't. Some of us had very normal childhoods, you know, but there's often a deep pathology that's attached to untreated alcoholism. What I have noticed in my studies and in working with others is that the average alcoholic has a neurotic, repetitive mind function, and the mind continues to say the same story over and over and over again. And that I don't think in a linear way, and most alcoholics don't think in a linear way. Like I have a lot of neurotic tendencies. Bill calls it in "The Language of the Heart," and these neurotic tendencies have a, have the capacity to get worse as time goes on. So I'm, I'm drinking, and the mind is going and going and going and going, and I really, in the end, just can't even put two and two together anymore. Have the inability to use any eye contact or really have a deep meaningful conversation.

And, um, you know, I'll tell you a couple of stories in the street real quick of just how dark it got. You know, the obsession for alcohol is so much stronger than self-will, that the obsession will trump over any moral fiber. We're not sociopaths. We're not ax murderers. That's not who we are. We're actually very sensitive, broken people inside with a lot of heart and a lot of empathy that want to love and want to be loved, but don't have the capacity to do it. Run, run on self-will. And I remember being in the street, and it was pouring rain, and I found this burnt-out building, you know, that had had a bad fire, and water's pouring through parts of it. And way in the back, there's this girl laying on this sleeping bag, and she's very pregnant, and she's loaded, and she's using drugs, and she's laying on her side. And, you know, I just sat there and got totally loaded with this woman for hours. And every once in a while, she'd take her hand on my hand, and she'd put it on her stomach, and I could feel this infant just contorting and kicking in there. And I remember the feeling and the thought, like, "I need to get out of here. This woman needs help." But alcoholism trumps over the natural human instinct to care for my young, to care for a fellow, to the herd instinct to protect a woman and her child. I can't do it.

I mean, well, but I can't do well. Now, that principle can also apply itself to me when I'm sober. That's how alcoholism is. It's a neurotic mind function. It's a disconnected mind function. It's a deeply injured mind. It's an injured character, and in the end, it's a spiritual malady. It's a soul sickness. So to get to the root causes isn't always easy, because I feel that if the real problem isn't presented, then how are we going to have a solution? And sometimes people think, "Just get through the steps. Just get into Step Four and Five," or when you get to the amends. But we don't want to do things mechanically here. The important thing for me was to have a real spiritual unfoldment, to have a real relationship with the steps, to have a relationship with God, to have a relationship with my fellows, to have a relationship in Alcoholics Anonymous.

So again, so much needs to be considered in how I'm interacting. And you can see that in my alcoholism, I had a very, very limited capacity to do anything, you know, to help this woman, to be of any kind of service. And as things went from bad to worse, I, um, I went in and out and in and out of jail. I've been arrested many times. I've just, I've seen and been through all of those hurts and harms. And as I got sober, looking at that stuff is a horrible, horrible feeling. You know, for me to have inventory that in the first few months of my sobriety would have been hell. I would not have been prepared and spiritually fit enough to do it. And what was given to me in my home group was to build a foundation and a relationship in Steps One, Two, and Three, and to really have a real relationship with God, and to look at how the disease functions and how the ego operates.

You know, I want to go a little bit further with what Bill says here. So he talked about these absolute dependencies. While these word "absolute dependencies" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into the present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of return. To me, this seems to be the primary healing circuit, an outgoing love of God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of God, of His love for us. It is most clear that the real current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.

So even coming in and getting sober after going in and out of jail and being in and out of rehab, my heart's broken, and I'm hardened. And if you approached me, my body language is like this, and I'm cussing all over the place, and, you know, swearing like a lunatic, and maybe I can't have the capacity to even have any eye contact. You can see in my composure and the way I move that it's very erratic and angry and hard and hostile. And this is what alcoholism does. It's not a joke. I mean, it affects us at a cellular level. It affects my, my mind and my emotions and my body and my muscles and the way I feel and the way I view the world. Not a lot of untreated alcoholism is a problem of perception.

So I come into A.A. and it gets painful. I mean, there's this very light pink cloud phase where the plug's in the jug, and there might be a little like, few of the monkeys off my back for a few minutes. But then often, for me anyway, my mind starts to really devour me, and the problems become bigger than before. Because when I gave away my child and I lived in the street and turned tricks and saw all that stuff, I had something that could drown me out, and I drank to oblivion. But now there was nothing between me and that. There was no buffer left. And we see people kill themselves in A.A., and we see people, you know, go on meds when it's not necessary. I don't really have a big opinion on meds. Some people really need them. They're absolutely chemically so imbalanced that they can't live without them. And other people appear to be sometimes severely overmedicated or the wrong medication. And that, to some degree, is an outside issue. But, you know, it breaks my heart when I see what, what looks like somebody that could possibly, if some of the medication could be lifted, they could be having a higher experience, a higher interaction with the human race, a higher interaction with a God of their understanding. And yet the medicine keeps them down, down, down in a fairly unconscious state.

You know, and the way the steps in this program are designed are there in a logical order, form from 1 to 12, to produce a new way of life. Alcoholics Anonymous is only 76 years old. It's such a new thing. It's a revolution. We're part of something so big that has struck this planet. It's so unbelievable. The other religions have been around for thousands of years. We have this special thing going on here. It's a spiritual program. It's not a religion. This isn't about naming your God from the podium. It's about having an experience. And if I'm not having an experience in the day I'm in, if I'm not continuously having experience in the steps, then I'm not in a program of recovery. That I'm not achieving more emotional sobriety. There's absolutely no finishing point to this program. I will be working on getting rid of self until the day I die. Self never completely goes away. There's always another dust bunny to sweep up. There's always more to go for, more communication skills, more forgiveness, more love, more letting go.

As Bill says, these dependencies, he even says A.A. for him. I get it. I get it. Because self can even hold on to that, and it's unhealthy. I'm not saying that A.A. doesn't have a beautiful healing property, but you see, I can twist it up, and I can do something different with it. I can think that I'm in authority, or I'm the boss of it, or I need to be recognized in a certain way. All of a sudden, you start getting asked to speak all over the place, and now again, here comes a new rodent into the kitchen that needs to be monitored and looked at. You know, the thing never stops. And the disease, it's an ism, it's not a wasm. It's alive and it's functioning, and it needs to be treated. I believe on a moment-by-moment basis. But if I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm not going to treat it. I'm not going to know what to treat. You know.

And for me, like, really transmitting a message of depth and weight is so important. And I want to tell you what, um, what Bill says about about Dr. Silkworth. And this was Bill's experience when he went to Silkworth and then when he had Ebby sponsor him. "I came to Dr. Silkworth. His most recent concepts and tactics had begun to produce slightly improved results, so he was encouraged. He went after my situation with something of the enthusiasm and hope of a young doctor on his first critical case. He told me what an infernal malady alcoholism is, and why he made no promises. He did not try to conceal the poor recovery rate. For the first time, I saw and felt the full gravity of my problem." You see, it's so important that we feel the full gravity of our problem, or we're not going to go for more.

I learned also for the first time that I was a sick man, emotionally and physically. As every A.A. today knows, this knowledge can be an enormous relief. I no longer needed to consider myself essentially a fool or a weakling. This is not a moral thing. And so many alcoholics do the most crazy things. You know, people have probably even raped and murdered and sold their grandma's wedding rings. I mean, the stuff that we hear in Fourth and Fifth Steps. My heart has to remain so open and so receptive. And yes, we have perverts and child molesters. I mean, this is A.A. This is the way we roll around here. You know, we're emotionally and mentally and spiritually sick. So I've got to grow further and further and further into my open-mindedness, into my open-heartedness, if I want to be a real A.A. person. I can't work with one and shut the other one out. I want to be open-minded to the whole entire ball of wax.

He says today, "Every A.A. member implants into his new prospect just what Dr. Silkworth so powerfully lodged in me. We know that the newcomer has to hit bottom, otherwise not much can happen." You see, with emotional sobriety, we can hit a bottom in, in sobriety, with physical sobriety, and yet we've been a twisted up relationship or up to our old tricks, stealing from our boss, embezzling, somewhere, way overeating, too much sex, too much this. The mind is just yearning and turning and wanting and needing to orchestrate things. And those bottoms, we can have many of them. You know, Bill talks about pain being the touchstone to all spiritual progress. So I can look at this pain liability as my greatest asset, and I can stop fearing it so much. But I can just use it as a temperature taker, as a thermometer, as a barometer to go, "Wow, I'm off the A.A. beam. I'm off the mark, or there's something more to go for."

Dr. Silkworth, we know that the newcomer has to hit bottom, otherwise not much can happen, because we are drunks who understand. We can use that nutcracker of obsession plus the allergy as a tool of such power that it can shatter the newcomer's ego at depth, or even the old-timer. Thus only can he be convinced that on his own unaided resource, he has little or no chance.

1934, I visited Ebby. I was visited by Ebby. He was an old friend, an alcoholic, and my sponsor to be. Why was it that he could communicate with me in areas that even Dr. Silkworth could not? Well, first of all, I already knew that he himself was a hopeless case, just like me. Earlier that year, I learned that he too was a candidate for a lockup. Yet here he was, sober and free. And his communication now was such that he could convince me in minutes that he really felt he had been released from his drinking compulsion. He had represented something very different from a mere jittery ride on the water dragon wagon. And so he brought me a kind of communication and evidence that even Dr. Silkworth could not give me. He was one drunk talking to another. And here was hope, indeed. And that's the way we roll here. You know, the 12th Step, "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all of our affairs." That doesn't mean I ever do anything perfectly. Sponsees come and go, come and go. I do the best of my ability to practice the principles in all of my affairs, to bring them into everything, but I fall short every day. And that doesn't mean that I beat myself up. It's that I learned through the steps to check my track record, to, to keep on the beam, to really watch my mind, to watch what my thoughts are doing.

But there's something that has to be presented, and that is the structure of the ego. For me, what was given to me were the Harry Tiebout papers, and I went painstakingly through that work. Harry Tiebout was a psychiatrist that worked with A.A. and he worked with alcoholics in the '30s and the '40s and the '50s. And, you know, he wrote some papers on the ego factors. And the reason why for me it's so important to use the Tiebout papers is because there's very little literature that we have in A.A., and I don't ever want to dilute my, the message here. I don't ever want to dilute Alcoholics Anonymous. So I don't bring in other things. I don't quote outside people. There's plenty of other stuff out there, but it's very important for me that I keep it real clean A.A. stuff, and the people that were connected to A.A. and the writings of A.A. And Harry Tiebout was one of the great pioneers and unsung heroes, and he wrote these papers, which we will go into at much depth first thing in the morning. And he broke down the ego of the alcoholic, sober, and that he was impatient, and that he was defiant, and that he was grandiose, and he was omnipotent. And if I don't look at these and consider these, it's very hard for me to see where the alcoholism is, because the disease is designed not to see itself. Self can't reveal self to self. The disease is never going to show itself to me. So I really need a tremendous amount of human help.

And when they say, "Stick with the winners," you know, I used to think like, "Get that lady to sponsor me that drives the Mercedes and has those big fake tits, you know, and the big diamond. She probably has it going on. She can probably help me. She looks successful." Like my mind can't even, doesn't even have radar for what is success in a human being's life and what is not. I don't even know what I'm looking for. I need so much human help when I come into Alcoholics Anonymous.

So basically, for me, what happened was after I put the plug in the jug, I was given these tapes by this guy named Bob Anderson, who's my grand sponsor. And he started this meeting in this group called Prime Time out in the San Fernando Valley. And he just broke it down in a way that I could hear it, you know. And what he talked about was that the main part of the disease centers in the alcoholic's mind rather than her body. And like I said before, I'm the same woman drunk as I am sober. And that I have a physical allergy, and that it's coupled with this mental obsession. And the mental obsession is not just for drugs and alcohol. The mental obsession is for anything out there in the third-dimensional world. And just like Bill Wilson said, all of these false dependencies, even A.A., I can mentally obsess about my own home group, about people in my home group, about how the format should be, about that guy that shares every single time and goes on and on, "We need to get rid of him. Should he drink again? Can't he go somewhere else?" My mind will poop in my own nest right here in A.A., you know. It knows no boundaries at all.

And, and so I want to see that. I want to see more. And I want to see more, but things have to be shown to me. There's no way that the disease is ever going to tell me the truth about how it operates. So Bob, uh, left this whole great lineage of a way to break it down, and he used the Tiebout papers, and he used the Sermon on the Mount, Emmett Fox, and he talked about watching my mind and watching the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain. And that most of these thoughts are subconscious thoughts, and I don't even notice them. You know, neuroscientists say that there's 46,000 thoughts that surf the waves of an average person's brain a day. But if you look at an average alcoholic, there's probably like five thoughts that surf the wave 46,000 times a day. And it usually has to do with those primary instincts: my instinct for sex, my instinct for security, or my desire to be someone in society.

The sex for men can be the more barbaric, you know, penis, vagina kind of sex. For women, it can be, "How do I look to the opposite? My hair, my nails, my skin. Oh my God, am I not thin enough? That bathroom scale, wing it out the window. I think I'll kill myself. Wait, Betty Crocker, one more cake." You know. And, and it's funny, but it's incredibly, incredibly painful. You know, Bill talks about that in here. He says, "Painful, painful." Let's see. Bill says, Bill's secretary claimed that those close to Bill were deeply concerned. She mentioned days when Bill would be dictating to her only to stop and break down and start weeping. God, it makes me sick inside. I love that man so much. I have so much, much respect for him. He had everything going on. He had started Alcoholics Anonymous. Him and his wife were together. He's just at the cutting edge of this whole revolutionary thing that was going to change the alcoholic world, and he's sitting in his office breaking down and weeping. He had so much to be thankful for. He put the cork in the bottle. Why this depression?

To another old-timer, Bill wrote, "Many in recovery were going through the same difficulties with depression. Today, many identify with Bill. When after facing their primary addiction, which is alcohol, they may find other compulsions: smoking, eating, sex, etc. These need attention too." Most alcoholics' responses: anger, oh God, not another. For some, depression. Bill writes another letter, "I suppose that about half the old-timers have neurotic hangovers of one sort or another. Certainly, I can number myself among them." So, you know, Bill really struggled, just like the rest of us do. I believe if you be a real alcoholic, you're never out of the woods. And I want quality to my life. I want quality to my moments. I want quality to my days. But I don't know how to achieve that without first really viewing where the disease operates. And watching the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain is a really important factor, because that application starts to wake me up to what's really going on.

And if I start to watch the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain, then who's watching? And who's producing the thoughts? And for the first time in my life, I have an "aha!" spiritual awakening moment where I realize that I'm not my thoughts. That there's an involuntary bunch of besery rolling around in the basement, percolating itself up and saying, "Hey, fatso, remember your mom, she hates you." And all of these pains and harms and hurts from yesterday, problems, people that owed me money, people that I think ripped me off, people that I ripped off, pain and harm and hurt, and it never stops. My mind, like I said before, it speaks to me with great authority. So watching the mind is a really important factor.

You know, and in the literature, when it says that there's one that has all power, that one is God. May you find Him now. If I start to watch the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain right now, that'll naturally lead me into a Step Two process, because seeing those thoughts and really recognizing what is going on in my mind gives me an incredible desire to, "How do I stop this thing?" And I'll see that there's no way to stop it. I'll get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and my mind was on before I even completely woke up. It was talking about that thing that was bothering me all day. It never stops.

So when we go into Step Two and we look at that more in-depth, and we come to believe that there's a power greater than self that can restore us to sanity, I have to figure out how to get this power down into where the disease is. And the Big Book on 55 tells us that actually, "We're fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or another, it's there. For faith in a power greater than ourselves and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives are facts as old as man himself. We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our makeup, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend. Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there. He was as much a fact as we were. We found the great reality deep down within us. In the last analysis, in the last analysis, it's only there that He may be found."

And so it is with us. And so Bill Wilson very clearly makes this statement that we're going to search for the power inside of us. It's not outside. Like I said, this isn't a religion. It's not in a book. It's not in a prayer. It's not in anything else. The power is in me, and there's a power inside of me that can restore me to a sound mind. You see, there has to be something that's as accessible to the newcomer as it is to somebody with 25 years, or this isn't a program of recovery. I don't want to tell a newcomer, "You just wait till you get your Ninth Step. You just wait till after your first year. You just, it gets really bad at year seven." Those are all real lies. There's no truth or validity to any of that. The only time I can treat this disease is right now. And I can give that to somebody that's brand spanking new.

And the application for me is, "Power, could you please protect me from my mind? Can you help me? Can you be with me? Can you help me feel okay in the moment that I'm in?" And, you know, like Emmett Fox talks about in the Sermon on the Mount, the quality of my prayer is very important. I want a petition with intention. I want a petition like I mean it. I want to ask with real intention, almost like I'm pleading to the judge not to send me to prison. I really, not just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, a self-talking prayer, but a heartfelt prayer. And I ask God continuously, "Can you protect me from my mind? Can you keep me away from the resentments of the past and the fear of the future? Can you help me have a new experience in the moment that I'm in? Can you show me something beautiful?" You know, and often I'll just go to the bank, and I don't know why, but the bank teller, she just looks so beautiful, or something shifts in my perception. The leaves on the tree all of a sudden look so green. Everything begins to shine and sparkle. And that experience is inside. It's an inside job, and it's coming from inside of me. I'm having a real experience with God on the inside.

As I start to have this experience, it becomes much more easy for me to go for more. I don't have to better get the willingness, better pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I have willingness because I'm having a real experience with this relationship with God. But like I said, that if I don't see what's going on down in the subconscious mind, I'm not going to really go for God. So viewing my thoughts on a daily and a moment-by-moment basis is something that's an ongoing process. I'm never going to completely master it. But I can tell you that the more I watch my thoughts, what happens is is that the ego backs down, because the ego and God can't live together in the present moment. The ego always has a story about the resentments of the past or the fear of the future. It's always speaking to me with a dialogue. And the God consciousness is infinite. It doesn't have the answers. It doesn't have a story. If the answers come, they're intuitively guided. They're through inspiration. They're through enthusiasm. I don't have to get up on my muscle or get ready for Freddy or have a dress rehearsal dialogue of how this is going to go down, what I'm going to say to you, what I'm not going to say, how I'm going to present myself, what I'm going to wear, what I'm going to look like when I show up. You know, that's all for me, alcoholic thinking, untreated alcoholism.

What the ego will never tell me is that the present moment is so beautiful and so glorious, and that is the most amazing place where God really expresses itself. The ego will say, "This is so stupid. Who is this lady? What is this crap?" The ego will do anything to take a detour, not to hear this information. I do believe that the ego is a living entity, along coupled with alcoholism and the self-talking mind, and it knows that there's a God. It knows that there's a mousetrap waiting to trap it, and it doesn't want to be trapped. It's a living thing inside of me. Self is alive and functioning inside of me, and it doesn't want to die. So it wears many hats and faces. And just when I think I've caught self and I've put the thing down, and I'm living in humility, and I'm in silence, it'll sneak in through the kitchen window or under a crack in the bathroom. It somehow gets in in another way, and it has a brand new hat and brand new shoes, and I look and I just go, "Where did you get that outfit?" It starts, it starts to speak to me about something we were never interested in this before. I never even heard this story. Now we have this kind of resentment or this view.

And so I want to keep in my program of recovery. I want to keep one step ahead of the ego, not one step behind the ego, because the ego of all the people in here is learning this information right along with the God consciousness that's dying to burst out and trump over the ego. It's very smart. It's very cunning. It's very powerful. It's very baffling. The other thing about Step Two is that God's never going to do anything for me that I won't allow this power to do. So in the Tiebout papers, we'll talk about compliance versus surrender, and we'll talk about what a real surrender is like, a real wholehearted surrender, not a half-hearted surrender. A surrender for me is, is when there's no thoughts even coming or going in my mind anymore. Like I'm so relaxed, that I'm so okay in the moment that I'm in, that we could be in the middle of a war, and I'm diagnosed with cancer all in the same day, and I'm just not tripping. And it's very difficult for a human being to produce that. The only way I really know how to get there is to continuously petition to God and to watch my mind and to not take the bait when a story comes along, when an energy comes along, when a muscle comes along, when a desire comes along, when a warped instinct comes along, just go, "No thanks, not today." Because once I'm in a surrendered state, and I take the bait of untreated alcoholism, it might take hours or days or even weeks for me to get back into a surrendered state. It's a very, very precious state of consciousness for me.

And I believe that it can be achieved by everybody. I actually even think that there's a gift in alcoholics to get there faster because than the average person because of the amount of pain that we've endured. It gets you there quicker. The more pain I see, the more people that surrender, because part of the surrender that has to happen is that I don't need to be attached to my life or my story anymore. And most people come in here so hopeless that when they hear the demonstration that you get to have a whole new life with no reference to the old, like me, they sign up. "Let me just get rid of it. Yeah, let's, let's just clean this up." You know, the point of every A.A. hitting bottom is imperative to this process. But once I've hit bottom, and I can't stand my life, and I'm crying, and I have pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization, the, the sunlight of the spirit can open up, and God can really come in and expel all the obsessions and raise my consciousness up.

So the pain is an incredible motivator, and it's actually a gift in the end for somebody like me, a great, great gift. And even with years of sobriety, when I get into pain again, I can just see it as like, "Wow, thank you. Thank you, whoever you are, for being such a biotch to me that I can't stand you." And that I see that I need to somehow be more right than you and more self-righteous and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I can see where I've taken it back, and I can really rightfully start to pray for those people, start to say, "Thank you for putting that man or that woman or that situation in my life, because it's waking me up again." You know, there's no way to rest on a laurel, and there's no way to sit with this thing if it's not continuous action. It just vanishes. It goes away. I can even be treated at night, and I can wake up in the morning, and I don't know what happened. It's on and crack.

And so as I look into Step Two deeper, and I come to believe that there's this power greater than me that can restore me to sanity, later on in the steps, where, where Bill Wilson talks about in the Fourth Step, he talks about those three primary instincts: my instinct for sex, security, and my desire to be somebody in society. And he also talks about those seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth. I want to have a relationship with those words. That's Alcoholics Anonymous lingo. So I want to really have an understanding of what this sex, security, and to be someone in society. And I know I touched on briefly about the sex instinct, you know, being turbocharged and out of control. But my, uh, desire for security can be, it can be my wallet, it can be my job, it can be that I think somebody at my office is doing something better than me, or I can feel threatened that they might be taking something from me. My sisters are very competitive. My security instinct can be threatened there. My wallet, my home. I can even look at my car, and my tires are bald, and it's like, "Oh my God," and I can just go into all this fear and panic. So I really want to have an understanding of how these instincts are warped, and they're turbocharged, and they attach themselves to the ego. And untreated alcoholism, untreated alcoholism, and those instincts, the self-talker, and the ego are all scrambled up together. It's one ball of mess that we can sit here and we can pick apart.

But in the end, what's more important is that I want to get very clear about what it feels like when I'm with self, and what it feels like when I'm connected to a power that's people's own personal feelings. I know some people that just feel very subdued and mellow. I can often get really enthusiastic and on fire. I mean, just like so in love with life and so joyful, and even noisy and silly and kooky and crazy. I just feel free inside. So it's people's own, everybody has their own relationship with God, like it says in the literature. It's a personal relationship, and it's something that I want to continue to build. And like, because God is infinite, it changes over the months and the years, and what it used to feel like before, it doesn't feel like now. As time goes on, it changes. My prayers even need to change. My mind function is changing. Uh, things are always changing. Nothing's ever staying the same. The circumstances on the outside, the instincts get triggered in a different way.

So my instinct for my desire to be somebody in society, you know, that type of instinct can be very subtle. You know, it's not like I want to run for president. It's just like, "Can't you hear me? Didn't you hear what I said? Did she just snub me and say hi to you? What is that?" You know, and then the next time I see that person, I don't say hi anymore, not realizing that they might have been having a really bad day. And so I operate from these places when these instincts are out of line. I hear it. The ego gets triggered. It says, "Danger. These people aren't treating us right." I start.

Telling myself the story, I get on my muscle. My body language changes, and the next thing you know, I've pushed you away. And so, I don't want to take the bait. I don't want to listen to what the disease is saying. I don't want to listen to what it's doing. I want to be present, and like I said, I want to continue to watch and watch and watch it.

As I go into Step Three, it is so much easier for me to turn my will and my life over to the care of this God, as I understood Him, because I understood in Step Two that the power's a power for my life, that He's the authority, that He's the father, that I'm the child, that there can only be one driver in the seat. And I learned to really back down. You know, throughout all of the literature, it talks about we must be rid of this self, for it kills us. Selfish and self-centeredness, we think, is the root of our trouble. God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. My Creator, I'm now willing that You should have all of me. You know, so it's all over the place, but I have to have, like I said again, a real relationship with what self is. And like I just said, it's the ego, it's the instincts, it's untreated alcoholism, it's a self-talking mind, it's that repetitive mind function, and it makes me nervous inside, and it makes me uneasy.

What happens through this process? The more I wake up to how my mind is functioning, the easier it is to get into a surrendered state and to stay in a surrendered state. I become more and more willing in Step Three to turn my will and my life over to the care of this God because I'm getting real results. I'm getting empirical evidence. I'm starting to feel the grace of a living, loving God in my life. I'm having a real relationship with the steps. This is not a race. I don't believe in just hurrying and hurrying through all the steps. It's a lifelong journey, and it's a lifelong process. And like I said, you know, it, it doesn't end. You know, what I'd like to do maybe is just even open up for a couple of questions if anybody has any questions at this point, and you could come up to the podium and ask. Is there a question in the room? Scared them. [Laughter] Wow, okay, okay. Would you like to come up and ask? Okay. Am I asking the group? Yeah, yeah. Just, I think because of the recording, you may want to ask from up here. Sorry about that. Chair. I'm Dave, I'm an alcoholic. My tag says I'm from Roseville, but I'm from Modesto. My question involves sponsorship. Um, I come from an area in the Central Valley where sponsorship is considered very important and it's very strong. The one problem I have is I was in a meeting the other night and this woman slammed her hand on the table and she goes, "My sponsees don't do a damn thing until they talk to me first." And, uh, I'm my sponsor, and the way I sponsor people is I take them through the steps. To me, it's a journey of self-discovery, and I think that we can work the steps and talk to other alcoholics, including our sponsors, and find out how we might do that and how our life might become more unmanageable or more manageable. I just don't feel like I need to manage my life by waiting to see what my sponsor has to say about that. And I run into a lot of people that disagree with me. Um, I run into people that when I voice that, they go, "That's right on, Dave. I think, man, I wish you could tell my sponsor that." Um, so the question is, what is the proper use of the term sponsor, and what does sponsorship mean, and how should it be, um, done? I, I, I don't think, um, it's being done right, and I try not to just get involved in that and try to stay back away from it. It's theory, it's how you feel your relationship is with your sponsor, but I feel that this, the sp, my, my sponsor runs my life is wrong. Okay, thank you so much. Yeah, it's a really great question. First of all, I'm not any authority in AA. I don't have all the answers, but I have an experience with that. And, um, I always look for somebody that has something that I want, first of all. And I have, I'm in my eighth year of sobriety, and I have had four sponsors in eight years, and I'm not at all ashamed to say that because I drank from this well, and then I got a tremendous amount of application and information, and then I went to this person, and then I went to that person. So I have definitely sponsor-hopped around a lot.

The women that I work with, and I work with men also, I don't ask them to call me every day. What I, you know, I have an interesting form. I mean, I do some of the stuff that's not really even in the literature. I want to see their disease. So if they want what I have, in the way I present the message, what I do is this: I say, "I want you to take a piece of scrap paper and a pencil, and I want you to write down for the next two days your most repetitive thoughts." And I want you to call me and tell me what, tell you what they are. Most people can't even get to that, you know, they can't even get that far. And so now, if they call and they say, you know what, "I hate my brother, he always thinks he's smarter than me, I owe him a bunch of money," blah, blah. Now we have something to discuss, and I start to show them what their untreated alcoholism is still, even after this. When I shine a flashlight on their mind, they still, they might run and scatter like cockroaches. So for me, I'm going this way. You guys want to come this way? Let's go. If you don't, that's okay. You know, I'm, I'm not here to make anybody right or wrong. Whatever works for you. I've definitely seen that real tight-knit thing where where alpha people will find submissive males and females, and for some people, that works really, really well. There are some people out in the world that have been so neglected by their moms and their dads, they've grown up in foster care, they can't even make a decision, and they need an alpha female or an alpha male. It's a perfect fit for them. And there are other people, "Don't you put an alpha female in my face. Oh, no. You know, I gotta hear a suggestion. I can't have somebody dictating to me." The minute somebody starts to point their finger at me, I am so far in the other direction. So for me, delivery is very important. But I've seen people that love that, you know, "Call me every day or you're out of here," you know. And I've seen other people that have a completely different relation. In the end, is can I hear the message? Can I hear the message? And if the sponsor and the sponsee aren't growing, then all bets are off. If the sponsee is not growing, then the sponsor isn't growing as a sponsor. I'm not feeding you, you're not raising up. Maybe you should go somewhere else. And it's real important that I even learn how to let go of these people, that they're not mine. I actually feel like I'm very, very good at that. I've had so many people come in and out of my life. I've had very few people get to Step Nine and Step Twelve. That's a big feat for any sponsor out there. I'm not ashamed to say that up here. Most people don't get to Four and Five and Six and Seven. And sometimes I get disappointed, but most of the time I try to let go. You know, if that woman is drill sergeanting it and it's working for her and some of her people, great. You know, the chances are very big that this person may wind up giving some really, really bad information one of these days. If you can't make a move without the sponsor, and somebody might really get hurt. But, you know what? Other people's lives may be really safe too. I'll give you one, um, example. When I first got sober, my mom is very cruel and abusive, and my sponsor at that time said, "You can't go to Thanksgiving, and you can't go to Christmas because you're too sick and you're too twisted, and you're just going to get thrown over the edge." And I thought, "Oh my God." And he said, "I'm not kidding. You're not going." And now I see that was the greatest thing he could have ever told me. And for two years, I didn't go. But what that did was, I pulled back the reins, and now all of a sudden, it wasn't like, you know, my mom's like, "Well, maybe we'll invite you, maybe we won't." Then all of a sudden she's asking, "Are you coming? Could you come? Would you come?" Like it switched, and it turned the tables, and I could have never seen the demonstration and the application of somebody putting the screws so hard on me. So, you know, I, I don't know. It's so different for everybody. It's a living program with living application and living relationships. But thanks for the question, Dave. Does anybody else? Right here. Greg. Yeah. Hi. Thank you very much. I'm Greg, an alcoholic. Yeah. You, passionate, fascinated me. Oh, and a couple of things here. One was, uh, in dealing with the ego, you know, you, you talk about, and Bill talked about it too, with with these massive obsessions, you know, for everything from, uh, you know, sex to smoking to alcohol to overeating to, you know, you name it, you know, all these, all these things that we talk about, and they're coming at us continuously at this rate that is, whatever, whatever the rate is, we don't really know, I don't think, whatever it is. And, and I know we talked, Bill and I talked earlier today about the, the, the devilments, and I was just wondering, you know, without being a total OCD person, how do you put some order into your handling of that, management of this crazy ego that's coming at you 24/7? Like you said, you get up three in the morning, go to the bathroom, and you've got 40 thoughts before you finish, you know, wiping yourself, you know, I mean, and that's what I'm into, you know, I mean, it, stuff is, it, it comes that fast, right? You know, but at some point, I keep thinking that someone's got a plan that slows that down and gets it under control. And so you sound like that might fit, you know. For me, I believe that there are two paths with this to the spiritual life. One of them is to bring our instincts into alignment with God's will, and the other path is to transcend. And for me, this is a bit of an outrageous statement, but I do believe that God has called me to transcend earthly desires, and I really don't want anything anymore. And I don't want a husband, and I don't want shiny things. And so when I feel desire, I'm just like, "Whoa, back down. We don't need that. We don't need those shoes. We don't need that house. We don't need that recognition. We don't need anything." That's a very easy way for me. And when I back down, I can get dialed into humility really quickly because I've built a relationship with God where I know that God is the author for my life, and that's all I really desire. And I want my relationship with God more than I want anything out there in the third-dimensional world. I don't believe there's anything left in the third-dimensional world that's going to treat my alcoholism. You can't love me enough. There aren't boobs big enough. There isn't a bathroom scale skinny enough. There's not a car grand enough. There's not a bank account fat enough. There's not enough. Now, some people want to bring their own, their instincts into alignment. Some people really want a husband and a wife and a house and a garden, and there's nothing wrong with that. But what is this fine line between need and greed? When does it far exceed its intended purpose? How many cars do I need? How much recognition do I need? When is it so insatiable that I'm choking on my own instincts? That's something that you can work out with a sponsor through inventory, that you can get self-honest about. And once you see, "I'm crossing over an invisible line here, it's just way too much out of control." In this, I don't need to go back and buy that fourth pair of shoes in a different color. I can get on my knees and I can say, "Power, You've got to help me. It's three in the morning, and I just got up to pee, and I'm thinking about shoes. Please be with me. Help me not want this. Help me not need this. Quiet my mind and quiet my heart." And it's a spiritual solution. Whatever it is, I'm always offering it to the power. I'm giving it to the power. You know, sometimes what I do in my mind, I have a little mental prayer that I do. I go out into the desert in my mind, and I'm naked. I have nothing left. I don't own one single thing. And I pile everything on this altar, and I just say, "It's Yours. Take my daughter, take my car." When I've really taken it back, you know, when I've taken it back, and everything's bothering me again, it's like, "Oh my God, I got to get rid of my life again. I got to clean everything off my plate." And this can even be daily. Take my boss, take my bank account, take my charge card, just take all my stuff, put all my jewelry, everything on there. And I just stand there in my meditation, and I'm like, "Okay, You can have it all. Please just keep me safe and help me feel okay in the moment that I'm in." I don't want this stuff. I don't want to hold on to this stuff. I want to just be okay. I want to be free from the bondage of self. And my sincerity in that prayer really helps to maneuver me into the fourth dimension and stay there. But again, it's a living application with this relationship with the power in Step Two and through all the other steps. But thanks for the question right there. I'm Joan, I'm an alcoholic. And Astrid, I'd like to maybe ask what you do on a moment-to-moment basis. I've heard things like turn my watch upside down, put a rubber band on my wrist. I, uh, these are things that, you know, my normal day, I'm, I'm like probably you and others. I'm, I'm thinking a few hours ahead, you know, I've got a sort of a day planner, and it's either I'm either tracking or I'm not tracking. And when I'm not tracking, I'm figuring out what my next move is. Um, I just the other day, I, I had a number of errands to run, and it seems, I don't know about you guys, but it seems like some days I hit all the lights just right, you know, they're, they're turning green, they're turning green, and there's parking spots. And then other days, they're turning red, and there's no parking. And so the one thing I did the other day was as I came to a red light, I thought, "Okay, got a moment of meditation." You know, and I just used, and it happened to be one of those days when there was a lot of red lights, so I just kept connecting. I just said, "Okay, if You want me to sit here for a moment, I'll sit here for a moment. If You want me to sit here for a moment, I'll sit here." And that's, you know, that day I actually had a good day running late. So I don't know, maybe you have some other thoughts on that thing. So the question is, how do I remember to practice the moment-by-moment meditation with the Power? You know, for me, first of all, everybody's mind is a little bit different. Alcoholism is a self-talking, repetitive mind function, but it has a different story. So your story and your dialogue because your history is different, is going to be different than mine. My story is so painful that for me, when I go into the disease or when I'm with self, I'm in pain. I'm really disturbed, and I'm hateful. So I'm not just like, la la, daydreaming about going skiing and then I'm gonna do this. It's like, you know, I'm like, I'm a mess, you know? And so it's very easy for me to go, "Oh my God, I've pulled the entire extension cord out. I am not plugged into the Power. Power, can You be with me?" I have done all those things like putting my watch upside down, little post-it notes, you know, remember to talk to God. But for the most part, it became a working part of my life because it's so painful for me to be with self. And over the months, and then over the years, it's just very natural. Like I'll just notice that I'll get on the 405, and there's a ton of traffic, and out of my mouth are, "Oh my God, be with me," instead of, "Effing," you know, like my first response now is like, "Power, I'm going to need some help here. What's wrong with the freeway? I need to be there in 25 minutes." So the further I go into this relationship with God, and the more I continue to remain in application, the easier it is to remember. Interestingly enough, I have sponsored several people that are not alcoholics. And one of them is a monk. And, you know, monks really aren't connected to God all the time. They have a self-talking mind, but their self-talking mind isn't full of pain and harms and all of this stuff. So, you know, he'll just be thinking and daydreaming and strategizing, and he's very attracted to what I have because I have this deep moment-by-moment practice with God. And it's interesting because the one thing that I always discuss with him is that my mind hurts so much that I have a reference point. His doesn't hurt. He had a great life. He lives a great monastic life. His parents loved him. He was raised in the church. And so he just sort of diddly-daydreams around and doesn't go to God nearly as much as somebody that has so much pain that it's the touchstone to all spiritual progress. So, you know, I pray for people to have that gift of desperation. You know, I mean, those, those principles are real truths for me, and for so many others. But turning your wristwatch upside down, having a timer that goes off on your cell phone every 10 minutes, all of those are good things. And in the end, what are my intentions and what are my motives? My inside life has to become so important to me that I'm willing to go to any lengths to be connected to the Power in the moment that I'm in. Anyway, thanks for your question. Is there anybody else? I'm really grateful to be here. There's a lot of gratitude in my heart. I've never done a weekend like this before, and I did a lot of reading and a lot of preparation, and I blew my God dust to Sacramento way before my physical body arrived here. I have no idea what we're in for this weekend, but I know somehow there's certain people in this room I'm already somehow spiritually connected to, like I know that I know that because my God tells me that. I found my God in Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't go to a church. I found it here. I found it in the steps. I've had a real living experience with the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I continue to have that today. I'm always going for more, you know, and I'm not perfect. I'm not a saint. I'm just willing to grow along spiritual lines. It says in the literature that I claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. I claim it. I get to claim it. I'm claiming it. I've had a real experience and I've had spiritual progress. I've progressed along this road of happy destiny. It's a real thing. AA is so beautiful. We're so lucky. We're so, so lucky to have a physical allergy and a mental obsession because we get to go from that all the way to the highest height in one lifetime. It's a miraculous thing. And thanks so much for having me here, and I look forward to meeting with you all tomorrow. Thanks. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Supercast is ad-free, and we'd like your help in order to keep it that way. So if you'd like to help us be self-supporting by pledging a dollar to a month, visit sobercast.com and look for the donate links. Thank you very much.