Jerry J. from Lake Withney, TX doing the steps at the Space Coast Roundup 2005 in Melbourne Beach, FL

But I can tell you there's not any planets in the world I can't go sit down next to anybody today. I'm comfortable in my skin, and I'm comfortable in my environment. And that's that's been as big a blessing to me as almost anything I can think of in Alcoholics Anonymous. We need to find new ways to have balanced relationships. We don't wanna be dominant or submissive.

We want to be mutually sharing and respectful of one another. We want it to be free and easy. I took a lot of prisoners. People that work for me were my prisoners. They had to get along with me.

And so I had I had some people that I had mistreated because I treated them badly. We used to have telephone operators. Telephone operators heard a lot from me when they gave me the wrong number or well, too long getting it done, and I don't even know who they are. But I know I gave them some bad days. Sales clerks sales clerks are people that I like to discuss the policy of the store with.

They didn't have a damn thing to do with the policy of the store. They're working just they're trying to make a living, and I'm standing there telling them now this is a hell of a way to run an organization. Let me tell you. Let me tell you how we ought to do this by now, and it always was gonna go my way. We're blind to our own faults, and we we see others.

We judge ourselves by our own motives. We judge other people by their by their actions. You did that. Therefore, I know you had bad motive for it. You didn't speak to me.

You must be mad at me, but I didn't speak to you because I didn't see you. Gosh. I I wanna be good to everybody. I wanna be well liked. You know?

So you got this got this going on. So you make this list. You go back to your life, and you look for the people you have harmed. What kind of harm? Any kind.

Economic, spiritual, emotional, just any kind of harm that you can feel, they can feel. And you make this list, and you become willing to make amends to them all. It sounds like a major when you've lived the kind of riotous like the life we lived, it sounds like a major job. You're really not too hard. Most of the time, we don't even you know, I'm I've tried to make amends to people who didn't even know I thought they were offended.

You know? You know? Why should I I'm kind of embarrassed when that happens because you certainly wouldn't wanna tell anybody you did something wrong when you they don't know it. But that's not the deal. We're trying to clean our side of the street.

When you come down, call it synonymous, and you have bad relationships, you either owe those people in the men, or forgiveness, or both. That's what the deal is. You need to discuss these with things with your sponsors. There's you have not most of us don't have the objectivity to know what to do in these situations. We we may make the situation work worse if we don't discuss them and and play these things out among with our sponsors where it's safe.

We, amends more than saying I'm sorry. An amend is to right a wrong, to correct a wrong. And you really can't push off on your sponsor or anyone else what that is. You're trying to free yourself, so you need to do what you think is right. But you're you've gotta be very careful because you don't wanna harm anybody else.

We have no right to get well at anybody else's expense. So we have to deal with these these relationships in a very careful manner. The 9th step says that this step also talks about willingness. Some people you can't make amends to. There's some things you can't do.

But if you become willing to make the amend from a spiritual standpoint, it will heal you. 9 steps is we made direct amends to such people whenever possible except when to do so would injure them or others. You're not there to press impress anybody when you go to see them. You're not there to please them or to seek their sympathy. I don't think you're even there to obtain their forgiveness.

I think that's sort of their business whether they wanna forgive you or not or maybe it's God's business. I don't know. There's a great deal of similarity between forgiveness and and surrender. It seems to me, and both of those, I think, are gifts from a power greater than myself. So you know what you're gonna try to do is clean up your side of the street.

You're trying to stand stand tall. You know, know, this is something a lot of people never do. This is a this is a stand up kind of activity where you can be you can have some pride in doing the right thing and feeling good about yourself for having tried to do the right thing whether you please anybody else or not. Let me tell you about a few of mine. I had a son.

I have a son. And he was about 16 years old when I got sober. God, he was had a good life. He was on the football team, the basketball team, and the baseball team, and he was president of the student body, and he had girls running after him. And it's his was a good life.

He was popular. My life was in the it was not very good. And I stayed close to my son because I liked I was kinda living my life through him. I helped him all I could. I went to football practices.

I talked to coaches. I critiqued umpires on a fairly regular basis. I was the guy at the baseball diamond who was hanging on the screen wire behind the catcher, talking to the man in the blue suit about his mother and father, you know, and trying to get him to call strikes instead of balls while my son was pitching. Doesn't work very good. I was a pain in the you know what.

I was I'm the only fan I've ever known to get a technical foul on the basketball game. They stopped the game and gave the other team a free throw because of what I said about the umpire. And I told the truth about that guy. I was the guy who picked his son up after practice and drove him all the way home, giving him helpful hints on how he could improve for the next day. Or same thing through with the ball games.

You know? And I was wrapped up totally in him. And I was sitting in a meeting 1 night, and some little lady said, you have to love your children and give the hold them in an open hand so they can go if they need to go and come if they need to come. You need to give them roots, and then you get need to give them wings. And I thought she was talking to me, and she was.

I thought about that for a day or 2, and I went home and saw my son. And I said, Mike, I've been sitting on top of your life, and I'm gonna give you some room. I'm gonna give you some slack. I'm not going any more football practices. I'm not ever gonna talk to another umpire.

I'm not ever gonna tell the coaches what plays they ought to run or how they ought to play you or anybody else on the football team. I'm gonna go to your games. I'm gonna enjoy them. I'm gonna support you every way I can, but that's all I'm gonna do. Mike told me later, he said, I felt like you were rejecting me.

But in a very short period of time, he recognized that he had been given a great deal of freedom, and he began to enjoy that. Yeah. I found out recently that my son I thought I'd made amends to this the best I can, but my son's son still has some carryover feelings about those days when I was trying to run his life. I'm sorry about that. And I'm gonna do all I can to straighten that out.

But you never know how long these amends will take or what they will what they will require of you. But I know that I have some more work to do there. On the other hand, my daughter, who was about 4 years younger, I didn't really have much time for her. I was busy. I was practicing law and running football and doing all this kind of stuff.

You know? And she didn't she had a bunch of little girls around her all the time, and I never was able to I never have understood little girls. Now when she let me ride on the she'd ride my shoulders and play horsey and that kind of stuff, I did fine. I was had no problem at all. But then she got a little older and they began to hang around together and they giggled a lot.

And they whispered all the time. They're whispering and giggling, and they would never tell me what they're she she really kinda got along fine without me. She was made her own life and was moving right ahead. And so when I got around making amends, I recognized I probably owed her some too. So I I said to my Billy one night, my wife, I said, I can't seem to get anything going with Karen.

I'm trying to get a friendship going with her, trying to get something happening, and I can't seem to get it going. And I said, I don't know what to do. She said, why don't you take her to dinner? I said, take her to dinner? She said, yeah.

I said, would she go? She said, I don't know. Ask her. So I went in. I said, Karen, would you go to dinner with me?

She said, why? I said, well, because I'd like to I'd like to spend some time with you. I'd like to know what you're doing in your life. Where would we go? Anywhere you wanna go.

When? Whenever you will go. Okay. So we started going to dinner, and we go to dinner once a week. Now after about a month or 6 weeks of this, I quit asking because I didn't wanna do the same thing I was doing with my son.

I didn't wanna force myself on him on her. 1st week, nothing happened. 2nd week, I don't remember whether it was the 2nd or 3rd week, she came in and said, daddy, aren't we gonna go to dinner anymore? And I said, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Never have. She brings her kids to me. She puts them on my lap. She wants them to know me. She brought them to an e a talk that I was given recently, the whole family.

Daughter came first. Her 16 year or 14 year old daughter came first, and she liked it. So she brought her 2 boys, and they liked it. Youngest one's 5. He's calls me pop pop.

After the talk, he said, pop pop, I'm not gonna drink in that alcohol. Gets you in trouble. So you do the opposite. You stop hurting people. That's that's first.

And then you try to restore that which you've taken away or that which you've damaged. And people respond to that. People respond to that. Not always. Some people have have resentments of their own.

They've got a spiritual sickness. You know, our our 4th step talks about those folks who who are spiritually ill, and we have to pray for them. And you pray for them and you get forgiveness. Some people you don't even know that you have. You don't know whether you've created a you really don't know whether you owe them an amen or not.

There was one guy. He was a he was a man I went to work for. He was one of the best lawyers in Dallas. He's president of the State Bar of Texas. He'd been president of the Dallas Bar Association.

He was enormously well regarded and respected. Clients loved him. And, I got to go to work for him. I carried his briefcase. I'd briefed his cases.

I prepared his bills. I wrote his letters for him. I did everything. He told me many times that he didn't think he could practice law without me. And then one day, he called me in his office and said, Jerry, I'm leaving this law firm.

Several of us who have been practicing here are forming a new law firm. Come on, Mars. Ask me, will I go? He didn't ask me to go, and I was offended. As I looked at it, I really didn't wanna go.

I didn't like a couple of people that he was going with. But, by God, I deserve to be asked. So All the clients that we were working on cases together hired me To continue to work with him after he left. It was a miserable year or 2 because I couldn't see his I couldn't see his correspondence. I didn't know what people were writing him letters for.

Didn't know what what he was building or not. I I was just scratching around on the outside, and finally, we got all that laid to rest. And I, got to this part of the program. His name did not make the list. I did not owe him an amend.

And then about a year and a half after I finished my first round of amend, I was in Lubbock, Texas where we had been one time. And I was going into a restaurant, the Hickory Steakhouse. And I thought, you know, the last time I was here, I was this with this other lawyer. And then I remembered the whole thing. We'd been out there trying a lawsuit.

At the end of the day, the lawyers on the other side said, come down to the bar and have a drink. Let's talk about settlement. We went down and had a bunch of drinks. Didn't talk about settlement at all. And then a remarkable thing happened.

A a lady came out from the back of the room. She was the first go go dancer I had ever seen. She had an interesting costume. What what there was of it? And, she she danced and moved around under black lights, and it was pretty exciting type of deal.

As she took certain steps, I had an awakening. Miracle of miracles when the when the dance was over, she came over to our table and sat down. She knew one of the guys there. And then they got the gear and they were pretty high, and I was just kinda watching this thing going on. She said turned around and mentioned, would you like to dance?

And I was ready. So we danced a little while. She she knew some very interesting jokes. Not jokes she would tell in polite company, but she told lots of jokes, and she had a rather loud voice. And as we danced, she said she was hungry.

And I said, well, I'll tell you what. I'll get my partner here, and we'll go get something to eat. And he we also had our client's representative who was one of the major players in Dallas, owned an interest in the Dallas Cowboys at that time. And, so I took the 2 of them and the go go dancer to this restaurant for dinner. She continued to tell jokes, and I remembered all that as I walked in that night.

And I thought, you know, you know, that might have been a little embarrassing to the man who was a president of the state of law of Texas at that particular time. He may not have been real comfortable in that relationship. He may have even thought I drank a little too much on that occasion, and then it came back like a flood. I would no more have asked me to go with go with me to form a new law firm. I wouldn't ask a young lawyer that would drink like I did.

Why would you want why would you wanna start a new business with a with a problem like that? So I knew I ordered them in. I went to him, and he didn't wanna hear it. He didn't wanna hear it. And I said, you know, I just gotta tell you this thing.

And he said, you know, it's it's o it's okay. It's okay. You made partner in the law firm I left. You better have a good career. I'm happy.

You're happy. There you go. But I had carried that around, and I've said some pretty caustic things about him in the interim. And I needed to straighten that up. But I'll tell you this, he's a good lawyer, and I've told lots and lots of people that he's a good lawyer.

And if they need a good lawyer, they could not go wrong if they hired him. That's about as much as I could do, and it's been enough to free me from all those ill and bad feelings and to allow me to talk there. And to to set your mind at ease, the lady went home after dinner. She got her free meal, and that's all she was really looking for. The, the amend step, you know, there's a lot of people that you like I told you about the telephone operator.

There are a lot of people that you that you've offended. You you can't identify who they are. There are people who have died that you can't make your your amends. It's really important to make these amends as soon as you and your sponsor believe that the time is right, because you don't wanna have to. You don't wanna have to try to clean up after they're gone.

The first amendment I ever made was to my mother and father. They didn't raise a kid to act like I was acting, to drink like I was drinking. And they both were courageous enough to tell me from time to time that I was ruining myself and ruining my family with the way I was drinking. And I just had to tell them at the time that, you know, I'm just a a big boy now, and I'm gonna have to live my life the way I'm gonna have to live it. And they had a sad look on their face and went went home.

And when I got in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I've been there about a month. I mailed them a copy of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. They live about 500 miles away. And I said, I've thought it over, and this is the way I'm gonna try to live the rest of my life. And that was good enough for them.

They thought Alcoholics Anonymous is the best thing since sliced bread. My god. My dad, every time they passed, he'd go to AA meetings with me. And every time they passed, they had he'd go for that wallet. And I'd say, wait a minute.

Wait a minute. We're self supporting through our own contributions. They say, damn it, Jerry. It ain't right. Man, I ought to be able to give money to something like this place.

And it didn't. And it didn't. I write my relationship was right with both of them. They they supported me always. And when I got through with my men's and and living a decent life, they flowered in that relationship.

My dad my dad could never say I love you. He just couldn't say it. Mom died first, and he got in a lot of trouble with depression and one thing or another after she died. And I went up to West Texas and got him and brought him back to Dallas. And he wouldn't live with us.

He wanted to have an apartment of his own, and he went to this apartment. And and I'd go by there and see him every day or so. And, he gave me all of his money. Said, I don't wanna keep up with it anymore. You just give me what I need.

And, I, got a call one morning, 6 o'clock in the morning. He said, are you up yet? I said, yes, sir. I'm up. He said, I need you to come get me.

And I said, what's wrong? He said, I don't know. I have a lot of pain in my chest. So I said, I'll be right over there. And I got in the car and went right over there.

And I said, when did this start? And he said, oh, about 3:30 or 4 o'clock is 1. So why in the world didn't you call me? He said, hell, you never did like to get up early. And I said, well, let's get you to the hospital.

So I got him to hospital. He had a ruptured aorta, the big vessel coming out of the heart. He lasted about a day. Just before he died, he, he, I've been in I've been talking to doctors. One doctor wanted to crack his chest open and go in and try to repair it.

And I said, well, this old boy's been making these decisions for a long time. I'm gonna he's gonna be involved in this one. So I went in, told him what the doctor said. One doctor said it was one of my guys that I sponsored was a doctor, and he said, he said, I think it's an idiocy to try to operate on him and this condition. And, the other doctor said it was a heroic surgery, but he didn't think that we should ought be try to be heroic here.

And this one doctor wanted to do it. And, so I told dad the whole story, and he said, hell, I'm not gonna do that. He said, said, I won't make it I won't make it to the operating table. But he said, I'm not sure how long I'm gonna live. How long am I gonna live?

I said, well, dad, I I don't have any idea how long you're gonna live. You may hell, you might even get well, but they don't think you are. He said, really? And he said, stuck out his head. So, well, Jerry's been pretty good.

Been pretty good, and he died. That was good enough. That was good enough. It's a wonderful freeing step. The promises come here.

Before you're halfway through, the promises come to you. You'll know no freedom, no new happiness. You'll not watch to shut the door on the past, and you'll see how your your experiences can benefit others. Can you imagine a greater miracle than your worst assets in your life, the worst liabilities you had, the moment you accept them become your your greatest assets. You can use them all your life to help people, add fulfillment to your life.

All of the promises come to you. Not all at once, not every day, but they're there. And that's the program, Baucholix Anonymous. We'll do the rest of the steps, in about 30 minutes. Are we ready to go?

Yeah. Y'all just about had a about a full load of me, I think. So I I need to get through before everybody leaves. Step 10. Step 10 in our program.

As we've cleaned up our relationships with others, we, we reach a point in the program where some people call the last three steps, maintenance steps. I happen to believe that they're growth steps. I think this is the place where we move forward and grow and and understanding in-depth as we work with other people and, and usefulness as we try to be a force for good in our community. The 10th steps as we continue to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, we promptly admitted it. Well, I, when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, there was a lot of old timers around who would say that, you only do one fourth step.

Only do one fourth step. And then you do 10th step. I can't tell the difference between the 2 except perhaps in the area of how frequently you do them because we're referred right back in the stent stent step. We're referred right back to the other 9. The book, to quote it, says, we have entered the world of the of the spirit.

Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness. We have ceased fighting anything or anyone, even alcohol. For by this time, sanity will have returned. That's where I got the idea that step 2 is talking about the first drink. We will see that our attitude toward liquor has been given to us without any thought or effort on our part.

It just happens. Just comes. That is the miracle of it. We're not fighting it, neither are we avoiding it. That's what the steps do.

I told you I had a bad temper. I was in Colorado about 5 years sober, and I was in a tackle shop buying some flies. I was fly fishing. I looked across the room, and there was a friend of mine that I'd been on a church board with. And he was a veterinarian and taking care of my dogs and knew him well.

Been deer hunting with him. And I saw him. I said, hi, Bill. And he looked at me kinda funny. And he started walking towards me.

And he said, are are are you Jerry Jones? I said, yes. I'm Jerry Jones. He said, what happened to you? I said, well, I got a few more nicks and a couple of bangs, but, you know, I'm just aging and moving along.

And he said, oh, no. No. He said, you're not angry anymore. What happened? I said, well, I you know, I've just had to change some of the ways of my life a little bit.

He said, come on. He said, I wanna go out and sit down on the curb here and talk for a minute. Tell me what happened. People stopped me in the 1st year of my sobriety as I begin to let go of some of my old ideas and say, we don't know what you're doing. But whatever it is, please keep doing it.

The steps change us just that way. They change the way we think, the way we approach life. We're moved into a re a a a a a life of reality. We're not living on chemicals. We're not living on anything.

We're living on just life just life. So we we have to continue to to practice this and we continue to work on it. When I first came to Alcoholics Anonymous, the serenity prayer was very important to me. I, I said I didn't know there was a third part of the serenity prayer for a long time. I prayed a lot for serenity for the things I couldn't change, which I couldn't change.

I was an alcoholic. I couldn't change. I wanted to drink. Couldn't change. Couldn't change.

Couldn't change. And the courage to change the things I can't. Found out I could change some things could change some things. But it took me a while to recognize that there's the 3 part. This is a whole ball of wax here.

First of all, you're asked to deal with whatever problem's in front of you. Then you say, if I can't do anything about this thing, give me the serenity to accept it. If I can, give me the courage to do it, and give me the wisdom to know whether I could change it or whether I can't. And that last part is where we really grow a lot in maturity to find out to gain wisdom. You can't transfer wisdom.

We've been on this globe for no telling how many generations of people, and there've been some very wise men. They write books. They they record things today, all sorts of things, but you can't transfer that from one person to the other. Each generation, each person in each generation has to to grow his own his or her own wisdom. And this is where we where we grow our own wisdom.

We continue to take inventory looking for the same things, exactly the same things we look for back in step 4. Self centeredness. We're looking for resentments. We're looking for, fear. We're looking for problems with our relationships, both sexual and otherwise.

The same questions apply to your to your, nonsexual relations as apply to your sexual relations in your dealings with people. So you need to keep looking at those things. You grow. You try to establish sane and sober ideas. And when you're when you fall off the off the wagon and make and miss it, you go back and straighten it out and try to try to correct it and move forward.

James Allen in his book on inner peace says, wisdom is acquired by our own exertions. He who is prepared to be honest with himself, to measure the depth of his ignorance, to come face to face with his errors, to recognize and acknowledge his faults, and at once set about the task of regeneration, we'll find the way of wisdom. That's what we're doing here in this step. The wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self searching becomes a regular habit, until he's able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he has patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong. That's what I think we're trying to do here in the 10th step.

You always start out from where you are. I learned that in the navigation. I was an assistant navigator in the Navy. You don't just go to Japan. You gotta start out from somewhere to go to Japan.

So first, you start out here, then you start saying which way to guide the boat. But there's wind and waves and human imperfection in guiding the boat. And first thing you know, you can get way out in the weeds, and you have to correct it. And it's just that way with here. I I worry a lot about alanones.

They don't have a mascot. And I know one of my clients out in the old East Texas guy told me about Ladino. Ladino, I understand, means outlaw in the Spanish language or Mexican language. And he said that on the ranches in Mexico, they would take the young cattle or steers out in the in the warmer weather and leave them out there for the summer. And then when the weather would begin to get cold and worse in the winter, they would round them up and bring them in.

But there were always some steers who were a little rambunctious, a little stubborn, a little hard to get along with, and they couldn't get them to come in. And they they they that wasn't such a big deal because they had a lot of cattle, but they'd leave them out there. And the next year when they came around, the herd instinct would kick in with these steers, and they'd start rounding up the newcomers. And next, they wouldn't want any of them to go back in either. And the the ranchers used to shoot these old Ladinos because they were trouble.

Then some smart ranger one day decided that he would, he would take a string of these little burrows that they have down in Mexico out with him, and they'd rope these wild steers and halter them to one of the little burrows. In the beginning, the big steer would just take the little burrow wherever the big steer wanted to go. But sooner or later, he'd wanna eat or drink or do something or stop. And when he did, the little bureau would start for the home corral. And it would take him about 2 weeks to lead the big steer docilely into the home corral.

This persistent pressure on him finally gets him there. And I heard that story, and I thought, you know, I I was kinda out there in the wild. And my wife my wife came and got into Al Anon, and she led me into the home corral. And I may just suggest that the jackass may be the symbol for Al Anon. We we could make little little pins.

You know? And little stores like this would sell them or get make them available to the Al Anon so they'd know who it was gonna be a wonderful idea. Billy wasn't quite as, excited about it as I was, and I had to think about it a little more. And, you know, I realized it. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. I've been out in the weeds several times since I've been sober. She didn't bring me back in. Something did. Something brought me back.

Once I'd been in the home corral and knew where I was and recognized a little later on that I was not comfortable where I was, I knew that I was off the beam, as we say in AA, and something led me back. So maybe the little bureau was not an Al Anon all the time. Maybe it was a loving god. He was turning me back to where I needed to go. The interesting thing the really interesting thing is this, no far no matter how far out in the weeds you get, the moment you turn and start toward the home corral, your life improves immeasurably.

Ain't that remarkable? You don't have to get back on track for it to work. You just gotta start back in the right direction. And the 10th step of Alcoholics Anonymous is where we pay attention to what we're thinking about, pay attention to our actions, and see this the program work in our life. And when we're wrong, promptly admit it.

Do you ever do that? That is a remarkable phenomenon. I have a little story that is just just blew me away. I told you about how one lane of traffic was mine. I used to drive a big Mercedes, and I would, I could get on the freeway pretty much anytime I wanted to.

It accelerated rapidly, and I would just blow onto that and take my lane and didn't worry a hell of a lot about what the other people on the freeway were doing. One morning, I saw a little Volkswagen come along, and I realized they didn't have any precept you know, no real acceleration. So I just stomped on it and popped right in front of this little Volkswagen, I don't know, Just to check things out. I looked in the rear vision mirror after I got on the freeway, and the little lady driving the car was giving me hand signals. And her mouth was moving.

And I it was kinda cute. You know? So the devil rides with me in a car part of the time. She decided she would whip over in the other lane, and I whipped over too. Now she was giving me hand signals with both hands, and her mouth was really going.

And I forgot about her because I had I had serious problems, Not, you know, like most people, but my problems were pressing and and serious. And I needed to think about them and worry about them. And so I'm driving on worrying about my problems, and I get all the way downtown to my exit. And I don't know how in the hell she did it, but she got ahead of me some way because I pulled out of out of my lane and got into another lane, and she happened to be she pulled right in behind me. And I got off on the exit, and she followed me off the exit.

I went down the corner and turned right. She turned right. Boxed her left. I turned left. She turned left.

Turned right one more time. She turned right one more time right behind me. And I recognize I've got a problem here. So I just pulled over to the curb and stopped. She pulled right in behind me and stopped, and I got up.

And I walked back to her and said, can I help you? She said, you harassed me on Central Expressway. She was kinda cute, and I thought about, you know, playing a little bit. But something kicked in, and I said, you're right. You're right.

I did that. I was wrong to do that, and I will do my best to be a more courteous driver in the future. She said, oh, thank you. She took off. That was all of it.

Completely disarmed the thing. She had been angry enough at me to follow me off of the expressway, and it probably wasn't her her exit to just tell me that what I had done. And I admired her courage, and just saying that I was wrong made a lot of difference. It almost cuts out all the debate. When you say to somebody, I was wrong, they say, you damn sure were.

That's right. I was wrong. Well, you were wrong. Yes. I was wrong.

Where are we gonna go from here? I was wrong. And try to make amends for the wrong that you've done. Try to straighten it up right then before it has a time to fester and grow and create a bigger problem. It's a wonderful, wonderful tool.

I don't use it often enough, but it really works when I do. The, 10th and the 11th step, in my experience, is or are related to one another. I was reading the 12 and 12 one day, and there's this paragraph in the 12 and 12. There is a direct linkage among self examination, step 10, meditation, and prayer, step 11. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit.

But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result may be an unshakable foundation for life. Now and then, we may be granted a glimpse of what of that ultimate reality, which is God's kingdom. And we will be comforted and assured that our destiny and that realm will be secure for so long as we try, however falteringly, to find and do the will of our creator. What that says to me is if I this life, if I get one point for step 10, and then I do step 11, meditation, prayer, 3. If I combine those 3 together, I get a whole handful.

I get a lot bigger life. So that dictated some of what I ultimately try to do in my morning meditation and in my prayer. When I got to step 11, which says sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will and the power to carry that out, I didn't know anything about meditation. You may have known about meditation, but I there was a little place in the bulletin in my church where they played real sad organ music, and it was called meditation. That's where we talked about what the cowboys were gonna do that day on the football field.

I, right over my head, I just didn't focus on it at all. And I began to do a little examination about meditation. It kind of was a spooky sounding thing. I was not going to try it until I fully understood it because, you know, you might levitate or something and couldn't get back down. So I began to buy books on meditation, and I had all kinds of books.

I read books that were way out there. People writing about things they did not know and expecting the others to understand them. And, anyway, one day, we have a debate in my family about this, whether I bought the book or whether Billy bought the book. But one of us bought a little tiny little book in the in the, checkout line at the at the drug at the grocery store. It's called How to Meditate.

I read How to Meditate. It was exactly what I needed. And if you haven't tried it, I wanna challenge you to try something here. Meditation, it said, is the occupying of your conscious mind with something, anything. Sex is not a good thing, but a neutral something is a good thing.

I, it gave several different kinds of examples how you could say a mantra. Just think about a short phrase, sometimes in Sanskrit or some other language, or it can be, be still and know that I am God. Be still, know that I am god. To repeating this over and over, just concentrating on that one thing, You can do it watching a flame. Don't do anything.

Don't think about anything except watching that flame. I took the one that said, count your breath. That sounded simple to me, not too spiritual, something I could do. Said to breathe in, count 1, you get comfortable. You get setting up in a chair.

You close your eyes if you like. Probably should not look around much. Don't answer the telephone. Just count your breath. That's all you're gonna do for a little while.

Didn't matter whether you think it does any good or not. Just count your breath for a little while. So you count 1 in, 2 out, 3 in, 4 out. Start over because you don't wanna learn You're gonna learn that controlling your mind is like herding geese. It goes everywhere but where you want it to go.

It, it does. It just moves around. I guarantee you, you sit down and start doing that. The first thing you think, well, I gotta call John. I just I'm supposed to call John today.

I better go well, I said I wasn't gonna call anybody. I'm just gonna sit here and meditate. And you you I I finally had to put a piece of paper out here, a pad, so I could write down these wonderful thoughts I was having about things I had to do to stay there in that chair and keep counting my breath. Then I'd get her to go and, you know, 12341234. Boy, I'm doing real good, ain't it?

Wasn't I? I'm not supposed to think about how good I'm doing. I'm just supposed to count my breath. It's really an interesting phenomena. And there's no thing on earth that alcoholics need more than to slow down that alcoholic mind.

Do you know what an alcoholic mind is? A guy told me recently, an alcoholic my my alcoholic mind, he said, would have killed my body except it needed transportation to go from place to place. The, the result is objectivity. I found that if I had any kind of self centered emotion going on in my life, anything that any resentment, any fear, any greed, anything that it would had happened the day top. It would be right on the top.

Thought would come to top. It would be right on the top of the list I'd think about. So I made a deal with God. I told God, if you will let me quiet my mind, I will handle that situation, whether it's resentment, whether it's fear, whatever it is, the way the book Alcoholics Anonymous tells me to do it just as soon as I get up from here. It'll be my highest priority today.

And I kept a little my little pad was there so I could write down a word, just a word so I could remember what I was gonna do. And then I'd go back and start counting my mind my breath. You can't relate to this, most of you. But I when I was a kid, I used to go to movies on Saturday, see Tom Mix and Roy Rogers and all those guys, and they were sorry, old films. I mean, they'd been run so many times.