The "Living Fearlessly Men's retreat" in Estes Park, CO

pieces of literature that we have is found in the, oh, let's start.

Jay the Alcoholic, and God's doing for me today what I couldn't do for myself.

One of my favorite pieces of AA literature, aside from our big book,

and by the way, this is the fourth edition of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If you're not using it, you're not using the book that the new guys use them.

If you're not familiar with the new stories that are in here,

How the heck are you going to be of service to somebody who's new in the fellowship?

Oh, well, my notes are all in it.

Well, put them in the other book.

You mean you haven't grown a little bit since then?

Just an opinion.

Thanks, Jay.

I came in in 1979.

The third edition came out in 1978.

Nobody was telling me, oh, my big book is better than yours.

My stories are better than yours.

Oh.

Oh.

Page 449, oh, I don't know.

What do they call it nowadays?

It's called Acceptance is the answer, is the name of the story in the book.

Call it by its right name.

Anyway, just a little opinion.

And I also got sober in an AA that wasn't 164 pages.

No, it's the whole book.

It's the whole book.

Just to stir it up a little bit.

Okay.

But another piece of literature that I really like is the language of the heart.

And in the language of the heart, there's some correspondence between Bill Wilson, our co-founder,

who in 1961, because a lot of his mentors had passed,

he wrote a letter to Carl Jung.

And it was regarding the patient that Jung had, whose name was Roland Hazard.

And Roland Hazard was the guy who carried the message to the guy that carried the message to Bill.

And he was a member of the Oxford group.

But he had all the money in the world, and he still couldn't get sober.

And anyway, so Bill wrote a letter describing the program, sent some pamphlets and some books to Dr. Young.

And this is the letter that Jung replied.

Dear Mr. W., your letter has been very welcome indeed.

I had no news from Roland H. anymore and often wondered what had been his fate.

Our conversation which he had adequately reported to you had an aspect which he did not know.

The reason that I could not tell him everything was that in those days I had to be exceedingly careful of what I said.

I found that I was misunderstood in every possible way.

Thus, I was very careful when I talked to Roland, but what I really thought about was the result of my experiences with many men of his kind, alcoholics.

His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language the union with God.

How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood in our days?

The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality,

and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to a higher understanding.

You might be led to that goal by an act of grace, or through a personal and honest contact with friends.

or through a higher education of the mind

beyond the confines of mere rationalism.

I see from your letter that Roland has chosen the second way,

which was under the circumstances obviously the best.

I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in the world

leads the unrecognized spiritual need into danger,

if not counteracted either by real religious insight

or by a protective wall of human community.

An ordinary man...

not protected by an action from above and isolated in society,

cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the devil.

But the use of such words arouses so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible.

These are the reasons why I could not give a full and sufficient explanation to Roland,

but I am risking it with you because I conclude from your very decent and honest letter

that you have acquired a point of view above the misleading platitudes one usually hears about alcoholism.

You see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well

as for the most depraving poison.

The helpful formula, therefore, is spiritus,

contra spiritum.

Thank you again for your kind letter,

I remain, Carl Jung.

So it's, we need the spirit

to go against the spirits of alcohol.

And, uh,

So, and what we do on retreat or what I believe that we do on retreat,

and what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous,

is that we form a protective wall of human community.

And when a guy comes into the Parker Men Stag,

the first thing we do is we take him and we bring him up over that wall.

And we get him in the middle of the pack.

And we start to teach him these things.

First, it's like an honest contact with friends about, you know,

getting comfortable enough to be able to come back to the meeting.

and then getting a sponsor and then going through the steps,

which then lead us to this higher understanding

that leads us beyond the confines of mere rationalism,

beyond just this normal stuff that we walk around

in thinking that this is reality.

And so I love this, I love this letter.

And it's in the language of the heart, or you can Google it.

It's on the Internet like just about everything is nowadays.

So...

The Oxford group, which all the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous, were members of the Oxford group.

Bill and Lois went to Oxford Group meetings the first three years of their experience, of his sobriety.

And what it was was it was kind of an evangelical Christian movement.

It was not a sect, but it was a group of women and men that had found away a set of spiritual exercises that relieved them from their problem.

And...

And what they always talked about was,

is that you don't have to believe anything.

But what we ask you to do is to make an experiment.

What we're asking you do is make an honest experiment.

So this weekend, for the next about 30 hours, 27 hours,

because that's all we're going to be together,

is I'd like to ask you to make an experiment.

And the experiment is this.

Let's pretend that God is everything.

You don't have to tell anybody.

You don't have to define God.

But let's just pretend that it's everything.

And then come Sunday afternoon, when you go home, before you have the first fight with the wife,

because, of course, we've all been out being spiritual.

Come home and there's immediately conflict.

But anyway, that what you do is take a look at what happened in your thinking and in your heart over the course of this weekend.

Now, as far as a framework for this retreat, I like to, Bill Wilson's mentor in the Oxford group was a guy by the name of Samuel Moore Shoemaker.

And Sam Shoemaker's hands are all over the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Guys that he worked steps with were the guys that got the Oxford group started in Akron so that Bill could find a meeting when he was there.

Okay.

And he was a remarkable guy, remarkable, remarkable man.

And he said that there are four things that if we're going to have a clear channel to this God as we understand God,

if we're going to be able to actually work the 10th and the 11th step,

if when we ask for guidance in our day that we're plugged in instead of just running around,

blind.

There are four things which needed putting right in my life.

Okay?

The first is, is there was a person that I would not forgive.

There was a person that I would not forgive.

Second, there was a restitution that I would not make.

There was a restitution that I would not make.

Third, there was a doubtful pleasure that I would not give up.

How did he know?

And fourth, there was a sin in the long past that I would not confess.

Now, again, when I say God, I'm not saying what you think I'm saying.

Okay?

And I'll be using terms that are, I love this thing about it being medieval language.

The word sin comes from the sound of an arrow missing a mark, missing the target.

S-th.

That's what it comes from.

So I don't know what it is that you,

what kind of baggage you may hang on that word.

But anyway, sin is an air in the long past that I would not confess.

And then he said, when these things were straightened out,

I not only came into a new power and release,

but for the first time I began to get daily guidance,

which I knew could be relied upon.

Sam was a remarkable, remarkable character.

And I have found that this is a great way that if you get a guy that comes to you in crisis,

that you can go through.

And so during the course of this weekend, we're going to look at these four points.

So we're a group of men, and probably the most, one of the most important questions that we have is,

why did God create women?

And in my time in Alcoholics Anonymous,

What I've come up with is so that men would learn to pray honestly.

Because there is nothing that brings us to our knees.

There is nothing that flattens our ego like the higher power.

Okay.

So, you know, I talk to you.

I come into this Manhattan Beach Club, and I'm...

I'm running around and I start working after 30 days and I started attending bar.

And one evening this creature comes in and we start running around together.

And God's will was operative in my life.

A few weeks later she moves the husband out, gives me the keys to her vet.

Obviously, I'm working a very bitch and spiritual program.

And then about four or five weeks after that, she decides she wants what I really have and she wants to get sober.

And so I bring her to the meetings.

and introduce her to all the old timers.

Teach her to sit down in the brain damage section

in the front where my sponsored set me.

And life is large.

You know, I have it so that, you know,

I'm not really, we were involved before she came into AA,

so it's not like I'm taking advantage of a newcomer.

Right?

And so, anyway, we're going around.

We go running around for about four months, and, uh,

Then she leaves me for another woman and brings her to the group.

And they sit in the seats that we used to sit in.

And I learned that great thing that many of us experience in Alcoholics Anonymous

of cruising the parking lot, looking at the cars, trying to decide whether or not we can go into the meetings.

I know that doesn't happen with you guys, but it happens in Southern California.

And...

And so I'm just beside myself.

I'm just all screwed up.

And I go to the Ilano Club, and I'm sitting out front waiting for the club to open, and there's

Irish Dan.

Now, I don't know how you get sober without Irish Dan.

And Dan had been sober at that time about 30 years.

And he says, what's wrong with you, kid?

So I, you know, was just waiting to be able to once again tell this tale of, whoa, I've got to

You know, it's like any problem that we have, any problem that we really, you know, that we think we have.

There's the two-minute version.

There's the eight-minute version.

And then there's the box set.

You know?

Or if you get somebody in the coffee shop, you give an hour and a half and you never breathe once, right?

Because you don't want them to give you any real experience, strength, and hope.

So Dan says, well, what's your prayer life, like, kid?

What are you talking about?

You know, I didn't say that.

Didn't you listen to me?

What's your prayer life like?

Well, I said, you know, well, I'm an AA guy.

You know, I got like six months of sobriety.

And so, you know, when I get up in the morning, I was taught in Alcoholics Anonymous that prayer was to be honest and to be personal.

So when I get up in the morning, what I'm doing is I'm getting down on my knees and I'm going, help!

Because I really, I was really, really thirsty for about four months.

I mean, like every third thought was a drink.

And then I'd say the serenity prayer 1,800 times during the course of the day.

I'd stop at a couple of meetings.

I'd say the prayers at the meetings.

And when I got home at night, I'd go, thanks.

Because I couldn't believe that I got home sober.

I didn't have anything to drink that entire day.

So that's my prayer life.

He says, well, kid, you know, the San the Serenity Prayer 18,000 times was all fine and good.

He said, but we're going to give you, we're going to make you a real prayerful man.

He says, you got a job, right, kid?

Yeah, I got a job.

See, I got sober before newcomers had a union.

The union started in about 1987.

And so, like, if you even started to talk about a feeling in a meeting, you're

or anywhere around Alcoholics An Anonymous, an old timer just throw you up against the wall and go,

do you have a job? What?

And he said, so you got a job, kid, right? Yeah, I got a job.

And he said, you're alcoholic, so you drive to work the same way, no matter what, every time, right?

Yeah, right.

He said, okay, so this is what I want you to do.

I want you to get a god spot.

I want you to get a god spot.

When you're on your drive to work, I want you to pick a place

where you will make a conscious contact.

All I want you to do is just say hi.

And then when you go home from work, you do the same thing.

So I have doubled your prayers right there.

It was true.

It was true.

And an interesting thing.

For me, it was when my car would be going down Vista Del Mar,

and I'd turn, you hit the Pacific Ocean, and I'd see the ocean.

I'd just go, oh, yeah.

And I'd go, hi.

Now the great thing about high, so I'm going, help!

Hi, hi, hi, thanks.

The nice thing about high is that it's an invitation to a conversation.

And it would not, after a little while, maybe a couple days, it wouldn't stop with just high.

And I'd start to think about like people that I knew that were having trouble in the meeting,

or about people that I maybe was in conflict in my life.

And what it did is it drew me out of myself.

Because, see, I am selfish and self-centered.

The whole world revolves around me.

But that saying, hi, what it did is,

is it brought me out of myself.

This was such a remarkable occurrence that, you know,

a couple weeks later, he got me aside.

He said, how's it going, kid?

Oh, it's going good.

He said, okay, now we're going to crank it up a little bit.

He said, do you ever have any trouble at work?

How did he know?

He said, I want you to get, you know how in the boxing ring

there's a neutral corner?

He said, I want you to get...

a god spot at work.

So I'm Tenden Bar at the time.

You know, it doesn't really give itself to, you know,

dropping to my knees in prayer.

And, but there was a part over on the rail where I could go,

and if I put my hand on it,

the big guy and I both knew what I was doing.

I was saying, hi, and I might need a little help here.

And so all of a sudden I got this spot at work where I can go.

Now, how many of you guys live with other people?

Don't live by yourselves.

Okay?

Yeah.

Same thing works in the home.

You don't have to tell anybody that when I come over at this window sill

and I go like this, I'm praying.

But I know in my heart of hearts,

and whatever it is this creative principle knows,

that what I'm doing is I'm reaching outside of me.

So suddenly, I've gone from two periods of prayer

that were kind of jackknifed into just me doing something

that I really didn't feel comfortable with

to about eight to ten times.

that I was making conscious contact.

And that's all it is.

That's all it is, is just being conscious for a moment,

that there's something going on outside of my mind,

which is a pretty stunning stretch.

Because when I got here, I was really important to me.

And the great thing is that I'm kind of clued into the joke.

Now, another great thing to do is terrorizing new guys with this concept.

Now, I'm brutal because I can do it now.

They don't swing at me very often.

But I like to really fuck with them, and I'll go up and say,

you know, I've got a really personal relationship with Jesus.

And Jesus has revealed to me that his favorite thing to do

is to have a cigarette with a new guy.

And I'm absolutely sincere about it.

You know, I would never, you know, you drop the Jesus part.

But the truth is that every new guy just about smokes, right?

And so what you do is you get them to put God or just a G on their cigarette pack.

And every time they go out to have a cigarette, that they look and find some place where, you know,

because they've got to go outside now, and to look and to find a place and to burn one with the big guy.

And if a guy smokes three packs a day...

He's the most prayerful man in the meeting, right?

But this is how we draw ourselves out of ourselves.

I like to call these stupid God tricks, you know?

Because if you do them, something happens.

And try it.

Try it and see what happens.

So that's what my conscious contact is.

It's drawing me out of myself.

Whatever it is that I can do that draws me out of me.

That's why Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are so wonderful.

And meetings are spiritual chemotherapy.

They, you know, my disease has no idea what's going on when I go to it.

Now, I can't, again, you know, it's pre-union AA.

So I had to go to a meeting every day in my first three years.

Oh, my God.

Well, okay, so I got a day off for laundry when I had about six months over

for my nine-month chip.

But what happened is I went to a meeting every day.

And in my day, the most important thing that I was doing was going to a meeting.

See, to me, Alcoholics Anonymous is the most important thing in my life.

Still is.

Still is.

And so I need to put myself in the consciousness of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And what is the consciousness of Alcoholics Anonymous?

First and foremost is that we don't have to drink today.

And that it is safe here.

And are your meetings safe?

One of the responsibilities about being a dynamic men's stag

is making sure that when you're at the mixed meetings,

that the predators know that we know who they are.

and that we make sure that our meetings are safe for our sisters.

That's our responsibility.

And that when we're out and about, that we are looking for how it is,

that we are able to carry this message

and make sure that the environment is safe for men and women to come into

and recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body.

So is it safe here?

Now, this is our first retreat.

And it's, so what we're doing this weekend is amazingly important.

Because what we're doing here is we're establishing a consciousness that will go on from here to October to next year, you know, on and on and on.

And we need to make sure that this is a safe place here.

So I'm going to implore you that what is said here stays on this mountain.

unless the other man that's involved, you know, the person that's involved gives his permission.

Because we're going to be doing some important spiritual exercises up here,

and it needs to be safe.

And, you know, our co-founder, Dr. Bob, you know, he had like a five-minute talk, his last talk.

And one of the things he said was is that we have to watch out for gossip.

And what is gossip?

Gossip is any conversation that I have about somebody that's not in the room.

You know, so we have to be careful with it.

I mean, as long as we know what we're doing, you know, but let's be, let's be conscious about this.

So is this a safe place here?

Now, yeah, thank you.

So this weekend, what we're going to do is we're going to be doing some self-examination.

And we're going to be doing some sharing.

Now, you don't have to, you don't have to, you know,

bust out anything that you don't want to.

But there are some things sometimes when they're shared at a group level

that if it's safe, that it's very, very helpful.

That's even, you know, there's one thing about doing it with your sponsor,

but if we share it at a group level,

we may find out that we're not quite as unique as we think.

Sam Shoemaker said that there's only one sin.

There's only one mistake.

And that's believing that I am different.

There's only one mistake, believing that I am different.

One of the reasons that I believe that alcoholism is a disease more today than I did when I came in

is the fifth steps that I've heard.

And believe me, I have heard a number of them.

And they're all the same.

I mean, we're alcoholic males.

We're just not that creative.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, the shock for our sisters is finding out how truly shallow we are.

Some of us may be a little more flamboyant than others, but we all destroy ourselves in exactly the same way.

So what I would like to do is, oh, so what we need to do is we'll get together and we'll talk a little bit about it.

See, in a room of alcoholic men, there is a tremendous amount of pain that's in this room.

And that can be left here, or a piece of it can be left here.

So, like, first of all, we're going to get together in small groups,

and I'd like you to share about why are you here.

Share about whether or not you believe that this place is safe,

that you're willing to make a commitment, a spiritual commitment,

to making this place safe, not just for you, but for alcoholics for generations to come.

My home group's retreat.

We've been at our current location for 15 years, I think.

And it's a spin-off from a retreat house that closed,

and that retreat's been going for over 45 years.

And then the other thing is,

is there something that you'd like to leave here?

Now, what is it that I wish was not true about myself?

A friend of mine taught me that how do you know that you're living in God's will?

If I can tell my daughter, my wife, and my sponsor what's going on at this moment.

And for me, what I wish wasn't true about myself...

is that occasionally, I know this doesn't happen to any of the men in the Parker men stag.

But on occasion, when I'm on the Internet,

I end up with sites that I can't even defend to myself,

much less to the people that I love.

And it violates my wife's trust.

It makes it so that my computer is not a safe place for her to go,

and my computer's in our home.

And I'm real good about dropping it for a period of time.

And then every now and then I'll pick it up again.

And I know that it isn't anything that people get strung out on,

but I'll go on a run for a few weeks with it.

And it's just, I feel horrible about it.

And that's the thing that, of everything in my life,

like I say to new guys, if you think I'm full of shit,

come and spend the day with me.

See how I treat my wife.

See how I treat my employer.

See how I treat my cat.

See how I treat my daughter.

You know, but of everything that...

That's the thing that I'm most embarrassed about, about who I am in my personal conduct.

Okay?

And I would like to be able to leave that here.

So, again, you don't have to drop this out loud to anybody up front,

but if you want to share about that, you can.

Now we're going to get to the most difficult part of the retreat,

which is that we're going to count off

We've, and so this is really, really hard.

Because I'm thinking about me the whole time they're counting and then when it gets to me,

I'm still thinking of me.

So, and we're going to get together in small groups.

We're going to get together in small groups.

Hopefully you won't be, you know, hanging out with your Goombas because again we're

creating a different dynamic.

So,

There's eight groups.

You know, you can go outside.

There's some small rooms.

You can go upstairs.

You can put a couple of groups in here.

Spend about 45 minutes.

I figure if we've got eight groups of eight, you know, that everybody can share in an hour easily.

And then we'll come back here at, is that at 11?

At 1115.

So you've got time to smoke.

You got time to share.

And then we'll be back here at 1115.

So one, two, six, four.

I'm now going to introduce you're going to introduce you to my

and you're going to hear a lot about her this weekend

because the great fact is that I have a sober home

And it's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

And she's a, she's brilliant.

She's a, aside from a lot of things about her, she's a columnist,

and she has a way of putting things in words that's really cool.

So along the weekend, I'm going to read you a few columns from her of hers.

The television and radio have been turned off in our home and my car for a month now.

Coincidentally,

During that time, I have not been afraid.

As a lifelong television watcher and noise addict,

I began to watch my television habits change a number of years ago.

My husband Jay killed his television before

and seldom watched the several I brought into the relationship.

He was, thank goodness gracious,

during the years of my incessant watching

and simply left the room when I grabbed the remote.

Sometimes I turned on the TV so that he would leave.

He eventually figured that out, but he was kind nevertheless.

Some years ago, my compulsion to watch primetime television dropped away.

For many years, I had found daytime television to be loud and violent and frankly ridiculous,

and the commercials unbearable and even louder.

I learned that the volume of commercials is turned up.

Yet I watched Jerry Springer or Judge Judy or whatever fit the where did those people come from paradigm,

as if my head were craned toward a freeway accident, knowing that gawking was inappropriate, but not able to stop.

Then I turned the channels to cable TV and started watching better nonsense for a few more years.

I found myself thinking that I ought to know what was going on in the world, so I watched CNN too.

Concurrent to the television experiment, I increased my exposure to spiritual books, workshops,

tapes, and CDs of spiritual teachings, Joel Goldsmith, Barbara Moll, Eckartola, and Byron

Katie to public radio. I had the long before abandoned network radio, but mostly I listened to the radio.

Interestingly enough, I began to correlate my anxiety

to what I was listening to and watched it decrease

during the discussion of spiritual truth.

Though spending most of my radio time listening to wonderful shows

like This American Life in LA Theatre Works Radio Theater,

I often list to the BBC and National Public Radio News.

I found the reporting deeper and coverage at much higher quality level.

Something in me still believed I was supposed to be apprised about what was going on in the world.

The discovery I made, however,

was that constant intake of broadcast news, however reported,

instilled in me a river of fear, one drop at a time.

Two years ago, I stopped watching the news completely.

About the same time I limited my watching to HBO,

Showtime, IFC, and the Sundance channel.

Still, I turned the television on whenever things got quiet.

I felt lonely or I felt bored.

I surmised that sex in the city and the sopranos were more artistic than American Idol and felt appropriately superior.

Jay learned never to approach the bedroom between 8 and 10 o'clock on Sunday nights.

This summer, I watched myself spend hours in bed watching TV, although I had many, many things to do.

I couldn't get up to do them. If I did get up,

I brought my projects to the television or the television to the projects.

I watched and watched myself do that and recognized at some point that I was powerless to do anything else.

Thinking I should stop or judging my behavior as bad or good or lazy or whatever was less than useless.

It actually produced more of the undesired effect.

And there I stayed for two months watching the television from my bed and observing myself.

Then one day in July...

I didn't turn on the TV.

It's been off since.

Perhaps I'll turn it on again one day,

but the need to is gone.

I find that remarkable.

During those hours frozen to the television,

I discovered that the story of my life

has been about my attempts to postpone now.

I attempted to do that with activity,

radio, paralysis, and particularly television.

I did it because I was afraid of what...

this moment now might contain, that it would not be good enough, that it should be different and so on.

So I tried to make now stop.

Because now, the only thing that ever is, is impossible to stop.

I ended up merely distracting myself.

In doing so, I missed the joy of being.

Life is a process of awakening.

Until a certain level of awakening me had already taken place,

the television and the radio had to be blasting.

I understand that and am simply grateful now for the shift.

It's amazing how beautifully long a day is when one is in it.

Kill your television.

The only reason that sports exist is to sell us beer and trucks.

Okay.

Okay.

So I was talking a little while ago about meetings.

Why I go to meetings?

Why do I go to meetings?

Well, this creative principle, this God as I understand, God, the universe or whatever,

knows that I'm a fairly busy guy.

And that so, but God as I understand, God knows that on Monday night,

I'm at the Hermosa Beach men stag.

On Tuesday evenings, there's a meditation group for men at my house.

We spend a half hour listening to a spiritual teacher, Eckartola,

And then we spend a half an hour being silent together.

Wednesday nights, I'm at my spiritual teacher's house going through a tape series with him

and a group of friends, a group of women and men.

Thursday nights, I'm at the 11-step group of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I'm usually involved in some kind of service activity along these lines.

But God doesn't have to even think about where to find me.

Because it knows.

Oh, it's Thursday.

You love this Thursday.

When I was 13 years sober, I hit a wall in my...

Up until then, I was sober man, armed with steps, concepts, and traditions,

able to transcend any life situation with the application of the spiritual principles of alcoholics,

anonymous.

You know, I used to be that when I went to speak at AA meetings or when I was called to participate,

I was so serious, man, I made the paint crack.

Because lives are on the line here.

Untreated alcoholism, running through Alcoholics Anonymous.

When you stop it.

You have a slipper, give him to me.

I'll save his life.

And there was nothing I hated more than some dried-up old geek and alcoholic synonymous that

he'd say, well, he'll get around to doing it when he'll get around to doing it.

I thought those people were killing people in AA.

But after about three decades with you, they'll do it when they're going to do it.