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

OK, great.

This never gets easy

and I hope it never does

because what I try and do is I try and share the most costly things with you guys when I'm together doing this stuff.

Another article by these actually get published in the newspaper every Saturday and

she gets to write whatever she wants. And anyway, this is my fabulous wife, Adele.

The letter took 27 minutes to write,

27 minutes,

337 words. Writing. It took less time than I spend in the bathtub each day, less time that it takes to make and eat breakfast, less than half an episode of The Sopranos. A nap, a lapse of memory, a trip to the grocery store.

It took one minute to find his address. The information came up so on Google so quickly I actually jumped.

After so many years of thinking about it, it should have taken longer. I've been thinking about and thinking about and thinking about writing a letter for 17 years. I've been talking to and yelling at and crying to the phantom to whom I wrote for more than 25. I have screamed every resentment and rageful accusation and hurt lament 1000 times. In my mind. I ran 3000 miles to get away from the problem but took

idea of him with me

rent free. The story that I made-up about my stepfather lived in my head, retelling itself endlessly,

eating at my life silently

becoming stronger and more lethal as I added chapters.

I knew that, and I knew that forgiveness would quench the fire. I'd written other letters, write it, many other wrongs, yet this one I could not do. I was too angry

and too hurt and too frightened to say anything kind.

I was attached to my bad memories, as an old woman would be to her old, smelly, dying dog, watching it whimper and crawl but insisting it stay nonetheless, the idea of its absence too painful to consider. No amount of knowledge or judgment about myself could make me feel differently.

And then things changed.

In recent years, the story teller grew less and less loud and stopped repeating things. She wore herself down and started taking naps. She forgot large passes, passages and laughed out loud at others. Then today she gathered all the words and threw them in the air, where they vanished.

When the last vowel disappeared, I turned on my computer.

I have found that forgiveness is not something I willingly give. I'm not referring to saying the words I forgive you,

but feeling forgiveness through me. I cannot will that feeling, or manufacture it, or insist upon until it materializes when it is ready. And he's become, even for those things that the world names, unforgivable.

It happens when I recognize that there is nothing for me to forgive.

It comes over me when I clearly see that no one is doing anything to me

and I realize that we are all seeking peace,

a moment of it, and are often mistaken at its sources.

Nothing is personal,

there is nothing that need be forgiven but a story

I've told myself about someone or something. And stories need no forgiveness. They simply need to be seen for what they are.

The letter was one page long.

It said everything.

It said thank you

and please forgive me,

but mostly thank you.

There was number anger or fear or resentment to it.

I was incapable of writing it one minute before I did.

17 years was not too long to wait for that.

Now a space has opened up in my heart where a story used to live,

and once again I am reminded that nothing is impossible.

That's my baby

now. You can imagine what it's like. You know, corollary resentments are always fun. Somebody who's got a justifiable one and then you take it on, you know, and you can imagine that there was a little corollary to that resentment.

I mentioned a guy by the name of Thomas Keating and I found out that we have mutual friend here and earlier and Father Thomas, he was at, he was, he's, he's a Roman Catholic. He's a, he's a, he was an Abbot for a number of years ahead monk and and just a marvelous man. And he was out at a fundraiser in Los Angeles,

and this is about six years ago and all that. It was at the new cathedral and all the big money was there

and this incredible spiritual man got up and he said

that there has to be room at the table for everyone,

even the pedophiles.

And if there isn't, I can't sit at the table.

And you can see the head spin, the people that were there because that was in the middle of all that.

And I have no opinion about that statement

except that I believe it to be true.

I believe another line that he said that in this life what we are called to do

is we are called to love the unlovable

and to forgive the unforgivable

and that each of us in the course of our lives, we will run across this.

Now I come from, as we all do. I come from

a

a long line of family weirdness and I think I mentioned to you about that, or maybe I didn't, but I'll tell the story again.

When my when we had my daughter, my my wife then said we're not going to hit the kid. And I come from, I mean, lots of violence and in my home, it was the non alcoholic that the violence came from. And,

and one of the reasons why I

left the marriage was that I saw that I was starting to play out the same dynamic that had happened in my home. That I was not able to be honest with my, my first wife about how it is that I was really feeling about the fact that we were unable to be intimate together. And you know, I didn't. I knew that she wanted to be intimate with me, but we couldn't, for whatever reasons we couldn't be.

And every time we tried, it was very, very difficult.

And you know, it came from her being sexualized as a child. And,

and, but what happened is, is that my frustration and my inability to work things out with her, I triangulated it to my daughter and she'd just be busy being a kid. And then

she'd do something and I would get angry at her

and I would rage at her instead of being responsible for my feelings with the person that I was not being authentic with.

Pain that is not transformed

is transferred.

Pain that is not transformed is transformed. And luckily for you and I, where we are is we're an Alcoholic Anonymous, which is the greatest agent of transformation

that we've seen in this era of history.

There's a guy by the name of David Hawkins. There's a great book by the name of Power versus Force. Very, very hopeful book. And he did some calibration

on. He does this thing of calibrating the vibrations of different things, books, movements, this, that and another thing. And one of the things that he did was he calibrated Alcoholics Anonymous and he found that it was higher than just about any other. There was more truth in the book Alcoholics Anonymous than almost any other spiritual book that he that he ran it through. And he said that

Alcoholics Anonymous is the greatest social 4th force of the 20th century

and that over 50% of the people in North America have been touched by the 12 steps, either by, you know, an Al Anon or a A or GA or ZA or somebody has gotten sober, somebody has made, somebody has transformed.

Anyway. So when I saw that I was doing that with my daughter and I knew that, number one, she was not seeing a loving relationship between my wife and I have complete loving relationship.

And that I was being angry at her that I didn't know what else to do except to remove myself from the situation. And,

and about six months after I I left the house, she and I were out one day and she was doing something, being a kid. And I reacted to her and I yelled at her and I was able to see myself and I was able to stop

and to ask her forgiveness. And I told her I hope that I never do that again.

And I don't think I ever behaved that way around her again.

And so I thought that I'd been a really good guy

and that, that I had really done the deal. And then a bit later, when she was about 13, I sat her down. And I, you know, I apologize for leaving the family. I knew that when I left the family that I was #1 going to scar her

and her relationship with all men. And I asked her forgiveness for that. And I didn't tell her why I left the house, but I, I asked her forgiveness. And, and,

but it was interesting every time that I'd start to get angry, not at her, but at something when we were out in public or we were in private, she would always flinch as if I was about to hit her.

I kept thinking, you know, I never hit her.

Why is it? Why is it that she hasn't changed in that

and

you know, I the my idea of violence, it had had stopped. I thought we'd stopped it with me. And

one of the things that that I do is I, I go to this place called Cohen, Switzerland, and it's the International Center for Peace and Reconciliation. That Frank Bookman,

the guy who initiated the Oxford Group, that Alcoholics Anonymous came out of. That the, that the Swiss members of, of, of the Oxford Group built after the Second World War in gratitude for what had happened with their nation being spared to try and have a center where people could come and talk about things instead of fighting.

And, and it's a marvelous, marvelous experience. It's a, it's an amazing place. And, and while, while I was there, there was a woman from Colombia, if you've ever been to an, A, a conference, our whole a, a conference structure comes from there, where people from different places get up and they give their talks. And then there are small groups and, and special interest meetings. And then we all come together and there are other big talks. And, and

therefore are the format of our sponsorship, our working steps, all that stuff comes out of this group.

Anyway, this woman from Colombia got up and she talked about that she'd been sexualized as a child and, and the violence that she'd been raised in in her home. And then she talked about then when she was a mother, how she treated her children and how the violence had been transferred to her children.

And uh, uh,

and she said, think about what it is when this great big person is reacting that angrily to somebody small.

And I saw myself

and I saw myself.

And so that was that was an interesting experience for me.

And

a little while later I had a buddy visited in the house who's from England. And now this, this next story that I'm going to talk about, this is my story and this is my resentment. And it's not justified. And it and, and don't take it for it to be political, OK,

But what happened is, is that the second time we launched into Iraq, I got a little upset

and and my resentment about that

because of some experiences that I had when I was younger.

Way off the chart. And I was, I was,

I was deeply troubled and just, we were just, we just, we just invaded. The second time this guy was here and he looked at me, he was staying at my home and he was one of these Oxford Group people initiatives have changed. We call ourselves now. And, and he looked at me and he said, how are you ever going to be helpful to your nation when you've got an attitude like that?

He was saying that to me in my house.

I mean, at least you say that when you're going out the door, right?

But that's the problem. When you're on the spiritual path, you get

spiritual truth laid on the end from all sides.

And then

so he drops this bomb on me. And then a few weeks later I read all this because I'm a student of the Oxford Group and the spiritual antecedents of our movement, all this stuff. And I get the pleasure of going around and talking about it all over. And it's a, it's a wonderful thing for me. And

I, so I read all this Archaean Christian literature. I, I actually get these books and I don't collect them. I read them. And one of the things I'm doing is I'm working my way gradually through all the books that Bill and Bob read,

you know, and it's a lot of stuff. And it's, you know, not, you know, it's not something you just sit down and pound through. And I ran across a book by a guy by the name of Glenn Clark with an E. And the name of the book is I will lift up mine eyes. And both Bill and Bob had this book so that we know, I know that they both read it and, and in it very much like in Emmet Fox's Sermon on the Mount, which if you have not read that,

it's a marvelous, marvelous piece. In it. There's a dissection of the Lord's Prayer because these guys are kind of out of the same explosion of consciousness. And it's, it's a little bit different than than Fox's, but it's the same. I mean, it's the, it's the same thing. And in it,

it's got some spiritual exercises in it. And so I'm reading along in it. I'm going, well, this is like Fox, you know, I'm got my nice historians detachment going on it and then I run across this.

He sets it up like this. Read this next sentence very carefully, for in it lies the secret of the failure of half the so-called Christians of the world to walk with Hinds feet into high places, the high places God has prepared for them.

If you hate just one individual in the world

by just that much, you are separated from God Himself.

Oops,

I did not wanna read that.

But when I heard that, I knew that for me that was true

and I had some justifiable resentments

and.

And it would burn me. I could feel it in my body.

So I go on through this and he gives a.

He gives a recommendation

and he says that if you want to be forgiven,

we got to forgive

now. I just shared with you

the one thing

that

of all the things, all the mistakes that I've made,

that

that I really felt that if I ever got to sit down and

I got this image that remember truth weed,

that if I ever got to sit down and smoke a big fatty with the big guy and he'd go like, So what was it like?

You know, and I know I got to hit it right.

And

so anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm reading this thing and I'm, I'm going.

And and So what it it does is is it it says what you do is you write a person's name on the

a piece of paper

and that you think about the thing that you need to be forgiven about the most. And if it was between you and them,

could you forgive them?

And as I thought about this,

it occurred to me that there was number difference between these people that I resented and myself because with the most precious gift that I had ever been given, what I had been as I had been, a terrorist.

And in the final analysis, I don't want to live like that.

And so I put their names down. I just put Bush ET L

make it easy. And

he talks about saying a prayer and putting it in the fireplace.

And I did that,

that it didn't work.

But I don't give up.

See, part of the thing about being on the spiritual path is we don't give up.

It's like with what Adele was writing about, 17 years isn't too long.

So I tried again a couple weeks later,

still didn't change.

But a few weeks after that, I did it a third time

and it left

and it left.

And a really interesting thing came out of that

about a month later. You know, I talk about this paying attention to your life.

Month or so later I'm I'm hanging out with my daughter and I got angry about something

and she didn't flinch

and she hasn't flinched around me ever since.

Each and everyone of us

has someone

that we have not forgiven.

When I was

newly sober, I I took my father out, sat him down and started to do my fifth step with him or I might not have my fifth step, my 9th step with him. And he got up and walked out of the room.

So I waited a little while. Just after my first year, I went out and I tried again. Gone.

Tried again at 5:00.

And then when I talk to you about that, that group when I was like 14 years over that we got together and went through the steps.

I, when we got to my dad on my, on my list, I wrote him instead of calling him or trying to talk to him face to face, I wrote him a letter and this is what I wrote him. I said Father my, my marriage is now dissolved and I have now committed every sin that I have ever judged you for.

Please forgive my arrogance.

Love Jay

called me up, he said I got your letter. Thanks, Click.

Part of my resentment against my father was is he was a he was a hip guy. He and his wife, his second wife, they were, they were fly man. They were before they had a name, Jetsetter. They were jetsetters going all over doing all kinds of great stuff. And they were fun.

And alcohol

wore all of that out of them. Alcoholism just tore it up. And

I was, I was up visiting him a little while, about a year after this thing. And I was, I was sitting in his home bar with him. And he got up to use the head. And the bartender leaned across the bar to me. And he said, hey, kid, you know that letter that you wrote? Your old man said, yeah, He said he carries it in his wallet.

Don't give up.

Don't give up.

A couple years after that, my, my, my grandmother Marie, who I mentioned to you, who sends you her greetings. She was, she's got macular degeneration. She was getting older. My father and stepmother had this ranch up in the Yreka Air Montague, up by Yreka, California, up by, by Mount Shasta. I mean, it's just spectacular. And she decided that it was time to go and live with her son.

And so we were going to go up and she lived near me in Southern California. And so,

you know, I was taken up there so we could sit down with the folks and have the conversation

and,

and when we got up there, when we opened the door, my stepmother was there and she looked pregnant and she was yellow from cirrhosis.

And they hadn't told us how sick she was. I don't know if you've ever seen cirrhosis of the liver, but it is a lousy way to die. And so obviously Grams isn't going to be there. Now, my relationship with my father and stepmother from their alcoholism had not been that great. You know, I days of obligation, I would call them, you know, but I just knew that, you know, I don't talk to my dad afternoon. I never call him afternoon,

but I but when I saw that because I'm one of you guys, because I'm a member of the Hermosa Beach Mens tag, I know what to do. They live 10 1/2 hours away

and every other weekend I would drive up and I would spend a couple of days with them and do what I could because my father's alcoholic, my stepmother's alcoholic. Their way of making love at the end of her life was to sit there and eat a couple of Vicodin and drink salty dogs together.

This disease runs deep in my family, and here we've been recovered, my sister and I, for years. Last time he got a DUI, he said put me in jail for a couple days. I ain't going to those meetings.

So I was privileged to go and be there and to be his surrogate while my stepmother died and to show up and do the things that we need to do, you know, and this is what we do as members of Alcoholics Anonymous, that we show up and that we learn to do these things. And I got to have the experience of being with Hospice and learning all those great things that you get to learn

about, you know, changing your parents diapers

about doing the things for them that they did for you,

you know, And then why did I do it? Because the men before me had done it. There's a wonderful book that I'd like to recommend to you. It's by a guy by the name of Stephen Levine. It's called Who Dies. It's an old classic. He was he worked with Ramdas in the conscious dying movement. Really important. Good stuff. Anyway, so I show up, Marsha passes and I had the privilege of being there with her when she did and,

and my dad's a mess by now. And

I go to

I at the funeral. Everybody's going well, what are you going to do about your old man?

Well, fortunate enough for me. My wife had driven me to the Anna Lennon family groups and I got some skills. I said I ain't doing nothing, man you talked with.

You want to talk to my father, you talk to him.

And so he's just a mess. And I, and I told him, you know, sooner or later you and I are going to have to have a talk.

And, but I left after the funeral and I went home. And about six weeks later, I decided to just do a little drive by, you know, 10 1/2 hours. And, and I go rolling up the driveway and I, and I walk in the ranch house and I find my father. And he's sitting there in his command post at 5:30 in the evening. And he's in his bathrobe, covered in his own waist.

And luckily for me, I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous

and I got raised in a a where we went on 12 step calls. So I know how to pick somebody up and not judge them and get them into the shower and wash them off and clean up their waste and talk to him like another human being.

And on the way up there, I'd made a couple of calls because I thought he was in pretty bad shape. And I knew that there was a VA that had taken in. And I, I said, dad, I found a place. And I'm not talking to you about going to the silly meetings or anything, but I think we got to get you detoxed.

And the next morning when I got up, he said. Jay, I've been thinking all night,

I'm not going.

But I, you know, I did what you guys taught me to do. I ran away and I drank a double espresso and I sat for a while and I meditated and I made a few phone calls he could sponsor and the wife and my good friend Bill Cleveland and and got, you know, and I went back into the house and I said,

OK, Pops, that's fine. Can I go to the store for you? What can I do? When I left

and I tried to get a hold of him, you know, for the next few days, for the next week and a half, didn't call the neighbors and have them go check on him. And finally I got a phone call from him and he said, you know, Jay, I'm about half mad at you. Really, Why is that? He said. I had no idea it would be that tough. And my old man kicked

a quart and a half of vodka, a couple 6 packs of beer and a dozen Vicodin a day habit by himself.

And I said, Oh my God, man, good job.

I said, Ray Miland had it right in the last weekend, didn't he? And he went, yeah, he did. And so anyway, my dad stopped drinking

and physical sobriety is a wonderful thing.

Just physical sobriety. And I got to see my old man without the mask of alcohol

and it was a wonderful, wonderful gift.

At Christmas, he came down and he spent time at his mother's house and,

and he was able to repair his relationship with his mother

and

it was really fun. And then he went back up and my sister was up visiting him. I used to talk to him. He'd say like when he was wanting to have a Virgin Mary, I'd say, well, This is why I don't drink Virgin Mary's dad, you know, I talked to him about the physical allergy and all that stuff. And my sister's up there. She's an active member. She's getting phone calls all the time while she's there from Response Ease. My dad says, well, what's the sponsor?

And so she tells him

and he goes. Well,

I guess Jay is my sponsor.

She's up there a few months later and she calls me and she says you better get up here. The old man's pretty sick.

So I drove up and he was really sick and he had this really fast growing cancer in his lungs. And so you let him be a cowboy for a day? Always let him be a cowboy. Then the next day I took him to the hospital and he was almost dead when I got him there. And they got him kind of patched up a little bit and, you know, found out what was wrong with him. And they said

you

and said, what we can do is we can do this kind of surgery on you. And, and, and if we take part of your, you know, we take the one lung and, and we give you chemotherapy twice a week for six months, there's a 50% chance that you live two years.

And,

and after they left, I said to him, Dad,

that's a pretty shitty hand.

And he said, yeah, he doesn't like doctors, but he was thinking about going along with it. And I said, did you hear what they said to you? And he said, well, yeah, I think so. So I repeated it to him and he said that's a horrible hand.

And he said, what do you do? What do you think we should do? And I said, I say we fold

and said, let's go back to the ranch. I won't leave you. I got skills

and

and we did that while I was there in Medford OR I went to an AA meeting and when I was at that a meeting at the clubhouse. Horrible meeting.

I found out there was a meeting at the hospital the old man was in that was a better meeting. And while there, they didn't realize that Soberman was there when I came walking in.

But So what do you do? You go over by the literature table, right?

And there was a flyer for the Rogue River around.

And at that roundup, which was the next weekend, one of my dearest friends, a woman by the name of Mildred Frank, who I hope that someday you guys get to hear

one of my spiritual advisors. Part of her story is about working with her sister dying and how you go about doing that. She the one who'd given me the encouragement, you know, so that I knew what to do when I was there for for Marsha, she was the one who told me that if you're a sober person and you show up, the way will be clear and you will do exactly what needs to be done.

And I believed her.

And she's speaking at the roundup.

So I get to take the old man home, brought my sister and my grandmother in, go up and get time to spend with my glorious friend, hear her talk, have dinner with her and go back.

And I got to be there with my father when he passed.

Now all we ever want

is for our fathers to be proud of us, and many of us think that the way that we're supposed to do that is to be tough guys.

And I was able to be there for my father

in the face of death and not be afraid.

And while he's starting to pass, I'm, I'm, I was reading him spiritual literature, but I could see that he was,

it wasn't working real well. He wasn't being consoled by it

and so I stopped and I just picked the sports page up and I started to talk to him about baseball

and he started to die.

And

being there at those times,

death is just like birth. Some of them are difficult, some of them are easy, but it's all just part of the process.

And to have the privilege to be there. I believe that the holiest place that you can be is the birthing room, and the 2nd holiest place that you can be is in the room when somebody passes from this line. And I got to be there when the old man died. And not only that, my intuitive voice was working. I didn't want my grandmother and my sister to see him while he was going through the throes.

But when he settled down something said go get him and I got to go get him and my sister and my my grandmother came in. I backed out. Then my sister backed out and my grandmother was able to sit there with his son as he passed and she said all he did was look at me and smile.

Now, I've been a spiritual whack job for a long, long time, OK? But my dad chose to leave this life on the 25th anniversary of my coming to you on the second day of May in 2004. And when that happened,

I

took the next leap because I know that there's so much more going on than I have any idea

and that everything is just fine and that there's nothing that we have to worry about.

But what we get to do in this life is we get to go and we get to represent. And that that each of us has people that we have not forgiven.

And you know that while you're here tonight, if you can write down those people's names and we'll put a little something up here and just come up and take the piece of paper and rip it up and drop it in. And we'll give it to somebody to take down the hill because they, they don't want stuff burned here. And we'll make sure that that gets that gets given to the flame.

But don't leave here without at least making the experiment. Just pretend for a minute

and if you got more than one resentment or if that person is you, put your name down there. OK.

So thank you very much and

let's go off. Thank you.

What do you want?