Workshop titled "The Spirit of the 12 Steps" in Santa Fe, NM

being present now that's some serious work that's some serious giving of yourself because it's not

always fun easy and little butterflies in your tummy that's not what's going on um so am i going to grow

and mature um in these areas of my life and that's been one of the biggest areas for me in my marriage

is growing up and maturing in my marriage um i didn't have a clue

about what it meant to be married, being a committed relationship,

to be faithful to one man.

You know, what an order.

I can't go through with it.

I wanted to be those things, but completely incapable of pulling that off.

Because like I talked about earlier, if the heat gets on,

or if you make me mad, I'm going to go find some strange, baby.

You understand me.

Yeah.

They all understand you.

Or I'm going to go find somebody to pay attention to me because you're not.

Or whatever.

You know, real immature stuff, but it seems like a good idea at the time.

How did I get off on that? I have no idea.

I felt like Tom just then.

Oh, we don't know.

Worshiping, sentiment.

Getting sentimental relationships.

And I used to do, I worship the past.

I'd visualize a vision of what things should be in every area of my life.

I mean, it's nuts.

Not being present with what is, paying attention to what is currently today.

And I like what it talks about in 55.

We found the great reality deep down within us.

In the last analysis, it is only there that he may be found.

It was so with us.

And again, I mean, the thing that has created that within me is willingness to work with other drunks,

willingness to pray and to get quiet.

When I would get quiet...

Don told me one time that if you want to know what your relationship with God, how you feel about God,

if you want to know what that's all about, all you got to do is watch how you treat other people.

And I was still very a steamroller with people.

And very little patience, very exacting in a lot of ways, very rigid people.

And that's what my meditative life was like.

When I would get quiet, I would get, if my mind went somewhere else,

which is where it's going to go, I'd get really angry at myself.

And I'd jerk it back.

There's nothing calm or gentle or peaceful about it.

I mean, I just, it was just angry.

And anger at myself and anger that meditation was so hard and

I thought that I should be able to, you know, once I started meditating,

that I should be able to float in spiritual nirvana pretty quickly, you know,

because I'd read these great meditation books, and they seem to be getting it,

and why didn't it happening like this for me?

You know, now, I want it now.

And I still don't have a lot of what they described when I read those books.

But when I sit quietly now, it's peaceful.

It's peaceful.

My mind takes off in a thousand different directions,

and I just bring it back, and it's okay.

Sometimes it doesn't go very far, very often,

and sometimes it's just on parade, man.

It is on tour.

And thinking about everything,

and what I'm going to do later today,

and how I'm going to handle stuff that hasn't even happened.

What I'm going to say, you know, if they say this, I'm going to say that.

Right.

You know, all that kind of stuff.

I'm going to get my team straight at work,

and I'm going to give them the come to Jesus today.

You know, I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff goes on in there.

But it's just quiet.

And the thing that I use is just a single word.

And sometimes I'll use a phrase.

But I just say that over and over and over again.

And it's just simple.

For me, this simple has been the best.

I used to think I needed to do very wordy prayers, and I can't.

So I just keep it simple, simple mantra or just one word.

And I use that just over and over.

And what that does is it builds a place of quiet within me,

and it pretty much sustains me throughout the day,

and it's a place where I can retreat to.

And I don't always retreat to it.

because sometimes I get excited by controversy

and want to jump in and play,

or I get distracted, or whatever.

But that is there, that little nest within.

And it's my responsibility to create it.

I started to realize how selfish I am

in my relationship with my creator.

It's easy for me to pray when I'm in a lot of pain,

or I'm frightened.

I'll pray, pray, pray, pray, pray, pray.

When things are going good...

when things are just, you know, hopping along.

I'm doing what I'm supposed to do.

I'm not really running into any problems.

Things are kind of going along.

I'm fairly happy.

I'm not praying very much.

And in a prayer time, I started to realize how selfish I am.

That really my prayer life and my communication with my creators

is when it's convenient for me

and when it's comfortable for me.

And when it makes sense to me.

or when I really need God, then I want God to help me.

But carrying him on into the everyday, day in, day out daily life

has been a new experience for me in the last year and a half or so,

being really consciously aware of how I don't want to be so selfish in my relationship with my creator.

I want to access that and participate in that relationship on a daily basis

and not just give it lip service.

And I used to go into meditation a lot looking for an answer.

And that's changed too in this last year and a half.

Now I just go there to be there.

And it's a very...

Gosh, I hate to use this word because it's just too touchy-feely.

But it's an adoration thing.

I'm just adoring and gratitude and adoring and loving.

And that's it.

And...

It's great.

Love it.

It makes things a lot easier.

And I feel closer to everything.

To have people in AA, to my husband, to my son, to people at work.

I don't feel so insane.

So it's just a nice way to go.

And that's what has happened.

The consciousness of my belief has come to me.

as a result of just being willing to start at that simple place

where I didn't understand anything,

and it's still very much of my limited understanding,

but it's light years from where I was.

And in the relationship that I haven't met with my creator today,

I wouldn't have thought that possible back then.

I couldn't even conceive of it.

Couldn't even conceive it.

And I like this.

It used to make me mad, of course.

Yeah.

But that last sentence on 57, it says when we drew near to him, he disclosed himself to us.

I'm like, why do I have to draw in here first? Can he just come up to me first?

That's a hard term again, you know.

But again, it's the nature of the relationship.

Read about the actor. After the A, B's and C's, are you like, oh, yeah, that's me?

I still use this all the time, and I love the first requirement, that I am I convinced that any life run on self-will

can hardly be a success.

In my case, absolutely will not be a success.

Am I convinced of that?

And, yeah, I'm convinced.

And that's what happens.

If I'm running the show, I'm absolutely in collision with other people,

even when my motives are good.

And I can get fooled by this all the time, frequently.

I think my motives are good and I'm doing the right thing,

but really I'm being a self-seeker again,

under the auspices of I'm trying to help.

or I'm just trying to do the right thing.

But usually still sometimes behind that is I want to look good or I want my way.

So whenever I get into a jam today, if I go put myself in this, it's me to a T.

It describes me to a T and it doesn't even matter what the situation is.

It always fits.

And I've read it a hundred times and it always brings me smack back to I'm the problem.

It's not other people.

It doesn't matter what they're doing.

A recent thing that just happened, my ex-husband, Steve, passed away last September.

And he died of cancer.

He had lymphatic cancer.

And he was pretty well off.

And he was living with this woman.

And I didn't like her.

And I liked his third wife. She rocked. I was wife number two.

Wife number three was good. I liked wife number three.

She got my standard approval.

Wife number four, I didn't like her.

Anyway, and I wish I had that inventory with me, because I'd read it to you.

But anyway, so he passed away, and he had a lot of money, and...

I found out after the fact that they were not married and that she was representing herself

as being his wife and representing herself legally that way and court documents and you're

dealing with a lot of money.

And I found out that she had threatened his health while he was ill.

If you don't leave me this stuff, who's going to pull your head out of the toilet?

You know, and he's going through chemo and stem cell transplant surgery, all this stuff's going on.

You know, he had a beach house and she knickered that out of him, took it away from my son and gave it to her,

changed the will around, and just all this stuff. She made all these changes when Steve was really ill.

And, in my opinion, took advantage of him.

And when I found out about this, I went into a rage.

And I hadn't felt that in years, in years.

It had been a long time.

And my bear, as Dawn would say, came out.

And I was absolutely, in my mind, 100% justified.

And I was ready to go find her and hold her up against the wall by her neck and throttle her.

It was that kind of, I'm going to kill her.

And I can just kind of feel it now.

And that was nothing compared to what was going on at the time.

And...

So, and I felt completely justified.

You know, she has robbed my son.

She's taken from my son, you know, my ex-husband, who I came to love.

I loved him more sober than when I was married to him, who I'd come to love dearly

and have this incredible relationship with.

You know, I didn't know that that was going on, and I was angry about that.

I was angry at her.

I felt like she took from my son, which should be his, and...

and she harmed him and she didn't take care of him and she was just a gold dick and I had lots of nasty words that were coming out of my mouth and I called Gary Brown and

Because I couldn't get a hold of Weaver, so I called Gary.

And just a tirade of profanity is coming out of my mouth.

And he's like, wow, you're scaring me right now.

And that's something if you scared Mr. Brown.

And I felt proud in that brief moment.

Isn't that sick?

But immediately, he stopped, and he said, stop.

pray, you've got to calm down, and then you've got to write about this.

You're wrong.

To me, with everything in my being, I was not wrong.

She was wrong, and I was ready to go to war to write this wrong.

I was ready to take her to court.

I'm going to get an attorney, and that attorney is going to be the meanest, you know,

The dirtiest cat fight and attorney I can find.

And I'm going to rip her a new one.

It was like, ting, tinge, tinge, tinge, fiel!

I'm going to get her, you know.

I'm ready for a fight.

And she's going to pay.

And I mean, I was, like, in it.

And called him up and was just, and I was justified.

Right.

Absolutely just. She was wrong. I'm not wrong here. She's wrong. I didn't do anything wrong. I was getting ready to and did, but I hadn't yet.

But I was using all it to justify the actions I was getting ready to take.

I think I didn't go find her.

I was going to go get some black spray paint on her nice cream-colored garage door that my ex-husband bought.

White trash lives here, and I'm going to vandalize her cars, those Jaguar slash slash-slash-slash-slash.

That 4-4 SUV trashed.

You know, and I'm going to get her kids' cars too, and their kids are going to pay.

I mean, I was, like, in it.

I was talking about threatened.

Woo!

And, you know, fire from the mound was coming down.

And she messed with the wrong woman.

And so Brown says, you know, whoa, stop, stop.

Stop.

after he listened to my tirade, and he gave a little chuckle, which, you know, I didn't like that either,

because this was very big deal serious to me.

And he goes, I want you to pray.

I just want you to calm down.

You're not ready to write yet.

I just want you to try to calm down.

And every time this comes up, I want you to go into prayer.

And before you go causing all kinds of harm and talk to me in a couple of days, and let's talk about this again.

And, you know, everybody that came into contact with me for the next couple days heard the story.

Everybody.

I was an equal opportunity demonstrator.

My husband heard about it,

that some of the women I sponsor heard about it.

Weaver heard about it.

Everybody got a taste of.

People at work heard about it,

and they're all on my side, you know?

Because I can tell a compelling story,

except they're really fit ones.

They're like, yeah, there's some inventory here.

So I had to get quiet and get to a place

where I could stay the third step prayer.

Okay.

And I saw myself in this.

Am I not being a self-seeker right now?

Even with believing through my core that I am right, she is wrong,

I am ready to go to war, am I being a self-seeker?

I was convinced she's more to blame.

Convinced. This isn't about me. This is about her.

It wasn't even about my ex-husband. It was about her.

Um...

And I wasn't even admitting I was somewhat at fault.

I didn't have any fault here.

None.

You know, self-righteous justified resentment is the worst.

It'll kill us dead.

So that's where I was at.

So I got prayed up and started writing some inventory

and started seeing some interesting things in there

and how my self-seeking was showing itself

that it really was about me and about mine.

Because if Nick has it, then I've got it too.

If my son has it, then I have it too.

Still driven by things, money.

And that was ugly.

I don't like to think of myself in that way today.

And I wish I could tell you this happened years ago,

but I think it was about six months ago.

And that that was still there.

It's mine.

I want it.

It's mine.

You don't get to have that.

And you took it from me.

So that kind of stuff, real ugly stuff showing up.

And the place that I was at was being driven.

You know, like they talk about, we get driven, selfishness, self-centeredness.

That's the root of our troubles.

That was absolutely the root of my trouble at that point, and it has been since.

It will continue to be.

It always has been.

Any problem I've had, that is at the root of it.

Sometimes it's taken, I've had to wade through some stuff to find it, but it's always been there.

And I've absolutely, all my decisions were based on self-revelling.

When I was younger, and I used to milk this one, this was one of my favorites, I was raped.

And I took that into inventory, and I didn't possibly see how I was wrong with that.

Not at all.

I wasn't wrong.

They were wrong.

And it was three guys.

when I had to take that inventory, you know, which we'll talk about some, you know,

and I had to do that prayer in between third and fourth column.

I was still absolutely convinced that I didn't make any decisions based on self.

And what was revealed to me is that my decisions based on self was,

I snuck out of the house, I wanted to go party, I went out and partied with a bunch of guys that I didn't know,

were all drinking, what I think was going to happen?

God knows I've taken advantage of people sexually.

What did I think was going to happen?

I wanted to be a part of that.

That was my decision based on self.

And it doesn't mean that what they did was right,

and I'm not co-signing that,

but I made a decision based on self

which placed me in a position to be heard.

I wanted to be cool.

I wanted to hang out.

I wanted to drink with the boys.

That's what happened.

And then I used it for a long time to be a victim and to judge people and to judge situations.

But more than anything to be a victim.

to feel sorry for myself on why I don't measure up or why my life is a mess

or why I have to drink this way or why that.

That was one of my favorite things.

Well, if what had happened to you or what had happened to me,

if you'd have my life, and that's just one example, I got a ton of them.

I know.

Of where I was just, you know, unfairly taken advantage of.

Yeah.

And it just set me free in a lot of ways.

I absolutely made decisions based on self.

Even stuff that happened when I was younger that I could not control,

I took all of that and used all of that.

Ruthie's story helped me with that.

I took experiences that I had when I was younger

and made them bigger than what they actually were, added to it.

And my God, if you take that stuff to a shrink, they're going to help you

make it juicier and intensify that idea of being a victim and why my life hasn't worked out.

It's all their fault.

If all this stuff had happened to you, you'd live like this too.

If you'd been abused and taken advantage of and raped and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.

You do it, you know?

That's why I do the stuff I do.

So it took away my right to be a victim.

Right.

And, you know, Don and Jerry talk about all the time.

I love the story that Jerry tells about going to Don with his bill of rights.

I got rights today.

And I got the right to be angry.

I've got the right to withhold forgiveness.

And the spiritual path is a complete opposite to that.

You know, we surrender all of that.

I don't have any more rights.

I give them up in the third step.

I surrender it all, all of it.

the good and the bad.

My will, my thought life, everything I hope to become, be, it's all given over.

God's now my director.

I go and do what God would have me go and do.

I am out of the equation.

What I want is out of the equation.

And there's like, what's the word?

My brain's just going toasty.

You know, you've got to surrender to win.

What are those things called?

No.

Yeah, yeah.

But you can also have what you want here, but you surrender everything.

But you'll get what you want.

You may not know that that's what you want, but you're going to get it.

That's a God's sense of humor.

So, anyway, you know, surrender it all.

Y'all want to take a break and then pray?

Y'all want to pray and then take a break?

Are y'all ready to take the third step?

You want to get on the knees and do it?

Sweet, let's do it.

Oh.

Do we tape the prayer?

We don't tape the prayer.

If not, let's do it again.

That's what I used to do as a woman I sponsor.

Do you feel it?

If you don't feel it, we need to do it again.

You miss something.

You did it wrong.

Like you can do this wrong.

Can't do it wrong.

So after we do the third step,

the next direction is to immediately launch into inventory,

into a house cleaning.

Okay.

And, you know, it was told to me, next means next, right away, not sit around and think about it,

not float on the good ju-ju of my third step, but to immediately launch into this house cleaning effort.

And I was in a lot of pain, so it was easy for me to do when I first did that.

I launched right away.

And I made my list and...

Writing inventory is a simple process.

A lot of times it gets, what I have observed is it seems to get very complicated, and it's a very simple process.

It's not necessarily an emotional one, although it can be.

It's not an intellectual process.

It's like just the facts, ma'am.

Let's get down to disclosing the damaged and unsoluble goods that are going on within you.

If my internal life is my business, I'm definitely broke.

So I've got to find out what's the unusable goods within me.

My stock and trade with the world that is not working anymore.

That's caused my failure.

And I couldn't fool myself about the value of my character defects anymore.

And I talked about this some last night.

For me, anger had tremendous value for me.

And I couldn't fool myself about the value of that anymore.

I couldn't fool myself about the value of greed or lust or whatever.

So I had to get down to exact causes and conditions.

So...

I'm sure you're all inventory gurus.

I think I told you all about how I'd like just get caught up and write in inventory all the time,

turn into a little navel gazer, and I was told that I needed to open up for business

that I needed to get out of inventory.

And that was good advice.

And I like it that they talk about...

From resentment alone stems all form of spiritual disease.

So it's the big daddy, the mother load resentment is for us.

When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.

And not only has that happened with me, but I've seen that happen profoundly with other alcoholics.

People that were really physically ill.

And getting rid of resentment, changing them physically.

Right.

where those illnesses departed.

Some amazing stuff.

For those of you that know Camille Frey, she's got an amazing story in terms of she had so much resentment and it had built up in her back.

And she had gotten to the point where they told her, you're never going to walk again and you're going to be on narcotics for the rest of your life.

And she submitted herself to this process and got resentment free.

And the woman walks around today without a cane, and she's not on narcotics.

So I also have noticed that when I am not in the floor of life, when I'm trying to run my life, manage my life,

when I'm just head and barrel on into life, and I'm not consciously aware or present with anything.

Actually aware or present with anything, I get sick a lot.

It shows up physically for me.

And I've seen people with just, you know, a lot of different illnesses

that have gotten better once they got rid of resentment.

A couple of the women I sponsor were very ill physically.

One of them had really bad.

She's been diagnosed with chronic fatigue.

She was in a nasty depression because of it, her thyroid,

I mean all kinds of stuff, and they started doing tests

after tests after test, everything was fine,

but she was still, like, exhausted all of the time

and not okay physically, and had gone on disability with work,

And she was at the end of a really negative relationship in her life,

and she had been holding on to that pretty tight and not letting that go.

And it just gotten all funky and all wound up in herself.

And she submitted herself to that, and she started to get better.

And it was after the doctor's telling her,

we've done everything we can for you now.

We don't know why you're still sick.

We've done everything we can.

So I know that there really is, you know, mind, body, spirit.

They really are connected.

They really do have an impact on each other.

So from resentment alone, stem all forms of spiritual disease.

And my spiritual disease can take a lot of different forms.

You know, it can be depression, can be anxiety.

My antisocial behavior...

A lot of stuff, where I don't want to get out of bed, where I don't want to answer the phone,

where I'm starting to isolate, that kind of stuff.

So we make a list of people, institutions, or principles with whom we're angry.

We ask ourselves why we're angry.

Now, when I was told to write out why, it had to be eight words or less.

Okay.

I did not like that direction because I had a story to tell.

And of course, my story, I wanted you to understand every nuance of the story

because you needed to see how these other people were wrong

and I wanted you to be on my side.

And I needed to tell you the whole story.

And that was just ixnade.

You know, I wanted to write a novel.

And...

And even when I went to go read it that first time, it was like, I don't want to hear all that.

What's the resentment?

I don't need to hear all this other superfluous stuff.

Just get to the point.

What's the resentment?

And that just like made me sad.

So eight words or less.

That was the direction I was given.

It was good for me.

And how it was pointed out to me is, you know, on the other page with the cause,

that those are some pretty serious resentments there.

And I was told, I'm sure, that the circumstances around those core resentment

was all pretty dramatic and there was lots of details to tell,

but they got to the core resentment.

You didn't have to tell the whole story.

What's the point here?

What are you angry about?

Okay.

Sometimes I needed to write some, though, just to find out what my core resentment was because it was just a mess up here.

So sometimes I'd get another piece of paper and just kind of write it out to try to figure out what is my core resentment here.

You know, and then I had to go in and start writing about what parts of self were affected,

or seven parts of self.

You know, and I was, you know, asked to write out the extended third column about how these different parts of self were affected.

And I was also asked to look at in that third column, were there any fears there?

Like...

self-esteem, I'm not enough.

You know, well, is that a fear?

Are you afraid you're not enough and you never will be?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes, that is a fear.

So to look at that third column and see if there were any fears there too.

And if there was, I just put a little bracket there to remind myself when I got into fourth column.

And then I just followed, I was instructed on how to follow the directions here.

And it was right on, it was perfect for me.

I am always convinced you are more long than me when I'm going into inventory.

You are always more long, always.

I have just a minuscule little part in that, if anything.

Okay.

You know, and I wanted to be something sweet and cute, like, oh, I'm just withholding forgiveness.

What a crock-a-poo, you know?

And sometimes that's true and that's valid, but I can't hang my hat on that.

And that's what I try to do sometimes, be cute, you know.

But, and this was my experience.

The usual outcome was that people continue to wrong me, and I stayed sore.

Yeah.

So, on my own, you're always more wrong than me.

I need God's help in order to see where I'm wrong.

I called Don up one time when I was reading some inventory.

Got the fourth column, I said, Don, this is my part.

He goes, really?

Where does that say that in the big book?

I get out my big book, I'm convinced that it's in there

because that's what I've heard in meetings.

My part, my part, my part, my part, my part.

And so I said, it's in there.

So I get it out and I start looking, it's not in there.

And he goes, Valerie, as long as you have a part, then that means they still have a part.

And this is about disregarding the other person involved entirely.

It's no longer about them.

And there were some resentments that I hadn't gotten free of, and it's because I was still saying my part.

I did not disregard the other person involved entirely.

To me, I was still holding on.

What was going on with me?

I said I was still holding on to how they had wronged me,

or how I perceived they had wronged me.

And that same woman kept showing up on my inventory

over and over and over again.

I was tired of her.

And I was tired of writing about her.

And Don was great for his little zinger.

He's like, if I resent you, then you own me, and I hate being owned by, or I don't want to be owned by the people who piss me off.

And he was great with those little one-liners.

That's very true.

And I definitely didn't want to be owned by that woman, because she definitely pissed me off.

And I'm better than her anyway.

So I started to get free once I was given that prayer and just that shift of disregarding the other person involved entirely

and asking God to help me to get to that place because I just could not travel there on my own.

And some amazing things started happening to me when I started writing fourth column.

I started experiencing tremendous amounts of forgiveness in places towards people that I was never, ever,

going to forgive ever ever um and started to experience some compassion towards others some compassion

uh and understanding with my own weakness that as much as i am capable of um i have no right to judge

anybody else because god knows look at what i do and i started to see that and experience that it

wasn't up here i started to experience it um

And it helped me when I went out to make amends,

because I saw clearly that it wasn't about them anymore.

Where have I been wrong?

And I got to see stuff.

I remember this one time I had to write inventory,

and one of the things that came out of there on my faults

when I was writing out where I was wrong,

and I got selfish, dishonest, self-seeing, afraid,

and I had to write out where was I to blame,

and what were my faults?

So when I wrote out false, one of the words that came to me was sanctimonious.

I didn't know what that word meant.

I had to go look it up.

That word did not come from me.

And what it means is spiritual arrogance.

And that's exactly what was going on.

Spiritual arrogance, I was sanctimonious.

So the spirit definitely gets involved in this and has brought things to me that I didn't see about myself.

Even in talking to other alcoholics or talking to my sponsor,

I don't always get clearer on what God's can show me about me.

There is something more and greater than human power,

even the best sponsor in the world.

There's something greater than the best sponsor in the world.

So getting in tune with that and asking for that