The topic of "God and recover spiritually, the application of consistency" at the Nosara Big Book Workshop in Nosara Playa Guiones, Costa Rica

Good morning, everybody.

Is everybody going on the zip line? No,

I can't wait for that. You know, recovery, recovery, spirituality. I kind of like that topic. For the longest time I really thought not drinking was my solution to being an alcoholic. I I thought that certainly that was important. And if I, if I went about the practice is not drinking, I would start to put the years together

like some of the old timers that some of the groups that I was going to and

my life would fall into place because I was sober for a longer period of time. I really did believe that things would get better in my life the longer I stayed away from a drink. It seemed like that's what people were talking about. It seemed like when people were picking up their coins, they were talking about how much better it has gotten and it's because they don't drink anymore.

You know what I later started to to realize is just because I put down the drink didn't mean my my life was falling into place.

There were a lot of things that were still going wrong. I was, I still had really bad relationship issues with even if it was friends, but but with family, my family still looked at me like like, you know, I was a time bomb ready to go off. For a long time, my ex-wife didn't really feel comfortable sending my daughter for her

the visits every couple of times a year.

It didn't seem like my employment was getting any better. I was, I was a bad electrician and a bad electrical contracting firm and

it, you know that that wasn't real fulfilling to me. Um,

but you know, I want, I want to go backwards in time a little bit to the mid 1970s. There was a period of time I, I came out of the gate just a grievously crazed alcoholic. I,

I, I, I, I wasn't as, as alcoholic as I later became, but I had the allergy of the body from the get go. So whenever I drank, problems would happen. And I got in a lot of trouble in the early 70s. But by around 1976 or so, I'd had a DUI. I'd had some some realization that I needed to get my life together a little bit.

I the high school parties were becoming fewer and further between.

There weren't as many people to do crazy things with anymore. It seemed like people were getting on with their lives. They were going off to college. Some of them were taking full time jobs, some of them were getting married. And, and, and I saw my peers growing up around me and I wasn't doing that. I was still looking for the high school party.

So so I had some realizations after a DUIADUI really was not not something that I wanted back in in 19. I think it was 1974, I got my first one

and when I got my license back, I kind of made a deal with myself that I was going to calm down. And what I started to do is I started to go on the marijuana maintenance program. Does anyone know about that? I I still had periods of time where I got way drunk. That was, that was irregularity, but I was trying to control

the damaging effects of my drinking with, you know, just being stoned. And during that period of time,

for whatever reason, I started to feel drawn toward spirituality. And this is still in the middle of my, my drinking. I, I started to be drawn toward it. I, there was some rock bands that showed signs of spiritual progress. Like I, I really like the rock band yes. And if you started to read their lyrics, you know they, they certainly were about

about spiritual concepts and about spiritual growth. And I started, I was always a reader,

so I started to buy a lot of books. And a lot of these books had to do with spirituality. They were bizarre spirituality. But you know, like, like the Carlos Castaneda stuff, I got involved in that, the Suzuki stuff, the Zen stuff. I, I just started buying these books on, on spirituality and looking, you know, looking back in hindsight, I was being drawn toward

filling a hole that I had

within me. And you know, some of some of the recovery people that I've paid a lot of attention to believe that, you know, we have a God shaped hole and we try to fill it with alcohol and we try to fill it with drugs and we try to fill it with sex and we try to fill it with food and we try to fill it with money because there's something very, very seriously incomplete within us. We know that there's something more important than something better out there,

and I wasn't the type of person to run off and find a teacher in the 1970s. I was going to do this myself. So I was reading these books and these books would give me a little bit of comfort.

When you, when you read spiritual books, they can, they can warm your soul a little bit,

but they're not necessarily transformative because without the practical application of spirituality, you, it's an empty exercise. You can, but you can become incredibly conversant in spiritual concepts you have little experience with. And, and, and that's what that's what basically happened to me.

I on the on the outside it, it looked like I was trying to become a spiritual person. And I remember, I remember the woman that I was with at that time, it was,

I ended up marrying her. And she was convinced because of my talk and the books I was reading that things, things were going to get better. Because look what, look at what Chris is involved with. Look at what he's reading. You know, he's, he's, he's reading the course in Miracles. He's, he's, he's studied, he's studying GI Gurujif, you know, and, and all these, all these deep intellectual thinkers.

But the fact of the matter was I was alcoholic

and I was an untreated alcoholic

playing games with spirituality because it was bringing me

a little bit of comfort.

But I was, I was so chronically alcoholic that the alcoholism overcame any of that spiritual stuff fairly quickly. So that that three-year, three or four year period of time when, when I was on my quest

got eroded by active alcoholism and, and, and I, you know, I was no longer reading those books. I was reading science fiction, you know, and, and things that were, you know, taking me further away from myself. I

being in myself was becoming more and more uncomfortable, but the fact of the matter is, is that I recognized even early on, even before I progressed, that there was some type of a spiritual answer. I just didn't have the wherewithal to access it. I

Fast forward about 10 years,

my life blows up. I end up in Alcoholics Anonymous and

at first I was under the impression that I I needed to just remain sober and things would things would get better. But I truly believe, I truly believe that the alcoholic is an extreme example of someone who has a vacancy

within themselves that needs to be filled with something of the spirit. It, it needs to be. Now I was also, I was also kind of an, kind of a, a bizarrely untrained intellectual, You know, I, I, I read a lot of books, I studied of a lot of science and I believe the lot in the human potential too at that time. I believe that

if you were going to grow,

you were going to do it by works, you were going to do it under your own power, you were going to do it by achievements.

So there was a lot of confusion in my, in my life. You know, I, I get sober

and,

and I'm going through a lot of step meetings

around our area. At that time, there were step meetings, speaker meetings and discussion meetings. The big book meetings were few and far between and rather bizarre. So I was going to about, in my meeting mix, I was going to about four step meetings a week. And you know, looking back, I probably went through the 12, the, the step book, the 12:00 and 12:00. I probably went through that book

a couple of 100 times in my first five years, just going to all these meetings because in the meetings you would read the entire step. And in those steps is kind of a vision of spirituality, a vision of appropriate behavior, of kind of a, a blueprint for, you know, moving forward in this sober life.

And I was, I was viewing all this stuff intellectually, but I wasn't capable of change.

I, you know, I,

you learn so much, you know, in hindsight, you know what your problems are after they've been solved, oftentimes in in recovery. And now I, I understand what my problem was. I was trying to learn my way recover

and I did it through additional books and the big book, it says, you know, there are great books out there as some priest ministers or rabbis. I didn't do that part. You know, I went off on my own and, and I started up again my, my quest for spiritual momentum by going to the bookstore by, by, by, you know, finding catalogs by, you know, a lot of times in those early days, people were passing around books.

Emmet Fox was passed around a lot. The road less traveled was passed around a lot. And and reading those books again gives 1A sense of temporary comfort.

Yet the the needed change usually doesn't come on its own.

I needed looking back. I needed to remove the obstacles in my path that were separating me from the practical application of spirituality.

In other words, I had to go back to spirituality 101. I was reading all the advanced textbooks, you know, because we're, we're like that. We, you know, don't give us the, don't give us the rudimentary stuff, but we're way past that, you know, give us the graduate level stuff. So, so I I reintroduced myself to a whole crapload of spiritual books.

There was a period of time in 2002 where I had to move out of a very large house.

And in this house, I had a whole bedroom that was a library. And not only not only was every wall filled floor to ceiling with bookshelves filled with books, but I had about 90 boxes of books in the basement that wouldn't even fit on the shelves. You know, listen, obsessive compulsive behavior isn't just with drugs and alcohol. You know, it was like, wow, if a spiritual book is good,

4000 must be better. So, I mean, I had this incredible library of stuff and I even read some of them,

you know, so, so I was, I was back at this. But what, what I needed, what I needed, and I needed it very, very desperately was exposure to a teacher. I needed a teacher. Because what teachers will do is that they can recognize the prerequisites that you've missed. They can be your academic spiritual advisors and they can point you back to lessons that you've learned

that are sabotaging your spiritual growth or your intellectual growth at present.

And I ended up with, I ended up with a couple of couple of teachers.

One of them was a man named Happy Grateful Ray.

He unfortunately became so heavenly he became no earthly good. And he got drunk and I, I went on the 12 step call on that one about five years later. But he did expose me to some stuff. But where I really learned, where I really learned the basics, and without the basics,

you're not going to get very far, was from from the big book teachers, from the recovery teachers.

My first real teacher, the person who cleared away enough of the stuff in front of me so that I could really start to grow spiritually, was Joe Hawke, originally with the Salvation Army talks. And later, you know, I had the wonderful opportunity of working with him personally.

He understood that the intellect is not necessarily the way to spiritual growth. It's more in, it's more in the application of spiritual principles than it is in your deep understanding.

And I had to go back to square one and I had to go back to the steps. I had to go back into the steps like I'd never gone into them before.

You know, I remember, I remember one of the first serious exercises he gave me was a first step exercises

and I really thought I was beyond this, you know, Now come on, I know I'm an alcoholic. Let's get to the good stuff.

But he kept me in step one exercises for about 6 months, which is kind of bizarre. I mean, he had me he had me doing these these exercises and then I had to meditate and then I had to go back and redo him. And then I had to do more meditation. And there was a lot of there was a lot of Zen and Joe. And what I mean by that is a really good

Zen master will never let you ever think that you've got it.

As soon as you think you've got it,

what you're doing is you're closing the door on really getting it.

So I would I remember I would call him up and I'd say Joe man and exercise. You know, I thought you were such a horses ass giving me that exercise with me. And now that I've done it, let me tell you, Oh man, it was unbelievable. I now now I understand. Now I understand. And he'd say, no, you don't and you've got it completely wrong. And I'd be like, oh,

some of the, some of the lessons that I learned from this was

again, it was about these exercises, it was about this journey, it was about continuance, persistence and continuance with these, these practices.

I make no mistake. If you're alcoholic, alcohol is not your problem. Alcoholism is your problem. And if you're out, if, if you have alcoholism, applied spirituality is your solution.

There is no other solution that I've ever seen. And I've been around a lot of professional treatment people and I've been, I'm not saying AA, applied AA principles is the only way. I'm saying applied spirituality is the only way,

and applied spirituality is much different than intellectual spirituality.

I had to do these things.

I had to do the 4th step. In the 5th step, I had to do the immense. I had to go out and make the amends. I had to go back. And that probably, you know, different people have different parts of the step process that challenge them more than others, I think. I think the immense part challenge to me more than anything, and it was because of the sense of self that I was hanging on to.

Like Marsha talked about before, I was so attached to what I thought

you thought about men. Nothing would humiliate me more than to think that I looked small in your eyes.

I would I would tell my story at a meeting of 30 people and and 29 and shake my hand and say, great story, Chris. That was one of the best stories I've ever heard. And one person would go, you sounded a little bit pompous.

And I would go home like, Oh my God, I'm pompous. You know, that's, that's an unhealthy attachment to an ego and a sense of self.

Now for for me to be able to get past that, I had to do a whole lot of spiritual work. I did, I had to do, you know, there's, there's a saying in AA, we don't care what your opinion is. We care what your feet are doing

and that's really, really true. I believe with those that are alcoholic.

Your opinion, although it may be interesting at four days sober,

is not as important as where your shoes are taking you. You know, are you going to a meeting? Are are you? Are you actually actually participating

in this recovery process now?

Now the spiritual teacher, and I've had many, but the spiritual teacher that was the most impactful on my life again was Joe Joe

was a man of extreme in many, many ways. And when it came time for him to put into application spirituality, he went further than anyone I've I've ever known in a Ed.

He spent a year studying with an Indian shaman, Don Koyas, in Denver, You know, doing the sweat lodges and you know all that stuff. Spent five years with him under his tutelage. Spent another five years with a Zen master in California. Spent another five years with with Thomas Merton, not Thomas Martin, Thomas Keating, one of Thomas Merton's.

Protegees and then five years under the principle tutor of the Dalai Lama in Dhamsala India.

This guy took it to extremes you know and and what he had in the very very beginning was a marvelous structure of spiritual mechanics that he never let go of. He he never got too far in the door. You know that great that great poem I stand by the door. John ever went too far in to to be able to to reach back out and help those who were who were not as far along on the

death and a lot of the application of these spiritual teachings, he was able to able to apply them to recovery because listen, 12 step recovery philosophy is spirituality 101. The lessons that you learn in 12 Step Recovery philosophy are applicable in every spiritual discipline in Christianity, in Judaism,

if you're, if you're studying Hinduism

or Tibetan Buddhism or Zen Buddhism, you're going to say, jeez, that's step six or something like that. I mean, I mean, the, the wonderful miracle I see of Bill Wilson at 3 1/2 years sober, having his head far enough out of his ass to put together these basic spiritual principles in the 12 steps still, still is remarkable to me.

I don't know how you would be, if I would have written a book at 3 1/2 years sober. It would have been a pile of crap, You know, So he was at the right place at the right time with the right people. And he took his job very, very seriously. And there was a lot of input, you know, the 1st 100 or so, you know, there was a lot of input and a lot of suggestions. And it was kind of an open,

open system until, you know, hit the final revisions.

And I see that as our prerequisite. What a prerequisite is, is before you move on, you need to take this class. And I think as Alcoholics, there is room to broaden and deepen our spiritual growth in 100 forms of practice and devotion. There really is. But if we skip the prerequisites

of surrender, of identifying that

of our own unaided, will, you know, our lives are not going to be successful, You know, on our self will. If we skip that, if we skip the honesty that comes from doing a fourth and a fifth step. And and that that that confessional aspect of of four and five about what are what are, you know, just just how much sand our feet really are, you know, how much, how much clay we're really standing on.

If we skip six and seven, where we recognize that our character defects are much larger than us and we need a power greater than us to move past these character defects. If we skip making things right

for the harms that we've caused. If we skip learning, prayer and meditation as a discipline, a discipline. If we skip the the the attitude of compassion and service that the 12 step really points us toward. If we skip those lessons

as an alcoholic, our spiritual life is going to be empty. It's going to have periods of time where on the outside we can look very, very spiritual indeed. But on the inside, we're, we're going to be hollow and we're going to be,

you know, an empty gong as as as the Apostle Paul says, you know, a the clanging of a symbol, you know, that really means nothing.

So, you know, spiritual growth has become probably the most, the most important part of my life.

Now there's some other lessons that I learned. I, I learned this lesson, especially from Mark Houston, is he would approach a spiritual book as a textbook. I can't say that I'm there yet. I, I, I like to read these books and I like to apply certain pieces of them. But he would, what he would do is he would work with one book

and try to gather as much of the application of that book as possible and put it into practice. And I know some of the books that that he used. And you could see, I think, in no other person I ever met or knew, you could see the power

in Mark Houston. This whole thing, this whole recovery process, I believe is about freedom. And I believe it's about power. It's about exposing ourselves

to the actual power of God and allowing, allowing ourselves to be accessible to the power of God moving in and through us and doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And you can see this power, you can see this power in in certain people who have done the application of these principles in their lives. They're not necessarily the smartest people,

they're not necessarily the coolest people, but they're the people who have done the most application of these principles. And you can, you can cut the power coming out of them with a knife. And I think we've all met and been exposed to people like that. They, they can do things that are absolutely remarkable and they usually take no personal credit for it because they know where the power comes from. They know it is not

power. Every once in a while I'm reading this great book now called After the Ecstasy, The Laundry. And what this book talks about is it talks about

as an innate need in the human condition. We desire enlightenment. It it's a it's a, it's an instinctual Dr. that I believe God instilled on us, in us so that we we instinctively try to head in the right direction. Now, there's a lot of things that screw this up, money, power, sex, There's a lot of things that screw up this driving us. But I believe it's been implanted in US to grow spiritually. That's why we

that vacancy sometimes with that God shaped hole.

There are a lot of things that mess this up and there are a lot of people who start the spiritual path and go wrong.

In this book it talks about some of the spiritual masters who've really screwed up big time. It usually involves sex and power and money and they abuse the God-given power. The power does not come from the human condition, it comes from God.

And then once they get this power, they, they, they become drunk with it

and they can, you know, once you have this spiritual power, it's a lot easier to seduce. It's a lot easier to gather money and it's a lot easier to gain a crew of people that will do for you. And there is, there's a lot of abuse and there's a lot of stories about people who have gone wrong

and the disasters that follow. And I believe those are great lessons because they remind one once again

that this is not our power. On a daily basis. We need to do the things that we need to do to keep the ego in check.

There's an age-old battle. You can go back in, in, in the, the, you can go back thousands and thousands of years. The 1st, the, the earliest literature that we find, you know, Homer's Odyssey. I mean stuff that was written thousands and thousands of years ago.

A lot of times it's it's stories about a hero and how he had to overcome these temptations and how he had to to try to do the next right thing even though it was not easy.

And it talks about this, this, this duality, this

conflict that we have in our mind between the spirit and the ego or the good and the evil or the devil and the God. I mean, you will read about this over the course of written literature. It's not something that's new.

What we need to know as Alcoholics is we can't lose this battle

because if we lose it,

the thing that keeps us safe and protected from alcoholic death is a solid spiritual condition. And the normal man out there walking up and down the road who, who maybe goes to church on Sunday, or maybe he's practicing in an ashram or, you know, maybe, maybe he has his own own, you know, different types of spiritual worship. They can survive screwing it up.

As Alcoholics, we pay the ultimate price for failure to adhere

to these spiritual principles, the spiritual principles that Bill makes very, very clear in Spirituality 101, which is the book Alcoholics Anonymous.

So that's an additional warning to us as Alcoholics. When the ego is left unchecked in an alcoholic, the ego goes to the bar, the ego goes to the cop Man

's

and there's usually not a great outcome.

Umm, alcoholism and drug addiction. If you look at it purely scientific from outside of the recovery fellowships, it's a very, very bleak landscape.

Statistically, many, many more than most of us die of this.

There's a half life to crack addicts that's extraordinarily short. There's a longer half-life to Alcoholics, but it's not very long.

Insurance companies understand that if we've had professional treatment for these things, we're not a great risk for life insurance. Looking at it objectively from outside, you can see that more than most of us die.

And what I see is the is the the minority that escape this fate are ones that embrace a spiritual path. They find the right way. And again, you don't have to be smart to find the right way, you just have to be persistent. And having a good guide helps

in Alcoholics Anonymous in the in the 12 step world,

I make it a suggestion to people whenever I'm doing treatment commitments to be very, very discerning when you find a sponsor and do a little bit of qualification. Even though it may feel real uncomfortable to be interviewing a prospective sponsor.

There are many, many people out there who have not grown past

tertiary spirituality in Alcoholics Anonymous. There there are a lot of people that you could ask to be your sponsor who do not have real experience with the 12 steps. I know I did it myself. My my first sponsor who God love them, kept me sober enough to find recovery and find the a correct path towards spirituality early on. He shouldn't have even been in a a OK. He was a speed freak who got arrested,

went to a A to keep from going to jail and found a social click. It worked for him. You know, he liked crazy people. So he he became a meeting maker and he even had a very serious service ethic. He liked, he liked to do things for people because it made him feel good. But he wasn't an alcoholic. I was a critically, chronically, you know, really in trouble alcoholic. And I went to him and he gave me at least what he could.

He wasn't trying to hurt me, and he didn't even know. He wasn't giving me the right stuff. You know, how do you know what you don't know? But what he did do was he gave me enough for sobriety to at least last long enough for me to find teachers who could teach me about spirituality and about alcoholism.

So finding the right guide, finding the right teacher is important. You know, every single person that spoke here today, they've got serious ass sponsors and teachers. And it's not necessarily the people in their Home group, although sometimes it is. Sometimes it's people many, many states away because they take this, they take,

they take placing themselves under the care and direction of a spiritual guide very, very seriously.

And they want the best possible guidance that they can get. And that is very, very important to me also because this is not a game. If somewhere along the line I become drunk with the power that's not mine anyway. I need to be accountable to somebody. Somebody needs to have the spiritual consent to kick me in the ass and say, Chris,

your ego is running wild. You, you know,

you need to slip, you need to slow down, you need to, you know, we need to talk. I need somebody that will do that. And it's that's a life and death job for somebody. You know,

I to continue to grow spiritually. You have to find people who are ahead of you on the path. A lot of times that's the right way to go. You need to find people who are a little bit further down the road

and, and who can, who can continue to keep giving you the guidance that's going to continue

to help you to grow in understanding and effectiveness, to continue to participate in the maintenance of your spiritual condition. And that's a very, that's a very, very important part of, of our lives.

Now, spirituality, if all it was was a treatment for my alcoholism, I would do it anyway. But the great news about spirituality is it offers you literally hundreds of remarkable, incredible promises in your life. Your life starts to grow so large that it's almost unbelievable when I think what has been accomplished with me

in the last five years.

Me, the guy who could, who could screw up a guitar lesson. I mean, listen, this is this is me. Prior to applying some of the spiritual principles, I wanted to be a Boy Scout. Join the Boy Scouts one-on-one camping trip.

Wanted to learn the guitar, Went and took one guitar lesson and stole the guitar.

Decided to join the wrestling team. Did one practice, quit, decided to go to college. Spent spend 3 1/2 years getting 6 credits. You know, I mean this is this is this is me. So I am telling you, the things that have happened in my life come as a direct result of the power

that flows in and through me. It's, it's not my power.

It's not, it's not necessarily reflective of the work that I'm doing. The work that I'm doing empties the vessel so that it can be filled with the power. And you know, I, I again, I said this, it's dangerous to think that it's your power, but some of the things that have been accomplished in my life in the last last five years are, are bizarrely,

you know, incredible. I got a chance to do an XM and a serious at serious Sirius satellite radio show

just by accident. I mean, I got interviewed on this on this radio show and the woman that owned owned that particular station said, Hey, would you like to be the host from now on? I really liked what you said. So I said sure. I mean, I know, you know, I didn't know anything about being a host of a radio show,

especially a satellite show that went everywhere and had 70 affiliates from Calcutta through London to San Francisco.

And because

because I was awake to

opportunity and because there was a lack of self-centered fear in my life because of that sense of guidance, that intuitive sense of guidance that I that I was awake to. I just said yes. I didn't say, I didn't say to myself I'm going to suck at this and I can't not, you know, I'm afraid I just said yes because

it was an awesome opportunity. It was a show where you interviewed different people from 12 step fellowships and

I, you know, I was just a host. I wasn't a member of any fellowship or anything. I, I, I anonymously interviewed people from different 12 step fellowships. I will say this, the strangest and scariest 12 step fellowship, the people that I, I interviewed with sex and love Addicts anonymous. Okay, my buddy Dave and I are saying, hey, there's two chicks coming from sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. That should be interesting. By the end of the show we were changing our name and telling them we lived in a different state.

We were scared

a relapse for them was multiple restraining orders. You know, they were stalking some bitches and, and you know, but anyway, I, I had a great time doing that. You know, I went, I went from, I went from that to I actually hosted a TV show.

A music TV show for a short period of time as a cable show. I went from that to being asked by a big recovery organization, a multi $1,000,000 recovery foundation to to put together a web platform and a web broadcasting an interview addiction treatment professionals for the sole purpose of highlighting the best practices out there in addiction treatment. And, and for 2 1/2 years, I did that and I flew all over the planet interviewing some really, really interesting

people. You know,

where is it? Where does that come a bad electrician? Where, where does that come from? You know,

somewhere along the way, because I started to become halfway dependable in my life, I went from being a bad electrician to getting into facility services. And about a year and a half ago, I was offered the job to, to take over an account for a pharmaceutical company running their facility department. Now being a facility director is, is, is a high level job at these places because you're in charge of all the processes that keep them

being able to manufacture these life saving drugs. I mean, I mean, if I screw up the, the assembly line stop, you know, it's, it's a big, it's a big responsibility. And in the last year, I, I've been able to increase the scope of that job four times. I went from a $2,000,000 baseline to a $10 million baseline in a year.

I became, out of 19 accounts, I became the number one facility manager in the country for the I was number one in customer satisfaction and number 2IN in in financial performance. And I'm an idiot. You know what I mean? What, like I, I can't go, I can't go to motor vehicle to get my license back without being drunk.

You know, I, I did that one time I'm getting my license back for 1/3 DWI and I went there just as drunk as could be.

That was a really bad move. You know, I, I was never dependable at anything. You have to be dependable to be able to do jobs like this.

I get invited to places like this.

I have I have a group of friends

who have all come to me. Almost all of them have come to me,

I through the application of recovery principles in one way or another, whether they're my sponsees or whether they're just fellowship brothers, fellowship sisters. And my biggest problem today is the amount of time I have in the day

because I have so much opportunity and so many people that I, you know, I want to connect with a deeper levels that I don't have time to do. You know, that's my biggest problem today, that I don't have enough time to do the great things that that are in front of me.

You know, these friendships are these, these are people that would take a bullet for me. I always wanted friendships like that, but Green Man and Weezer just hung around until the coke was gone.

You know, always wanted those types of friendships. I think we're a tribal people instinctually and we need to be tribal. We need to have our crew and and today, today I have that and I can, I can call on people, not that I need people that often because if you successfully or even somewhat successfully

apply spiritual principles in your life, you know, you tend to not get in too many jackpots. So

things tend to run pretty smooth in your life. But I've got a crew of people that I can really, really count on

some of the great promises in the book that I see overlooked all the time. Certainly the 10 step promises are great promises. They're promises that were. That's about, those are the freedom promises. We're free.

We do not need to be meeting dependent. If we've recovered, we will be going back to meetings because that's the place where there are people to help. We're not going to be going back to meetings to fill up like it's a spiritual gas pump. You know, like I had a real hard day at work today. I'm going to double up on my meetings tonight. If you're doing that, you are going in the opposite direction that you should be going in.

You'll be going to meetings for the right reasons instead of the selfish reasons.

Umm,

it will become an innate ethic to carry the message to other people. It will become instinctual and that you would you will have an inner need to carry the message to to other people and that will come as a byproduct of recovery. You shouldn't need to be encouraged to go to beginners meetings or sponsor people. That will become

automatic

and that is a great, that is a great benefit. You look at any of the truly, truly happy people and they have some type of a compassionate, charitable nature. They're doing something for somebody. A great, a great example is this is one of my spotsies who who you know, who certainly surpassed the teacher. You know, some students surpass the teacher. This guy was one of them.

He was actually running the Bazooka Bubblegum company, the Topps company. And you remember Pokémon cards, that was him. Push Pops, that was him. Baseball cards, Topps cards, Bazooka Bubble, Bubble Gum, that that was him. He was running that company. And when he started working with me, for whatever reason, he just became absolutely 100% willing to do everything that was asked of him. That's rare, unfortunately. But this guy just said tell me what to do. And he took it like it was

a college, you know, assignment and he wanted to get an A and he just went out and did it. And he went from making half $1,000,000 a year to helping his company downsize and downsize him out. And right now he's running a soup kitchen because he volunteered at it for five years. They loved him so much. They said would you run our soup kitchen for 20,000 a year or whatever? And he said I would be honored

that on the outside looks like

looks like a downward trajectory in your employment line. It is anything but in the skies. Life he went. He went from being very successful and inwardly empty

to being more full than probably anyone I know with his spiritual practices. He's a go to guy. If there are newcomers, there's nobody better than this guy because he has the compassion to sit with these knuckleheads

hour after hour after hour and just listened and just keep handing them exercises and encouraging to do step work. And now he has a gigantic crew in North Jersey who are running around sponsoring people. You know,

to see this fellowship that we crave grow up about us is amazing. It's amazing. And the way to create a fellowship is to carry the message to Alcoholics in the way the book Alcoholics Anonymous asks us to. Now you have a crew. You know, Peter, you know what having a crew is like. You can call these guys anytime and say, hey, I need you in Florida. And they would be there. You know, having this fellowship that you crave, grew up about you

is absolutely amazing. The best years of our lives are ahead of us.

In the 80s, when I was drinking, I was reflecting on how fun it was at the high school parties. You know, you'd get drunk out of your mind and they, you know, they're, they're the music could be on and, and there'd be a fight and a car crash and you'd be inappropriate with the women and they'd be okay with it, you know, and everything was just wonderful. At least that's what I thought. And as the years went by, I reflected, I lived in the past. I reflected back on these great years that

had and wondered where it had all gone and where it had gone wrong. One great promise is the best years of our life are ahead of us.

Some of the things that happened through the application of spiritual principles is

Peter talked about this also being trapped in the past and having anxiety of the future.

They talked about living in the now, living in the now, be here now, living in the now. I didn't know what they were talking about in early sobriety because I hadn't done any of the things that you need to do to be able to clean yourself up enough so that you can be present to this holy instant.