The 9th Fellowship of the Spirit NY in Queens, NY

Good morning everybody. My name is Chris. I am an alcoholic.

It's good to see everybody this morning.

Our plan, as Peter and I discussed it just a little while ago, was to start off and finish up step one and see where we get moved over the next couple of hours.

I'm thinking maybe we'll get up to to step 3:00 this morning or four, maybe more. Anyway, I want to talk about something that I think is very, very important for a concept that's very, very important for spiritual growth,

for being open to the experience of recovery.

Peter talked about the laicide prayer or the set aside prayer yesterday. That's a very, very important concept. Other spiritual traditions have different ways of saying the same thing. Beginner's mind. Beginner's mind is.

I heard a great Catholic modern day theologian talk about that.

Basically what it is is it's it's allowing yourself to be open to new concepts and new ideas. One of the things that the alcoholic battles more than probably normal people is the ego

or the self. And what I mean by that is

when I came into AAI already had preconceived notions about a lot of things that I didn't know anything about.

When I saw the steps on the wall and I read them, I really thought that I understood what they were all about by being able to read the shade with the steps on the wall. When I was here, when I heard people sharing, I had prejudices, you know, basically I, I, I had preconceived ideas about what they were talking about and, and how the world worked and what things meant.

And the more I held on to those old ideas,

the, the, the longer I had really no growth. Because the spiritual life is,

is not a theory. It's actually, it's actually harmed sometimes by theories. I had a lot of theories about a lot of things and they really were wrong. The spiritual life is about being open to direction, to being open to action, behavior modificational

processes that we get exposed to through our sponsors and through our spiritual advisors and through

elders in AAA with a lot of recovery experience. And you know, you can see it so, so much, so many times. I think I'm preaching to the choir at these things because so often the big book conferences are attended by people who have a lot of experience with the big book. You know, sometimes it's a shame that you don't get people at these things or more people at these things who, who have never opened a big book, But that's kind of not the way it is. But, but anyway, I think we've all seen the people who respond to sobriety and recovery

well are the people who do what they're told to do. And you see them changing very, very quickly. You see them recovering very, very quickly

now in a in a workshop like this, in a conference like this, it's good to have an open mind. Now, I'm not saying that you should believe everything I say up here. I would much rather have you take what I say into consideration

and consider it against your own personal experience, against the the things that the things that you've seen happen

to yourself and to people around you and Alcoholics Anonymous. But to be open to consideration is to have an open mind. So as we move through this weekend, try to do that. You know, I think we're all familiar with the set aside prayer. Try to say that to yourself a little bit before each session, just to be open

to some of the concepts that you hear about today. Last night I I talked a bit about step one, about the powerlessness where it concerns alcohol and me.

I have a mind that will bring me back to drinking if there isn't it. It talks in this book about having a psychic change. It talks about in this book having a spiritual awakening,

a personality change sufficient to recover from alcoholism. All these things are very, very large changes in my perception and in how how I perceive reality and how I think about things, how I interact with things,

my relationship with things. All of that has to be changed. And yet you hear somebody say no major changes in the first year.

I really don't know. I really don't know where that came from. I'm sure it came from like well meaning professionals out there who were trying to trying to help us out, you know, because we're thinking too much. But the fact of the matter is, is there better be significant change in our lives. There better be a huge emotional rearrangement in our thought processes and how we perceive and interact with the world. There needs to be.

So how is that going to happen? It's not going to happen by sitting around.

It's going to happen by actually taking a lot of a lot of exercises, a lot of the spiritual exercise, a lot of the, the proposals that they give us, the suggestions that they give us, the musts that they give us in this book. And if we, if we experience these things,

the greatest promise of all is if we work for these things, these things will happen to us. If we take the action, we will get the result. It really is a promise, no matter how different we think we are. And

no, you know, no matter how special we all think we are, we've got our own special problems. Doesn't that? A lot of times that does not matter. Most of the times that does not matter.

You take the action, you get the result, which is a very, very good thing. Now in step one, I've got a mind that's going to bring me back to alcohol. Without that significant perceptual change, I'm going to be drinking again. That's not good news. I have to come to terms with that. I have to. I have to find some level of acceptance with that for me to have sufficient motivation to move through the rest of this stuff.

I don't know about anybody else, but by the time my drinking was at its worst toward the end, the last year or so of my drinking,

I was pretty lazy about a lot of things. I mean, it took all of my effort to drink. Really. It really did. I'll tell you what I'm going to cover. I'm going to cover a typical day in the life of Chris. OK, let's say it's a Wednesday morning. The alarm goes off in the morning and I struggle up. I have to be at work at 8:00. I set the alarm for 7:30 because it take, it takes a while for me to do my vomiting calisthenics. You know what I mean?

So I struggle. I struggle out of bed and I'm in the clothes that I wore the night before just reeking that the vodka or the bourbon's coming out of my pores. You know what I mean? Have you ever been like that? You know, they, they sniff you when you get into work.

Anyway, I struggle up and I, you know, I brush my teeth, I comb my hair and I put my glasses on where I would get out in the car and I drive to work and I am ill, you know, You know how ill you were back in those days. I am ill. A normal person would be in the emergency room feeling half as bad, you know, I mean, but I'm Wamu, I work, I got a job. I mean, it's like the last thing I'm holding on to. I've lost my family, my self respect, you know,

but I still have a job.

I'm a bad electrician for an alcoholic boss. That's the best I was doing at that time. Anyway, I'd get to work. I'd get to work, you know, and I and I was so sick, I would swear that I've got to stop this. I've got to quit drinking today. Today is going to be the day I am. I am not going to drink when I get off of work today. I'm going to go home. I'm going to get a night sleep. I'm going to try to feel better. And you know, today I won't or tomorrow I won't have to feel like this. You know, I'm, I'm going to quit. I'm going to quit.

And you know what, if you would have put a lie detector on me, I would have passed it because I meant it. I mean, I was thinking from a place of sanity being that I'll, you know, I was, I was, I would have passed it. Yes, Chris is telling the truth. He is going to drink. He's he's going to not drink, you know, and but here's what would happen. Sometime around noon, I'd get enough water in me or, or whatever,

I'd rehydrate, I'd get like half a sandwich down and I'd start to become, to feel, feel a little bit human

and it'd be maybe 2:00. I get off at 4. I'd start to think, you know, that decision I made about the, the permanency of not drinking, you know, ever again, ever. I might have to modify that position a little. You know, that's that might be an overreaction to to this issue and matter of fact, I might have to modify it on a way home today.

I think I'll stop and I'll buy a quart of vodka. Now I've got to tell you when I thought I'm going to stop today to get a court of vodka. That's an insane thought. I'm not thinking that thought

from a sane state of mind. I sponsor an individual who here's what he was doing. He he alcohol is alcoholism. It got his attention so much that he had signed himself in and he's driving off to a rehab local rehab in in New Jersey and he made himself the road drink. You know how you do this is going to be the last drink I ever have. And he made himself this giant vodka and and orange juice, a screwdriver and put it between his legs and started driving for the rehab.

Now you know, this is this is absolutely tragic. But what happens is he's on this road heading up to the rehab and a nurse who just started her job, first day on the job is leaving the rehab coming this way. He's coming this way. He crosses the double yellow, he hits her head on and he kills her. Okay, I mean, horrible. Now his lawyer talks him into pleading insanity.

Now, I don't know if anybody in here's ever pled insanity. It's like,

it's absolutely true that you're insane, but you're not going to be able to prove it. But here's what here's what I learned about an insanity defense because I went to court with this guy. I, you know, my, my, my suggestion to him really was you should probably just plead this out. I mean, but he listened to his lawyer and here's what it was.

They found him guilty and here's here's why they found him guilty because he buckled up for safety and he had decided to go in to rehab. He'd made the decision that his drinking was bad and he'd made the decision to buckle up. So they did not feel that he was insane.

To be insane, you have to not know the truth from the false. You don't. You have to not know good from bad. You can't, you can't compute any of that stuff. It it, it's not real for you. And they got him because it looked like he knew what he was doing by going to rehab and buckling his seat belt

now

in alcoholism. Truly,

when I decided to buy that, or when I decided to buy that court of vodka on the way home from work, I was, I, I wasn't really there for that decision. My, my ego or myself wants me to believe that. But I, I truly believe that being powerless is just that. Not having the power to choose whether or not I stop at a liquor store.

And a lot of the things I used to hear in AI just don't drink no matter what. I never, I never could understand that because my experience went against deciding. I had decided a lot of times not to drink and yet I ended up drunk there. There had to be a, a deeper answer.

I want to talk a little bit about after the dash that our lives had become unmanageable. Now I knew about unmanageability in life because I'd had 3D Wis, you know, I'd had my family leave. I, I had, you know, crazy things were constantly happening to me. You know, I was a blackout drinker. Every single night I was in a blackout and I, I would turn, I was Jekyll and Hyde. I would turn really nasty

and I would travel and you know, you just, it's not a good combination being in a blackout out there amongst other people. And so I understood what they meant or thought I understood what they meant about unmanageability. When I saw it on the wall, I thought, OK, my life is unmanageable because I drink. That's what I thought. Soon as I stopped drinking, my life is going to return to manageability.

I didn't really think back far enough to realize I was never manageable. Life was never manageable for me. I always had problems with life.

I want to give you a brief idea of where I believe

unmanageability began for me or the one of the first manifestations of unmanageability I'm being. I'm being told that kindergarten starts today. My mother tells me I'm about yay high. Hadn't gotten out much, you know, was hanging around with the same woman most of the time, you know, didn't have a lot of experience out there on my own.

And, you know, OK. So I get in the car. We drive across town to kindergarten. I remember she pulls up on top of there's like a hill and then there's a, a slope and then there's the classroom down below. And she opens up the door. She goes, there it is. See you later. And I remember standing up on the hill looking down and all these kids are playing, They're playing kickball and they're playing tag. You know, they got there a little earlier and they're having a bless. It looks like they've been friends forever.

And all of a sudden a wave of self-centered fear came over me. I thought, I'm not going to be able to do this. What if they don't like me? You know, what if I do something stupid and they ostracize me? I didn't say that, but you get, you get the picture, You know, I mean, I'm like, you know, this is this isn't good, you know, and

I got to tell you what would have worked for me and it probably wouldn't have. Nobody else in the class would have needed it, probably, but would have worked for me.

Would be 1/2 a pint of whiskey right then and there. OK, the half pint of whiskey ought to bend the kindergarten kid. OK, I'd have gone down there. I'd integrate it in.

I would have bonded with my peers. Everything would have been fine. Nap time would have even gone a lot better. Yeah, never could sleep on those mats anyway.

Anyway, the problem was they weren't serving 5 year olds at that time,

you know, we weren't like progressive like Europe or something, you know, so I had no tools from first grade to like 8th grade. I had to do it sober. It was horrible. OK, I was always just acting as if Peter was talking about this last night. How are you doing? OK, I'm OK. You know, you can't say, well, I've got all these all these self-centered fear and I've got all kinds of problems with my and I thumbs kind of suicidal. I don't think I could go open everything. I'm

scared. How are you doing? You know, you can't say that. So you got to say I'm OK, everything's fine. So I'm acting as if. And then I come into AA and somebody comes up and tells me, you know how you get sober, Chris, You act as if. I've been acting as if my whole life. That's the problem. I'm acting as if. I want to. I want to be if you know I want to act as if

so. So anyway,

when I first started drinking, when I first started drinking, the first thing that happened when I put alcohol in my body is that scared kindergartner disappeared. OK, they talk about they talk about this. Let me find the part here. All right. Page 52. It was referred to. It was referred to a little bit last night. Let me let me read it here. We were having trouble with our personal relationships. We couldn't control our emotional natures. We were pray to misery,

depression, we couldn't make a living. We had a feeling of uselessness. We were full of fear. We were unhappy. We couldn't seem to be of real help to other people. All right, That was my basic spiritual condition

from kindergarten on, You know what I mean? And alcohol, alcohol seemed to treat this internal condition. Now, here's the thing. I don't think alcohol treats those internal conditions in normal people. If normal people have those conditions, alcohol does something for me that it doesn't do for other people. So I get caught up in alcohol. I use it as a tool. I use it as a soap, social

lubricant. I use it for dancing lessons, you know, because I could never get out there and dance without half a load on. I mean, I used it for all kinds of things and I became addicted to it. It became an obsession of the mind for me. Somewhere along the line, it went from preoccupation to obsession. I don't know where I crossed that line. It could have been the first drink. It could have been 10 years into my drink. And I don't know, because by the time I

tried this, quit drinking, I had, I'd gone over that line and I couldn't, I couldn't turn back. I couldn't wish myself away from alcohol.

Now

that covers the problem with me, my own personal experience. That covers my problem. My life is a living hell. I can't not drink, and when I drink I get blithering, tongue chewing drunk. Not really a good prognosis, you know what I mean?

I was like, I was like a blue collar drunk that you didn't want living anywhere near in your neighborhood. I would do crazy things.

This one time the neighbors called the police on us because we had

a loud party. We weren't watching the clock. Sorry. We had a loud party and the cops came and I was very resentful. I was in a drunken blackout. I took my roommate's shotgun and I blew that neighbor's satellite dish off their roof after the cops had left and I started yelling at their house. You want to call the cops now? You want to call the cops now? They didn't. You know something about a crazy man with a shotgun, you know?

Tends to tends to give you caution,

but I mean, all this just completely unmanageable. Like now I'm in trouble, OK, I'm in trouble. My drinking is finally at A at a point where I really think I'm losing my mind. You put enough alcohol in your body, you're going to get to a point where you're just, you start to just lose

your mind. And that's where I was. And I just, I just knew after that last drunk Christmas 89, I just knew that if I didn't separate from alcohol, I was going to die. If I if I was going to die, you know, so be it. But I had a daughter. I had some things that I just didn't want to go out in disgrace, and

I went back to Alcoholics Anonymous another time. Now in Step 2,

came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. There's so much good information on the first couple of steps in this book.

If it's a if it's a concept that we need to really, really believe and really

internalize,

this book will tell it to us at least three times in three different ways. And it talks. It talks in this book about the power must come from a power greater than ourselves. It cannot. We can't just figure out how to be stronger. You know, why don't you just hitch up your bootstraps and, you know, why do you drink the way you do? Why don't you just, you know, grow up? I mean, nothing really works for us. That's that's why alcohol

ISM really is really is a bad a bad diagnosis.

So it talks about in this book that we need to access a power greater than ourselves

for us to be restored to sanity. And I don't think it's talking about

the type of sanity. I think it's talking about is the insane decision

to put alcohol back in our body or drugs back in our body. That insane decision.

I need to be restored. I need to be in a place where I'm safe and protected from alcohol. If I can't do it myself, a power greater than myself needs to do it. Needs to, needs to become active in my life, needs to manifest through me, to me, whatever.

I don't think any of us have a really firm understanding of this process as we move into it. And that's why we're asked to have some faith that this works.

One of the things that helps that helped me was there were so many sober people and Alcoholics Anonymous and I did start to believe that they did drink like me. So maybe there would be some hope, but but in step two, we need to come to terms with a power greater than ourselves. Now, personally, I had a little bit of difficulty with this because

I don't know about anybody else, but I had some prejudices about religious people as a whole.

Anybody else have any prejudices against any of those religious people? Oh, yeah. I lived in Florida for a while where they'd knock on your door about 7:00 Sunday morning and want to come in and read to you. You know, are you nuts? I just got to bed

and

the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker thing was going on while I was getting sober and the

Jimmy Schwager was caught in the Texas Motel. You know, he was the guy who told me I was a Sinner every Sunday morning and they caught him at the motel with the hooker.

And these are God's frontline. You know, I'm

take a pass on this. I'm going to study Buddhism or something. Man, I, this, this is a, this is the most hypocritical stuff I've ever seen. So, so I had a lot of prejudices about this. Now it begs us to lay aside prejudice as we start to move through this process. It begs us to lay aside pressure because these prejudices can kill us. I'll give you, I'll give you a For instance,

if the first day I walked into Alcoholics Anonymous,

they said to me,

the only Chris, the only thing that's going to help you is a fundamental relationship with God the Almighty. That's the only thing that's going to help you.

You need to find God right this second. I would have turned around and walked out. I would have said thank you for the information. This is not going to work for me because I would have known it's not going to work for me. I would have been wrong, but I would have known, you know, So they were kind of sneakier when I came into a A about the higher power thing. But the fact of the matter is, is that's the truth.

That's the truth. I need to have an experience with God

to be able to recover from alcoholism. That's that's the solution.

So how do I do that? You know, how do I do it? Well, the first thing is I need to believe or have some kind of faith that this actually is the process that I'm going to need to engage in. And in Step 2, I kind of look around and I kind of see other people who who have done it and have recovered says in the step book, some of us took this piece meal. You know, the hoop that we have to jump through is larger than we think.

So there's a lot of, a lot of warnings in there that we can and we can even,

we can even develop our own concept of God, which is a great freedom, you know, an alcoholic synonymous. We do not tell you what type of God you need to believe in. We just tell you if you don't believe in God, you're going to die,

but we don't tell you what type of God you need to believe in. That needs to be a personal experience

that you need to have for yourself. I believe that there's two sins in Alcoholics Anonymous that you can be guilty of

being a being predatorial and trying to have a sexual relationship with somebody before they've been exposed to any type of recovery, you know, grabbing the newcomer and the other one is

trying to shove your concept of God down somebody else's throat. Those are two, those are two sins that I believe you can. And a sin is just basically, you know, a, a mistake.

It's a big mistake. But I had to come to, I had to come through this

over a course of time with a lot of information and a lot of prayer and a lot of meditation for me to come up with my concept and a lot of books. I'm burdened with a mind, you know, I mean, I, I've, I've got to think everything I've always got to know. And, you know, it's,

I've got to read more about and I have a study of more about it. I wish, I wish I had a simpler mind, you know, but I don't. So, so I've probably read 3 or 400 books on concepts of God, you know, to come to the point where where I've got a, I've got a very, very strong one myself. I will tell you the concept that I used to have that I had to abandon.

I believed that there was, like Bill Wilson said, a czar of the heavens,

an older man with a white beard sitting up on a cloud next to Saint Peter with his book out, writing down everything that Chris was doing wrong. So when judgment Day comes, I would have to stand in front of him and he'd go, oh, you know, stole the milk from Missus Mcgillicuddy, OK. And go through this long laundry list of all the things that I had done wrong and then send me down the purgatory or hell,

you know, I'm like, I, that wasn't really happening with me. I, you know, I abandoned that

concept fairly quickly because it just didn't resonate with me. I just, I just couldn't picture, I I just couldn't buy that concept. So it had to be abandoned and, and a more,

a more advanced concept of God had to start to develop.

A lot of us find that we're drawn back to church. A lot of us find that we're not, you know, Doctor Bob was drawn back to church and you could find him in the same Pew every single, every single Sunday. Bill, he was kind of a seeker. He sought instruction in different religious traditions, yet he never was a joiner. He never really joined up. He stayed stayed more spiritual.

I don't know that I don't think that it really makes a difference. I think that it's a personal a personal thing that we each have to go through. But the beginner's mind, the open mind, the lay aside prayer, the set aside prayer, the the being open to new concepts is is vital, is vital to this. Just don't ever say no, never will I even think about these kind of things. You know, to hang on to atheism is is reducing your chances of survival.

Alcoholism, unfortunately

now.

Umm, OK, let's say that

I've had fully conceded my innermost self that I'm alcoholic. And I understand because I've been exposed to this book, what that means.

I've come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. What would be the obvious next step I'd need to make a decision to seek that power greater than myself. If there is a power greater than than myself that can restore me to sanity, it's not working now. So what do I need to do to get it to work? There's a wonderful line in the in the 12 and 12. It basically says God will not render us white as snow without our cooperation.

Now we can't just pray, Oh, God, heal me. And that's it. With alcoholism, there's a participation that's necessary. So what? How then do I participate in my own recovery? What exactly do I need to do? Step three is basically making a decision to engage in that recovery process, making a decision

to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.

My many years in AAI think I've I've been through the steps at least eight times.

I I've approached this step in a different way. Today I'll tell you how I approach this step today. I know that making the third step decision is making a decision to go through the rest of the steps I need. If I'm not ready to go through the rest of the steps, I need to understand in step three that I'm going to have to do the prayer work necessary

to gather the enthusiasm necessary to make it through the steps. So when I, when I say that third step prayer, I'm basically saying I commit. I'm making a commitment to do everything I can. I'm going to be asking for your help, but I'm going to do everything I can

to get through the rest of these steps. And I believe also when I make that, that third step commitment,

I'm committing to improving my relationship with God, to improving my communication with God, to improving my meditative practices, to improving the things that I need the, to making the commitment for my participation in the practices that lead me to a more deep and effective relationship

with God. I think we've all seen people that are very holy, very spiritual people. They're they're almost bulletproof emotionally. They seem to be always happy, even in the middle of calamity and tragedy in their lives. They seem to have a, an unbreakable serenity. That's not something that just happens. That's something that happens over many years of spiritual discipline, I believe.

And when I'm saying the third step, I really am making a commitment to this. It's not, it's not just,

it's not just a prayer. I'll say in the morning and then move on with the day. It needs the the third step prayer is an affirmation of a decision that I've already come to,

and that decision does not come easily to me.

Again, I need to connect the third step with the first step and the second step

because it has to come out of, I'm not saying it has to come, but with, with my experience, it's come out of desperation.

If I'm desperate to survive alcoholism, sometimes I'm going to be a little bit a little bit more pliable as far as what what I'm going to be doing with my spiritual practices.

Now

in our book, there's there's a flow. The narrative basically has a flow, and it talks after the third step prayer that this decision really isn't going to have a lot of meaning unless it's followed at once

by a vigorous course of action at once. What is? What is at once mean? Does it mean, you know, I'll get to it when I'm on vacation next month and I got some spare time? It really means at once.

I've read a lot about the early days of a A. There was a couple of times. There's some great stuff on that table over there. There's a couple of times when some of those magazine articles came out that are over there on that table that that

doubled or tripled or even more the membership of Alcoholics Anonymous in a very short period of time. So you had a handful of old timers with a couple of years sober and all of a sudden you had a gazillion newcomers coming in. And I've read about the processes where they would take someone through the steps and then say, OK, now take him through the steps within a matter of days, OK, the person that still have a hangover and he'd be taking somebody through the steps.

Now, I'm not suggesting this is the way we should do it. We should have the newcomers all take everybody through the steps. I think that, you know,

cooler heads could prevail there, but but this book, this book allows for that type of thing. Somewhere, somewhere in our fellowship, we concluded that you needed to have a year to sponsor somebody or you needed to have a year to get into a relationship. Like, like on day 356,

there's going to be this transformation and you're going to be able to handle all this stuff. My personal experience is I had, I had just as just as much problems with relationships at 3356 as I did at 355. I'll tell you that, you know, I wasn't all of a sudden healed.

So where where a lot of these concept concepts came from, as I think they came from well meaning people in, in treatment facilities that had to have something to say to you, you know, some kind of advice to charge you for, you know, and a lot of times it's, it's bad, it's bad, it's bad advice. So, so anyway, I get a lot of crap in my area because the guys that I sponsor, the guys that I take through the work are sponsoring people in a couple of months

and people are like, what is what is Chris doing? This guy's a wild cat. This guy's out of control. But I've got to tell you here, here's the truth in the matter. I get somebody who's relapsed. He's been in a a quite a while. He's tried it in all kinds of different meetings and he gets thrown at me. I get him over to my house, we get to the steps. He actually

does a written moral inventory. He actually

shares that inventory. He actually does an 8 step list. He actually goes out and make amends. He's actually praying and meditating if he's working with me,

and within two months the guy's a new guy. He's on fire. A lot of times God is speaking through him. You know what it's like when you've just gone through the work. You're on fire. What better person to have working with newcomers than somebody that's on fire?

So,

so making this decision leads us into an immediate course of action. We launch into a course of action. There's some great, there's some great pages in here. I'm not going to read them, but there's some great pages in here about the actor who wants to be the director.

I give this exercise to the guys that I work with and here's what the exercise is. I ask them to take this, take these pages is about 5 or 6 pages and share those pages with some people that really know them very, very well and have those people highlight the areas that are actually true in their lives. Do you actually step on the toes of fellows and they retaliate? And

what, what, what this exercise I believe is good for is when I first read it, the actor who wants to be the director, I thought,

I, I get this, I get this. That's my roommate. You know, I, I wasn't able to fully, fully invest myself in it as far as this is, this is the way I operate out there. Again, the ego and the self. Very very difficult. Difficult to overcome.

But the fact of the matter is, I am the actor who wants to run the show. I've got a small bit part on this planet yet. I want to tell my family what they need to do and should do. I want to tell my coworkers what they need to do and should do. I want to tell my boss how he should be running his business. I want to tell the police why they're wrong arresting me. I have got the play in my head

and you guys aren't doing your parts right.

You aren't playing your parts right now. This is a beautiful manifestation of ego or self.

Peter said it best last night. Ego herself needs, needs to be, needs to be killed,

needs to be killed because we can't remain the actor who wants to run the show. We can't remain that and be and have any kind of happiness in life, have any kind of effective relationships with other people, be successful on any level because we're just, we're just going to jump in and stop, stop the scene. Wait, wait. You know you're not doing it right.

And it even talks in there about sometimes we'll be, we'll be demanding,

you know, we'll, we'll try to pressure people into doing what we want them to do. Sometimes we'll be nice. Sometimes we'll buy them flowers

and try to get them to do it, do what we want them to do that way. But we want people to, to obey.

And this is, this is one of the big problems with the alcoholic operational processes. And they give us a lot of this information right after, right after how it works. And then they move into

an inventory

covering resentments.

I've worked with several people who didn't have any resentments. You ever sit down and work with somebody who doesn't have any resentment? I don't have any resentment. You know why they're saying I don't have any resentments? They're really saying I don't want to make amends to anybody. That's what they're saying.

I resented practically everything that wasn't going my way. Remember, I'm the actor who wants to run the whole show and none of you are playing your parts right, so I'm resentful.

We need to inventory that

people, institutions, principals with whom we were angry. If it's the first inventory, it's very clear with whom we were angry.

Past tense. I would add present tense on there too.

That can be a long list. I just got an e-mail from somebody who has over 320 resentments and they're working with me. You know what that means? That means an awful long fist step. Oh boy. But I believe it. I believe it. That's not aberrant. You know that that's probably accurate. That's probably who somebody who's really been taking some time with this, with this list,

who did I resent? That's kind of easy.

Why did I resent them? That's kind of easy too. They did this and they did that. I was taught a long time ago, be very, very specific in column number two. You don't need to lie in column #2 and you can't be general in column number because they're a jerk. No, that's not really a good enough column to, you know, you need to be a little bit more specific. What exactly did they do? Because what I've found going through this resentment inventory, people I resent sometimes by the end of the inventory, I'm not resentful

more because I've seen that it's a lie. I've seen that there it, I had AI had a misjudge to perception about this particular resentment or this particular person. So sometimes, I don't know, 30% of my resentments disappear by the time I've inventoried them. The rest of them need the further action. But in column #3 it asks us to talk about what is affected in our lives. How has this resentment

or this perceived wrong to us affected our lives? Why is it that we're resentful?

And I've learned that unless,

unless I'm threatened, unless I'm harmed, unless my instincts or ambitions, my instincts I would I would define as the things that I have and want to want, not interfered with or hurt, harmed and ambition. So those are the things that I want to get, the things that are out there that I don't want anybody interfering with my ability to get. Unless my instincts are

ambitions are harmed, threatened or interfered with,

I'm not going to have a resentment.

So a lot of times how I perceive these things being harm, threatened or interfered with is a mistake in perception. And I'll get through, I'll get through column #3 and realize that that that I was wrong. I was I saw this whole thing wrong. And that's a bit of freedom. You know this. The steps are about freedom about the recovery process is about freedom from alcohol, freedom from self,

freedom from ego, freedom from self-destructive

thought systems, behavior systems.

Anyway, I then, then I believe there's a line of demarcation between column three and column #4 it takes a, takes a bit of shift in perception between those, those columns. And there's some prayer work that needs to be done. There's

our book is pretty clear on, on the, the prayers we need to say for, for the people or institutions or principles. And then it asks us what is our part? Where have we been selfish? Where have we been dishonest,

Where have we been self seeking and where have we been frightened? Those four categories can encompass everything. They just can. They can encompass everything. What was my part in this? What have I done?