The Fellowship of the Spirit in Bayside, Queens, NY

I'm an alcoholic. I want to thank you guys for showing up here this morning. A couple things,

you know, last night we talked a lot about the first step. We talked a lot about a need for applying spiritual principles to our life. You know, and it's really important that as an alcoholic, I understand who I am and why I'm here because when the stuff that we're going to talk about today, it's not easy stuff. They're not easy concepts. The spirituality that that this book describes is some of the most profound spiritual spirituality I have ever encountered. I've read

a plethora of spiritual books and

a tons of spirit of writers and a lot of philosophy and, and it's amazing to me how many or how, how much the concepts that are in this book

are proliferated in almost all spiritual literature that I have read, you know, because I'm a seeker. I mean, I think that I think that part of the broadening and deepening, deepening our relationship with God, our spiritual experience is about seeking, seeking truth for ourselves, you know, and trying to

be open to what the universe has to offer us, You know, and last night, you know, it's funny because I tend to have, I tend to be shocking when I talk and there's a, there's a reason for it. One thing because it's funny and I'm a smart ass, but two, because I'll take an absurd concept and I'll take an absurd concept and I want it to be something that makes you stop and say, wow. I mean, the typical stuff that we hear in the rooms all the time, You know, the, the

softer, gentler, more

commonplace statements. I mean, a lot of times they wash over my head. They have for years now. And then when somebody says something that challenges me and I say, you know, is that my experience or do I believe that, you know, sometimes I need to be hit in the head with a 2 by 4 instead of a feather duster? And one of the things that I do with the people that I sponsor and especially after a relapse is I actually read how it works with them. How many times has have you guys read? You know, 58 and 59.

We read it all the time in meetings. How many times have you really listened to what it says?

And it's one of those things that I tend to do with the people I work with because I mean it literally. You know, we say, OK, we state the problem, we have a problem statement. We say that there's a solution, a spiritual experience, right? We say that there's clear cut directions for that spiritual experience in this book. And then we have a chapter called How It Works. And we start this chapter with spiritual concepts before we even put pen to paper

because the truth is, is that what's going to happen now from when we leave aside the drink problem and we agnostics, it says we leave aside the drink problem and we ask ourselves why we're making a rough going in life, right? My job is not necessarily to look at my relationship with alcohol, but to look at my relationship with the universe from this point on, my relationship with you, my relationship with myself, my relationship with God, my relationship with all that is around me, because the 12 steps are about relationships there. And I don't, and I, when I

relationships, I mean that dynamic interaction between myself and other people, things, concepts, you know, principles. So I want to start off and talk a little bit about this because I mean, I think Chris and I as as this day goes on, we're going to be talking about some pretty lofty spiritual things. And we're talking about ideals, you know, like anyone else. I mean, there we, this book presents some really lofty spiritual ideas, some beautiful concepts, some beautiful principles. What are the spiritual

principles of Alcoholics Anonymous? What are the 36 right? The steps, the traditions, and the concepts each are extrapolations of one another. The 12 steps are about personal recovery. The traditions are about a unity and the concepts are that structure that put put it all together and create

the atmosphere for the personal recovery. Without anyone of those things, it's like a Russian nesting doll. Without any one of those things, it doesn't work. So when we talk about these things and what we're talking about in terms of spiritual life, spiritual concepts, and we're talking about ideals, well, there's an understanding that none of us is going to be able to do this perfectly all the time. I am not.

I am not, you know, a Zen, you know, master by any shape or form. I am a human being

and I fall short all the time. But there are spiritual concepts, principles, ideas that are troops with a capital T for me that have been presented to me. And when I mean truth with a capital team, I mean an objective truth that have been presented to me through the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Things that I concepts that I base my life and my worldview on, everything that I experience, everything that I do, everything that I believe is based on these fixed points

and what I experience in my life kind of revolves around these fixed points or concepts.

So we'll start off with reading how it works and taking it into consideration for a minute. You guys know what the consideration method is

consideration method, if you don't is when we when you take ideas or concepts, you know, big book, other spiritual literature and you sit with it and you ask yourself, what does this mean to me? Now as an alcoholic, I'm a people pleaser and I also don't ever like to look bad ever, ever, ever, ever, never, never, never like to look bad. So I have to know the answer for everything. And I had to sponsor who used to say to me, you, you would give me spiritual direction. I would be like, I know and he would say,

will you stop saying you know? Because if you knew, you wouldn't be asking me this asinine question.

Instead say OK, because the ego wants to say I know, I know, I know, no, I don't fucking know. Because if I knew I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have broken my toy and then showed up to my sponsor and said please fix this because I broke it. So for me, rather than saying I know, I say OK or is this true? First question is, is this true? And then if it's true, then OK,

so let's sit with this really quick. And of course,

I hate reading aloud. Mind you, I'm dyslexic, so I'm going to do the best that I can. But we're on page 58 and says how it works. How does this program work? How does the spiritual principles, the application of this, the recovery from the alcoholic affliction work? Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.

When I've fallen short, When I relapsed, when I failed,

have I really thoroughly followed the path?

Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program.

Have I

big consideration? Have I given myself to this simple program? Usually men and women are constitutionally incapable of being honest with myself, with themselves. Have I truly been honest with myself or have I been? Have I been fooling myself about the values of certain behaviours, concepts or ideas?

There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way. They're naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living. Rich demands rigorous honesty. Does my manner of living demand rigorous honesty? Or do I white lie? Do I go? Do I project something onto the world? Do I project

a persona onto the world that I think people want to see so that I can have people like me, So I can have acceptance, so I can have approval, so that my ego can be validated deep down inside, knowing that I am not what I'm presenting to the outside world?

Do I do that? Do I lie by omission, by what I do? Or am I vulnerable, honest and humble? Not all the time, by the way,

right, Mike? Their chances are less than average. There are those two who suffer from grave emotional mental disorders, but many of them recover their capacity to be honest. And that's the thing. Do I have that capacity to be honest or do I write myself a check and say, well, you know, you know, I probably exhibit that behavior because of, you know, past trauma, PTSD and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I had a woman, I had a woman I sponsored for a long time and whenever I would sit and talk to her and she would like, well, I do that because of PTSD. And I said, well, where does your PTSD end and your alcoholism

begin? She got really quiet. I was like, well, how do you know that's not your alcoholism? You're putting a label on something. You're saying I exhibit this behavior because of this. Can you consider that you exhibit that behavior because you're human and that spiritual principles applied to any human problem probably could fix it?

She was like, whoa, because we categorize things in her head. You guys ever hear something called a categorical imperative

here? Read can't. OK, I'm a dork, I'm sorry. But basically what it says is that human beings have a mind that works in a way that needs to put things in categories that when we process information, what we do is we assimilate information and relate it to things that we already know, right? So for me, when I experience something, I'm going to take that experience and I'm going to process it and I'm going to say, well, that's related to this and this is related to that. And I'm essentially going to compartmentalize my experience.

And when I do that, what I'm doing is I'm having a fractured experience because I'm taking that experience and I'm breaking it up into pieces and I'm putting labels on it. And by doing that, I'm sort of playing God. Not sort of I am, but I'm also limiting my experience because I'm saying, well, this experience is related to this label and this experience is related to that label. You know, am IA mother, am IA wife, am IA daughter, am IA sister, am IA an employee, am IA supervisor, am IA student. I'm

sponsor, am IA sponsee, am IA friend, all of those things. So why do they have to be independent of one another?

Do I have to have a persona for each one of those relationships that I have? Or is there a carry that is a whole?

So when we think about it, when when I exhibit a behavior, when I'm doing something, am I putting a label on it and associating, saying, well, that's never going to get fixed?

Or am I open to the idea that all things can be improved by the application of spiritual principles? Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened and what we are like now. So when I go to an, a, a meeting and I'm sharing, am I telling 30 minutes of war story and 5 minutes of recovery? No, I tell what it was like so that so that the newcomer can identify. That's what we did last night.

I tell about what happened. I worked at 12 Steps.

What's it like now? I live on a spiritual basis, but what does that look like? Because it's one of the things to say I live in a spiritual basis. Great. What's that look like

for each one of us is a different, but it's one of those things talking about that, that transactional relationship that we have with our creator. Because that dynamic, that thing is kind of like talking about what goes on in your bedroom. It's very private, isn't it? And it's very hard to put words to and explain. So a lot of times for me, I avoid it because it's almost like I don't know how to describe. How do you describe that, that relationship. It's almost words, almost trivialize it, but on some level

I need to represent or explain what living on a spiritual basis looks like. Because for me, I would know what a spiritual principle was, I would know what I had to do, but I wouldn't know how to actually apply it. It's like the concept between the difference between basic and applied. You know, we do research for terms, just for research sake, and then we do research in terms of applied research

in real life situations. So when we talk about spiritual concepts, we're talking about it in terms of the philosophy,

but we also want to be able to talk about about what does that philosophical concept look like and how does that translate into real life action.

And the truth is, is that sometimes it almost doesn't look any different than not living on a spiritual basis, except for what goes on within us,

that somebody who's living on a spiritual basis and somebody who's not may almost appear to outward appearances, Go to work, shop, take care of the kids, you know, go bowling, do all of those things. But there. But there's that sense what that's within us that's also hard to describe when you have it,

that we would like to present to the world because that's the kind of unknowable variable that can be very frightening for a newcomer when we tell them, well, you know, you have to change everything about your life. You just gave up the very thing that was helping you like, you know, not kill yourself and others and live on a spiritual basis. Good luck with that kid. So part of it is talking about what that looks like. And even if you lack the language or that the concepts feel difficult because it's very intimate thing,

is this making sense to you?

So it says at some of these, oh, sorry. If you've decided you want what we have and are willing to go at any length to get it, you're ready to take certain steps. So here's a question. Do you do we want what they have? Do we want, do I want with the 1st 100 have am I willing to take? I'm willing to go to any lengths to get it. Chris was talking about having that conversation with the newcomer, sitting down, breaking down the first step and explaining the deadly nature of the disease and having them look at you blankly when you're like, well, did you want to work some steps?

I had that conversation last week and it literally woman was

less than 24 hours abstinent from alcohol, broke down the first step called in the troops. We had a like a round table first step intervention type, you know, experience with this woman broke down the first step in great detail. And then she looked at me. She said, well, I'll probably call somebody next week and start working on that. I said, well, you know, you just got shot, your gut shot. You walked into the emergency room and I'm totally robbing this from somebody. But it's a great analogy is it? You know, you got a gunshot,

walked into the emergency room and said, well, you know, I'm gonna wait till I almost bleed to death before I go to surgery. I'm gonna sit right here in the corner, wake me up when I'm almost dead and fix me, you know, And she just kind of looked at me blankly and I said, you haven't had it yet. You don't you haven't had the experience of what it means to be hopeless. That experience that Bill talked about in his story when he talks about the quicksand and the, you know, the bitter morasses of self pity, right? Alcohol was his master. If you

haven't experienced that, if you haven't experienced that in the deep inner recesses of you,

you're not going to have that willingness to go to any lengths for victory over alcoholism. Ida sponsor. He lived an hour from me. If I showed up five minutes late for a step appointment, he would tell me to go home. And the first two times that happened, I got really pissed. I'm like, dad, I was like, I was like, I have three kids. I live an hour away. There's freaking traffic. What the what's wrong with you?

And he said something very simply to me, said, well,

why won't you make this important? I'm like, why make it important? And driving nowhere down here, it takes 4 hours of my time. It's like, but it's not important enough to leave 5 minutes early when you know there's traffic.

What were you doing in that 5 minutes before you left?

Combing my hair, checking my makeup. So that's more important than, you know, not dying an alcoholic death.

Good point. I was never late again.

Now, it was this very simple thing, but it taught me a lesson. It made me ask myself, is you know my hair or you know that five, those two dishes that were in the sink that I absolutely had to do before I left the house more important than recovering from alcoholism. So the question is, am I willing to go to any lengths?

Am I willing to take? Am I ready to take certain steps as some of these we balked. Of course they suck, they're scary. Who wants to knock on the door of somebody you totally screwed over, pay back the money, and admit to things that you didn't get caught for?

No St. person wants to do that except for somebody who's dying an alcoholic death and wants to stop that process.

We thought we can find an easier, softer way, but we could not. That's a question, And here's another question. Are we trying to find the easier, softer way in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous? How many of us have made 89 percent or 98% of our events and left? Those last two that were just icky and didn't want to do it did mostly. Not all I did until I got yelled at. You know, actually what happened is I did until my sponsor told me I was not allowed to share in a meeting until I made every single amends on my list. And I'll tell you what,

when you don't get to share in a meeting and somebody's talking about like dark tunnel stuff and you want to scream and hit them with a big book and whatever. And you're sitting there and you can't say nothing because you didn't make your amends, makes you make your amends. But there's one of those things that that question is, you know, even even knowing that this is the solution to my problem, Do I sometimes take an easier, softer way? Do I skimp? You know, do I do inventory in my head and think my way through it and then hope that maybe I figure out the solution to that?

Because that works really well,

you know, So it says

with all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very thought, very start. And my fearless and thorough,

some of us have tried to hold on to her old ideas. The result was nil until we let go. Absolutely. So when we talked about last night, we said that our ideas didn't work and the God idea did. See again, big book, new homes, man. We've been reading this every day in every damn meeting that we have been to for the past, I don't know how many years. And then all of a sudden there's this, this, this sentence that says that I have to, I have to let go of all my old ideas, not the ones that are inconvenient, not the ones that are annoying, not the ones that aren't working, but everything let go. Absolutely.

I don't get to decide what my brain says. I don't get to decide what my, I don't get to dictate my own reality. Because the truth is, is that my life, my recovery, my spirit is none of my business. I'm not in the outcome business anymore. I don't get to decide what Carrie's recovery looks like because, you know, my recovery is, you know, smoking some bones, chilling out, having a beer, putting my feet up and thinking about God a little bit.

That's Carrie's plan of recovery, you know? So my best thinking sucks donkey balls. So my job is to put aside everything I think I know, let go of my old ideas and be open to new ones. Let go? Absolutely. Am I willing to do that?

Remember that we deal alcohol oh so bills. So smart, he said. Look, you got to give up all this stuff. Rigorously honest, commit yourself to this way of life, blah blah blah. Stop making excuses for yourself because even if you're totally bat shit, you could still get sober if you're honest. And by the way, if you don't, alcohol is cunning, baffling and powerful and will kick your ass. Good luck with that.

Which is easier, die in alcoholic death or live on a spiritual basis? Cost benefit analysis

and says but there weren't but this is the most beautiful statement in this book. It says but there is one. It was all power. That one is God. May you find him now.

One, it's a statement. Do I believe that? Is there a God who has all power?

And that I can find him now. And that's a direction. Find him now. That's the other beautiful thing. That's a consideration. Do I believe that that's true? Is it possible? And then it's a direction, It's a it's a directive. It's telling me go find this God now, now, now. Now. Not yesterday, not next week. Not when I feel like it. Not when my TV show is over. Not when Survived, the Survivors over, or when Big Brothers done now.

The time frame of the Big Book is always about the present moment. It doesn't give a crap about next week, and it doesn't give a crap about last year. It's about now.

So the work I did last year has absolutely nothing to do with the work that I'm doing today because what I did last year earned me that 24 hours last year. What is going to earn me the 24 hours for today? Applying those principles today,

half measures availed as nothing. Is that my experience when I half asked this stuff? What happens? I screw it up. My sponsor used to tell me all the time that my spirit, my ego writes a check. My spirit can't cash

says we stood at the turning point where is we asked his protection and care with complete abandoned. Now we've been reading this every day in meetings for years, but have we ever really sat and thought about all of this prepares us for our four step, our fifth step, our 6th step, our 7th step, our 8th step and nine step. All of this this statement right here how it works tells us you will not fail. Rarely will you fail if you thoroughly follow our path. It is time to commit. It is time to get.

It's time to start moving now.

So we talked a little bit about Step 3

and Chris went through the actor and he talked about selfishness and self centeredness as being the root of our troubles, Right. He says that we're driven, driven by 100 forms of fear of self delusion and self pity. We step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate seemingly without provocation. But at some time in the past, we made a decision based on self that placed us in a position to be hurt. Yeah. My sponsor made me read 60 to 64 every day

because for me,

I forget that I'm being the actor when I think I'm being virtuous.

I forget that because I'm being nice, I want something out of you. I'm not being nice for nice sake. I'm not being unselfish for unselfishness sake. I'm often doing those things because I expect a specific result, a certain reaction. If I don't get it, I'm annoyed and I think, well, I'm playing the game. I'm doing unselfish things. On the outside, my actions look unselfish, but my motivation and the inside is about getting getting for me, whether it's recognition, approval,

acceptance,

you know, and when I don't do that, when people don't agree with me,

then I'm hurt. Threatener interfered with. So my sponsor had me read 6063 the actor in the eye every day and ask myself, am I doing those things in my life? So great exercise. No, you don't have to do it every day for like a year, but try it, try it. Just try sitting in the morning before you do your morning meditation or after you do your morning meditation. Read these paragraphs in the eye. You know, the first requirement that I be convinced that life on self well is hardly a success. I'm almost always in collision with something or somebody

and then my motives are good.

You know, if only everybody would do as I wish. And I read it in the eye and I'm telling you it wakes me up to the things, the motivations or the the behaviours that I cloak in. Spiritual make believe. You ever hear that term spiritual make believe where we do things and we say that we're doing it for spiritual or unselfish reason. In reality, we're doing it to serve ourselves. How many people have tried to save another alcoholic through sponsorship? And in reality, your ego was engaged in that battle and not your spirit.

I'll save her. Nobody else has sobered her up. But the 17th time she went through the steps because I had this very special way of doing it. I'm the most effective sponsor ever. I will drag her out of the gates of death, right? Like I'm freaking God. And I got the magic answer. I got the magic bone and I'll hand it to her. All of a sudden she'll stop drinking, right, 'cause it has nothing to do with me. Sponsorship has nothing to do with me and everything to do with God. My job is to be His tool. Literally. That's it.

I transmit information. God does the rest of it. Well, my ego engages in that and I'm saving people and I'm fixing people and I'm here sounding good here and I'm here doing that and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that.

You know, I might think that I'm doing the right thing, but nine times out of 10, I'm really serving my ego to make myself feel important or special. My sponsor used to tell me all the time. He said, like he's like, only Alcoholics will try to be be somebody in a program full of nobodies. We're like the most reviled human beings on the face of the earth, right? You know, you have like pedophiles and like child killers and then you have like drug addicts and Alcoholics, right? Like, we're not the, you know, top run of, of society, right?

And we're a whole program full of people who are just fucked up. And we come here and I'm like, I'm going to run this joint. I'm going to be the king of the, you know, land of the broken fucking toys.

I'm the king boobie like Chris was talking about. I mean, like, seriously, we like,

I'm with my Home group. Just ain't doing it right. Bleeding Deacon, you know, So there. Yeah, exactly. So like, there's that thing. It's like only an alcoholic will want to rule all the other social rejects.

And of course, I know the right way to govern all of you people.

So there's that idea. And these are things that when I'm reading these pages, when I'm taking these concepts, when I'm looking at them, I want to take them and say, you know, where am I doing that? Do I do that with my kids? And I'll kind of wrap it up with this because I know Chris wants to talk a little bit. I have an 18 year old daughter. I actually tell him this story this morning. I have an 18 year old daughter. So last week I came home. Oh, no, I didn't come home. I'm sorry. Well, last week I was leaving for work and like she sleeps in a Christian. She just graduated from high school. So I knock on our door

and I open it and there's her boyfriend in her bed.

Yeah,

so mom does what mom does. So my mom, like you ever see like psycho mom,

like I had a Linda Blair. My head spun around, pea soup went everywhere. Something I said something along the lines, if you get fucking pregnant, I'm not raising your fucking child. Something along those lines

had a total, total conniption, right? So then I stomp out of the house. No pause, no God, no nothing. Just laugh.

So I called somebody up and I'm like, so how? How odd was that reaction? He's like, not,

not at all,

not at all. So she didn't come home for 24 hours. So she decided that she was going to punish me by disappearing for a day and wouldn't answer her phone. So 4:00 in the morning, I finally get a hold of her. I actually get her on Facebook. Like, you know, like she won't answer my text and my phone calls, but she answers my Facebook message. I love that,

you know, cuz she, you know, and, and, and so I'm having this conversation with her and all of a sudden this really rational person started coming out and I'm having this conversation. I said, OK, you're not, you're an adult. All right, let's, let's think about this. Let's think about the decisions you're making in your life. Let's think about, well, what are the possible consequences? What is it that you want out of life? What is this? What is that you want to be independent? What does that look like to you? And all of a sudden I start having this conversation about ideals

and what that looks like and who do you want to be with My 18 year old daughter who just less than 24 hours ago I walked in on her in a very compromising position with her boyfriend

at 8:00 in the morning before I had to go to work.

And I'm thinking to myself,

Oh my God, you know, this is not me at all. I have nothing to do with this conversation. Nothing. This is all God having this conversation for me because I'm too tired because it's four in the morning and I've been up all night waiting for my daughter,

you know, and she came home and my husband, her boyfriend and I sat down and and her had a nice conversation and

it's never gonna happen again. But the point was, is that sometimes that reaction that I had,

yeah, it was like a reaction. But they're not always bad too. And that's, that's one of the beautiful things that that that I saw. It was like sometimes when when you have that experience, even though, you know, you might be pulling your hair out and you may not be looking all that serene and all, you might look like a crazy person. Like I did. It scared the crap out of my daughter. And I made her reconsider the decision she's making in her life.

And then we got to have a rational conversation about it. And I made amends for losing my temper. And she looked at me and she was like, mom, I'm surprised you didn't beat the crap out of me. I was like, why don't I hit my kids, you know? But when she saw, like, my God, my nice mom just completely lost her mind at 8:00 in the morning. What happened here? But this is what we're talking about. This is what we're talking about. These things, living on this basis, making these decisions and doing these things and not always being perfect, but trying the best that we can to live to live up to these spiritual principles.

You know, I am not my I do not own myself nor my spirit. I am God's child. He,

he is my director, He is my father, and it is my duty to do his job, to do what he wants me to do. I made a deal with him in the third step prayer. What I said is I'm fucked up and broken. I cannot fix myself. I'm offering myself to you to fix me, to build with me, to do with me as you will. Meld me, put me back together in the way that you see fit so that I can be a vision of what

your grace is on this earth. Don't fix me for my comfort. Fix me

so that I can serve you. My life has a bit about my comfort. My entire my entire life, it's always been about me feeling better.

We lie to feel better. We rationalize to feel better. We tell ourselves stories about our behaviors to feel better.

You know, I put on makeup so I could be pretty, so that people couldn't like me, so I could feel better.

We do things all the time for comfort. Comfort is not always what we need.

For me, it's about challenging and learning to be uncomfortable and happy at the same time.

So when I ask God to relieve me of my difficulties, when I ask Him to relieve me of the bondage to self, when I ask Him to take those things away, I'm not asking Him to do those things so I can feel better. I'm asking Him to do those things so I can serve Him. Because serving myself has sucked up into this point and I have failed utterly at it.

You want to.

Good morning everybody.

You know, Kerry, Kerry got me thinking this morning about the challenge of, of children.

My, my wife and I have three children and five grandchildren. And, you know, the grandchildren are not a problem yet. We're, we're like, we're like in the midst of spoiling them And, you know, no, you know, figuring out how to do that adequately. But but the children, the children have been a two out of three of the children have been a challenge. You know, my, my, my daughter has, has a long way to go, I think,

to learn, to learn to take, you know, to make the right decisions, to make decisions that are, you know, pointing her in the right direction. And she's doing, she's doing much better this year than she has has in the past.

My, my wife's, my wife's son was, was another challenge. We, he, he comes over to our house about four months ago, nodding out and admitting that he's been on heroin for six years and he wants some help.

And, you know, you want to, you want to see a mother get concerned, you know what I mean? That happened very, very quickly. You know, lucky, lucky. And luckily enough, I had some experience in this, in this area and I had some resources that I could, you know, I could enlist. And I'd like to say now that, you know, he's, he's not only doing well, he's doing really, really well. And

I'm grateful for that. You know,

you know, a lot of times, a lot of times we want to have control over something like that. We want to say, OK, here's a problem and damn it, I'm going to fix it. When it has to do with somebody else and their addictive illness. And, you know, it's more to do with their relationship with God and, and where they are with, you know, their ability to perceive reality than it then it has to do with us trying to trying to shove it in in a certain direction. I work with a lot of

and so often families come to me after trying to put their children, you know, putting their children into rehab for like 20 times. I mean, it's like, you know, I can see the frustration. I can see their frustration. And, you know, you just don't hear until you can hear. And you just don't see until you can see. And a lot of times it's very, very difficult for us to, to, to be able to accept that when it's our kids. You know, it's OK when it's your kid, but you know, it's my kid. I'm going to make, I'm going to make

work. And, and, you know, it's, I think the, I think the best news is, is we, we have experience with recovery. If you're in this room, you're, you're probably part of the choir that we're preaching to. And, and that means that you've got some really good connections, some really good information and some really good experience. So it's, it's, that's very, very helpful to be able to point somebody in the right direction when they're ready is very, very, very helpful. I want to talk about, I want to talk about something

just before we get going on the 4th step here. And it's something that I learned in business. You know, Bill Wilson used business analogies all the time. He used, he used let's, we're going to take an inventory and it's, let's look at the business inventory. He, he was, he thought that way. And I think that's a good way to think. What I've been doing for the last 20 years or so is I've been a, I've been a facility manager and, and through basically no fault of my own, I've been promoted up

basically because I'm not shooting myself in the foot

every couple of months like I did when I was drinking. But today I'm a facility manager for a, for a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. I've, I've got like 100 employees and you know, all these contractors and literally $14 million budget. I mean, it's crazy that, that, that, that, that's me. You wouldn't have wanted me running your lemonade stand, you know, in the 80s, let alone giving me like $14 million to spend.

I'm serious. But but you know, I do, I do a fairly good job. But anyway, in this far picture of pharmaceutical manufacturing business, this is where they, they make the tablets for the life saving medications. Now they have, they have two things that are very, very important in those processes. They have best practices, which is basically you learn the absolute best way through experience

and experimentation. You learn the best way to do something

and then they have what's known as a change control procedure, which is absolutely vital for this specific function. So they've learned the absolute best way to do something and then they lock you into a change control procedure and how that would work. Well, I'll I'll talk about a mistake that was made recently. There's an assembly line and it's got all these parts, and one of the parts broke and they found out that it would probably take two or three weeks to get this part. So somebody

to a machine shop and made the part. They didn't think that that was really any problem, you know, but it wasn't an exact fit. So what that did was when when the validation experts noticed that there was a change in the assembly line, they put all the medication on hold until they could validate whether that change had an impact to the pharmaceutical product.

So what they do is they are they are very, very specific about the details of these procedures.

They don't want you to to go any to the left or to the right. They want you to be following them specifically

now when they put together, they put together the recovery process in this book. And when it's mentioned that rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed the path. You know, we should be looking at this process with the same same vision that you would look at with a change control procedure. We do not want to change anything that's in here. We don't want to be the ones to decide. Well, I know it says to do this,

but I'm going to do this because I don't really see a problem with it. If you did that in the pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, you would lose your job in half a second. It's that important. So when we're looking at the instructions in this book, as we start to go through how it works and into action, think about exactly what it's asking us to do. And then we all need to ask ourselves the question, is this how I've done it? Is this my experience? Did I do

this way? Do I have experience with this? Because if you don't, you can't. You can't be part of the Rarely Club. To be part of the Rarely Club, you have to have thoroughly followed these processes. Now,

I'm not saying it's easy to do some of this stuff. Some of this stuff. Is, is, is, is a revolutionary change for us. You know,

listen, we don't want it to be our fault. If it's our fault, that's inconvenient. You know, we always want the fault to lie outside of ourselves. But where this inventory process is going to take us is it's going to take us to the, to the realization that our problems are not coming at us. They're coming from us.

And when you get to that shift in perception, when you realize

your problems are of your own making,

that is a shift in perception that has a lot to do with with becoming recovered. Because if you can see, if you can see that you're creating your own problems, then there's hope in that. There's hope in that because with a different set of behavioral characteristics and spiritual practices.

You can maybe stop shooting yourself in the foot and stop causing yourself all of these problems. I, I couldn't leave the house in the 80s without, you know, getting arrested or getting into a fight with a neighbor or the car breaking down or, you know, some, some travesty. I mean, I was, I was, I, I was drama, you know, in, in the 80s. That's what I was.

And if you would have asked me, you know, Chris, why are you so stupid?