The Fellowship of the Spirit in Bayside, Queens, NY

OK, we're back. OK, so let's settle down after a beautiful fellowship sort of lunch and get back into the business of, you know, saving lives and recovering from deadly disease, cold, alcoholism.

So, so we wanted to just the the game plan for the rest of this, for the rest of the sessions for today is to get us through talking about, you know, 6-7, a little bit more 8-9 and, you know, 1011. And hopefully tomorrow we're going to spend most of the morning, if not all of the morning, talking about step 12.

So that's the kind of the game plan for the rest of the weekend. But let's see what God has to say about that. So we were talking about 6:00 and 7:00, and we're saying that, you know, six and seven is something that's more of a surrender than anything that we actually do, right? You know, that the prayer is more of an affirmation of an attitude of mindset, an experience that we have a feeling completely defeated by our alcoholism. Not just alcohol, the bottle, but the ISM, the spiritual malady of

what's going on here, right? The engine of our disease,

you know, and so we're talking when we're talking about this and we're talking about, you know, and Chris made a great point when he was saying, you know, the best way to, you know, the instant character defect removal is a men's but, and I love that. I love when I I've had sponsors come up to me and they're like, you know, Carrie, what are my character defects? I need to make a list of my character defects. And I'm like, well, you did. It's called a four step,

you know, I mean, it's a pretty simple thing, you know. And again, you know, we're not making a list and checking it twice and saying, well, you know, I am passive aggressive and I do yadda, yadda, yadda. I mean, a list of my defects of character and what's very clear about what is wrong with Kerry is in the fourth column of my four step in my fear inventory and in my conduct inventory, you know. So again, you know, I think that people and I, and I've been guilty of this is getting stuck in the mechanics

trying to work a perfect step. The idea that if I can just work this perfectly, if I can just find the perfect combination, the perfect. Like it's like, you know, it's not algebra. You know where there is a right answer and you come out and everything is, you know, X = 3 when it, when it comes to this stuff, when it comes to the transaction that happens with within our spirit in this debt process, it is a subtracting process and it's an addition process,

subtracting self and replacing that with God.

And it's an experience that we have to have. It's not something that we can think about or figure out because when I'm trying to figure out how this debt process works, I'm trying to control it.

And I can't in my rational mind, understand the step process. I mean, I have, you know, I'm about 9 credits shy of a master's degree in psychology. I graduated summa. I'm a very intelligent person. I was an intern at the Museum of Natural History. I got to play with dead things. I mean, when it comes to, you know, academics, you know, like, I'm a freaking star, which is weird because I can't find my car keys and half the time I don't know where I am. But apparently I can read a book

and synthesize that information clearly,

you know, So when it comes, when it comes to the step process, I can't use my intellect to try to master this. So this is, this is something about we feel something we feel in our gut. It's about what happens between US and God, you know, So I can, I can tell you that I've listened to what, what sounds like completely flawless inventory. I've had people come to me with this most perfectly

arrayed 4 step with tabs and with like colour coded things.

And their handwriting is impeccable. You know that they rewrote this thing like four or five times so that it's absolutely clear. And it's this most wonderful magnum opus of an inventory. And we get to the 4th column and I ask them a question and said well, can you consider? No.

Is it possible? No,

did you? Not even a little,

you know, So I mean, and, and I'll tell you, I'll tell you a quick story. I did the first time I did a fifth step with a man and I've done 5th step with a man. I'm doing fifth steps with women. I've done footsteps with aliens. Okay,

the first it was suggested to me because I have, I have a long abuse history, a really long one. I experienced a tremendous amount of physical and sexual abuse in my act of addiction. So, and prior to actually so I had this huge history. I had a huge resentment with men. I had a huge fear of men and like, you guys were evil and you were pretty much Dicks in a wallet and beyond anything else I could give a crap

will word, you know, put you all in one state. Just, you know, you're there to procreate and provide for me and I don't give a fuck about how you feel. That was really how I perceive men for a really long time. My marriage was doing really well at that time, I'll tell you that much.

But what happened? I could not, I could not relate to, to, to men in terms of them being a child of God. There was always an adversarial or a desire to control the outcome in any interaction. So it suggested to me to do a fist up with it with a man. So I pick like the nicest guy I knew. And I did this fifth step and it was like in the woods, like like in this reservation and, and I'm all nervous and I drive up to do this first step and I have my four step. I mean, it was like, it looked like it had been pulled out of a cat's ass.

It was wrinkled. My, I couldn't read my own handwriting. Like I always like this, this inventory, like I had just been furiously working on like at points, like I had erased it to like, you know, like there was no paper left. There were holes in it, you know, So I'm sitting in the rain reading this inventory to this guy, you know, and I'm having this profound experience, you know, 'cause it's the first time I'm actually being voidable with somebody from the opposite sex. And I have no intention of doing anything other than growing towards God with this person. And I'm trusting them with my life. And it was an incredible experience,

incredible experience. So I had this experience. I'm looking at this course. If I come home and it's like the ink is run, there's mud on it, you know, it's a complete and utter travesty. I mean, it's amazing that I was able to get, you know, an A step list off of that damn thing. But that's kind of my point here, you know, like, you know, like we don't need color-coded binders and actually the item lists and like, you know, you know, a freaking flow chart for inventory.

You know, inventory is about the honesty that I bring to the table and the willingness to have an experience.

And so when you bring that kind of spirit to six and seven, it's a 5 minute process that happens after your first step because that's what your quiet hours for my quiet hours to reflect on what I just talked about, what I just shared with God, what I just shared with another human being, what the chunks of truth that I swallowed about myself. How do I really think about my first step? How did I experience my first step? How did I experience my second step? Am I leaving anything out? Do I have common, common, you know, common solution, common peril? Do I

believe that the 12 steps is an answer to my problem? I do believe that my problem to be to be to be alcoholism and my alcoholism is caused by lack of power and not by a bottle. Common peril, common solution, you know, did did I really make a decision to continue on with the rest of this process? Did I leave anything out? You, you take that quiet hour and I can I, you know, again, big book gnomes hid that for me for a really long time. You know, I've been writing inventory and 5th stepping it and then going home and like going about my business

and never bothered to take that quiet hour until somebody like said, I said we go home for an hour, take the book off the shelf. Oh shit,

I missed that one because the big book gnomes hid it from me. But there's this one thing and it says, you know, when we're going, when we're in and we're looking at these prayers right on page 76, it says, you know, actually start on 75 and we ask ourselves all these questions right now. Have we tried to make mortar without sand? Have we? What is our step process look at look like up to this point? And then it says we if we can answer these questions to our satisfaction. What questions? Well, the quiet hour. So you're 6th and

Deborah, your affirmation of the six and seven step, which you will experience in 1011 and 12. By the way, you know, you experience six and seven in making amends and living in 1011 and 12. The affirmation of that experience or that you this experience that you're going to begin to have you do after the quiet hour and it takes 5 minutes. We ask ourselves a couple questions, right? Are we now ready to have God move all the things we admitted or objectionable? So The thing is, is when I'm looking

that inventory, I'm sitting in that quiet hour, I'm asking myself, are these things objectionable?

And that's what I told you when I was talking about the 5th step. I said, when you're writing your four step and you're doing your fist step and you're coming into this, you know, if you're, if I see somebody skipping into the fifth step with their four step, you know, full of all The Dirty deeds that they've done and they're walking in, I'm so happy to write this. I'm like, you're a fucking liar, really. Like you wrote down all the stuff and you feel wonderful, truly. What'd you miss?

What'd you lie about? What'd you rationalize? Because, you know, writing down these things is not a, you know, we're not supposed to feel good. We're supposed to admit they're objectionable. That means that there are things about ourselves we don't like. We're supposed to have an experience of not liking things about ourselves. So again, if you come into, if you wrote a four step and you're coming into a fifth step and you got this four step and you're just like,

I'm like

somebody didn't look deep enough, so let's go deeper. I don't literally tell them a liar. What I do is I start asking questions and all of a sudden they start crying, and then all of a sudden we have a God experience.

That's kind of how that works.

And says can he take them? Now everyone and that doesn't say will he? He says can he? So here's the thing I really want you to think about is, is the higher power that you believe in at this moment big enough

to take all the things that you find ejectionable about yourself or are you limiting God,

you know, is it? Well, he can have, you know, my drinking problem, but he can't have my financial problems. He can have my financial problems, but he can't have my marriage or I'm you know what? I've been a bonehead in recovery. I've done incredibly stupid things. Please ask my friends, dude. You know, so the idea here is that I'm not perfect, never have claimed to be perfect. I'm not a St. I fall short all the time. Am I hiding that?

Am I pretending to be something that I'm not?

Am I playing the guru when in reality I'm the Sinner?

So here's that question. Is my God big enough for me to be humble and human and not have to hide behind a screen of perfectionism or sainthood? Or I'm the Allah, the Buddha and all these things and I walk on water and meanwhile, like, you know, I'm kicking the dog and beating the kids and yelling and screaming and snapping my feet, You know, what do we call that? The A, A what? The real, The A A Angel in the real world devil

you know. So there's a question, is my God big enough for that? Or do I need to have a deeper, more

meaningful experience with God? If your higher power, if you're the God you're thinking about at this moment, isn't big enough to fix you, it's not God's limits. It's the limits of your own

concept that you're placing on God.

God is infinite and can do all of these things. The only thing that limits God is my willingness to allow God to do His job.

If we cling to something, we will not let it go. We ask God to help us to be willing. And here's his coolest thing because like, how many times have you guys sat in a meeting and heard somebody say that they've been on steps six and seven for like 5 years?

Guess what? You're not even on six and seven, You're on step 0

because you know, it's as we ask him to remove him. So if there's something we're stuck on, we ask him to keep to remove them and we keep going.

Exactly. So then we make this and then of course, we say this prayer. There's affirmation. And of course, this prayer is the bookend to the third step prayer. The third step prayer doesn't have an Amen for a reason. We we make an affirmation. We ask God for a deal. We say I'm broken. I can't fix myself. I'm willing to be a part of your creation. Please fix me so that I can be of service to you and my fellows. I do some work.

I see my, I see the, the broken, the, the, the things that are not working, the things that are not good in my inventory, right?

The things that are unsalable goods. I haven't experienced with that. I share the state of the unsalable goods and my inventory with God and another human being. Because when we fist up, it says with God and another human being understanding that if God is everywhere and we're children of God and God is within us and God is within me and God's within you. When we're sitting having a fist up, God is present in all of this. There's no place where God is not.

So I have this experience

and I come to this and then I'm saying another aspect of this prayer. It's the same prayer, but just in a little bit different a form. And of course, we talked about the my creator and stop creating myself. And it goes on to say that we ask God to remove every single defect character, right? Which stands in the usefulness of my to you and my fellows. I ask that God should have all of me, good and bad. I don't decide what God gets. I just ask God to remove what he sees fit. I don't get to decide that. And then what do I do with that? I keep going.

We don't stop. We don't work on our character defects.

If I had the power to work on my character defects, I have the, I wouldn't need to come here, man. I could find something better to do with my time. I like, I like you all. But really, you know, sitting around reading this book talking about God, I could be like, you know, out like, you know, clubbing or like power surfing or some shit. But I'm here in a church basement because I don't have the power to do that. You know, my book tells me that I'm as powerless over my selfishness as I am over my alcoholism or over over whether or not I drink.

Excuse me said I'm as powerless over my fear because we have a fear prayer. It says, you know, we ask God to remove the fear and direct direct us to have what he would have us be, right. So the idea is that if if I could conquer fear, I wouldn't need to ask God to remove it, wouldn't I?

So if I'm asking God to remove my fear and direct my attention, then quite obviously I can't remove my own fears, right?

I can't remove my selfishness. I can't remove myself centeredness. I can't remove my resentments. I can't remove my fears. And I can't think my way through the drink.

That is the state of Kerry without power.

So then I go to that power and I say, all right, let's go. So what do we do? Well, we had this four step, right? Yeah. I love it when people talk about burning the four step. Is it cleansing the exercise? And I don't know about you, but my book said that is the key, right? It says it's the key to my life, right? We go back to the, you know, go back to our four step because it holds the key. So I'm going to burn the thing that I need to be able to complete the rest of this process.

Sounds crazy to me, you know,

So we take our four step and we go on. I go on. I was taught, and this was just me, I was taught to make to take every single name off of that list and make a card. And when I do my sex inventory or my harms or my conduct inventory, I don't just include the person I had the relationship with. I also do something called the tornado exercise. So like saying my husband, right? He obviously he's been on my sex and harms inventory more times than I can count.

When I write about that relationship, I write about him,

and then I look at the people around our relationship that were affected by my actions and my behavior, my thoughts, things like that. So I'm including, you know, my children, maybe his mother, my parents, friends of ours when I'm writing that inventory,

because what I'm doing is I'm looking at not just the relationship with that person, but all the fallout, peripheral relationships that were affected by that relationship. So when I do that in my sex inventory, then I have people to put on my harms inventory. You get what I'm saying? And that's why it's a progression. We have resentment, we have fear, we have sex and we have harms.

So when I'm doing my sex inventory and I'm adding ancillary people who are related to that specific relationship,

I take them off of that because it says who do we hurt? I didn't just hurt the person I was in the relationship with, I hurt other people who were around and take those names

and I put them in a harms inventory which asks the same questions. Who did I hurt? You know, did I unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion or bitterness? You know, where was I? Selfish, dishonest, self seeking and considerate and frightened. What can I have done instead?

So I have this list. I have a list of people that I resented. I have people that I people that I harmed that I didn't resent. I have a list of people that I was in relationships with that I might have harmed

and I start making that list. First, very simple thing, I get a blank piece of paper. I start making that list right off my four step. Then I can transfer them to cards. Now, not everybody on your A step list. Are you going to go knocking on their door? I mean, that's where sponsorships incredibly important. Why sponsorship is not what we're doing right now. What we're doing right now is called the 12th step in terms of we are

using attraction rather than putting them in promotion to present some concepts and ideas and get you excited about this process. To maybe give you some things to chew on, to think about, to bring back to the people that you're that you're sponsored by are people that you're sponsoring and you're in your fellowship in your community

and you're going to have an experience with that. You know, being sponsored in, in, you know, in terms of a seminar being sponsored in terms of tapes and things like that. This is where like having somebody and accountability and guidance is incredibly important. Because I don't know how many times I have a funny story. My husband had a sponsee many, many, many years ago. He went to go make amends to his ex-girlfriend and ended up getting a blowjob.

No lie, you know? And my husband was like, well, why didn't you ask me before you went to go make that amends? He was like, you would have told me not to do it.

I was like, now you got to make amends for that

later,

you know. So that's why like just just because I think I need to make that amends and I decided what the amend is and I decided what the harm is, doesn't mean that's really what I should be doing. This is where Council

and good sponsorship is incredibly important because what we don't want to do is cause more harm when we're going out to clean up the harm that we caused, you know, and and there's an Oxford group saying it says the light of God shines brighter through two windows than one. And that is a true statement. So the idea is I don't know how many times I've had a sponsee call me up and they're like, dude, I have this immense and I'm like, I have no idea. Like seriously, I have no idea how you're going to make an amends for that. But like, you know what?

Give me a few minutes,

let me go pray, let me ask God, let me make some phone calls and I'll get back to you.

And like, you know, and inevitably I'll be like praying, OK, God, I don't even know where to go with that one. Like I have no experience with that. And then I'll be like, oh, so and so does that's right. Boom, call them up. Boom. And so there's this awesome thing is like one of the things that I do as a sponsor is I kind of make note of people and their immense experiences and their 12 step experiences so that if I don't have an answer for somebody because, you know, being a sponsor doesn't mean always having an answer.

It means a willingness to assist somebody to get and establish and maintain a relationship with her higher power. So if I don't have the answer, that's OK. It is perfectly OK to say I don't know. I do not know how many times I've literally looked at sponsored in the face and like, dude, you got me. I have no idea on that one. I'm stumped. Let's figure this out. Let's pray, you know, let's say a little prayer. Let's figure this out. And it's amazing how how that vital 6th sense

really begins to flow and we can access it, you know, So for me, in my experience, you know, I make that list. I'm not knocking on that door yet. What I'm doing is I'm making a list of the people that I harmed. And then I have to think. And that's where we go back into meditation. We go back and we say, well, what were the harms? You know, I'm so egotistical that like I'll think I harmed you because I thought at you,

because I'm so fucking important that what I think in my head while I'm looking at you, but I've never said a word and we've never met harmed you,

you know, because you know, I'm a nippet in everything like that and you know what I'm thinking and you know, so I mean like so my sponsor had to sit down with me and she was like, you know, So what are the actual harms? Well, I didn't like her. What'd you do? Nothing.

Were you ever mean to her? No.

Did you do anything? No.

So what was the harm? I didn't like her. And it's like, well, Carrie, is that really a harm? Or are you just trying to prove how spiritually you are by going to make amends to every single person you ever met ever in your life so you could show how humble you are? Oh,

good point. So what we need to do is be very clear on the harms that we've caused. I don't know how many times I've gone into an into an amends where I thought my harm was one thing and it turned out to be something entirely different. Because here's something amazing is other people other than me are having a completely different experience with me than I think they are because I'm selfish and self-centered and I can't see beyond the tip of my nose. So I only experience you through me, my filter and I can only only

I can only I can explain this is the assumptions that I make about how you all think is based on my experience because I can only use my experience to experience you. Does that make sense to you? So like, you know, when you like when, when, when, when, when some you think somebody's doing something and that's that you attribute all these terrible, terrible things to that look where she might have farted or something and you think she's thinking you're a bitch and you're fat and you're this that and the other thing. You're thinking all the stuff and you realize

that that person's probably not thinking any of those things, but you think like that, that hypocrisy because there's that wonderful question, you know, like, and again, the forceps a beautiful thing because there's that wonderful question, where am I dishonest? Well, I do the same stuff that I judge other people for all the time.

I stand in judgment. I'm an absolute total hypocrite. God forbid you don't like me but I don't like you, but you have to like me because what I need you to like me, but I cannot like you all I want,

but you have to like me.

How insane is that? So when we sit down and we do this a step, what we really want to do is be clear on the harms.

And mind you, this is another thing where you're not writing your A step for nine months. This is a 10 minute process.

Let me give you a quick time frame. OK. You write your four step. Typically with the women that I sponsor, if you're a newcomer, and I mean newcomer, I mean like you're still shake, rattle and rolling and like, you know, you know, like maybe you got two weeks if that. Typically I get you, I snag in a meeting, you have no idea what you're doing and I just grab you and say, come to my house. We're going to raise it. We're going to read. We're going to read the big book.

I'm going to read the big book. We go Step 2, steps 1-2 and three in about an hour. I hand you a pen in a notebook and I start making start making a list of people you're pissed off at. Come back to me in a couple days when you're done with that list. So you come back. OK, Why are you mad? Write that down. Let's do that together. Boom. How'd they affect you? Boom. What's your what's your part? Boom. What? What are you afraid of? Boom.

Their inventory is done in a matter of a couple days to a couple weeks depending on how fast they write it.

So they come back and as we're doing this, we're actually fist stepping as I'm going through and they're writing inventory and I'm giving them direction, I'm giving the next thing to do. We're going through what they're doing. So their first step, we sit down with their finished inventory and we might have a two hour, 3 hour conversation because we've been fist stepping as they're writing it. Because I'm a liar and I'm a dope fiend. And so

I don't know how many times I've written inventory and I've scammed and I've this and that. And my sponsor had to go back and say, can you consider, why don't you write this down? Can you consider, blah, blah, blah. So I find that it really helpful to sit down with them as they're writing it because I help pull things out of them. So it's a more efficient process

because I'll ask them questions like, oh, I totally did that on resentment too. I'm going to go back and fix that.

So they're doing that right. They do their fist step, they take their quiet hour. They say they're six and seven step prayer. They make an A step list.

They start making amends the next day.

So from step one to step nine could be anywhere from a weekend to a day, depending to a matter of three weeks between step one and step nine. I'm not talking about a really long time frame. We're not writing Moby Dick,

there's no magnum opus, you know, Kinko's version of a four step. We're getting through some inventory, we're getting to some truth and we're getting on amends and we're doing that in a very, very efficient process. Now, if you have time and you've been through the steps a few million times, of course I'm going to have you do some extra special dandy stuff with your inventory just to smash your ego a little bit extra like my sponsors did for me. And we're going to have a different process with that. But what I'm telling you is a time frame from the 5th step to the 9th step

is about an hour and 20 minutes, a quiet hour, a prayer, and a list making process.

Do you have anything you want to add?

You know, when you, when you look at this process, the way the big book lays it out, there's an economy to this work. We will find ways to complicate it. We'll find ways to elongate the steps and add stuff to it. And you know, especially some of the some of the step working guides that you can find out there. They'll have your writing forever

with with the book alcoholic synonymous. There's an economy.

There's a story in the back, I forget the name of it, but it's an individual who went through the steps with Doctor Bob. And he says Doctor Bob had me over to his house on a free weekend. And then it talks about how he took him basically through most of the steps in a very, very short period of time.

Um, in, I believe in the earlier days, this was a very, very quick, quick process. And, you know, we've done things to it at, at worst, things like there's some groups in my area where you still hear you do a step a year. You know, I mean, that that's the worst that you'll hear.

But, but even even in just most, most groups and most sponsorship, you're going to find people who are who are going to, you know, going to want to slow the process down. And sometimes that makes a lot of sense because you want to be thorough. You want to be fearless and you want to be thorough. But when you look at the work in here, the work is the work is going to take, you know, up to Step 9, the work is going to take about four to six hours.

And how ever long you procrastinate.

So it could take a week and four to six hours a month and four to six hours or five years and four to six hours. You know, it, it depends on, you know, how much you want to to procrastinate with it. Now there's a spiritual appendix at the back of this book where it talks about the spiritual experience. And it says, you know, some of us have had spiritual experiences of the educational variety slowly over the course of time, because by the time that appendix was put in, people were slowly over

course of time going through the steps. They weren't, they weren't pushing through with the rapidity that was known in, in, in the earlier years. You go through really fast, you're going to have a sudden and profound spiritual awakening. You go through slow, you're going to have one of the education, right? I had one of the educational variety because I just, I just didn't know. I mean, how do you know what you don't know? I was landing in groups where people really thought that they were addressing the steps because they were going to step meetings

and Sharon about the steps. They really thought, Oh yeah, I'm doing the steps. I go to two step meetings a week.

That's that's like the opposite of doing the steps. Going to step meetings, you'll learn how to share about the steps, how to how to philosophize about the steps, how to listen to people talk about the steps. You can read the steps, but rarely do you find people in those meetings who actually do them, you know, So that's probably the worst place that you can, you can go if you want to want to go through the steps.

But I didn't know any of this, You know, I didn't know any of this until I was exposed to, to some tapes. You know, that's why I'm, I'm a huge supporter of the people who with the recorded, recorded message, I would be dead if it wasn't for the recorded message. Because the meetings that I were, I was going to in the early days, they were not about, you know, working the steps that they were not about using the big book. The big books weren't even sold in the meetings. I was going to, you know, maybe the step book, but mostly, you know, the Hazelton

was was being sold. You know, this is the, you know, the the very early 90s where, you know, it was all self help books and wounded in her children and all this other stuff was going on. So, you know, there was a lot of that stuff happening. But there was, you know, the big book was looked at like, Oh my God, that was written in the 30s. You know, they knew only a little. Well, let let me tell you, they knew a whole lot. I don't think, I don't think any literature has really improved

the recovery experience since this book. There's tons of new literature coming out of every 12 step fellowship in the world. And some of it's very, very good. But I, I, I think a lot of times it confuses the actual process that's in this book. The 12 and 12 certainly confuses things. The, the process in this book has a certain economy and, and when you address this like it's a textbook, like you're going through it,

you know, and you're doing the exercises. If you approach it like that, you're going to have an experience. Think about, think about this like, you know, my early experience in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, it would have been like this. Let's say you want to get the calculus experience. OK, I mean, you really you, someone has told you that if, if, if you get a full knowledge and experience of calculus, you're going to be able to do your job better. And you start going to a calculus classroom and you, you don't open

textbook. All you really want to do is raise your hand and share, you know, during the calculus class. And you want to, you want to go out to maybe the diner afterward with some of the people who are in the calculus classroom. And you do everything hanging out with and fellowshipping with the calculus people in that particular class. But you never open the textbook. You never, you never learn how to solve the problems.

Wouldn't that be insane?

But that's what we were doing

in the late 80s and early 90s in Alcoholics Anonymous. We were, we were sharing in the classroom, not opening the book, not learning how to solve the problem, not learning about recovery. And this was this was a widespread experience. You know, there's always been pockets of enthusiasm, places where, where they were about the business of, of recovery, you know, in different places in the country, certainly Denver, you know, some, some place, some places

South Texas. There's there those, there was a guy in Chicago that was promoting the actual practice of, of the, the, the big book as a recovery experience for 50 years. You know, we just 60 years, we just lost him not too long ago. So there's been places where this been happening, but the easier, softer way is to go in and, and, and share. I just want to, I don't know about all this homework. I just want to share. I mean, listen, that's, that's what we want to do.

Sometimes, though, it's not about what you, what you want to do. If you want to have this, this recovery, this recovery experience, you know, Kerry started to move into to Step 8 and a a little bit of step 9. This is you want to put horsepower in your recovery. These are the steps. Step 9, especially my experience with Step nine, was I came out of Step Nine with so much power. It was ridiculous.

I could barely get out of my own way and I felt uncomfortable going into a grocery store

before step nine. I was always looking over my shoulder and I was always worried about the past catching up with me. I could not live in the moment. In, in the in, in bills, meditation this morning. There, there was so much emphasis on being in the moment, living right now.

And if you haven't done your amends, it's going to be near impossible to live in the now because the past is always going to be catching up with you or you're always going to be worrying that the past is going to be catching up with you. So, you know, I, I basically started to approach step nine. I started to do some of the easier steps, some of the ones that I was willing to do and it started to gain momentum. I started to feel the change, you know, the, the spiritual

experience of this particular step started to come over me and I got excited about this step and I did, I did a lot of amends. There's, there's some that it took multiple inventories to figure out. There was, there was some stuff that I just, I guess I wasn't ready to see and some of my earlier eight step lists. But over the course of time, there's been a lot of things that have have revealed themselves,

revealed themselves to me. You know, in this book,

it talks about practically every kinds of kind of immense You can you can make the the man that we hated. All right, That's that's one

of most Alcoholics owe money. This is page 76 through about page 80.

Perhaps we've committed criminal offenses. It gives us some instructions about that

other people may be involved and they give us some instructions where other people are

involved.

Domestic troubles, you know what, we might have stepped out on the misses. Can you imagine, you know, or, or we may be in the middle of, listen, most of us when we come up out of the bomb shelter, you know, to, to take an assessment of our lives. We're not doing very well with our marriage or with our, or with our relationships. You know, they're usually on the, on the, on the last straw, if anything.

And and so it gives us it gives us information

on that. It talks about our design for living is not a one way St. It talks about how we can how we can engage the family. If the family is willing and ready to move along the spiritual lines with us. That's a good thing. That's not always the way it is, but it talks about what we can do to help make that make that happen.

It talks about us being the tornado roaring our way through the lives of others. Most of the time we are going to minimize. Remember, alcoholism is an illness and minimization,

we're going to minimize. The first thing that'll happen, you know, when you're looking at an 8 step list for the first time with a spot see is they're going to minimize. They're only going to be able to see so much. You know, a lot of times it's our job to, to help them, to help them dig into this,

you know, you know, and it's, it's also, it's also important if we're sponsors, if we're working with people, it's also important not to, not to edit somebodies a step list, OK, The a step list should be complete. We can, we can, we can counsel, we, we can counsel during the 9th step when they're going out and making amends. So you know, some amends, you know, you, you need to tact common sense. You need to act rationally. You need to be sure

people aren't getting involved. You need to know that that the person is is going to be ready to see you. There's a lot of things that happen in step 9, but in step eight, it's important to be as thorough as as possible. One of the things that was happening around my area early on, and this was the step meeting culture

that I came out of in the early 90s was people would share about something that was really bothering them

and other people would share right behind them and cut them the slack. In other words, you know, somebody say, you know, I really feel terrible. You know, I'm two divorces and lost a bunch of jobs. And then somebody will come behind him and say, say, you know, the best thing you can do is to just not do that stuff anymore or whatever. And, and what, what, what they're doing is, you know, we're worried about how people think about us, you know, whether they're going to like us or not.