Workshop about the chapters Into Action and Working with Others at the Spiritual Awakenings group in Bernardville, NJ

And that was a prejudice that I really had to work on early on because I had a lot of religious intolerance. He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial. We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of this program. And that's true. It's,

it's generic really. It's, it's spiritual. It's, it's not denominational. It's it's not going to, it shouldn't bother anybody who with any type of religious affiliation or spiritual belief because it's all just basic spiritual truth.

Willingness, honesty, and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery, but these are indispensable,

and that squiggly font tells us that that's important.

OK, we're going to start tonight.

We did step 6:00 and 7:00 last week

and that came after an inventory and sharing that inventory with a sponsor, spiritual advisor.

You're causing most if not all of your problems in your life. So we become willing to have those defects remote. And if, if, if anybody in here is like me, it talks about self will cannot get rid of self will. So every character defect I have is basically derived from me running my life on self will. So if I can't get rid of self will, I can't get rid of my defects.

Conversely, they're bigger than me and I need help with them

now. I don't want to. I don't want to give the misconception that there's not cooperation that's needed. There's an enormous amount of cooperation needed for you to be able to have your character defects removed with God's help. You have to put yourself in the right spiritual atmosphere. And

I'll tell you what, in my own personal experience, there is absolutely no spiritual atmosphere that's better for me to be in, for God to be able to work through me to rid me of my character defects

than to be in amends. It's the next logical step. In other words, if you're out there making amends for the problem self will has caused, that's going to put you in the best possible atmosphere to to to have the work done for yourself will character defects and it and it again, if you're anything like me, you're going to hate doing amends. I hate making amends.

And the more amends I make, the more I'm going to cooperate

in the removal. My character defects because I don't want to keep my, I don't want my behavior to continue to harm others so that I have to keep making these friggin amends. So, you know, they, they're, they're horrific for me. Some of them, you know, I just, it's very, very difficult for me. I've got to, I've got an ego that does not want me to do amends.

And I understand today that if I don't do immense, I can be LED back to alcohol. So I do them, but I'm not happy about them, you know, a lot of times.

So step seven, I believe, is putting myself in the best possible atmosphere, the best possible attitude toward the removal of my character defects. And then I move on to step 8, and we're going to start on paragraph 76, Page 76, Paragraph 3.

Now we need more action, without which we find that faith without works is dead. Let's look at steps 8:00 and 9:00. We have a list of all persons we have harmed and to whom we are willing to make amends. We made it when we took inventory. Take those out and pass them around.

I I explained when we were doing the four column inventory that during the inventory, when you see where you were selfish, where where you were dishonest, where you were self seeking and where you were frightened. If those those character defects

caused harm. If if you look at your part in it and it caused harm to another person, you were to mark, mark it with an A on the side of the fourth column. The the same thing with the fear inventory. If you're looking at some of your fears and some of your fears caused harm because your family, friends, loved ones harm were to put an A beside that also in the sex inventory

where it asks you where were you dishonest? Did did you

unjustifiably aroused resentment, jealousy and self pity? All those questions that the sex inventory asks,

if there's anywhere that you ask. Yes, especially to the question, whom did we hurt you to mark an A against that? Also,

now when we do our list, I'm passing around some sheets of paper here. In it, you'll find an example of an immense card.

I found it very, very helpful to do immense on on three by five or five by seven index cards. And this will give you

an example of that.

Are we running out of paper?

So what we basically do is we transfer the information that we found from our inventory over onto the index cards.

How I like to do this is I like to put the person's name at the top of the card. And if there's resistance to making amends. In other words, if you were to go to this person, place or institution and they were and they were to tell you what you need to do to make to to set right to wrong.

Is there a lot? Is there resistance more? Put a minus on the top right hand corner of the card. If you're absolutely willing at this point in time to go make that amend whatever it might be, put a plus.

Put down the person's name.

Put down the harms that you're clear on.

You know what you did. Write down how you can get in touch with the person you know. Where are they? Do you need to find them? If you need to find them, put find. If you know where they are, put their address and or phone number,

you need all this information.

We subjected ourselves to a drastic self appraisal. Now we're to go out to our fellows and repair the damage done in the past. Remember, an amend is repairing the damage done in the past. It's not an apology.

I suppose an apology can be part of an amend, but that's not the spirit of the amend. The spirit of the amend basically is go to the person and find out what you need to do to set right the wrong.

I mean, if it's money owed, then you pay the money back, whatever you need to do. We attempt to sway to sweep away the debris which is accumulated out of our effort to live on self will and run the show ourselves. If we haven't the will to do this, we ask until it comes. Remember it was agreed at the beginning we would go to any lengths over victory for alcohol and remember that that basically we came to the that conclusion in the first and third step. And we need to be willing to go to any lengths.

And those cards that have minuses

like I'm not going to make, I'm not going to make amends. That sumbitch, you know, I hate that, you know, I'm not ready for that. You're asked in the A step to pray for the willingness. So whatever stack of cards you have, minuses, those are the people you need to pray for, the willingness to be able to go make the amends now.

So it's probably there's still some misgivings. If you're anything like me, there's going to be misgivings. As we look over the list of business acquaintances and friends we have heard, we may feel different about going to some of them on a spiritual basis.

Let us be reassured to some people, we need not and probably should not emphasize the spiritual feature on our first approach. That's this first approach. That means there there may be further approaches. I like to break the amends down into two, two parts. One of them is the approach. Let's say you owe $50,000 and you're working at Burger King. Does that mean that you have to wait until you get $50,000 to start? Immense. No, it doesn't. You make the approach, you go to the person.

I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but you go to the person, you make the approach and what the approach is basically is it's making the deal and then whatever the deal is, you follow through on that. When that's followed through with the amend is complete. But we can we can take care of the approaches rather quickly. The Alcoholics are egomaniacs. They if they owe $50,000, they don't want to see the person until they have 50 grand in their pocket and they can throw it down on the table. You know, it's humbling to go to somebody and say I can send you $5 a week,

but it's a good kind of humbling. You know what I mean?

Under no circumstances do we criticize such a person or argue,

well I'm sorry, up the top of the page. We might prejudice them. At the moment we're trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and those people about us. It is seldom wise to approach an individual who still smarts her own justice to Him and announced that we have gone religious in the prize ring. This would be called leading with the chin. We may lay ourselves open to be branded fanatics or religious bores,

You know, keep, keep, keep the spiritual stuff to a minimum just so that they don't think we're whack jobs.

Because I'll tell you, I have made amends to people and later on down the road, because of the amends that I made, I've been in a unique situation to be helpful to such people. I've known so many people who've gone out and made amends. And then the, the person who they made amends to sons in trouble with drugs or booze. Guess who gets a call, you know, so we don't want to do anything that would, that would stop that Channel from being open. We want to be very careful with our men's to not to not

fanatical, you know what I mean? We need to be very clear and it'll tell us how to be very clear.

We may kill a future opportunity to carry a beneficial message, but our man is sure to be impressed with the sincere desire to set right the wrong. They're not going to be real interested in oh, I'm an A, A and I'm going to all these great meetings and you know, like I'm, I'm going to speak next Thursday at the men's stag meeting. They're not going to give a damn about that. They want their money back, you know what I mean? And it's their money. It's not, we like to think I've got to give them my money. It's not our money. It's their money and they just want it back, you know what I mean?

So anyway, he's going to be more interested in a demonstration of goodwill than in our talk of spiritual discovery. That's absolutely true. We don't use this as an excuse for shying away from the subject of God when it will serve any good purpose. We are willing to announce our convictions with act and common sense. If there's a reason to bring up that you found God, then go ahead and please and bring it up. But the question of how to approach the man we hated will arise. All right, they're going to give us

different types of immense. They're going to give us instructions on different types of immense. This is how you make amends to the people on your resentment list.

You want to get it. You want to get rid of resentments real quick, You know, go make amends to the people that you resent.

And these are the people we hate. And whenever you hear somebody, I like Gary's example, whenever you hear somebody who went back and made amends to somebody they couldn't stand, it was incredibly beneficial. Ron's example is unbelievable too. And I've never seen it fail. It's like, it's unbelievable. The more you hate the person, the better the amend is going to be for you. It's you. You just, it's something you can't figure out going in. But I'll tell you it's true and I've seen it so many times. Anyway, this is what we do,

the person we hate.

Well, maybe that he has done us more harm than we have done him, and though we may have acquired a better attitude toward him, we are still not too keen about admitting our faults. Nevertheless, where the person we dislike, we take the bit in our teeth. That means you're not going to want to do it, but you just, you force yourself to go do it. It's hard to do. You pray like a bastard. You tell your sponsor and all your buddies you're going to go do it. So now you got to go do it to to, you know, and you just go do it. It is harder to go to an enemy than to a friend, but we find that it's much more

beneficial to us. That's an absolutely true and a promise. We go to him in a helpful and forgiving spirit, confessing our former ill feeling and expressing our regret. Under no, under no condition do we criticize such a person or argue. Simply, we tell him that we will never get over drinking until we've done our utmost to straighten out the past. That's what you're supposed to tell the person that you hate. You're supposed to tell him I I will never get over drinking unless I do the best job I can to straighten out all my past relationships.

And that's why I'm here.

I want to just jump back a little bit in our into our prehistory.

Before Frank Buckman started the Oxford Group, which is what where Alcoholics Anonymous came from, he was he was a minister out in Pennsylvania. He was in the Allentown area and he was running a Hospice for some boys, which was a big thing back around the turn of the century, these hospices.

Now, what happened was he had a board of directors of five ministers who were on the board of directors who didn't see things his way, OK?

They had other ideas for how this place should be run. And he quit in a huff with a giant resentment against these five board of directors people. And he ended up over in England or something doing some, some kind of religious thing. But he was haunted with this. It was eaten. Resentment was eating them away. And he got the inspiration to write those five people letters of apology, confessing his former ill feeling

and expressing his regret. And he mailed them off. And he felt such a spiritual relief

from mailing those letters off that it led him into forming the Oxford Group. The spiritual experience that he got from the direct amends or indirect amends through the mail was enough for him to have a spiritual awakening that he he started to base the whole idea of the Ashra Groupon. So I say again that if you have a deep resentment against somebody, really look at making an immense to them if you want to be free. I mean, do you want to be free or do you want to be right?

You know, I'm shooting for freedom today because it's in my own. It's in my best centers

one second. But in some cases, for example, if what you did was sort of there's a lot of character assassination, which is sort of my background. In other words, to be talked really badly about people. You do a lot more like, you know, you do more harm by calling workers. And listen, you never do this. But I I said all these horrible things about you. I would keep it general that says we confess our former ill feeling. You know, we don't have to go into particulars. And if it would harm the person to say I scumbag you from New Jersey to Connecticut, you know, to everybody I know,

you know, you don't say that. You just, you know, I was, I was wrong. I had bad feelings toward you. I've actually had to do this to people in a A because I've scumbag a, a people

and I went through the inventory and go, Oh no, I gotta go make a visit. I'm sure. And I've had and I've had to do that and, and believe me, you do get free and you don't scumbag them again because you know, you don't want to go back and have to make another amends. So

it works, It really does. Under no condition do we criticize such a person or argue.

We are there to sweep off our side of the street, realizing that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished. Until we do so, never trying to tell him what he should do. His faults are not discussed. We stick to our own. If our manner is frank, calm and open, we will be gratified with the result. That's another promise. In nine cases out of 10, the unexpected happens. Sometimes the man we're calling upon admits his own fault, so feuds of your standing melt away in an hour. Rarely do we fail to make satisfactory progress. I've really only had a couple of amends. Where

refused to see me. I had a boss that on two approaches he refused to see me and it was I had about a year and a half on the 1st approach, I had about 3 1/2 years in the second approach and I finally had about 6 1/2 seven years on the last approach. And he finally would talk to me and I was able to sit down with him and make amends to him.

Our former enemies sometimes praise what we're doing and wish us well. Nine times out of 10, when you ask what can I do to set right to wrong, they'll say just keep doing what you're doing.

God, you know, that's great. You know, stay sober and that'll be how you do the immense to the person.

It's amazing here. You go into it thinking that they're going to ask you to paint their house. I mean, but we've got these preconceived notions of how horrible these amends are going to be. And nine cases out of 10 turn out to be great. You know, and you look at anybody in here who's done a bunch of amends and they, they'll agree with me.

Occasionally they will offer offer assistance. Team knows about that, that he got offered about six jobs making amends to all his old bosses. Every one of them offered him a job.

It should not matter. However, if someone does throw us out of his office, we've made our demonstration, done our part. It's water over the dam.

Here's how we do our financials. Most Alcoholics own money. We do not dodge our creditors telling them what we're trying to do. We make no bones about our drinking. They usually know about it any hat anyway, whether we think so or not. Nor are we afraid of disclosing our alcoholism on the theory that it may cause financial harm. Approach them this way. The most most ruthless creditor will sometimes surprise us, arranging the best deal we can. We let these people know that we are sorry

our drinking has made us slow to pay. We must lose our fear of creditors, no matter how far we have to go, for we are liable to drink if we're afraid to face them.

Nothing eats us up more than to owe people money. It's better to pay $5 a week than to avoid these people, you know, we we need to, we need to at least start doing something with our creditors. I

Whatever we can do,

it doesn't say too many times in the big book that we're liable to drink or we're quite sure to drink, but there's a couple places where it does and avoiding financial creditors is one of them. So pay attention. Perhaps we've committed a criminal offense. This is how we do this, how we do the crime ones. OK. And there are people in these rooms who've gone back and done B&E amends. I mean, this is you, you know, how free do you want to be?

How much do you want to recover?

And this is how we do the crime ones. Perhaps we have committed a criminal offense which will might land us in jail if it were known to the authorities. We may be short in our accounts and unable to make good. We have already admitted this in confidence to another person, but we're sure we would be imprisoned or lose our job before we're known. Maybe it's only a petty offense, such as padding the expense account. Most of us have done that sort of thing. Maybe we were divorced and have remarried but haven't kept up the alimony to #1 she's indignant about it and has a warrant out for our arrest. That's a common form of trouble.

So although these reparations take innumerable forms, there are some general principles which we find guiding. These are the guiding principles for for criminal immense reminding ourselves that we've decided to go to any lengths to find a spiritual experience. We ask that we be given strength and direction to do the right thing, no matter what the personal consequences way may be. We may lose our position or reputation or face jail, but we are willing. We have to be. We must not shrink it anything. I'll also say that I have never once in my entire life seen somebody go to jail

for making an immense one of my favorite speakers talks about a guy in California. He was from South Central Los Angeles, and he was trouble and he got sober and he had over 350 amends to do on his immense list, and 250 of them were breaking and entering amends. He ripped off 250 homes. He went back to every single place he could remember and knocked on the door and made direct amends. And he did not go to jail.

All right,

So we may, we have to be willing to go to jail. I've never seen anybody go to jail.

Usually, however, other people are involved. Therefore we're not to be the hasty and foolish martyr who would needlessly sacrifice others to save himself from the alcoholic pit. This is the important part. There is so many ways that you can harm others to do immense. I just give a, a one of my last demands was it came to me after years and years and years that back in the late 70s, I rented a, a house with a couple of other guys and we were thrown out of there for loud parties.

And before we left, we trashed the house. I mean, we trashed this house. We ripped the doors off the hinges and made a bonfire in the backyard.

We kicked in all the sheetrock and, and, and put chicken parts behind all the cabinets and then moved out a month early. I mean, we trashed this place. It was unlivable after we got done with it. And I, I didn't remember, I didn't even think about it, my first couple of inventories, but it came to me during my last inventory. I said I got, I got to do something about this now that I remembered it, for God's sake. So I got a hold of the roommate that I, that I could still get a hold of, and I told him what I was going to do. I'm going to try to find

these people. Is that all right with them? And he goes, yeah, just don't mention my name. So I sought his permission and I tried to find them. Their names were Shaw's, and they lived in Tampa, and that's all I could remember. I ended up calling something like 140 Shores in Tampa, FL, trying to track down the family that owned this house, this property, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I figure it's about $2000 worth of damage at that time that I did,

so I need to put that money back into into society somehow. I can't get it to the shores. There were elderly at that time. They're probably dead.

But what I can do is I can, I can move the money out into out into society somehow, you know, And that's what I'm doing.

So anyway, I,

a man we know, had remarried because of resentment and drinking. He had not paid alimony to his first wife. She was furious. She went to court and got an order for his arrest. He had commenced our way of life, had secured a position and was getting his head above water. It would have been impressive heroics if if he washed, walked up to the judge and said here I am. We thought he ought to be willing to do that if necessary, but if you were in jail, he could provide nothing for either family. We suggested he write his first wife, admitting his faults and asking forgiveness. He did and also sent a small amount of money. He told her what he would try to do in the future.

He said he was perfectly willing to go to jail if she insisted. Of course she did. Not in the whole situation has long since been adjusted.

OK, here's an important one. Before taking drastic action which might implicate other people, we secure their consent like I did with my ex roommate. If we have obtained permission of consulted with others and ask God to help and the drastic step is indicated, we must not shrink. You know this is how we prepare for it, right Rich? That's right. This brings to mind a story about one of our friends. While drinking, he accepted a sum of money from a bitterly hated business rival, giving him no receipt for it. He subsequently denied having received the money and used the incident as a basis for

crediting the man. He thus used his own wrongdoing as a means of destroying the reputation of another. In fact, his rival was ruined. He felt that he had done it wrong. He could not possibly make right if he opened that all the fair. He was afraid it would destroy the reputation of his partner, disgrace his family, and take away his means of livelihood. What right had he to involve those dependent upon him? How could he possibly make a public statement exonerating his rival? This is this really is important too. If you're about to to sell your house to pay off an immense, you better be consulting with your spouse and family,

you know? It's it's really not right to involve them negatively in these things. You know,

after consulting with his wife and partner, he came to the conclusion that it was better to take those risks than to stand before his creator guilty of such ruinous slander. He saw that he had to place the outcome in God's hands where he would soon start drinking again and all would be lost anyhow. Let's take that sentencing. Let's, let's consider for a minute if that could be our case. Everybody ask yourself,

could it be true that each and every amend I have to do can be contingent on whether or not I drink alcohol? Again?

You know, could it be, is that possible that every amends you have can be directly related to whether you pick up a drink?

Also, I like where it says put the outcome in God's hands. Just go in and do the amends and have faith that God's not going to throw your ass in jail. You know what I mean? Or where God's not going to not going to allow you to have term heart hard, too hard terms for you to be able to deal with.

He attended church for the first time in many years. After the sermon, he quietly got up and made an explanation. His action met widespread approval in today's one of the most trusted citizens of his town. This all happened years ago. The chances are that we have domestic troubles. Here's here's how you do domestic trouble. Perhaps we're mixed up with women in a fashion we wouldn't care to have advertised. We doubt if in this respect, Alcoholics are fundamentally muscle much worse than other people. But drinking does complicate sex relations in the home. After a few years with an alcoholic,

wife gets worn out, resentful and uncommunicative. How could she be anything else? The husband begins to feel lonely, sorry for self. He commences to look around in nightclubs or their equivalent for something besides liquor. Perhaps he's having a secret and exciting fair with a girl who understands. In fairness, we must say that she may understand, but what are we going to do about a thing like that? A man so involved often feels very remorseful at times, especially if he is married to a loyal and courageous girl who's literally gone through hell for him. Whatever the situation we used to have to,

we usually have to do something about it. If we are sure our wife does not know, should we tell her? Not always, we think. I mean, you do not want to go up to your spouse and say, honey, I've slept with all the neighbors adjoining our property and the milkman. And I mean, and I really, I got to get this off my chest because I, I just, I feel terrible about it. Boy, do I feel better.

You know, because this is going to cause an an immense amount of pain in the person that we're making amends to.

We're not about making amends to other people and harming them. That's not what we're about.

The people I see who go off half cock, they do step one and step 9. You know those people. Usually if they do the program right in the future, they have to make amends for the way they made amends later on. You know what I mean.

If she knows in a general way that we've been wild, should we tell her in detail? Undoubtedly we should admit our fault. She may insist on knowing all the particulars. She will want to know who the woman is and where she is. We feel we ought to say to her that we have no right to involve another person. We are sorry for what we have done. God willing, it shall not be repeated. More than that we cannot do, for we have no right to go further. Though there may be justifiable exceptions, and though we wish to lay down a rule of any sort, we have often found that this is the best course to take. I'll tell you though,

if you're going to admit to infidelity with a spouse, you better be prepared for having that come back up and slap you in the face of every goddamn argument you have for the next 30 years.

You know what I mean? Because that's very possible that that can happen. So be very careful about how, how, how you explain it. Our design for living is not a one way St. It is good for the wife as it is for the husband, but if we can forget, so can she. It is better, however, that one does not needlessly name a person upon whom she can vent jealousy. Perhaps there are some cases where the utmost frankness has demanded. No outsider can appraise such an intimate situation.

It may be that both will decide that the way of good sense and loving kindness is to let bygones be bygones.

Each might pray about it having the other ones happiness uppermost in mind. And remember, the families were involved in this 12 step process back then. When this book was written, the families were doing the prayer and meditation. The families were going to the meetings. Keep it always insight that we're dealing with that most terrible human emotion, jealousy. Good generalship may decide that the problem be attacked on the flank rather than risk of face to face combat. With that said, for people who are slow is don't get involved in details.

You know, be very, very general.

If we have no such complication, there's plenty we should do at home. Sometimes we hear an alcoholic say that the only thing he needs do is to keep sober,

certainly must keep sober for there will be no home if he doesn't. But he's yet a long way from making good to the wife or parents whom for years he is so shockingly treated. Passing all understanding is the patient's mothers and wives have had with Alcoholics. I just want to say right now that before you go and make amends to your family, read the chapter to wives if you're one of these Alcoholics. And believe me, we're in a cloud toward how bad we really are. A lot of times when we come in here,

the chapter to Wives gives in, breaks down in detail about 100 different things that we do. The wives have to put up with, You know, read that chapter and ask yourself the question, you know, did I do this? Am I guilty of this before you? You fill out your immense card completely with all the wrongs you're clear on.

Have this not been so many of us would have had no homes today and would perhaps be dead. The alcoholic is like a tornado roaring his way through the lives of others. Hearts are broken, sweet relationships are dead, affections have been uprooted. Selfish and inconsiderate happens have kept the home in turmoil. We feel a man is unthinking when he says that sobriety is enough. He is like the farmer who came up out of his cyclone solar to find his home ruined to his wife. He remarked, Don't see anything the matter here, ma Eno grand. The wind stopped blowing.

Yes, there's a long period of reconstruction ahead. We must take the lead. So we're the ones who are to take the lead, to try to put our families back together again, OK? We're the ones that have to start being an example to everybody. A remorseful mumbling that we're sorry won't fill the bill at all. We got to sit down with the family and frankly analyze the past as we now see it, being very careful not to criticize them.

Their defects may be glaring, but the chances are that our own actions are probably responsible. Try doing that for a month, not criticizing anybody in your family.

Do it. Start start tonight and do it as a spiritual exercise.

So we clean house with the family asking each morning and meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness and love. These are prayer, prayer directives. The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it. Unless one's family expresses a desire to live upon spiritual principles, we think we ought not to urge them. We should not talk incessantly to them about spiritual matters. They will change in time. Our behavior will convince them more than our words.

That's the only way you can 12 step a family member, I think is with your behavior become become a changed person for the better. And they'll get curious, go up to him and tell him that they should do this, they should do that and they should do this and you're going to build a wall. We must remember that 10 or 20 years of drunkenness would make a skeptic out of anyone. There may be some wrongs we can never fully write. Here are the ones that we can't write. There's and there's different reasons for why we can't write something, you know.

Someone might have died,

so someone might have disappeared. You don't know where they are.

There's just many, many things. I work through the steps with a guy who started a brokerage firm. He was hot on Wall Street, man. He was like, he was the Golden Boy and he took people's money from right and left. Everybody was investing $1,000,000 with this guy and he invested in a couple of Canadian auto places that he thought were going to do well and they all bankrupted. He he completely wiped out these mutual fund things that he had started.

He and he signed personally for him. He guaranteed them with his personal signature.

So is this guy, he, he's, he just got a job after about a year being unemployed. How's this guy going to pay back like $10 million? You know what I mean? He's not going to be able to. So there, there are. There are things that you can do, though. We don't.

He's not going to be able to. So there there are. There are things that you can do, though.

We don't worry about them if we can honestly say to ourselves that we would write them if we could. If he had $10 million, he'd pay the guys back.

Some people cannot be seen. We send them an honest letter and there may be a valid reason for postponement in some cases, but we don't delay if it can be avoided. The rule generally is, is if you can't see somebody send a letter in some cases where the person is still smarting from my injustice and

is just, it's just going to be explosive. I'll send a letter asking that, you know, letting the person know that I'm going to try to make an approach. You know, sometimes I'll send a letter like that. And I do letters with the, the people that are dead. I just did one with my with, with my father a couple of weeks ago. He's been dead a 30 years now and

in all my previous inventories I came to the conclusion that he died when I just turned 12, so there's nothing to make a menace where I was an 11 year old kid for God's sake. What could I have done?

Well, I treated his family like shit for the next 30 years. He wasn't around to be able to do anything about it. That's what I needed to make amends for and that's that's what I made amends for this this past time anyway. We should be sensible, tactful, considerate and humble without being servile or scraping. As God's people, we stand on our feet. We don't crawl before anyone, you know, We don't snivel up to make amends. We walk up, you know, proud and confident. Hopefully,

if we're a painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed. Before we're halfway through, here are the nine step promises. I'm going to read them.

So many people call them the 12 promises of A A and I think that's very, very misleading because there's promises from the title page on there's a last count 274 promises in the big book. You know, one person's interpretation at least. So there's a a million. These are the 9th step promises, and they can be taken out of context. When they're put up on the walls of the rooms,

they manifest themselves. After you're firmly underway with your immense, these things happen

and you can ask anybody who's really attacked in a men's list whether these promises have come true. And there's not one person I've ever met that didn't say you're damn right these came true. You know what I mean? These are the nine step promises. We're going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone. We will see how our experience can benefit others.

My feeling of uselessness and self petty will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows seeking. Self seeking will slip away. That's a great one.

Our whole attitude, not look upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic and security will leave us. The economic and security may not leave you, leave you, But the fear of it, well, we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes as quickly as you do the night step.

They will always materialize if we work for them. What a great promise that is.

That's right.

If tonight we're going over steps 10 and 11 and in the preceding 15 weeks, it's taken us really to go through the big book to get up to this point.

And I think, I think steps 10 and 11 are very, very good steps for us to pay attention to.

I believe that Step 10 is basically a combination

of of all the preceding steps and Step 11 really lets us grow spiritually and really lets us grow emotionally when we practice it the way it's laid out in the big book. I just want to read a a couple of sentences from the forward before I start.

The very first thing that you read in the big book, we have Alcoholics Anonymous, or more than 100 men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body, to show other Alcoholics precisely how we have recovered as the main purpose of this book.

So we've gone over a lot of the action steps so far and they're really designed to recover us from alcoholism.

It's, it's really, it's really a true statement to say that you cannot think your way into sobriety. Self knowledge alone is not going to do it. There's certain actions that we have to take, certain spiritual exercises that we have to take to be able to really recover spiritually and, and mentally and emotionally and emotionally from alcoholism.

You know, drinking is really just a symptom of alcoholism. There's an underlying cause to why we're so screwed up that we have to be always be be out of our mind drunk or on drugs or something. That underlying cause is really what needs treatment. And and to just to just sit in an A a meeting and expect to recover from alcoholism is is short sighted at best.