The New Horizons group in Bend, OR

Welcome to the New Horizons group of Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Mario and I am an alcoholic. I have just mute everyone's microphone. It's very important to keep background noise to a minimum so we can all hear clearly. The New Crisis Group resides in Bend, OR Area 58. Because of the pandemic,

we are currently meeting Monday through Thursday online. We use the same some room and ID for all four of our online meetings.

If you haven't already done so, we ask that you change your screen name to your first name and Home group. This is how we will be calling on people to share.

Now I have asked Ron to please read what is a A Thank you Mario, my name is Ron. I'm an alcoholic and the New Horizons is my Home group. What is a A? We have Alcoholics Anonymous are many thousands of men and women who have recovered from alcoholism.

We have solved the drink problem. However, we believe that strenuous work, one alcoholic with another is vital to permanent recovery. The purpose of an A A meeting is that of carrying the A A message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Therefore we share our experience, strength and hope as the safe sober and help others to recover from alcoholism. Experience with alcohol is one thing all a A members have in common. Therefore, we have to we have to confine our membership to Alcoholics.

Our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we may refuse none who wish to recover, nor are they A membership ever depend on money or conformity, regardless of age, gender, race or religion. Any two or three Alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves in a a group, provided that as a group they have no other affiliation. Meaning we are not allied with any religious or political organization. We do not affiliate with other 12 Step fellowships, the treatment industry or

any other institution. We do not wish to engage in any controversy and we have no opinion on outside issues.

We neither endorse nor oppose any causes. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. Each member squares his debt only by helping others to recover. In the words of Bill W, sobriety, freedom from alcohol through the teaching and practice of the 12 steps is the sole purpose of an A A group. Thank you Ron, thank you very much. Now I have asked Mike S to read from Appendix one in the back of the book on the A A tradition

and the tradition of the month in its long form. Thank you Mario, my name is Mike. I am an alcoholic.

The AA tradition, to those now in its fold, Alcoholics Anonymous, has made the difference between misery and sobriety, and often the difference between life and death. A A can, of course, mean just as much to uncounted Alcoholics not yet reached. Therefore, no Society of men and women ever had a more urgent need for continuous effectiveness and permanent unity.

We Alcoholics see that we must work together and hang together, else most of us will finally die alone. The 12 traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous are we as believe, the best answers that our experience has yet given to those ever urgent questions. How can a a best function and how can a A best a whole and so survive

in the tradition of the month and the long form

is tradition 8 on page 564.

Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional. We define we define professionalism as the occupation of counseling Alcoholics for fees or higher. But we may employ Alcoholics where they are going to perform those services for which we might otherwise have to engage non Alcoholics. Such special services may be well recompense, but our usual a a 12 step work is never to be paid for.

Thank you, Mike. Thank you very much.

The format of this meeting is as follows. Our speaker will share with us until 12:30

what they were like, what happened, and what they are like now. During this time, please keep on mute. The speaker will then choose a topic from the 1st 164 pages of the Big Book. When the speaker is done sharing and reading, I will call names for sharing. If you if you unmute your phone to thank the speaker or to share, Please remember to mute yourself again promptly.

Please allow me to introduce our guest speaker, Leslie. See from the searches group in Smyrna, GA Welcome Leslie. Thank you, Mario. Hi everyone. I'm Leslie. I'm an alcoholic. Searchers group is my Home group. We're outside of Atlanta in Smyrna, GA and I am currently working. That's 10:11 and 12:00.

I'm so excited to be here, you guys, but I'm also for some reason like nervous right now,

my topic, which I guess I'll get to the topic towards the end, but this group has had such a like profound and direct impact on my sobriety over,

I guess the last, I don't know, say six months or so. And so it feels like an even bigger privilege to be here. So I will just start from the beginning and and hope that this goes well.

Umm. So

I think that for me,

it seems as though I was kind of just Born This Way.

Um, you know, when, when I was little. I'm the middle child of, of three girls. My, my sisters are both four years on either side of me. And for some reason that we were all raised in the same house with the same rules,

the whole concept of like a moral compass was completely lost on me. And, you know, as we were growing up, my sisters would be like, Leslie Quick, I'm in trouble. What do I say? Like, what's the lie, you know? And for me, it just came so quickly and so easy. And

once the words came out of my mouth, I was incapable of bringing them back in. Like, even in the face of being completely busted, I could never admit that I had lied. And that started when I was really, really young. Like, it's, it's a joke now, but I was in preschool when I was three and my uncle came to pick me up. And I said to the teacher, please don't make me go home with that man. I don't know him

just 'cause I didn't feel like leaving.

It's 4I starting from classmates. If they brought something to show and tell that I wanted, I just took it and I put it in my cubby and by 5 I started running away from home. I just couldn't. There was something about me that I just couldn't sit with. I couldn't at 5 be comfortable with who I was in my own skin. And when things felt difficult to me as a 5 year old,

I ran away. And my mom took me to see, well, I guess my parents, they took me to see a child psychologist because they were like, you know, the other two are not like this. And so is it us? Like, are we doing something wrong? And the child psychologist said, no, you know what? She's five, she will be fine. She's not a bad kid. Like she's not going to be a sociopath or anything like that. She'll outgrow it. And I just never did. And, and what I didn't know was that, that lying and the stealing and the running

way was setting me up for these, you know, for the anger and resentment and that whole irritable and discontent that that goes with alcoholism.

You know, it was, it was such a, it was so, so I started drinking when I was, I thought 15, but I recently found high school Diaries. And so now I'm going to go with about 1314.

And, you know,

I have a letter

in a shoebox right now from high school, from when I was 15 years old. The boy that I was dating at the time, his father was an alcoholic. And this letter from 1994 when I was 15, he said, you know what, I'm really sorry that I called you an alcoholic. I could see that that offended you and I didn't mean to hurt you.

And

coming into the program, which I didn't do for another 20 years, but

I started reading things in the book that just completely tied every single thing that happened in my life together, right? So, so that thing of, of how insulted I was at 15 to be called an alcoholic, certain drinkers who would be greatly insulted if called Alcoholics are astonished. That's our inability to stop, right? And then the next year,

it says, you know, he has a positive genius for getting tight at exactly the wrong moment. I was on a senior class trip. They took us from Philadelphia to New York City,

52 girls. They let us out. We were going to see a play, like a Broadway play, and we had, I don't know, five or six hours to just like, go be free in the city of New York with no chaperones, no nothing. I think there were like two moms on that trip and we went drinking. And The thing is, the difference between me and my 11 friends that were drinking was that when we all went to the Broadway play, they all were able to sit there and watch the show.

But I couldn't. I had already started,

I had had enough that I needed more. And so I left. I left the play with one other classmate and that ended up getting up in a whole big, big bout of trouble with school and and school wanted to assess us for alcoholism and our parents all said no. And all these signs were there when I was really young. Is is really where I'm going with this.

And I just, you know, it was like for so long I had someone to say, well, they're doing it too

until I didn't. And that kind of ran out when

after I had my first, my first child, my husband was traveling a lot And, and so I was home alone with a baby. And we had such a great baby and he was sleeping through the night. And so that meant I had 12 hours every night where he was asleep and I was home alone until it started with like, I'll just have a glass of wine on a Tuesday night and then another glass on Wednesday night. And then by the next week it was two classes.

And so it just kind of started snowballing from there.

Umm, and you know, the thing with my story is my husband has really severe heart disease. At at that point, he had had four heart attacks. We'd had our son, then he had a fifth heart attack and it completely changed our lives. Not that any of them were good heart attacks, but this fifth one was a complete

doozy. He stopped drinking altogether and I? I did nothing but drink. Like I drove head first into the bottle, right?

And so that started all these conversations of like, what do you, what are you doing? He kept asking me, are you running from something? Like what's going on that you're not telling me? And

I I can do that and speech 31 in our book. That is my exact lived experience. Like every single thing that it says. Not before this time, only after this time only. I put all these conditions around my drinking. Nothing worked.

Every single day it was get up

like I have made the resolve. Today is going to be the day. I'm not going to drink,

you know, and then I start like begging myself and then pleading with myself and then demanding of myself. And then by like one, I would say, you know what, maybe just tomorrow I'll I'll try tomorrow will be the day. And it, it wasn't until I actually physically could not stop

that I started like really considering what does this mean? You know, could I be, could I be an alcoholic? Because I was positive that I wasn't. I kept thinking maybe I just don't want it badly enough, right? Because in every other area of my life, I can control things like I, I can just control all the other areas of my life. This is the one area why I was completely out of my league. I, I had never,

never thought that something would have so much power over me.

Umm, And so he has said, you know, we owned another house and he said that house, the lease is up, the renter, the lease is up. They're leaving. I'm taking the kids. We'd had a, another child at this point. He said, I'm taking the kids and I'm, I'm leaving. I, I don't, I don't know how long I have to live and I don't want to live like this anymore. And

so I said, OK, you know what? No way. Nope, you're right. There's a problem.

I'm not going to drink. And he said what? You just, you have to know that this has to be for you. If you're doing it for me, it's not, it's not going to go well,

you know, And I said, no, I don't want to drink for me, like it caused so many problems. There were so many consequences that it doesn't even matter because we've all had similar consequences, I'm sure. But

I promised I wouldn't drink. And he said, you know, if, if you feel like you want to talk to me about it, just don't hide it from me and don't lie to me about it. And I said, I promise. And for the first week, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel good. I'm sleeping better,

you know, I'm able to like play with the kids and all these things are great. And another week went by and I started getting really angry at him and really resentful that I was not allowed to drink because now I want it again. And, and so I, I had a conversation with him like I said I would and I said I wanted to drink. And he said, Leslie, it's been 2 weeks. I thought that we would talk about this like six months from now and that I mean, six months sounded

like 72 years, like it felt so incredibly far away that there was no way I could possibly make it to six months. So forget it all. And, and I started drinking on my own, hiding it, lying about it

and, and just everyday feeling so incredibly full of guilt and shame and just disgustingness because I knew if he found out he was going to leave with my kids.

And about four months later, he did. And one morning he came and woke me up and he slammed the bottle of Lasca down and he said, you lied. And so of course I start sobbing. And I said, please don't do this. Don't do this to me. Don't, don't do this to me. And he looked at me and he said, are you kidding me? Don't do this to you. You did this to us like you're the one that did this. Don't you dare put this back on me.

And that was really my moment of like, oh man, I surrender.

I said I'm sick. Like I desperately need help. And honestly, at that point I wanted help. And so that's, that is what what got me here,

you know, and, and it was such a shock because I thought like, if I could just get the the drinking under control, like if I could take care of the drinking, everything else would fall into place, you know? And I heard a talk with Clancy and he said, if alcohol is your problem, you're not an alcoholic.

If alcohol is your solution, you're an alcoholic. And I was like, oh, man. OK, so there's gonna be a lot of work here. And

you know, I hear people especially on this, in this group in particular, which has just the most

vulnerable sobriety. I love this, but I hear,

I hear the way that you guys talk about Alcoholics Anonymous, like in general about the program and the steps and the solution.

And you know, so like I said, you guys have have really changed so much for me.

But I fell in love with the people that are in my Home group. Like I walked into my first meeting, I raised my hand, I said my name is Leslie. I'm an alcoholic. I started sobbing because it was the first time in my entire life that I did like a full, complete, honest sentence.

Umm. And they became, you know, my people, my tribe, my Home group.

And in that first year of sobriety,

six months in, I got diagnosed with cancer. And already by that point I had developed a really strong relationship with, with my higher power, with God. And in the day after my diagnosis, I went out for a run and I said, God, like, please just carry me through this, You know, like I'm finally, I just got sober. Life is really starting to turn around already. Like

please just carry me through.

And and then I said literally actually stop, you've carried me this far. Like I don't, I don't want you to carry me. Just hold my hand through this and, and sure enough, that's what happened. And

as, as time progressed, like, OK, so, so I was diagnosed and then I went through treatment and I went through chemo and all this stuff. I, I was allergic to my chemotherapy. And so it was a really tough number of months,

but when I picked up my first year medallion,

I, you know what I was, I remember just crying and my sponsor was holding my hand and I said, this has been the absolute best year of my life.

And I think for me, when you can say that when you're bald and like, my skin was Gray and I'm allergic to my chemotherapy. And I said that's been the best year. That was the first year in my whole entire existence that I had lived like true

to me, true to the person that I think God created me to be. And there's been so much since then in the last several years.

But really what what happened last March, right before Kovid was things were going great. You know, I thought that I had a good program. I thought that I was really happy with the fellowship that I'm part of. And

I don't know, I just got this little like a bug in my bonnet where I was like, I really wanna start leaning into like prayer and meditation even more. You know, it's part of my daily life. But I just wanted to like lean in. I wanted to dig in. And sure enough, about a week later, the world shut down. And in in that happening, it allowed me to go from Atlanta to Bend, you know, on a on a regular basis. And I met you guys in February when you had

the Steps and Traditions

workshop. Somebody from a group in Philadelphia had been posting about it saying, you know, there this group, you got to go check out this group in batch. OK, so I, I come to you guys,

it was Billy Ann and Chris are and they like set my soul on fire. And not only did they do that, but hearing you guys, I literally after that weekend, first of all, I got a new for that for that workshop and I was like, oh man, I've been reading like a different book. Like I don't even know what book I've been reading because my

different from even though it's not, it felt like it was. So I said to my husband,

you know, he was like, how is that? How is the workshop? And I said it was like, we have to move to banks. That's really the at the end of the day, that's how that's how it was. And he was like, OK, that is a little bit of your alcoholic thinking, right? But it's like, I just want to be with you guys. I want to just like soak up what you have because what I learned was

as happy as I thought I was, it is not what you guys have.

And there's just no other way to, you know, there's no mincing words there.

But so I started attending your group regularly and I started attending your business meeting

and that was that was also kind of a turning point. And I'm moving into what my

my topic is, which is around

creating the fellowship that you crave. So if I'm

and the next testing is learning as much from you guys as I can while I can, while we're all here and we have the new platform and being able to bring that back to my group. And, you know, a lot of times attending, you know, attending the business meeting and going to other group business meetings, like sometimes it, it's overwhelming and it feels like I'm drinking from a fire hose. And it's, it's

almost disappointing because it's like, man, I've been doing this for years and I feel like I'm on day one. But that's OK because that is where I am in terms of,

in terms of the, the service structure really that's, that's what this is mostly about. I just, you know, it's, I have to accept and be OK with the fact that I just didn't know what I didn't know until I know it, right? And, and I'm part of a group that doesn't know what they don't know. And it's not negligence,

it's not any malice. It's just we just didn't know. We didn't we in this particular

we have an area but then we're outside of metro Atlanta area. So we have districts and zones within that and

there's just not a lot of participation in in the general service structure. There's not a lot of GSRS that show up to the district meeting. Case in point, I've got a meeting at my Home group today and somebody said you guys changed the preamble and we said, yeah, you know, we did. We voted on it at the last business meeting and,

and they were like, you're the only group in the area that's done that. And somebody else said, I don't think the other groups know and we don't know because we don't have GSRS that go to a district meeting that have an active GPM. You know, there's no communication. And so it was like heartbreaking for me to learn that all these years and Alcohol is Anonymous, I've never had a vote because we have never had Ags that goes to the district meeting.

But that's OK because again, we are where we are and we're starting to change that. And so, you know, I feel like now that I know I have this responsibility to keep asking questions like I, I had to ask you guys, I was like, what is like, what is this? You know, and,

and it seems that

some of you may think, oh wow, years in, it's like, you know, somebody would know that, but I didn't.

So in, in our first, we were meeting quarterly business meeting wise and I just kind of brought one, you know, the, the top priorities to my group and say, guys, listen, this is what I know now this is what I'm going to present to the group.

You know, what would you guys think about meeting monthly, right? If our business meeting is how God speaks through us and we're meeting 4 * a year, what does that say? Right? We're not giving God a lot of room to seek

and they were completely on board with that. And some of the things were a little bit overwhelming and some of them weren't. But, but we walked out of that meeting and we made a couple of changes and we said we are going to meet monthly. Our GSR does actually want to be active. He just didn't know because he didn't have anybody teach him when he took over the position.

Our GSR is going to be assembly for the first time. And I don't know if we've ever had a GSR go to the assembly and it happens to be one where a delegate is getting elected. So we'll have part in that and we'll be able to look at the resumes and, and tell him, you know what, what our thoughts are, but then give him his own right of decision at, at the conference, right. So, so we're all learning

and sometimes it, it definitely feels uphill,

but I expect it to. I know that growth is typically painful, but that that on the other side of the pain I hope will be,

you know, something more in line with with what what I see before me.

And I think I think that kind of all that I have

on on the topic, I do want to read from the book what

what the actual like discussion, what the paragraph is. It's on page 164. And it says still, you may say, but I will not have the benefit of contact with you who write this book. We cannot be sure God will determine that. So you must remember that your real reliance is always upon him. He will show you how to create the fellowship you crave. And there's an asterisk. It says Alcoholics Anonymous will be glad to hear from you.

The

459 Grand Central Station, New York, NY Hi you guys. I have started reaching out to both my intergroup and GSO so much, but I'm like, hi, it's me again. I was just curious, could you tell me more about that 1954 letter? And can you tell me where to find this? And can you tell me like, what's the story, What's the history with, you know,

where did crosstalk come from? Like I've, I've written to them so much that I'm literally like, hey guys, me again.

But every time they write back and you know, it's always a non answer answer, but always gives me so much to to think about and and to learn from

and it's just it's just amazing. And I want to read just one other thing really quickly

because this is really, you know, as far as creating the fellowship that you crave and and my own like personal desire to to be

much more involved, much deeper than just the group level. This is red

at a meeting that I go to a lot and this is is like it speaks to my core so much that this is the real reason why I have the desire. It's from the service manual page F20 on why we need a conference.

It's it's Bernard Smith speaking and he says we may not need a general service conference to ensure our own recovery. We do need it to ensure the recovery of the alcoholic who still stumbles in the darkness 1 short block from this room.

We needed to ensure the recovery of a child being born tonight destined for alcoholism. We needed to provide, in keeping with our 12 step, a permanent haven for all Alcoholics who in the ages ahead

can find an AA, that rebirth that brought us back to life. We need it because we, more than all others, are conscious of the devastating effects of the human urge for power and prestige, which we must ensure can never invade AA.

We needed to ensure AA against government while inflating it against anarchy. We needed to protect AA against disintegration while preventing overintegration. We need it so Alcoholics Anonymous, and Alcoholics Anonymous alone is the ultimate repository of its 12 steps, it's 12 traditions and all of its services. We need it to ensure that changes within a A come only as a response to the needs and the wants of all a A and not any few. We needed to ensure that the doors of the halls of a A never have locks on them so that all people,

for all times who have an alcoholic problem, they enter these halls unasked and feel welcome. We needed to ensure that Alcoholics Anonymous never asks of anyone who needs us what his or her races, what his or her credits, what his or her social position is. Now that I have been introduced to this, it's like it feels like a spiritual obligation to be

in service in such a much deeper way than just at my group level. And I've learned that from you guys. And so I just, I thank you for your time today. Thank you for letting me share.