Steps 10 and 11 at the Stateline Retreat in Primm, NV December 9th

Hi, I'm Bob, I'm an alcoholic, sober to the grace of God and age is the 10th of December 1967 and for that I'm very grateful.

Surely been a wonderful weekend. I think you get something out of these weekends that you don't get out of a regular

roundup. I think it gets something different out of the speakers, which is,

and everybody's been terrific. It's really

I know that Bob must have been disappointed when he couldn't get Ralph, but I think Ron did a good job

the

right.

I'm sorry,

and Mildred is

one of my favorite and it seems like I like what Cliff said last night about

that. Each of us has a gift and I I've that's I've used that in my age talk and I think that that's so and I think you see that as you listen to people talk. Everybody has a little something that they do. Mildred has always had a special place in in my heart and it's always hard. I find myself comparing myself to the other speakers and I'd like it that you have Ives or last, so I don't have to compare myself. I was and I like that you put Sheldon in the lineup, which brought the average down. I think that that that

I think that

I think it took some of the pressure off which I is, which is

I appreciate.

And I like, you know, Katie, I'd like to, you know, we need younger energy, you know, as, as we start, you know, old guys are interesting to listen to, but you need all of it. And you can watch

the people that come up to Katy and Chuck. You know, Charlie, it's, you know, we need that younger energy as we go off with these things so that we can, you know, kind of get a spectrum of it. I enjoyed Bill. I enjoyed Bill until he went out over and went through the last four steps, which was part of the territory I was supposed to cover. And it kind of encapsulated my entire talking about a paragraph

should be good. I enjoyed Larry very much and

that thing in history that GAIL does is really astounding. It is, you know, when you get into the story, you just can't believe I forget where I was. If someone was talking about the story, When Bill went to make that telephone call to the Reverend Tunks and then he ended up with Henrietta Cyberling, he made 10 telephone calls.

Tunks gave him ten names. And I think, I don't think I have that backwards. I think he called tongues first and then they got the names and put 10 nickels in the phone and did that,

that I might have made it through three or four, but I don't know if I would have made it through, you know, 10. So it was really

very special

covered Sheldon, Larry. That was the stories on the amends were very powerful and very good and I'm looking forward to Thomas. If you're going to pick someone to compare yourself to, try not to pick Tom Ivester. That would be a bad deal for most of us. Cliff.

When I think of, I've known Cliff a long time and

I think if I just pick one word that

is love, you know, I mean, it really is about love. And I think

you did that and embodied it and it was kind of an old fashioned talk. It was really,

you know, it's amazing the communication in a a has changed. All the talks when we first came in were closer to what we call drunk a log today. And

and then I think Chuck Chamberlain more than anybody else altered the communication and Alcoholics Anonymous, he shifted it to include recovery and spirituality. But even in the talks of the first men and women that we've heard, they start with their first string, end with their last. They take 5 minutes at the end of the talk to talk about the kids and job.

It was included in the way they told their story. There was the power and dignity and change and transformation

was so strongly implied and demonstrated in the story. Today it's more explicit, and then it might have been more implicit, but it was really, you know, pretty cool.

I'm supposed to talk about 10 and 11. Quickly tell you a little bit about

myself. My story is kind of the opposite of Ronnie's. I was born on third base. I've been congratulating myself for hitting a triple.

You know, I was

from an intact family, you know,

set 107 kids,

private school education, you know all that through drink. My way out of the University of Notre Dame, middle of my senior year. Started drinking alcoholically in my late teens.

Couldn't shut it off. Great starter. Poor finisher got kicked out or walked out of Notre Dame. Middle of my senior year. Finished school at home, left home, spent the last year

drinking a quart a day and kind of at the bottom of the barrel and woke up one day hugging a toilet and my underwear. Missed work and it was the third day in a row or something. And I looked at myself in the mirror and that was my moment of truth. And I called alcohol extonymus, and a couple of men came out and talked to me and changed my life.

We have many traditions in alcohol, astronomists, maybe the most wonderful one of which is that we share our experience, strength and hope. Not our ideology, not our philosophy, not our thinking. And there's a power when you share your life with another person that Cliff talked about last night. And those two men in the I talked to all sorts of helpers, but never to another person who had a drinking problem. And they gained my confidence

in a relatively short period of time. And I went to my first meeting of A A where I met my sponsor that I still have today,

who is 91 years old and 56 years over and still active.

And he was a 12 step champion of the Uptown group of Alcoholics Anonymous. And he sat me down in a chair and told me that alcoholism was a disease that affected me physically, mentally and spiritually,

and that what my job and alcohol extent was to do was to use the 12 steps to change, to find a different way to live. And if I didn't change, I wouldn't stay. He told me that I would diagnose myself over the next couple of months as I sat in the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is what happened to me. And then he walked the path with me and I got to go on all those 12 stuff calls, if not as many as Cliff, but I went on an awful lot of them. And they were

some of the best experiences that I've had in my life.

I have loved a A since the moment I came in the front door. That was my gift. It's been hard for me to do the work, but easy for me to stay. And I've worked with a lot of other people who has been the opposite. You know, they, they were not attracted to Alcoholics Anonymous. They did it for whatever reason, didn't identify. They look for the differences rather than the similarities. Cliff talked about having a wall. I built a wall up around me to thinking that goes on behind the wall says you like me, but you only like what it lets you see about me.

If you could see everything about me, you'd hate me. I hate me, that sort of thing. I started to tear that wall down when I called a a continued in a conversation with my sponsor, completed it when I took my footstep and I made a discovery. And the discovery was that I'm not unique. My personality may be unique, but not my illness, not my behavior, not my feelings. And I started to have a sense of hope that what worked for you could work for me.

When I came to Alcoholics Diamonds, what I expected to find was

an expert on Bob. I wanted someone who was so wise that they could see through me into why my life didn't work. I was the the guy who

was seemingly pretty well equipped to live life and was unable to live it. It was like this. It was as baffling to me as it was my family, and

I never found that person. What happened to me is I surrendered and I became an alcoholic, and I had hundreds of people who were experts on recovery from alcoholism. Now, later in my recovery, I built the damn wall back up,

thank you very much. Gentlemen, drink a problem. Let's stay out of my sex slave, stay out of my marriage, stay out of my gambling, stay out of my work. Brick by brick, I built the damn wall back up until I was sober seven or eight years and somewhat isolated, going to a lot of meetings and and I got unsurrendered.

I was on a honeymoon for about nine months of surrender. Experience creates an opening and grace that is almost unparalleled. Did you just, you know, for nine months, every time I asked a question, I got an answer. After nine months, you could give me an answer and I was not always sure you were correct. My ego started to reassert itself and I had the mixed experience. I had a another spiritual experience at which I'll get into and talk to at at eight years.

I hit a wall and I think I had,

I think we do, we make astounding growth in Alcoholics Anonymous in our first two or three years. And then we, many of us tend to level out. We have reached some of the goals that we, you know, big goals like not wetting your pants and going to work and Jay Mary, but it's kind of subtle. We, we seem to be able to do the extraordinary and many of us have an unbelievable amount of difficulty doing the ordinary. We just, you know, have trouble with marriage. We have trouble with check,

we have trouble with insurance. We have trouble with children, we have trouble with life. You ask normal questions to Alcoholics and they're tough, you know, are you married? And there's just pause. You know, I just, it is,

do you have children? And there's this concerned look on their face. I mean, they don't know, you know,

are you educated? Did you go to college? I mean, those are complex questions. Those are they're not. We're not unwilling to answer them. We just don't know how much time you have. And

it is.

It is a

I do. What happened to me at 8 years of sobriety was as important to me as anything that happened in my sobriety and brought me to a second level. And I was able to start dealing with the,

I think, more of the causes and conditions of my alcoholism and I was unable to see it. You just don't get it done in two years. You don't get it done in three years. You don't get it done in five years. I mean, I get a kick out of listening to the different speakers sometimes.

It's like they stumbled around an AA

and then it's ten years or 12 years or 15 years. They found the truth

and, you know, now they have the correct way. And I don't think that's that's not the description that I would use. I think the quote stumbling around. I mean, they look backwards and they judge themselves in their childhood sobriety. I mean, who isn't stumbling around? I mean, we do get some old souls. I mean, every once in a while you get someone that can give a talk at one year that no one that someone else would have to wait 10 years to give. They just are able to see it. They did the work. They saw it

and they can describe it. Those are different gifts. There's lots of people who do the work that can't describe it, but they're they've done it. And every once in a while you get one of those and it works out fine. So I at 8 years, I had this epiphany. After eight years, I became a

the unmanageability of my life mostly left. I was a guy who had work problems and marital problems and children problems and gambling problems and those left at that point in time

and then my work life took off like on a rocket ship. I started making lots of money for the next five or six years in my deeply shallow period and

big houses, 2 Mercedes, all the sorts of things. You know, I thought I was blessing me for my recovery.

I was the asshole in the $1000 suit and the Mercedes coming to the meeting, you know, how would you like me and your group? It was,

there's an arrogance, you know, there was a false humility and lack of success and there was an arrogance in my success and I didn't see it. I was blind to both those elements as I went through it. And then they had the then I lost it all, which still seems unbelievable to me that you can lose it all. I mean, how the hell do you lose it all? You know, and I,

you know,

and my father saw that my father, I'm the guy who's making a lot of money, you know, all the sorts of demonstrations that you had. And my dad was always concerned. And I thought you're just a depression guy, but he wasn't concerned about the depression. He was concerned about my shallowness. He was concerned about my love of success. He was concerned about how he spent money. He never went after me and was specifically, he didn't have to, but he was such a fine man. I knew what he was concerned about, even though I pretended I didn't know

he was concerned about. And I'd always answer him in dollars. It's OK, I got it handled, you know, not

so. I went through a collapse in the late 80s and early 90s. It was one of the worst periods of time I had. I felt I thought about suicide 20 some years with in 1990 would have been 23 years sober. Sitting in meeting, crying through the meetings. You know, my kids in treatment. Linda and I go to the sober house every Friday night. I cried my way all the way through the meeting. See that guy over there? He's got 25 years.

How'd you like to have what he has? I think

the lesson for me was to learn who I was with money and who I was without money. And then I went back to work. I was allowed to God through God's grace to keep the company. We lost most of the money, but then kept the company and then I we built it back up and,

and then the last couple of years we tore it down and I learned most of the lesson that I think the universe and God wanted me to learn in the collapse in the late 80s and early 90s. And then I forgot it.

And somewhere during the great run up of real estate values, I,

uh, forgot it and got back in the, you know, into the deeply shallow period and I need to learn the lesson again. Old and dumb is such a crappy combination. If you can change one of the variables, I would. I would encourage you

to do so. So if you're

willing to sit and listen to a guy in his late sixties, 40 lbs overweight, who's been gone broke a couple of times, I will share my story with you. It is,

but I'm an active member of alcohol extent. I'm as I sponsor a bunch of guys, they go to a lot of meetings. I'm in love with my wife. I have three children that I have a good relationship with and there's lots of other wonderful things that are going on in my life.

And while I am in different financial circumstances than I historically have have been, I am still self supporting through my own contribution. So there's the both sides

ten step continue to take personal inventory when we're on promptly admitted it. The short version is I don't do a formal tense step. I'm I don't know what that that's just the bottom line. I have done it over a few periods of time, but I don't do, I do it in a, in a

I do it throughout my day. It is a step that has become part of my life. I don't, I don't, I think there are people that would say, oh, baloney. That's a rationalization. That is not my experience of it. I bring that. I think the steps are both something that we do, but eventually they become something that we are. They become literally part of the fabric of our thinking and character. And I bring that to my daily life. And when I have a

conflict, I examine it and do the things that the book talks about in the 10th step. And I

myself down talk to another person, all the sorts of things that I supposed to do. I think one of the great enigmas of alcohol, he's anonymous and recovery or any spiritual walk is if it works, why do I still have problems?

I think that is the enigma that Bill Wilson faced. I think that's what he talked about when he talked about an emotional sobriety. And I think that's the little boogeyman that lurks in the backs of most of us. And I want to talk about that a little bit. Why? If it works, why if? Because the message that were given to the newcomer, I mean, that was my dilemma early in sobriety. Come in here, get in the book, get a sponsor. You don't have to do it perfectly. Just do it well

and you're going to be fine. And then you get in your car and you drive home and say when are you going to be fine? You know, you don't,

you know, you're 10 years sober and you're not fine. What the hell is this, You know, going to be OK. And we don't have that conversation very loudly and alcoholism because it sounds like it's kind of a disloyal conversation. Our lives are extraordinarily better in most ways. But the fact is, as you get us on most days, it's not enough. I don't give a damn how grateful I am. It's it's not OK

and I want a better marriage. I want

a better relationship with my children. I want

more balanced. I want you know something. It's not OK. I've been trying to get it for a while. I don't seem to be getting it. Is my life better? You bet it's better. Am I grateful? Oh, hell yes, I'm grateful. Would you like to freeze your life right here for the rest of your life? No,

no, I don't want to freeze it. I, I, I want more and not more like selfish, not more like

greedy, more like I want to continue to grow and change

what's in our way. And why the hell doesn't that happen? Which I think has been one of the central questions in my life. First of all, I want you to know that at your core, you're conflicted. Only party you want to get better. Only party who wants to change the problems that have persisted in our lives over a long period of time. We think they're problems, right? They're filed under answer

in our hard drive.

I promise you they are. We come in here, we've got a toolkit. It's entirely full of hammers. There are no screwdrivers. There's not a saw, there's not a wrench, there's not A and we have learned to adapt. We use the claw, the screwdriver to unscrew thing or the claw, the hammer, you know, we use little hammer and big hammer to turn nuts. We we have adapted,

we go to workshops on how to use hammers and.

And it's just, I mean, it's almost hopeless and,

and we don't know that. We literally do not know it. And the causes and conditions of our alcoholism are somewhat invisible to us. And they're invisible to us because we don't want to change them. And then when we go to change them, you know, we got the ego to deal with. And the ego just sits in the background, says, look, do whatever the hell you want to do. Go to the meetings, talk about it. I like inventory, inventory and talk to the guys. But get this straight. We're not changing.

I don't give a shit. You can talk about the steps, you can talk about the tradition, love the concepts. We're not changing, so just have a good time.

And

the

so I'm working with a guy 35 years old, married second time with kids. He's having trouble with the columns in the fourth step. I'm saying that's complicated. Don't worry about it. Just get your mom and your dad, brother, sister, get your ex-wife, your ex boss, your present boss, couple of neighbors, couple of guys in the group, bring them over to the house. And here's what I want you to say to them. Just say we have a step in alcoholism. We try to get in touch with our defects of character and I'm having trouble identifying them. And I wondered if you'd help.

Most of us would not call that meeting.

Why?

And I'm going to say we, we don't want to change.

But it's worse than that. We don't want to know.

We train everybody in our lives as to what they can talk to us about and what they can't talk to us about. We train our wives. We're not talking about that. You want to talk about that going to be a tough conversation. We train our kids, we train our bosses, we train our coworkers. We train our friends in a a we train our sponsors. Your sponsor knows bloody well what you're willing to have a serious what's a real piece of business and what's a complaint

and whether you're up to it or not up to it.

Both parties know we're going to have a pretend conversation. Sometimes the sponsors, we get tired of it and maybe we'll try to bridge that gap, but there's a lot of pretend conversations in alcoholism. There's a lot of sponsors that don't call the sponsors, so they don't think they have any business. They don't know what to say

and that I think that's normal. I mean, I keep saying you don't have to say anything. Just check in, tell me how your day is. I'm not looking for a four step every time you call me on the telephone. I want to be, you know, I want to develop a relationship. Just,

you know, just checking in days, OK, Doesn't have to be a deep conversation. You know, the, the main condition in my relationship is, is that you pay attention to what I say. I've got to have some impact on you or I won't enjoy the conversation. I do enough things poorly. I don't need one more thing that I do poorly. I'm serious. I, I get the guys that ask me to sponsor them and I'm sponsoring a lot of guys and I just, I don't, I don't need a bigger list.

I'm saying you got to help me. I do not play ping pong.

You have not called me until you've called me three times. This is not a game of tag. If you weren't willing to do that, get another guy. But I just that will help me. If you're not willing to help me, I don't want to help. You know, I'm not willing to, you know, get in the game to go do that.

Oh God, time's going on.

We are afraid of change

and what we think we are going to change is who we are at the essence of our being. We think our behavior. It's how I've always been. We are overly in love with our stories. The story is one of the most important things we have in alcohol economists because it's our method of communication. Because you can't show God. You can't reveal God in words,

but you can kind of paint a picture about the power

and the transformation and the result. And that's their story. But there's a negative part of our story. Many of us are locked up in our story, and our story is what ends up restricting us from the full measure of what is available in our recovery. Because we think that really describes who we are. We think the ego describes who we are. The behavior we have is not skin and bone is simply what we do. You can change from a Chevrolet to a Ford. It doesn't change who you are. You can change your behavior and it doesn't change who you are. And yet we are so

with certain things that have been in their life. That's the way I am. No, it's not. It's what you do. You don't even have a clue as to what you am. If you had a inkling into that,

you would. Most of us have an idea of ourselves as bad people trying to get better

and it's a paradigm that is broken and doesn't work. I think if you talk to most of the old timers and the rocking chairs on the veranda,

they tell you that with a job is not getting better. It is finding the good that has always been there.

The Cliff Roach is the same guy today that he was 30 years, 40 years ago. And he simply removed the the things that were in his way.

And if we don't have the discipline and the tool of inventory, but what's in our way is we really have part of us at some level that does not want to deal with it and does not want it to be revealed because we think it's who we really are. It ain't who you are. It is what you do. It is behavior. It is easy to change. And when you open yourself up to the grace of God, most of the behavior just falls off.

Doesn't mean resistance and muscle doesn't work. When you listen to the reading before the meeting when it talked about,

you know, I'm not even resisting it, the problem has been removed. That is what happens in transformation. That is what happens through the grace of God. Most of us don't want to take us to God in a complete way. We'll take the 70% we brought. We're willing to bring, but I'm not going to bring the porn collection. I'm not going to bring my gambling. I'm not going to bring my, you know, there's just a few holdouts. You know that I'm doing that. I don't want to

bring. Why? Because I, I, I just

because those are your treasures is one of the answers. They, I mean they look, they are our treasures. And I will report you for my own personal experience. They are dog turds wrapped in gold tinfoil. They are not treasures.

I mean that, I mean, they look like, you know, the and the other reason we don't want to bring him to God is we don't like God and most of us will not get into that.

For most of us, if we keep the same conception or idea in belief in God that we brought into the program, it's hopeless. If that doesn't broaden, widen, become more personal,

you cannot get there.

It has to be. It ends up I've

most of us are lazy. We don't read spiritual material. We don't seek. I mean, the book says, you know, couldn't would if he were sought. And in the relationship specifically about God and a relationship with God,

there's been lots of my life, whereas the Seeking has been pretty damn skinny.

Now I think going to alcohol is dynamics. I think going to meetings, I think having a sponsor, I think doing 12 step work all meets some of the requirements of Seeking. But there is some work that we have to do in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that is not communal, it is not in the fellowship, it is personal, it is us, it is private. It is what we have to do to attend to some of that's in our inventory,

some of that's in the 8th and 9th step. In a considerable amount of it I think is in the 11th, 10th, and the 11th step. And especially in the 11th step, if we don't broaden our God, that it was that guy that wrote the book. Is your God too small? Our God is too small. And I think in the last analysis, as an old guy, I can tell you, I think what you're going to find is that at the point that you and God intersect, that that's the points that you want to arrive at,

that we're made in the image and likeness of God. That what you're going to find at that meeting point

is yourself.

The process of finding God is the process of removal, not addition.

We have dragged our perfect magnets through the junkyard of life and have showed up here with A6 football of crap

that we that we bring, that we drag into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and that and it's who we think we are. And then we've got an internal conversation about that the Cleveland wasn't supposed to talk about and talked about it.

And we identify with that internal communication and we think it's who we are. We don't even realize that we're observing the conversation, that we may be the consciousness behind that conversation, not that conversation. But most of us are hypnotized. We really think that internal dialogue is us. It is not you. If I was going to start the meeting on meditation this morning and asked us all to meditate for 5 minutes. For those of you who have admitted to the very first thing

will discover is you can't quiet your mind, which is what you may think meditation is. And all of a sudden you're aware of this gerbil track of stuff that is going through your mind and you think, you know, if if you ask most of us, we think we initiate and instigate and create our thinking. If you do stop it,

and what you discover is you can't stop it, it's just clouds in the sky. It is meaningless crap until the one comes through that's about you, that's got Velcro on it and you catch it and engage it and you think it's meaningful because you have now pasted it on your eyeball.

And when it is on your eyeball, it's your reality

and it's not reality. It is a random piece of crap going through the pipe that you have taken and pasted over your eyeball.

And when you start to gain some distance from that internal dialogue instead of patient and on your eyeball, you're going to be able to look at it here

and you're going to look at that. And you say, oh wow, I haven't had that one in a while. And it won't own you. And you can just let go of it and let it the train go through the station. You don't have to get on every train that goes through the station.

The process, I mean it is the only way we are going to change and become more peaceful and to have more joy is to increase our consciousness, is to become more awake, having had a spiritual awakening.

See it or be it.

If you don't see it, you are it.

As long as I could not see my alcoholism, I was an alcoholic.

The Seminole event of me changing or of my being changed to the grace that happened to me when I walked into Alcohol He's Anonymous, was seeing it.

If you don't see it, you are it

and that is the process of Chuck talks about about discovering, uncovering and discarding that we have an alcoholic synonymous. It is a difficult process. It takes courage to to keep on growing. Many of us arrive at a point that seems acceptable and we stop growing and we start, we defend ourselves with our sobriety. The very gift that we have gotten in the program is the thing that we start to use about why we don't have to give up the few turds that we have

kept. We really do think we can pee in one side of the glass and drink out of the other. I mean, we honest to God, we, I mean, we, we should,

I mean, we should give lessons. I mean, I really, I mean, would everybody raise their hand who's, you know, got that as a core belief? I mean, I really do think that many of us that has been a core belief that, you know, that the few things we reserve don't affect the rest of our life. And,

and I think that most of us are trying to change the things in our lives with muscle. And,

you know, I'm going to go to Prim and I'm going to sit down and listen to these guys talking. I'm going to come away with some chips. I'm going to come away with the new energy. I'm going to come away with a new idea. And we're not missing any ideas and we're not missing any information. You know, it is the, I mean, what's difficult for you is what's difficult for all of us. It's a whole lot easier to do a A than it is to do life.

It's easier to go to meetings, it's easier to sponsor people, it's easier to give talks. It's easier to do the steps

in a casual way than it is to be married, to be a parent, to have a career.

Doing it, taking it from the practice range to the golf course is a measure of our skill. And most of us can't take what we take, what we have in the practice range to the golf course.

And there's a little bit of that same gap when you talk about the ideology that we talk about in meetings. And then when we get it out on the street and we start dealing with the child who just got thrown out of school or arrested or all those sorts of things. I mean, I used to have this story about why I would occasionally slap my children. If you had my kid, I mean, you've been thrown out of school. He's, you know, he's just a pain in the ass. You can't do anything with them. He's just,

and most of it was Linda's fault. But the few, the little bit,

the little bit, you know, that I'm willing to, you know, take ownership of

and I'm doing with my child what my father did with me. And that's another sort of circuit that I would get into. I become my old man and the kid would become me. And yet I've got the responsibility. One day I realized that if my brother see, I thought it was Peter.

And I realized that if my brother were Peter's father, he wouldn't strike Peter.

I'm saying, where's the problem? Problems with you, Tiger,

if two or three or four, you know, if you could put 10 people that were going to parent Peter, only one or two of them are going to have the issue you're having. Why don't you take a look at you?

When I took a look at my gambling as opposed to a source of income, because I was a good backgammon player, all of a sudden I took a look at what was costing me in terms of work and my the dishonesty of looking for someone who didn't do it as well as I did it and taking advantage of them. And I took a look at what it was really was. And when you see it, you walk away from it.

And when I came in alcohol astronomers, I stood naked in front of my alcoholism. It altered me. At 8 years, I stood naked in front of my life and I was able to see the unmanageability of my life at that point in time. And I was able to let go of it. And pain was the touchstone of growth.

Pain was what reduced my ego. It ground my ego down enough that all the concerns that I would normally bring up about the areas of my life that I was trying to change

disappeared and all of a sudden it wasn't important that I hurt or I felt uncomfortable or it was difficult. It was, it's time. Let's cut the crap and let's take a look at the real picture. What's going on here? Is that who you want to be? Is that what you want to do? Is that how you think? You know, this honors your faith or this honors your program, and this is where the man you want to be.

No.

Are you ready? Yeah. Let's go. And then it goes from complaint to business. And there's such a difference when it's a piece of business. There's a conversation is just entirely different. When you're both on the golf course and your teachers got a club in his hand and you got a club in your hand. That's a whole different conversation than you have with your buddies. When you're you know, you just you know something's there's a danger of something really happening in this process.

So that big 6 foot football of crap that we've got that we brought through

the process of alkali synonymous through meetings and through step work, piece by piece we start to pry crap off. And then occasionally we go in for a steam cleaning to get some of the rubble and dirt and junk that is off there. And then after a little bit, I mean, and ongoingly, you start to say, oh, there's a beautiful piece of glass,

there's a gym, there's a piece of brass. I think that's pretty cool. There might be something interesting. And you keep going on that process. And what you discover as you continue to remove the things that are there

is this art object.

And it's beautiful. And the more you remove, the more beautiful it is. And after about 10 years you find out it's a it's a lamp, whatever the hell that is.

Couple of years later someone gives you a cord.

Year after that you get a plug.

Sometime after that you plug it in the wall.

Sometime after that you turn it on, you get a light bulb

and then you turn it on and three years later you find out it's a 3 way bulb.

And I

that's something like the process that we are in. It's a process of removal and what you're going to find in the process of removal is yourself.

And what you're going to find in the process of removal is God.

And where they intersect is the core of your very being. So what you find when you, when you go after what God's will is for you. I think at the very essence of it, it is your will for you. They are identical. They don't seem identical because most of us are looking outside, not inside. We are trying to fill the hole and to fill the pain

with objects and thrills and it's like feeding a racehorse sugar. Works very briefly. Very short range does not work long range.

We don't care. Long range, just short range is perfect. We have I'm, I'm add this is going to work. You just give me the you know, throw me a fish, throw me a fish, throw them. I don't want to learn how to fish. Just throw me a fish.

But at some point in time, we started to get in touch with the same courage that got us to the front door of alkalis. Some of the combination of courage and pain and an honesty. And what's the underpinning of that is, is what Bill talked about, both Bill Wilson and Bill Cleveland, is humility, which is the bedrock of the steps. And it is.

I have had the worst

year and a half I've had in 20 years. The last year, up until about 3 months ago,

I've lost 3/4 of whatever I've accumulated in my lifetime.

And I was in danger. I thought of going bankrupt. I was in danger. I didn't think I was. I was. And I went into a depression. And the depression lasted about 15 months. And

you say, what does a guy do with 40 years of sobriety? Who's in a depression, who's scared to death, think that they're losing their treasure again? You asshole, you lost it in 1990. You've made it back and you're losing it again. I mean, give you a break. How in hell?

I mean how, I mean, you know, how could you be here again? And

So what do you do? You know, I mean you, you feel doubly bad because you're supposed to be wise and you and you have stuck it in the dirt.

I do what you do. I go to 5,000,000 a week. I went to Mass on Monday and Tuesday and the other five day, you know, there's some go to five or six millions a week. I keep sponsoring the men that I'm sponsoring and I do the deal. I get on airplanes to go give talks and sometimes I have to hold a shotgun on myself to go get on the plane. I don't feel like giving the talk. I don't feel like going. I don't feel I should be the guy given the talk because I'm