The AA Blog

Session 2: Is A Spiritual Experience Necessary?

Mr. McGinnis spoke of life sober with and without a “spiritual experience”, and that both were possible. Your comments are invited.
The book can be purchased at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rest-Of-Your-Life/dp/1453631313/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337086015&sr=8-2               Group inquiries should be directed to me at  this website.

The Rest Of Your Life
by Allen Reid McGinnis

LET’S NOW try to use a very overworked but apt cliché that points out what sobriety has become to the alcoholic. Sobriety is like soil to the farmer who has to bring in a crop or go broke. If he has a farm and good soil, he has to cultivate it, let it lie fallow and feed it. There has to be some rain, and finally, there is a harvest. But without the soil, the ground, the earth, nothing would happen. And yet the earth, of itself, cannot bring forth a harvest. Sobriety is the foundation of the rest of your life, but it cannot of itself bring you very much more than good health and a better brain to think with, not that they should be minimized for they can take you far. So, if sobriety is our foundation, then let’s take another question.

What are we doing here in AA if really all you have to do is stay sober and to stay sober is to stay away from the first drink, This is a legitimate question and I’ve asked it of myself many times. I hope that I’m shocking you with this because until you get this in your head, You can get all confused with whether or not you’re having a spiritual experience or a spiritual awakening, whether or not you’re doing it right, whether you’re working the program, whether you’re on the program or off the program and the next thing you know, it’s all added up to, there’s nothing else to do but get drunk. And there is no reason in the world to get drunk. Nobody’s so bad that he can’t stay away from the first drink and no alcoholic’s so good that he can afford not to. It’s as simple as that.

Is a spiritual experience necessary to sobriety? I’ve answered it factually, no. Remember, I’m speaking only for myself, but I hope that you think about this a lot because, if you can buy it, then your sobriety is as secure as the air you breathe. Your sobriety is independent of anything else except your staying away from the first drink and if you’re sober now, you are doing it so you know it can be done.

Then why would we come to meetings like this’, Why would we have this book? Why would we have twelve steps? What would be the point to this whole business? Finally there comes a question that we have got to ask ourselves, Why did I drink? What made it necessary for me to become an alcoholic? Why was it when I found out that this liquid or these pills or whatever chemical substance that I was using was doing a lot more than I bargained for, why didn’t I leave it alone?

The answers are as numerous as the people who drank. A lot of them come down to five, six, seven answers, but when you put them all into a Bunsen burner and distill it, it comes down to the essence. The reason you drank and the reason I drank to alcoholic excess was that we wanted to change our reaction to what we thought was reality. I would say that we wanted to change our reaction to reality, but you will find out, as I found out, that we didn’t even know what reality was. There was always some kind of change involved. We wanted to get from where we were emotionally or mentally to someplace else and it didn’t work. We were never content to sit where we were in reality. It was move over here or move over there. A change had to be involved. If we were being peaceful, we wanted to be uproarious. If we were being uproarious, we wanted to be paralyzed. If we were in good health, we wanted to be sick. If we were sick, we wanted to be healthy. We always took this booze in order to change our reaction because we found out that the reality didn’t change. Our attitude towards it changed.

Is Your God Silent? Are You?

By Heidi Fogle

Before I got sober at the age of 55, I was trapped by an ice storm at an abbey near Dubuque, in NE Iowa. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There are no coincidences. I’m beginning to see that in my life, anyway, there are only events that cause me to choose. I can choose to take the climbing path towards Him or I can choose my own descending path… It’s what I believe. My choice.

According to my journal, that stormy week I spent time in the wisdom of Murray, Merton and Manning. A continuous thread throughout the readings was the topic of prayer.

While at the Abbey, I joined the services every few hours, sometimes even getting up well before dawn. I am not Catholic, so I was frequently lost while trying to follow the liturgy during the many times of communal prayer. After blurting out when it was not my turn to be responsive, I learned to just follow silently—not an easy thing for a public speaker, once English teacher.

This was the perfect metaphor for how lost I was in prayer, period. I was well acquainted with conversational prayer and comfortable praying aloud, in groups or even leading prayer in front of large gatherings. What I wasn’t comfortable with was…silence.

It was this week that I first started to practice silence in my personal prayer. It seemed like an oxymoron. Wasn’t I supposed to be talking, here? No. In my readings, I kept bumping up against the idea of being silent before God. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

I already believed that God wanted to love me, to comfort me, to guide me, but I was not able to experience it. I couldn’t feel it! It wasn’t for lack of trying. I tried. I did. It wasn’t working. It was like my God was silent. Why did I feel that way?

It seemed that I was already isolated from God, so with the three authors recommending that I try silence, what did I have to risk? He wasn’t talking, why should I?

I tried coming into the presence of my God with silence–not with my words; with my heart–not my head. I tried doing something that I now call practicing the presence of God. Me, just being still, being aware of His love. I was seeking His love and His will. I wanted Him in my life. For the first time, I really did. I was getting desperate. I was becoming tired of living my life according to me. I didn’t know it, but I was being led to a new path… one that would call for the sacrifice of old ways and a program of new ones.

This willingness to be silent was a new willingness to be dependent. After a few weeks, this confidence of God within fueled my outward dependence on Him. I think it’s actually the principle behind Step 2, don’t you? I was finding a right relationship with God. I was tiring of the intellectualizing faith that had given me information without relationship. God was in my head, but not my heart. I had God, but He didn’t have me. Not yet.

The God of intellect displaced the God of our Fathers. ~ Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, 2012, p 29 Step 2
I gave up drinking less than a month later. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

PS: It wasn’t until I pulled this journal from the shelf that I discovered when I started to practice the presence of God.

Have you tried it?

Read Heidi’s Blog: http://goodlifenoalcohol.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/is-your-god-silent-are-you/

The Blame Game

“One must first learn to live with one’s self before one blames others.”
Feodor Dostoyevsky

Blaming another person can become a way of positioning the self as a victim. When children are young and see their parents as the entire world, they are extremely vulnerable and dependent upon their parents’ opinions. If their parent belittles them and makes them feel in the wrong, they will eventually come to do the same, turning that opinion inward onto them. In this case, part of the process of healing will be to turn self-hatred outward – back toward the parent as a way of righting the original distortion. This, however, is only a part of the process. Continued healing will happen when the parent is knocked off the pedestal and no longer seen as the ultimate authority when the parents become human for the child, who is now an adult, and when that child can see them with understanding and perspective, realizing that they, too, had a history.

I am not my parents’ opinion of me.

The Rest Of Your Life: More of Session 1

This book is a transcription of Seminars in 1968 by the author. It was first published in 1986 and has been re-printed for the first time in 2010. Allen Reid McGinnis’ experience, strength and hope were an inspiration to thousands of recovering alcoholics in California during the 1960′s. The book is available in its entirety from Amazon and can be found by clicking on the link at the bottom of the blog.
The AA Blog will continue to publish sections of it, including the Q & A from time to time.
We would appreciate to hear from you and share your comments with others.
Personally, my search for serenity and growth has been aided by applying Mr. McGinnis’ ideas. He was also the author of the AA pamphlet A Member’s Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous.

What Is The Point Of Sobriety Part 2
by Allen Reid McGinnis
When we come to this Fellowship, most of us fall into two groups. The largest group says, “I will stay sober if I get back…” Now they have been around for a while and they have accrued and acquired things and they say this way down deep inside in the unconscious where it really counts. They never say this out loud because it would sound too crass. But they say it to themselves, “I will stay sober if I get back…,” and there is a long list, depending upon the circumstances and background of the individual. “I will stay sober if I get back my wife, if I get back my husband, if I get back my job, if I get back the car, if I get back the kids, if I get back my health, if I get back my self-respect, if I get back my figure…” and on and on.
I’m going to stop right now to define my terms because I want to forestall the tired old question of what is the difference between being dry and being sober. When I use the term sobriety, I am using it in the sense that it is the absence of any kind of chemical substance in your bloodstream that changes your thinking. Any substance, be it liquid or solid, and whether you take it through the mouth, in the veins, or some other way I haven’t learned about. That’s what I mean by sobriety. It just isn’t there. You’re not taking it anymore and you don’t go off in a corner and ponder whether you are dry or sober. You just don’t have any chemical inside of you that is changing your thinking.
Now, when you make this statement to yourself that “I will stay sober if I get back…and you have this long list that follows, very salutary things happen, great progress is often made. Generally old-timers look at these people and say, “My God, look how they’re growing! “ And they grow. Light comes into their eyes. They start making 12th step calls. Sobriety blossoms all over the place. And then without any warning, there comes a day, an hour, and they suddenly find themselves kind of ticking it off. “I stayed sober to get back…,” and the things they stayed sober to get back either haven’t gotten back or now that they have gotten back, they no longer want them. So, what course do you take at that point? You say to yourself, “What the hell is the point of sobriety?” That’s what you say. And there’s no point to sobriety if sobriety is going to be a means to an end and the end hasn’t been gotten, or you no longer want it. So you dispense with it. Now that’s one group.
The smaller group (maybe it’s growing because they’re coming in younger and younger and a lot haven’t been around long enough to acquire very much to lose) says to themselves, “I will stay sober if I get a husband, if I get a wife, if I get a job, if I get a Cadillac, if I get the contract.” And they grow. They stay sober. Great things happen. Months pass. Years can pass. Then one day its inventory time for them and what they have stayed sober to get either hasn’t been gotten or now that they have gotten it, it has not the value that they thought so they in turn say, “What’s the point of sobriety?” Since it didn’t get them what they wanted, it has no point, no value in itself at all, so it is dispensed with. The virtue was followed. The virtue was practiced. We were virtuous while we were practicing it, but we didn’t get our reward … We didn’t get our reward.
Now if you are an alcoholic, the “if I get…” is the most dangerous thinking that you can do. It so often happens to the newcomer this way because when he comes in, we define alcoholism for him. We tell him that the physical part of this disease comes to a total, dead stop if he stays away from the first drink. Generally there will be a great nod of recognition to this statement. I remember the first time I heard it. I thought, “My God, why in the hell didn’t I figure that out? Someone as brilliant as I am… that’s the way you stay sober. You stay away from the first drink.” And that’s exactly the way you work the physical part. AA has no great formula or magic little kind of thing that you do in order to stay away from the first drink. You just stay away from it. Do anything else you want to. If you’re a newcomer and you can still taste that drink in your mouth and I say to you, “There’s only one way that you can stay sober and that is to stay away from the first drink,” then that is all you have got to remember … that is all you have got to remember.
I’m dwelling on this because sometimes at two or three o’clock in the morning I get a call. It’s always nice to get a call at that hour and, generally, the voice on the other end is kind of towards the end of the second act. We haven’t gotten into the third act yet where it’s really going to get tragic, and it goes something like this. “Allen, I heard you talk and I sure as hell like what you say about letting the tailgater pass. Would you tell me more about that?”… And on and on. Finally I say, “How long have you been sober?” “Oh, I haven’t been sober. I’m drinking, but I sure like what you say.” Well, you see, anything I say is just wind unless you’re going to stay away from the first drink. That’s the name of this game. You don’t come here to see me walk around making up a lot of nice things to say and then go out thinking, “By God, that’s pretty good!” and then go down to the nearest bar or pick up a fifth on your way home. That isn’t what this is all about. We are here for one purpose and one purpose only and that is: We are not going to drink anymore, we are not going to pop pills anymore, and we are not going to smoke pot anymore. This is the name of the game and how does it begin? It begins by staying away from the first drink or whatever you do with these different things you use. You are not going to do them anymore.
Now, you are going to say to me, “How do I do that?” You’ve done it before. We all have done it before. There’s always been a day or an hour or an afternoon where we’ve stayed away from the first drink. Somebody or something kept us away from the first drink and that’s all I’m saying to you. That’s it. That’s where it begins. I don’t care about anything else you do. You don’t have to be virtuous in order to do this. Generally we get you confused an awful lot of times. You come in here and we define alcoholism for you. We tell you you’ve got a disease. We tell you you’ve got to find a higher power. You’ve got to work 12 steps. You’ve got to go to meetings and you’ve got to do this and do that and pretty soon you think, “My God, get out the incense and the candles and let’s go!” But you don’t have to do any of this. You just have to stay away from the goddamn first drink! That is what you do. Now, do anything else like kick your wife, your husband, beat the kids, yell at the dog, and tell your boss you’re resigning. Screw up your life however you want to, but don’t take the first drink! Now, if that isn’t clear, I don’t know what else I can say.
So, if that’s how you do it, then that’s what makes it an end in itself. All comparisons are odious; all analogies never quite fit, but let me try to put it in another form. Let us suppose that, instead of alcoholism you have diabetes. You go to the doctor and you’re examined and the tests are taken and then he comes in and says, “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, Joe, you have diabetes. And, as you know, you can die of diabetes. It can be a very, very serious disease, Joe. But you don’t need to worry too much because there is a substance called insulin and if you take it regularly as I’m going to prescribe it to you, you will be able to live a normal life.” And you go away with your insulin pills or syringe and after a while you come back to the doctor and say, “Doctor, I have decided not to take the insulin anymore. I’ve taken it exactly the way you prescribed, but my wife doesn’t treat me any better than she used to. I still have the same trouble with my boss. My kids are driving me crazy. Taxes are too high. Nothing has changed, Doctor, nothing has changed, so why the hell should I take the insulin”? And then the doctor patiently says, “Joe, you take the insulin because that way you live”! And for the alcoholic, whether you like it or not, you stay away from the first drink because that way you live. Now, does that mean that if you continue to drink tonight, you will die tonight? No. It’s too bad maybe that it isn’t that way because my experience with progressive alcoholism is that it is fatal. But long before you die physically, everything that makes life worth living dies … long, long before you die physically. And, in the almost 16 years that I’ve been in this Fellowship, I have had the unfortunate, sad experience of seeing many of the friends that were very close to me, come in here and leave, and they are still drinking, and they are dying by inches … but they have lost everything that makes life worth living.
There is another thing I would like you to think about. Every human being, sometime in his life, somewhere in his life, is going to have to take a stand if he is ever going to grow up emotionally. If he’s ever going to accept life on its terms, if he is ever going to face and recognize reality, then he is going to have to take a stand somewhere. He is going to have to put his feet down and do what in marketing we call “position the product.” For an alcoholic there’s a wonderful way if you’ve been on the run all your life and you have if you’re an alcoholic. There is one way you can take a stand. It’s so clear-cut. A lot of non-alcoholics, just as driven, just as neurotic, just as bugged, just as sure that there’s no way out, don’t have as clear-cut a place where they can put their feet down and take a stand. But you do, just as I did one night.
I put my feet down and said, “Here I will stand. I will not take the first drink no matter what. I will not expect anything for it. I don’t give a damn whether things are good or bad, whether I keep my job or lose my job, whether people hate me or love me, whether I finally flip my wig and really go insane and the boys in the little white jackets come and get me and take me away. At least, by God, I will know where I am going and who is taking me.” And I put my feet down and I said it, not to God; there were no tears, there were no prayers, you don’t need them, you don’t need them to do this. You can do it yourself. You can put your feet down and say, “I may die here, I may collapse here, I may go crazy here, but from this spot I will not retreat.” You can do it. I did it. Thousands of others have done it. And until you do it, you don’t move forward. You keep moving backwards.
By now I hope that you have come to the conclusion that sobriety for an alcoholic is an end in itself. You have to quit thinking about it as a virtue. It has nothing to do with virtue. It has nothing to do with a reward. It has nothing to do with fringe benefits and dividends … those phrases that we toss about like confetti in AA. The answer to the question, “What is the point of sobriety?” is “The point of sobriety is LIFE.” It is as simple, it is as fundamental; it is as encompassing as that. The point of sobriety is life.
Remember that what I’m telling you are only my opinions, but I am telling them to you very vehemently because they are my vehement opinions. I don’t have any mild opinions.
As your days in AA lengthen, you will hear a couple of phrases. One you don’t hear much anymore, but I sure heard it because AA, as an organization, has only been in existence about 30 years and I’ve been around 16 of those, so I got in what we might call the early part. And when I got into AA, if you still had your own teeth, you were looked upon with a little suspicion. They thought maybe you hadn’t suffered enough. Fingers were pointed at you and you were told; staying sober is your number one problem. Can you imagine how that sounds to the newcomer? When I heard that, I was dying to say to those old-timers (but I didn’t want to displease them), “Why don’t you come out with me to the parking lot of the 6300 Club and give me a couple of hours and I’ll tell you what a few of my number one problems are?” But they were telling me the truth because I am an alcoholic, and while it is true that alcoholism is a symptom of deeper troubles, there is no point in getting into that until you have answered that first question, “What is the point of sobriety?”
The other phrase you hear, and it doesn’t infuriate you quite as much … sometimes it has kind of a wonderful, spiritual and noble ring to it. It’s said with a far-off look in the eyes, the head tilted up a little bit towards heaven. For me sobriety alone is not enough. Everybody kind of sighs and waits for all of the recitals, all the blessings that had to accompany this person’s sobriety in order to make it worthwhile. Fine and dandy; I think that is great. As I have said, this is a Fellowship where everybody can believe what he wants to. But if sobriety alone is not enough, and all these blessings disappear, and they have a terrific way of coming and going, I tell you from 16 years of experience that sometimes they just aren’t there at all and no AA program can guarantee you that they will be there. Sometimes they are so absent that you wonder why you ever started on this at all. So on those days when the sky is dark and you are looking in the mirror and you realize that you are not one whit different than you were several years ago, and these blessings that you thought you had were really wishful thinking, and these virtues that you thought you possessed were kind of being worn as a cloak in order to impress others and win for you the self-approval that you had been thirsting for all of your natural life, then what do you do? Sobriety sure as hell better be enough at that moment or you will drink again. And you will say the fatal words, “What the hell is the point of sobriety?”
That’s the first question. I hope I’ve answered it and now I hope that I can answer some questions of yours.

Book Available: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rest-Of-Your-Life/dp/1453631313

What Is The Point Of Sobriety? Part 1

The Chapters will be divided into 1 0r 2 parts depending on their length. Each session was followed by a Q & A which will be included as separate posts. Please comment on the content as well as the format. Remember these workshops were conducted in 1968 and the language, like our Big Book, may be dated. I believe the message is just as relevant today as it was back then.

By Allen Reid McGinnis

I’D LIKE you to think of this, not as a meeting, but as a workshop, where you and I come together and talk about this thing that we share called alcoholism; what I have learned about it, what I have come to believe about it, what you have come to believe about it, and things you might want to know … questions that are in your mind. Because I saw so many newcomer’s hands go up I want to emphasize to you, and don’t ever forget it, nobody speaks officially for the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, not even the founders.

One of the most incredible things about this organization is that I can tell you things that I have come to believe with every fiber of my being, and you can disagree with every syllable I utter, and yet both of us can be sober … both of us can be useful, productive members, not only of Alcoholics Anonymous, but of society. So, if anything I say bothers you, just dismiss it. If anything I say you disagree with, you’re entitled to.

It took me a long time to get this through my head because I came from a very authoritarian background. I thought that if anything was going to work, I would have to agree with it. I didn’t have to be around very long before I discovered that these alcoholics were not only disagreeing with each other, they were seldom agreeing with themselves two days in a row. So, I took the next and much more inviting alternative. If I couldn’t agree with everything I heard, then everybody else would have to agree with me.

Now this is an inviting alternative, and I pursued it for many years until it finally dawned on me that it doesn’t work this way in Alcoholics Anonymous. I realized that, without any great design, we people who were forever living our lives on the basis of what somebody else thinks had come into a Fellowship where everybody tells us what they think … but it’s always different … so somewhere along the line we are forced to think for ourselves, and that’s the beginning of growing up.

In the next to the final paragraph in the book ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS there’s a paragraph that I’d like to read to you because I want to set the tone for what we’re going to be doing here.

”Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little. God will constantly disclose more to you and to us. Ask Him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man who is still sick. The answers will come, if your own house is in order. But obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got. See to it that your relationship with Him is right and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. This is the Great Fact for us.”

What I would like to do for myself and with you is to see how you start to build a house that is in order where you can ask others to come in and have a little shelter from the wind and the cold. And I’m going to try to do it by reviewing four questions that came to me after I came to this Fellowship.

The first question is, as far as I’m concerned, the very heart and crux of what we are doing here and why we are not someplace else. It is the most promising question an alcoholic can ever ask himself because, depending upon the answer to it, it largely shapes the future of his life. And the question is What the point of sobriety is? Somewhere, sometime, if you haven’t asked yourself that in those words, you will. Chances are you have done it long before you got here. Of course, you probably haven’t used the word sobriety. It seems to me that word never existed in my vocabulary until I had a 12th-step call made on me on February the 6th, 1952. When I first heard that word, I went into a state of shock. The minute I heard it, as drunk as I was, it brought a vision to me that has only slightly faded over the years, and that was a vision of a person who is in the pink of health but he is dead.

Now why would you and I look upon the mere fact of staying sober as something so wonderful that it should have some point to it? Well, I think it’s because in our culture, sobriety is considered a virtue. Even on the part of non-alcoholics, abstaining from the fruit of the vine is often considered quite the thing to do. So if it is virtuous to do this, then it follows as the night to day that, (a) you have to be virtuous in order to do it and, (b) you should get, by God, a reward for it!

By the time the alcoholic reaches AA, this virtue has been held up to him as one of such shining dominance over all others that he wants something pretty big to happen if he goes along with this. It would be wonderful if we all discussed this expectation from the very beginning but apparently, somehow or other, we don’t. That’s why I’m trying to discuss it with you now because I think it’s where it begins, it’s where it stays, and finally, it’s where it ends. When the alcoholic gets here, he can no longer look upon sobriety as a virtue no matter how difficult it might be or how many benefits he thinks are going to accrue from it. After he gets here, he finds out that what he has, this virtue that he thinks is something that is done by choice, and the lack of it on his part is a disease. When he isn’t sober, he’s sick! And he gets sicker and sicker the more he stays un-sober. He’s been testing it for quite a while and he doesn’t really believe the results most of the time.

I no longer had any quarrel with the results by the time I got here. I didn’t go through any fingernail biting about whether I was an alcoholic at all. By the time I got here, I, and others, had called myself so many other names with such deadly accuracy, that the term alcoholic had a nice scientific sound. It sounded kind of upper class. In fact, it had a nice antiseptic ring to it. And when they assured me that I had a disease, I never really paid any attention because, the way I felt, whatever it is, whatever label you want to put on it, some terrible stigma or some nice euphemism, whatever, I’ve got it.

Book Available: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rest-Of-Your-Life/dp/1453631313

The Rest Of Your Life-Foreward

Over the next month I am going to publish on this website a reprint of the book that was put into print in 1986 from the transcription of tapes recorded in 1968. My introduction to the book was posted a few weeks ago as an explanation of the re-printing. The following is the Dedication and original Foreword.

 Building a House of Sobriety

A Workshop on Alcoholism

By Allen Reid McGinnis

Dedication
This book is dedicated to all those who have loved this man for sharing his experience, strength and hope… and to all those who seek and will hopefully find some answers through reading the written words.
Foreword
Allen was a native of Oklahoma, received his education In Catholic parochial schools and attended the University of Tulsa. Before turning to advertising, he had a successful career as a writer of short stories. He also had several plays produced by various civic theaters as well as summer stock companies.

He joined a highly respected advertising firm in 1945 after his discharge from the Army and in the more than twenty years that followed he wrote copy for many large accounts working up to TV writing in the ‘50s and eventually becoming Creative Director and a Vice-President in the company. His list of advertising awards was long and varied. Allen was a past president of The Copy Club of Los Angeles and a member of the permanent advertising committee for the United Crusade.

This was the public man who entered the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1952. Those of us who were there when he shared his “Workshop on Alcoholism” in 1968 and many who have heard the tapes of those five Thursday night talks over the last seventeen years feel that an opportunity was presented to find out what kind of foundation was needed upon which we could build a house of sobriety that would be secure.

The words that have been transcribed and printed onto the following pages have been edited as little as possible … with many prayers for guidance … and hopefully will be of benefit to those who have requested they be printed. The question and answer periods have also been included with all names of persons omitted respecting our tradition of anonymity. These further clarify frequently asked questions and contain a degree of humor. The editor only wishes that the many healthy sounds of laughter shared by all, questioners included could have been inserted. If the reader is trudging our road, they will be heard.

A talk that Allen gave in 1971 … one of the last times he shared … has also been transcribed and reprinted here. It is possible to learn from it much about how life can happen to us sober when we are challenged to put into practice what we have heard and learned through the years. It isn’t always easy, but it is possible if the foundation is solid. Shortly after this talk, and perhaps providing some explanation of how our physical condition can affect our reaction to life situations, Allen was diagnosed as having cancer. He died of that cancer in November of 1972… Sober… and still giving hope and encouragement to those who were there.

Website Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1453631313/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

Contact me directly to purchase for groups, available at up to 50% off.

Home

Excerpt From The Spirituality of Imperfection

Being-at-home involves, first, coming home to ourselves-being able to accept our own imperfect humanness. This is the first and, really, the only coherent meaning of another concept: self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness, as a spiritual act, is quite simply the opening of one’s self to “experiencing forgiveness,” which begins with allowing another to forgive us. It is in letting some other that close; close enough that his or her forgiveness matters to us-that we find ourselves released from fundamental estrangement from self and the world. We discover that we can and do fit, that we can be-at-home with both self and the world. Self-forgiveness requires the kind of openness that is first of all trust. There is a letting go of the fears connected with one’s old identity, expectations, and beliefs-and not least the belief that one can do this by oneself.

The total experience of forgiveness-being forgiven and forgiving -is a reclaiming of one’s true self. In own-ing (making one’s own the part of self that had been split off-because it was seen as imper¬fect, flawed and therefore, in this perfectionist world, somehow, shameful-that “dark side” becomes less threatening. There is less to fear in the vision of self as ordinary, imperfect, and limited-neither devil nor angel. And this acceptance flows into and involves an awareness of connection with others who are also, inevitably, imperfect, and with the world, which, because it is made up of imperfect beings, does not demand perfection of us. In accepting this vision of self, others and the world, we let go of the feeling that we have to betray our true self in order to become a part of humanity.

Home is, ultimately, that place where we find the peace and har¬mony that comes from learning to live with the knowledge of our imperfections and from learning to accept the imperfections of other; Such a place, such a Home, can exist in various settings, but its ultimate foundation rests jointly within self and within some group of trusted others. Some places are more conducive to this experience: than others. But wherever and whenever we do attain that sense-”being-at-home”, we experience a falling away of tensions, a degree of balance between the pushing and pulling forces of our lives. In such a place we can cease fighting-most important, we can cease fighting with ourselves. We find the space to be the imperfect beings that we are, and we discover that in such a space, we also become able to let others be who they are.

Scholars have found in this experience of home-the longing and the searching for it-a sensitivity exquisitely developed in most al¬coholics. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson, in his essay on Alcoholics Anonymous, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self,”’ pointed out how the lonely drinker at the bar, as he gets more and more lubricated, becomes either maudlin or pugnacious. It makes little difference, Bateson observed: whether weeping or fighting, he has at least become engaged with someone else. Psychiatrist Edward Khantzian, following a lead suggested by analyst Michael Balini in his study, The Basic Fault, notes how “alcoholics seek the effects of alcohol to establish a feeling of ‘harmony’ -a feeling that everything is now well between them and their environment.” The alcoholic’s “sense of incomplete¬ness” combines with “the yearning for this feeling of harmony” to become “the most important cause of alcoholism or, for that matter, any form of addiction.”
But what kind of place is this home-this space of harmony and balance that not only alcoholics but all of us seek? And how is it created? Home is, first, the “kind of place” where we “fit in” because of-indeed by-our limitations. It is that setting where our inabilities and incongruities fit and therefore belong. And thus it is a place where “feeling bad” can be turned into “being good.”

Visiting a strange city, a newly sober A.A. member sets out to find an A.A. meeting. Following directions received on the telephone, he walks into a hall that is part of a large church complex and begins to search for the room where the meeting is being held. The first door he opens reveals a group of children in choir robes, getting ready to sing. He closes the door rather quickly … no, that’s not it. He looks in an¬other door … no, half a dozen women are sewing and talk¬ing. That’s not it.

Approaching panic, for he has never felt comfortable in a church, he walks quickly down the hallway, feeling a little lost, thinking that if he sees an exit he will take it, but still hoping to find what he came for. Suddenly a cloud of cigarette smoke wafts down the hallway, and he smells the bitter, burnt aroma of strong coffee. He hears voices, and the welcoming sound of people laughing. Walking faster, he finds a room with the familiar blue-jacketed books on the table and the oh-so-trite but now so welcome framed mottoes on the wall. Entering the room, greeted by a dozen smiles, he sighs deeply and smiles back. He’s found home.

Home is the place where we fit in precisely because of our limita¬tions, where we fit in not because of what we have but because of what we lack.

A man was looking for a good church to attend and he hap¬pened to enter one in which the congregation and the preacher were reading from their prayer book. They were say¬ing, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”

The man dropped into a seat and sighed with relief as he said to himself, “Thank goodness, I’ve found my crowd at last.”

Our first “home” is our parents’ home, and our first stories begin there. Sigmund Freud once observed his grandson playing the game¬ lost/found, in German the game of “fort-da.” The toddler, sitting in his playpen, developed a way of demonstrating a kind of mastery. When someone entered the room, he would pick up a ball or other toy and, throwing it away from himself, look at the visitor and exclaim “Port! “Gone!” As soon as the visitor acknowledged “gone” and showed the requisite sadness and anxiety, the child would triumphantly produce the “lost” object, exclaiming “da!”-”Here it is!”

This is perhaps the shortest story we can imagine: An object is lost and then regained. A child’s story, enacted by himself, told in just two words and yet containing the requisite beginning (an object exists). middle (it is lost), and end (it is found). In this child’s story, as in all stories, something must be lost or absent for the narrative to unfold after all, if everything stayed in place, there would be no story to tell! If we were only evil, or only good, there could be no stories. “Lost has meaning only in relation to found,” literary critic Terry Eagleton commented in his discussion of the fort-da game. “But, of course, found has meaning only when the thing is first lost.” Once we become aware of the essential limitation of our own humanity, we cannot think of any reality without thinking also of its possible absence, without knowing that its presence is in some way arbitrary and provisional.

Friends Of Bill W., Please Come…..

Once you learn to walk, crawling is out of the question.-James D. Davis

Sometime in the early 1990′s I was treating a woman in an intensive outpatient chemical dependency group. Let’s call her “Grace.” Grace was a flight attendant and had been suspended from her job with a major airline due to her untreated alcoholism. She had been stealing the little miniature liquor bottles and drinking in airport bars in uniform, etc. Her employer, realizing she needed treatment sent her to us.

After the eight week program, I suggested to her it might be a good idea to solidify her foundation in recovery before returning to work as she would be working in a high-risk environment (serving alcohol, being out of town alone, etc.). Grace did, however, return to work shortly after completing outpatient treatment. One day while she was departing from a plane at the end of long day a major craving for alcohol overpowered her. There she was, in the Los Angeles International Airport pulling her roller-bag behind her when this massive craving to drink came over her. She tried to just “think through it,” or “just forget about it,” but it was way too powerful. It was so powerful, in fact, that she had resigned to herself that she would just go drink. Grace thought, Oh, heck with it, I’ll get another job….or maybe no one will find out anyway. But deep down inside Grace did not want to drink. She truly had wanted to stay sober, but she was in trouble.

On her way to the bar in the airport, Grace had a moment of sanity. She stopped, picked up the airport paging phone and said, “Will you please page friends of Bill W., “ she paused, quickly looking around for an empty gate, “to come to Gate 12?”

Within minutes, over the paging system in the LA International Airport came, “Will friends of Bill W. please come to Gate 12. Will friends of Bill W. please come to Gate 12.” Most people in recovery know that asking if you are a friend of Bill W. is an anonymous way to identify yourself as a member of AA.

In less than five minutes there were about fifteen people at that gate from all over the world. That brought tears of amazement, relief and joy to Grace. They had a little meeting there in that empty gate, total strangers prior to that moment. Grace discovered that two of those people had gotten out of their boarding lines and missed their flights to answer that call for help. They had remembered what they had seen on many walls of meeting rooms: “When anyone, anywhere reaches out their hand for help, I want the hand of AA to be there and for that I am responsible.”
Grace did not drink that day. I would venture to guess that none of the people who came to Gate 12 drank that day either. Instead Grace had a moment of sanity, realized she could not do it on her own, took the action of asking for help and received it immediately. This help is available to all of us if we want it and sincerely ask for it. It never fails.

Chicken Soup For The Recovering Soul: http://www.hcibooks.com/p-2836-chicken-soup-for-the-recovering-soul.aspx

The Power of Powerlessness

By Dan Griffin
I remember when I was very young and my mother and I were in a car accident and she was pinned under the car and as the flames were spreading everywhere I could hear her screaming and I tried desperately to lift the car off of her…oh wait, sorry that was the introduction to The Incredible Hulk. And that is who I wished I was or could be on a regular basis. Or Superman. Or a Green Beret, especially Rambo. From a very young age I was being trained by my father, my schoolmates, and the media to be powerful and to not respect those, including myself, who showed any sign of weakness. Weakness equaled unmanliness—period. Or fag. Or pussy. As in gay or a woman—because that is as unmanly as it gets. There was no grey area. The kill or be killed mentality of my training—subtle at times—to be a man led me to one internecine battle after another. This lasted through the first half of my life. I spent most of that time trying desperately to get power and, more importantly, feel powerful. Everything changed when I was introduced to the idea of powerlessness. When I say introduced I mean I was on my knees and was willing to listen to such a pathetic concept because my ass had been thoroughly kicked by alcohol and pot. Yes, I know addiction recovery is a common narrative these days but one of the more compelling in the human genre, if you ask me.

In my book, A Man’s Way through the Twelve Steps, power is a part of much of the discussion throughout the book and the second chapter, which focuses on the First Step, is all about men’s relationship to power. I interviewed men with different lengths of sobriety from various addictions and yet, much of the ideas and wisdom could help any man. This is what one of the men had to say about powerlessness: “Admitting and accepting powerlessness at face value challenges the notion that men are strong, self-sufficient, and should not admit weakness. Paradoxically, recognizing and admitting powerlessness takes incredible strength and courage and is more manly than living in the fantasy world of denial.” So many of us spend so much of our time trying to control so many things—other people, our emotions, the future, etc. Much of our suffering comes from not realizing that we do not have power in a certain situation. Certainly, that I, alone, do not have the power.
The power inherent in powerlessness is a wonderful paradox. Think about it this way: You are a day laborer and are tasked to move all of the rocks in this one small area. You look over to where you are going to work and it is far enough that you cannot tell exactly what the landscape looks like. You see all of the other workers going to their respective lots. You are ready to work and feeling invincible. You start moving some of the rocks: no problem. Then you see a huge rock that you decide to move next. It will not budge. You keep trying to force this rock to move. If you admit you cannot do it a whole new freedom opens up and you have choices—maybe you keep trying to move it or you turn your attention to all of the other rocks in your area that you can move or you ask some of your fellow workers to help you move the really big rock. We, men, spend a lot of time trying to move these huge rocks by ourselves refusing to ask for help or accept the futility of it—wasting our time and others’ time as well. If we admit we cannot do it somehow that is a reflection of our worth—and our manliness. All of this because of our great fear of being powerless.
A good friend, also quoted in my book, said this: “When I was young, I thought of power as additive, the more I took the more I had. Kind of like money. The program [of the Twelve Steps] has helped me to see that the more I take the less I have. Being powerful enough to experience my powerlessness is being awake and fully alive.” The truth is we are all powerless, to varying degrees at different times throughout our lives. It could be a great fact to connect us all because rooted in our powerlessness is our need for others and our need for community. The irony is that one of the greatest ways to experience true power is when you create enough space in your life for powerlessness.
Dan Griffin’s Website Link: http://dangriffin.com/

Easter Message

How to Build an Intimate Relationship with Jesus
By Jack Zavada
As Christians grow in spiritual maturity, we hunger for an intimate relationship with Jesus, but at the same time we feel confused over how to go about it.
How do you get closer to the invisible God? How do you hold a conversation with someone who doesn’t audibly talk back?
Our confusion begins with the word “intimate,” which has become cheapened because of our culture’s obsession with sex. The essence of an intimate relationship, especially with Jesus, requires sharing.
The Gospels are remarkable books. Even though they are not exhaustive biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, they give us a compelling portrait of him. If you read those four accounts carefully, you will come away knowing the secrets of his heart.
The more you study Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the better you’ll understand Jesus. When you meditate on his parables, you’ll discover the love, compassion, and tenderness that flow from him. As you read about Jesus healing people thousands of years ago, you begin to grasp that our Living God can reach out from heaven and touch your life today. Through reading God’s Word, your relationship with Jesus begins to take on new and deeper significance.
Jesus revealed his emotions. He got angry at injustice, showed concern about a hungry crowd of his followers, and cried when his friend Lazarus died. But the greatest thing is how you, personally, can make this knowledge of Jesus your own. He wants you to know him.
What sets the Bible apart from other books is that through it, God speaks to individuals. The Holy Spirit unfolds Scripture so it becomes a love letter written specifically to you. The more you desire relationship with Jesus, the more personal that letter becomes.
When you are intimate with someone else, you trust him or her enough to share your secrets. As God, Jesus already knows everything about you anyway, but when you choose to tell him what’s hidden deep within you, it proves you trust him.
Trust is hard. Other people have probably betrayed you, and when that happened, maybe you swore you’d never open up again. But Jesus loved you and trusted you first. He laid down his life for you. That sacrifice has earned him your trust.
Many of my secrets are sad, and maybe yours are too. It hurts to bring them up again and give them to Jesus, but that is the path to intimacy. If you want the closest of relationships with Jesus, you have to risk opening your heart. There’s no other way.
When you share yourself in relationship with Jesus, when you talk to him often and step out in faith, he will reward you by giving you more of himself. Stepping out takes courage, and it takes time. Held back by our fears, we can move beyond them only through the encouragement of the Holy Spirit.
At first you may notice no difference in your connection with Jesus, but over weeks and months, Bible verses will take on new meaning for you. The bond will grow stronger. In small doses, life will make more sense. Gradually you will sense that Jesus is there, listening to your prayers, answering through Scripture and promptings in your heart. A sureness will come upon you that something wonderful is happening.
Jesus never turns away anyone who seeks him. He will give you every help you need to build an intense, intimate relationship with him.
When two people are intimate, they don’t need words. Husbands and wives, as well as best friends, know the pleasure of simply being together. They can enjoy each other’s company, even in silence.
It may seem blasphemous that we could enjoy Jesus, but the old Westminster Catechism says that is part of the meaning of life:
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
We glorify God by loving and serving him, and we can do that better when we have an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, his Son. As an adopted member of this family, you possess the right to enjoy your Father God and your Savior as well.
You were meant for intimacy with Jesus. It is your most important calling now, and for eternity.