Below is a raw transcript from the audio recording by
Sonny C. and Masa M., Emotional Sobriety Workshop, in 2019.(Click to go back)
Good morning. My name is Joe and I'm an alcoholic. Good morning. And I would like to welcome you all to Embar and our emotional sobriety panel. I can't even speak today. That's my new word.
I'd like to thank Embar for giving Money Pah the opportunity to bring in these panels. We've brought a great bunch of speakers this morning. And without any further ado, I ask for a moment of silence followed by the serenity prayer. Got grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change things I can and with some to no the difference. So to start off our speakers are going to share a bit of their experience, strength and hope on emotional sobriety. And then as time allows, we will have time for Q&A at the end.
And without any further ado, I'd like to start off with Masa. All right. No readings, nothing? I'm sitting? We're coming up to the corner. I'm sorry, I put you under the gun, Sonny.
I'm an alcoholic. My name is Masa. Yeah, that's weird. Like I was expecting three more minutes to get centered, right? I'm an alcoholic. I have a sobriety date.
It's September 25th of 2007. I have a home group. It is from the heart. It's needs Monday nights at APM in Santa Cruz. I have a sponsor. He knows he's my sponsor.
It's very important, right? I have sponsors. I've worked all 12 steps several times. I'm a little sicker than others maybe. Or a little stubborn. I don't know.
Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I don't know where to like. So we're talking about emotional sobriety, right? And I want to say that like you stay sober long enough and you do enough digging and you build enough relationships here in Alcoholics Anonymous that you're just going to stumble upon this topic, right?
Although that's not always the case, you know. And over the last week I was doing a little reading. I wanted to sound really good for you guys. Okay. I listened to the podcast and the YouTube videos and I read up, you know, and I looked up Bill's letter, emotional sobriety, the new frontier. And it struck a chord for me.
And what I'm going to say now is that I am not a medical professional. I hope that if you were here earlier, you sat in on the doctor's opinion. Bill had some interesting things to say. And I hope that if you read that article searching for emotional sobriety that you do more investigating past that. That's all I'm going to say on that. A little bit about my past.
I think it's kind of important. Aside from being an alcoholic, I'll tell you how I processed emotions when I was younger. I did. I was a latch key kid of the 80s and 90s. My dad is full Japanese and he's like, he's six to and like the picture of what you think a Japanese man is, right? They don't talk.
Right. They're very stoic and staunch and. And my mom and my dad. So my mom and my dad separated when they divorced when I was three, but they stayed together until I was 14. So I lived in a household that had two parents that didn't talk to each other. They didn't hug each other.
They didn't say, I love you. But anyways, so. But I had everything that I needed, you know, and. And the big book talks about being maladjusted to life, right? And, and I suffered from this problem from the beginning, you know. There's this speaker that I listened to many, many years ago and he talked about like.
Being in preschool and grade school and like just waiting for the directions, right? It's time for nap time. Perfect. Tell me what to do, right? It's time for recess here. Drink this milk, you know.
And I needed that, you know, and. Once I got out of that structure, right, it was a long day until I found a drink, you know, like once I found alcohol. I felt a little bit of relief, you know, because I couldn't process life, you know. My story is, I mean, it's similar to a lot of ours and it's very different from a lot of ours, you know. If you're new here to Alcoholics Anonymous, I don't know. We didn't even, are there any newcomers in here?
Anybody in there first 30? Welcome. Glad you're here. If you're new here to Alcoholics Anonymous, if you didn't raise your hand, your story does not have to match up to mine. You don't have to have been homeless. You don't have to have walked away from your family, stolen from your mother, gone to prison.
Unfortunately, for me, I had to experience all of them, right? So, I'm going to fast forward a little bit because the topic is emotional sobriety and I got like 15 minutes here. So, like I said, my sobriety date is September 25th of 2007. I did not plan on getting sober on the 24th of 2007. Alcoholics Anonymous was not on the radar on the 24th or the 23rd or the 22nd. All I knew of Alcoholics Anonymous is it's where really, really miserable people went to stop drinking together.
If you watched a movie back then, I don't know, my interpretation was that only the miserable people who didn't like couldn't live life anymore went there, right? Which is actually almost true, but you know, we don't stay miserable, hopefully, right? You know, and I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and I was this angry ball of. . . They talk about the emotions that we feel prior to getting sober, right?
Anger, excitement, that's pretty much it, lust. Like we get these three emotions, we feel them really strongly, everything else is kind of. . . It gets in the way, it's collateral damage to our drinking. So, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and I chose anger, right?
I came to meetings, I sat in the back with my court card, with my parole officer, with my probation officer, with my prop 36 case, with my sad mom and my angry girlfriend. You know, don't hug me, don't talk to me about effing God, you know, your coffee tastes like crap. You know, just sign my card, leave me alone, you know? God, just to think back on that, you know, it's so funny, like how did I even make it, right? I had no intention of staying sober and here I am, you know, but so anyways, you know, that's how it started. And it took me about eight months of being the angry guy, you know, trying to seal myself off from you people and your hugs and your holding hands at the end of the meeting and until I came to a breaking point, you know?
I was running out of fuse, you know? I was either going to drink or do something rash, you know, and I finally broke down and I asked Amanda to take me through the steps, you know? And I fell in love with alcoholics and onoments. Thank you guys. Thank you for being here. Thank you for making it possible for me to be here, you know?
And when I think on the topic of emotional sobriety, you know, it's not advanced AA, right? There's not a special, special club outside of this special club, right? I think a lot about the 10th step and the 11th step and the 12 and 12th. I think a lot about the big book telling me that I will cease fighting everything and everyone, you know? So about two and a half years sober, I was super popular alcoholics and onoments guy, right? Like, I know it's not a thing, but it was a thing, right?
I was on committees, I had all the sponsors, I had the AA girlfriend, I was, you know, shouting out from the mountaintops about, you know, my, I was giving my testimony. And my daughter's oldest sister walked out onto highway 99 in a blackout and died. And here I was, Mr. Super AA, right? I was saving all these poor alcoholics, you know? And someone so close to me I had no, like, I couldn't affect them.
I didn't save them. I wasn't able to deliver this program to them, you know? And the reason I bring up that story is because in the beginning of alcoholics, anonymous, right? And my, not the beginning, right? In my beginning of alcoholics, anonymous, I knew how to do a couple of things, right? I cried about it on Facebook, you know, I'm only human.
Then I called my sponsor. I met with my sponsor that day. We worked out some things that I could do to stay accountable and stay alive. I talked to my support group. And later on that day, I was, I think I was in, ended up in like pleasant dinner or something at NCCAA, setting up tables or whatever. And what does that have to do with emotional sobriety?
Well, you know, this is spiritual kindergarten and I didn't have a lot of tools. And so I used alcoholics, anonymous, and the fellowship as my emotional sobriety, right? I used the tools that you gave me to stay sober and stay useful, right? I think I cried a lot while I was setting up chairs. I think I cried a lot, you know, in the weeks I'm a crier, right? Like, I get really angry.
I bottle it up and then I cry. But that's the best I could do, you know? And that's okay. You know, I managed to stay. I didn't drink. I didn't cause any, well, I did actually, never mind.
I think it caused a lot of wreckage. But I'm still here, you know? And like this? So, there's a lot of, like, I don't know, like, I have a lot of really depressing stories in my chair or my chair. I don't know. It helps for me, like, they're markers for me when I face adversity and I manage to stay sober, right?
At four and a half years sober, I had her, right? My unicorn, you know? We had the jobs. We had the place. We were planning on the 2. 5 kids and the dog and one day she came up to me and told me that she couldn't do it anymore, right?
And I was crushed, right? And again, I used those same tools, right? I used the fellowship. I used alcoholics, not on this. But I had a little bit more, right? And I managed to stay sober through that, you know?
And here's where it gets interesting, right? Because at this point, I'm convinced that God has taken away all my toys, right? I called her a toy, right? You know, I'm just childish, alcoholic, you know? And I try all these other ways to manage my feelings, you know? I try.
. . What do I try? I spent six days a week in the gym. That was fun. I really physically fit.
But that didn't leave a lot of time for meetings and sponsors, you know, and life outside of that. You know, I tried sleeping with everybody I could in Alcoholics Anonymous. I. . . What.
. . I tried working a lot. That one. . .
Oh, that one's fun, right? And you start working 60 hours a week at your job, you know? Oh, there's overtime, I'll take that. Oh, you can't give me overtime, I'll still work, you know? And the reason why I bring up these extremes is because what I found out is that I had been. .
. Even though I had been sober, I had worked the steps to the best of my ability. I had done all these things in Alcoholics Anonymous. I had found a higher power of my own understanding. I was placing undue dependency upon the realm of man, you know? I needed approval.
I needed love. I needed to know that. . . Maybe I needed Alonon. Oh, fuck.
I needed. . . I was looking at all these other things, right? And I was getting miserable, you know? Like, why is this not working?
Why am I still going to meetings? You know? I still have a couple of sponsors. You know, I still pray every morning. I still meditate once a month. But why are.
. . Why am I feeling so empty? You know? And what I was doing is I was depending on things outside of my God, you know? And I would.
. . I fell back into. . . the bedevilments, right?
Anger, frustration, despair? Is that what it goes? I think that's how it goes. Or am I talking about the horsemen? I don't know. There were really bad emotions.
And at about eight years sober, you know, I was really tired of you fucking people. Oh, shit. I didn't want to cuss. I was trying not to cuss. I was really tired of you people, you know? I was really angry at God.
I really hated the coffee again. You know? I stopped praying at meetings. At first I thought it was to lip the newcomer know that they didn't have to join into the cult. But it was really me just being angry at God, you know? And I found myself alone again.
You know? If you're in this room tonight, tonight, today, and you feel disconnected from the people about you, from your fellowship, welcome. I was like coming up on double digit sobriety, and I felt really, really alone. You know? And I had to make a choice, you know? I remember I was driving to my home group at the time.
And I was blaring, really, really angry at music. I think it was tooling, right? And I was hating the world. I was hating the cars in front of me. I was hating the pedestrians. I was hating that stoplight.
I was hating everything. And I came to a realization that if I was going to continue to be angry, I was going to die. You know? One way or another, whether I was going to drink myself to death, or I was going to, you know, just tug. And I said to God, if there's nothing better than this, you need to stop it now. You know?
If this is all you have for me, I'm done. You know? I'm done. And the thing is, is that that's great, right? To go yell at God, right? Like a child.
Just go yell at God and sit in the corner. I couldn't sit in the corner, though. My feet had been trained. Your voices kept going through my head. You know? And I started back out on the path, you know?
Really simple. Go to meetings, shake the newcomers hand, you know? Answer your phone, pray, meditate every day, clean up your wreckage, you know? And what I have today, I have. . .
I don't know, there's just this light, right? You know? Life doesn't ever get too dark. I mean, my life's not perfect, right? I don't have a sports car, and the wife, and the 2. 5 kids.
You know, what I'm able to do is I'm able to. . . face life? Not even. .
. it's not like face life, right? That sounds so like dramatic and like really, really hard. You know? I get to participate in life. You know, I get to live life as an alcoholic who spent most of his life maladjusted to the world as one among many.
I know who I am, I know my strengths, and that's pretty damn amazing. You know? I want to say something profound right here, but I feel like it's not there, right? So, I'm just going to sit down and say thank you. Thank you, Masa, and next up we have Sunny. Hi, family.
My name is Sunny, and I'm an alcoholic. Sunny, Sunny. I get really nervous standing at the podiums. I'm Masa, thank you for a great job. And also for blowing the opportunity to sit. I don't know, is that Marie and I here?
I want to thank you for asking me to come and speak today. I'm just going to do a little third stop, guys. I'm God, I offer myself to need a building. So, if you're new to Alcoholics Anonymous, if you're returning or if you're just visiting, I want to say welcome. I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I was like, what happened to what I'm like today. I want you to know I don't speak for as a whole.
What I'm going to share is based on my experience, which is limited. It's my opinion, which will change. Talk to me a week from now about some of the things that might come out of my mouth today. And I might say, yeah, that was stupid. Because we get to grow here. And what I would invite you to do is what I try to do is listen with an open mind.
And if you find something with which you disagree with this, if anything comes out of my mouth that you can't reconcile what's in this book. You should completely disregard it. And as a warning, when I talk about what I was like, I find it useful to use the language that was in my mind and coming out of my mouth at the time. So, if that offensive one, sorry, we have a step for that. And I may also bring in some non-AA approved literature that was embraced by our founders. So if you have an issue with that, again, there was stuff for that.
And if you like, after the meeting, you can call my sponsor. He loves getting these phone calls. So what I was like, Masa kind of touched on the whole notion of anger. And for me, somewhere between the ages of three and five, this, you know, things happen to children, sometimes it just shouldn't happen. And as a result of that, I learned to walk through life with a little fear, a little anger, and a lot of mistrust and this need to understand and control and somehow try to create some semblance of safety. All the while looking around me and going, how are these other kids doing this?
Like, you know, what I don't understand. How do they take a nap? Like, I'm lying on this mat and all I want to do is like run around. And as I got older, it became like, how are they like, holding down jobs and doing laundry and making dinner and having kids and buying a car and going on vacations and periodically in my life, that stuff would flow in and out, but it was always like, you know, where's the manual? Where's the instruction set? And always this feeling of being disconnected and like kind of like, just, I think most of you understand what I'm talking about.
And I don't know, by the time I was five, I think I really needed a drink. And at seven, I got that drink. I had my first drunk. It was strawberry wine that we had gotten from Hammond, Louisiana at the Discovery Festival. I grew up in New Orleans in Baton Rouge. And it was these six little bottles of red wine and it was sweet and like, cool-aid and sitting in the fridge and I went down and uncorked the bottle and took a little sip.
And I was like, that's delicious. Put the top back on, put it back, walked away. Five minutes later, I came back. An hour or two hours later, every bottle was half full. And I was like, oh, this is not good. I'm a resourceful seven-year-old.
I knew what food coloring was. I got some food coloring, got some cool-aid, refilled the bottles, put the cash back on, put it back in the fridge. I don't think anyone ever found out. But I had my first drunk that day. And I didn't go off in like hit benders every day. It was 14 or 15 in high school.
The drinking started. And it was never a problem. Everyone around me drank. And it's what we did. And I've rolled a car over, put my head through windshield, destroyed the roof of a car. I had it literally cave in on top of me without rolling it over.
That's a story. And that was all before I was at the age of 18. And I didn't think I had a problem. I went to college at Berkeley, which is a lot available at Berkeley Dry and Wet. And I like to explore. And I managed to do that for a very long time.
It's hard to go around a little bit. When Bill Wilson wrote this thing on Emotional Survival, next frontier, my interpretation of it is he was talking about this notion of dependency. And sometimes I'm talking about it, I'll call it attachment. But there's also this notion that at some point for me personally, and I think this is true for most of us. There became this desire to seek something external to us to fix or fill the internal. And that process doesn't end well in my experience.
And to go back to that child, I want to say this. And this is, I'd like to share this for the people in the room that are struggling with this. I am an atheist. I have a higher power. I am connected to it. I call it God, because that shorthand works very effectively for me.
So I just want you to know if you're in this room and you're struggling for connection to something bigger than yourself, then the whole God idea makes you bristle. I'm with you. And there's a way. There are many paths to that place of being connected. So with that said, for me, like these spiritual teachings and what Bill wrote about, it's echoed in a lot of other places. Our book tells us like look to these men of religion.
They have things to teach us. And there's another set of teachings that talks about these wounds that we carry and how they touch certain places in us. And so if it's an issue of physical harm, and the first time it happens to you, it's this light little brush. And then the next time it happens, it's a little scratch on that same place. And when some of these places get touched again and again, the wounds get deeper and deeper. And so I have these things that I carry with me.
And some of them are those light touches. And the analogy I like to use is it's a stick and dry sand. And for those light touches, it takes a little wind a little time, and I'm fine. And then you have the ones that go a little deeper. It's a big stick dragged through wet sand. Then I need a little water.
I need a little wind. I need a little sun. And maybe, but there's that remnant. You can see that little scar trace there. And then I have the ones where I took a rock. And it's that one that hits again and again and again and again.
And that rock gets a channel of carbonate. And that takes a lot of time. And then I have the ones. The ones that really, and that's the chisel and the hammer. And it's the Grand Canyon running through my soul. And in that Grand Canyon, there's gasoline flowing.
Right? And it's looking for a spark. And if you come in and you touch that, you know, it's. . . When I first got sober, anger had been present a lot.
And someone in a meeting was talking about like being in the bowl in the China shop in their life. And for some reason, I got called on next and I was new. And this popped into my head. And it's actually like really fitting. I was like, I wasn't a bull in the China shop. I was the shit flinging monkey riding on the bowl in the China shop.
And like, it was just, you know, I walked around in my life with two open pales of gasoline and I was looking for a spark. And if you didn't give it to me, I would ignite. And I share that to say that when these different wounds in me were touched, there would be a reaction which is understandable, right? You're touching this place and bringing up a lot. But it was never commensurate with what was going on in the moment. It's just they just happened to be touching this place.
So the question is, is like, how do we get. . . How do I get from there to this place of like. . .
It's okay to touch me there. How much time do I have left? Oh, that's awesome. Okay. So I want to fast forward to the end of my drinking. The things to which I was attached externally for security, for love, for value, for affirmation, I had drank those things away.
I didn't trade them away. I didn't lose them. I just said, I need this. And I chose alcohol. Now how much self will and power control was in that choice? I don't know, but it was a choice.
It was a decision. And at the end of my drinking, it was about nine months of two bottles of vodka a day. I'd get up sometime two, four and six in the morning. I'd pour big to go tumbler, full of vodka. I'd add a little snapple to be healthy. And I think there were days I heard even like I was like, oh, I'll take a bite of it.
And I would go and sit out in this bench, in this park, underneath this hospital, like in the shadow of this hospital, and I would start to drink. And I would sit from that cup. And the cup would empty and I'd go back in and I'd fill it up. And if I had worked that day, I'd go to work maybe for a little while and be done after a few hours. I'd pick up a bar, think about how much alcohol was left at home. And that was nine months of that.
And at the end of that, I was consumed by rage. I was consumed by self-pity. I was consumed by loneliness and despair. And all the panic like anxiety had to spend this constant companion to me. I didn't understand until my 30s that this thing had a name and it's called anxiety. I took my first Xanax before I got sober.
It was a half a tab. It was about two months before I got sober and I remember taking it and 20 minutes after putting it in my body. I was like, where was this my whole life? Like whoa. But all of that was like this ball and then one morning it was about two weeks before I walked into my first meeting in Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm in front of the mirror and I'm not looking in the mirror but I'm in front of the mirror and this voice goes, if you keep doing this you're going to die. Then I just said, okay, that wasn't suicidal but it was working and it was quiet and all of that.
That was a fair trade for me. The whole I had dug in my life there was no getting out of it. There was no getting to the places I was supposed to get to when I was 18 and 25 and 30 that were gone. So what was, thank you very much vodka. And then an interesting thing happened about a week later. I woke up one morning, I poured that tumbler, I still drunk for the night before but I needed it and I was walking across the street to the park and I stumbled on the curb and it was goes, oh you're still drunk.
You know what I'm thinking? I just can't walk away. Sit down and drink a cup and everything is there. I mean it's there and it's not going away and I am entirely lucid. I'm just stumbling and that was not good and I went a week. I drank as much as I could and it didn't, it took like black out to make it get quiet and it was on a Saturday morning out of the park with that tumbler and it was just like the hospital, check in, straight jacket, drugs, they'll feed me, they'll clothe me, nothing to worry about.
That is really attractive. What about going to Alcocks Anonymous? Dude. Okay, maybe. Let me get another cup for the meeting. I'm going to go in and fill up another cup and I get on my phone and I go to a meeting of Alcocks Anonymous and I walk into the meeting, I look around the room, it's a bunch of very, very old white people and I say to myself, look at all these sorry sacks of shit, there's nothing, there's nothing for me here.
And I was tired, it was a Saturday morning around 12 noon, it was hot. I didn't feel like walking back in that moment and I wanted to finish my drink and I swear to God the treasure for the meeting was drunk so I was like, she's kind of cute so, because I was a vision for you in that moment, I don't think I'd bathed or shaved for a week, I'm not sure what the status of the clothing I was wearing. I like to think I wasn't that pungent but, and unfortunately for me or fortunately, and this may be my perception of it but it wasn't a meeting of Alcocks Anonymous where a message was carried, it wasn't talk of a solution, what there was talk of was problems and how my remote control did this and my cat is doing that and I bumped my Porsche into the corner of my garage and I was just like, what is going on here? I have a therapist and she can't help me with this and I walked out of that meeting in absolute despair because it's like it's a bullet in my head and I was also thinking about where do I go for my next drink. And a man came out from that meeting and he put his hand out to me and he said, hi, it's something right and I said, yeah, he's like, how are you doing today? I was like, not good dude, it's Saturday morning and I'm at an AA meeting.
Do you want to go get a cup of coffee? No, but I probably should and I went and sat with him and that's a man today that kind of irritates the hell out of me, I don't really, I can't stand him. He saved my life. He saved my life and I'm like, now I'm going to lose it. In the course of that conversation, he talked to me about prayer and alcoholics and alcoholics and alcoholics and God and the 12 steps and alcoholism and we're sitting on a patio at a coffee shop and I'm looking around and I'm like, people are going to think I'm an alcoholic. You need to stop raising your voice.
And if you mention prayer or God one more time, I'm going to stab you in the eye and I'm going to stab you in the eye. Because neither of those things are going to help me in this moment. I have problems that need solving. And he laughed and to his credit he took a breath and he said, why don't you tell me about your problems and I told him about my problems for about 10 minutes and then he said, do you want to know what your real problem is? And I'm sitting here and I'm like, oh pray, tell, wise man, I don't know what your problem is. What is my problem?
And he told me and it fell on me like a ton of bricks. And I made a decision right in that moment. Like I don't know what it's going to look like. I don't know what it's going to take but I'm going to do whatever it takes. I never feel like this ever again in my life. Because he's absolutely right.
And I had no intention of staying in alcoholics and on a list. I needed a reprieve. Like I said, I had problems to solve. I had a 45 to 60 day plan. I ended up staying a little longer than that. At four months I had it all figured out.
I was going to write a book. And I felt guilty about it. Because once that book was published, like AA was going to not be around. Because it was just my best book. And I did the steps gradually. And the thing that got me to do almost seeing men come into the rooms after me and seeing them two weeks later, two months later.
And they had something I wanted. Not all the same. They could cross the board. But nothing they had in common with. They had done the work. And I'm grateful for all of that.
Talking about emotional sobriety is something that I could talk about for hours and hours and days. In fact, we talked about it last night for hours. We went to meetings, came up from Santa Barbara. We got to the hotel like two or three in the morning. And then we stayed up talking until five, thirty or six this morning. About the stuff.
One alcoholic talking to another. It's where this all happens. So I'm going to talk briefly on this. But you know, Masa said it too. Like if you go and you look this stuff up and you get into it, it's everywhere. And all of these teachings, in my opinion, all of these spiritual paths, they bring us to the same place.
But this notion of attachment, of dependency, of these things that we seek, and in my opinion, it's the external to fix or fill the internal. It's how do I get to the place where I'm okay? And the best way that I can put that to you is by using words that aren't mine. This is the non-AA literature warning. It's from a plaque that Dr. Bob kept on his desk.
I found this written on a piece of paper at the bottom of the literature box and it was about three months ago. Oh. And my understanding of it continues to evolve and grow and devolve in times. But it's a prayer. It's entitled On Humility. It was written by a Catholic priest.
So another reason for me to go. Damn. All right. Anyway, this is a perpetual quietness of heart. It is to have no trouble. It is never to be fretted or vexed, irritable or sore, to wonder at nothing that has done to me, to feel nothing done against me.
It is to be at rest when nobody praises me. And when I am blamed or despised, it is to have a blessed home in myself where I can go in and shut the door and kneel to my father in secret and be at peace. As in a deep sea of calmness when all around and about is seeming trouble. Like, that's it. That's it. And Bill, when he talks about emotional sobriety, he wants to think he talks about it.
He gets his stability and quietness of mind. You know, neither praise nor condemnation can shall affect me. And it's not to say that we walk through life with, you know, that we're saints. As someone once said to me, the Buddha likes boundaries. And I was like, oh, cool. Because this shit is killing me.
But we get to a point, you know, Bill talks about like loving freely and without expectation. And that was one of the biggest lessons that I learned here. I was like, I get what I give. You know, what I feed into the world comes back to me tenfold. I feed love, I get love, I feed anger, I get anger. I get hate.
And what I nourish grows. And six and seven for me are, it's like two paragraphs in the book seriously. Like, come on. We have this roadmap from four and five that is like, here it is. This is it, right? And six and seven, I get a willingness and then I can take a defect and I can say, I'm going to practice a contrary action for this.
For me, it's like, I'm going to do it for six weeks. It's just one little thing. You know, one of my first ones was honesty. And what that looked like at the start was, I don't know why I said that. This is the truth, right? And that took a long time.
And then, but when we practice, what I know about myself can change. The stories I tell myself about myself, I can put back in the book and I can put that book on the shelf and new things can get created. Because I, like myself, is just what I tell myself, is myself. That's it. And that can change as long as I'm open to the change. Meditation for that quietness of mine.
For me personally, the thoughts come and go. And they come and go. And they come and go. And one of the things that I get to learn from that is I can control my thoughts. I don't remember it in a moment when my mind is going crazy and I'm like, screw that member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but it's there. My body remembers it.
That you're choosing to think of this and get embroiled in this. And the more I meditate, the more that that becomes apparent. And there are times when I can literally go, this ain't good. Let's go over here. The other thing that teaches me on a cellular level for meditating is that everything passes. Everything passes.
Oh my God, I got to go. Well, you're breathing. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's okay. Right.
The world is the world. And for some reason I can spend 10 minutes alone in my head and everything is different. You know? And sometimes I do this talk called the lies of AA. And one of the things I talk about is it tells life gets better. Bullshit.
Life is life. Life is life. Life is the same as it was before I got sober as it is today. Life is life. What's different is my experience of life. My perception of that experience, my gratitude for that experience, is profoundly different today.
And life stays life. And in life's unmanageability and unpredictability. And confusion and tragedy and beauty, it's magic. It's this beautiful gift for me. And it's just all wrapped together. So life doesn't get better, but we get better.
And there's, again, so much to talk about. But the big thing is these attachments and my relationships with others. And how do I walk into those relationships and be a source of love and be a source of compassion and maintain boundaries and be able to look at myself and have that voice that goes, you're upset. There's something to look at. I don't have to struggle with my demons today or push them away. I get to come and snuggle with them.
I'm angry. Come and sit with me. Let's see what you're all about because you have something to teach me. Am I repeating behaviors in my life that come in different boxes with different paper? And I think this is going to be different. And I open it up and it's the same.
Well, there's something they're going to look at. And it's a progressive disease. In my experiences, my recovery has progressed. My disease has progressed. My defects have evolved. To read something from the book.
And now I'm going to. . . Oh, shit. I'm way over. This is from a vision for you.
The less people tolerated us, the more we withdrew from society, from life itself, as we became subjects of king alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapor that is lonely to settle down. It thickened every becoming blacker. I think that's it. And there's a story in the book. And I believe this in every core of my being. AA is not a plan for recovery that can be finished and done with.
It is a way of life. The challenge contained in its principles is great enough to keep any human being striving for as long as he lives. We do not cannot outgrow this plan. As arrested alcoholics, we must have a program for living that allows for limitless expansion. Keeping one foot in front of the other is essential for maintaining our arrestment. Others may idle in a retrogressive groove without too much danger.
But retrogression can spell death for us. However, this isn't as rough as it sounds. As we do become grateful for the necessity that makes us total on. And he finishes with, I have a wealth of friends, and with my AA friends, an unusual quality of fellowship. For to these people I am truly related. First through mutual pain and despair, and head through mutual objectives, and you have faith and hope.
And as the years go by, working together, sharing our experiences with another, and also sharing a mutual trust, understanding, and love without strings, without obligation, we acquire relationships that are unique and priceless. There is no more alumnus with that awful ache, so deep in the heart of every alcoholic that nothing before could ever reach it. That ache is gone and never need return again. The container of my life was incredibly small when I walked into alcoholics. It was the bottom of liquor bottle. You put something in and you took something out.
I felt it, especially if you took something out. Because I needed that thing outside of me to make me okay. And my experience here so far is sitting by the ocean and I am emptying it a ladle at a time. And when I look at the ocean, it's like, God damn, that's a lot of work to do. The container of my life is immense today and it's full. And my baseline, that level of water keeps rising as I do the work.
I walk through life today and what I like to call low grade euphoria. Like I mean that. I've walked through things that before the only way I could describe it was it would break my heart. And what I get to say now is my heart got to do things I didn't know were possible. You know, and that gratitude and that euphoria are present even in the most difficult of times. And I walk through stuff.
Because life gives us stuff. But we do the work and that water keeps us level and it keeps rising and the container isn't meant. And you put something in and you take something out. And I notice it and everything is okay. Everything is okay because I have that place and that connection. And the other thing I want to say is like coming from Louisiana I grew up with hurricanes and storms.
And they're from low fronts and high fronts. And the rooms of alcoholics and onomists. We have great depression and great suffering that comes into these rooms. Great suffering. And it's met with great love. And what we get is this beautiful, beautiful storm of compassion.
And empathy and understanding and healing that is just incredible. And I'm grateful to be here. I'm sorry for going over time. This is something that I love to talk about. And if you're new to alcoholics and onomists and you're wondering what the hell is going on here. I want to say welcome.
If you want to question things, feel free. There's plenty to read out there about what's wrong with alcoholics and onomists. I'm read it all. There's some good stuff there. There's some stuff that we need to think about in my opinion here in the rooms of A. But if you're wondering what's going on, find someone who has a working knowledge of what's in this book and has an experience built on doing these steps and just have a conversation with them.
It saved my life. And if you're in that place where one drink leads to another and when you're not drinking, you're uncomfortable as hell. And otherwise, you just don't feel connected to anything. You might be one of us. Thank you. Thank you, Sonny.
We do have a few minutes left for questions. Please keep the questions related to the topic of emotional sobriety. Actually, I'm calling. What did that guy tell you was the real problem in your life? The question was, what was the problem in your life? That's the problem.
The love of my life had said no more. He said, Jennifer, is your heart proud? I didn't believe it was downtown. He said it was second. I understood that my happiness went your way. All of it was just time to hurt.
That was my not going to have this attachment. This fashion to another human being, I'm not going to have this attachment to anything that's going to be there. It's not the same. I don't want that thing to be connected to. That love and that joy and community and a prisoner, I know human being. I have that, but now I'll be okay with what he went.
And that's an amazing place to be here, but I could be there. Yeah, that was a big, big, big one. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any more questions? Any more questions?
Any more questions? I just want to thank you so much for our first speaker. Maasad? Thank you, Maasad. I really appreciate that you were so honest about the difficulties that you had about the mistakes that I believe are so important in sobriety. This idea that you did sober.
And hello, everything is fine now. I don't make any mistakes. I do. I make a mess and everything. I have this such bullshit. I'm so grateful for every mistake I have made sober.
And I make some of the mistakes over and over and over again until, and I have to say here, I'm just about to do some other false step programs. I was able to be an underneath one of those. But what did you find besides being honest with a bunch of people about the errors that, you know, the mistakes that you had made, what did you find to yourself that allowed you to get some sense of peace about those things? Oh, man. That's a good question. Yeah.
What brought me peace with my bad decisions? Let's boil it down. When. . . So therapy was one of them.
Just FYI. Alcoholics Anonymous is a great program. Both steps are excellent. But I needed more. And what I found with working the program with Alcoholics Anonymous is it allowed me to be honest with medical professionals for the first time in my life. But what it was is it was the second step about everything else in my life.
Right? I admitted that I was insane when I came to Alcohol a long time ago when I first came to Alcoholics. Right? But when. . .
I found myself running into the same wall over and over again with the job, with the. . . You know, here I am. I'm lifting 450 pounds, but I don't feel better inside. You know, when I spot that girl at the meeting and I take her home next week, you know, and then like that's so empty.
You know? It took pain and it took a realization, you know? But I was insane in areas other than just alcohol, you know? So hopefully that answers your question. And I'd like to thank both of our speakers. If we do have further questions, they will be available outside.
What? News to you, right? We invite you to sign a big book that's outside. There are two of them, I'm being told. They're going to be given away tonight at the big speaker meeting to some lucky newcomers. Sorry.
Okay, real quick. Real quick. So my son, I don't know about the holidays. I don't know about the money part is sponsoring this today. I don't know if any people are familiar with my talk. People in the office are not supposed to be the part of the day.
They're kind of a pretty messy. And they try to do that. My, sorry, use the mic. Young people in the office are not just service communities that are part of the day. They're the future of office and they have a part of the things all the hours. They're just carrying this and suffering all the way to some interesting and fun ways.
If you've never been to a WIPOC conference, I would invite you to open up your mind and go attend one. It is an experience. And the reason I opened up with all of that is that the Santa Barbara young people in the LIPOC is not on this group. It was very recently awarded a privilege of hosting the South Western Conference. South Western area conference, we're going to cover six states. It's going to be in Santa Barbara in summer 2020.
If you'd like to support that conference in a very young community that I've just noticed, please register in Swappy Pot and I've already accessed WIPAA. And we also have fliers for hosting these elections coming up. So, we're going to talk a little bit about the next year, which will be in October, 2020, and October 13th. No matter what your age, you are invited to come and take part in helping this person zone. There's an amazing experience, you know, that was for me. And come and talk to me and you have some maybe good questions about that.
Thanks. Thanks, St. Peter, for participating with a moment of silence followed by the Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things that cannot change. It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very good things that I can and there was something to know of the difference.