Finding Gratitude and Purpose After 20 Years of Sobriety

San Diego was filled with the most homey grassroots,

real conversations, no pretenses, you know, and yeah.

So my sobriety date is July 1st, 2003.

My home group's the Hermosa Beach Men's Stag.

We meet Monday night at the Hermosa Beach Alano Club.

If you guys ever want to brave

that kind of southbound traffic,

you're welcome to come and visit us.

And my sponsor's a guy named Bill Cleveland,

and I actually just came from his house.

My friend, you all met Mahesh,

who's visiting from New Zealand,

and it's crazy to be sober.

It's, Susan, thank you so much for your 10-minute pitch.

I was just thinking about it.

I just came from a house in the South Bay

that I bought this year, this last year in December.

We left, I've got a puppy,

a new puppy that's being shepherded by the older dogs.

I had a pit bull that I got when I was about,

my gosh, I guess, 20 years sober.

I must've been four years sober,

'cause he was almost 16 when he passed away.

And he just recently passed away at the end of last year,

and we got a puppy now for the other dog.

And I have a beautiful woman that I met

as a result of being a service in Alcoholics Anonymous

that I live with, that lives with me, rather.

Doesn't throw me away, loves me,

gives me room to be myself.

And guys, I'm weird.

I'm a weird person who's got a lot of ideas,

a lot of opinions, a lot of energy,

a lot of counterintuitive neurodivergent proclivities, right?

And she just gives me a wide feel.

And I was just thinking when Susan was talking

about how grateful I am,

despite it being a very long day for me,

despite leaving this giant party

where all our friends get together once a year

to celebrate birthdays that are in July.

200 people were there today,

and sitting out in the sun all day,

Russia and Mahesh wanted the roll dog with it.

And here we are, doing Alcoholics Anonymous.

The best thing I've learned in 20 years of sobriety

is that it doesn't matter what you think.

It just doesn't matter.

You can hate every step of the journey you're on,

so long as you remain on the journey.

It doesn't matter.

My thinking and my thoughts don't necessarily

have an impact on my usefulness when I show up, right?

The action doesn't care why it's being taken.

So here I am, instead of watching UFC.

And I know, but the reality is that there is gratitude.

And there's something that happens in the,

not just in the alcoholic mind,

but to make it larger than in the human mind,

that is dichotomous.

Something either is good or it is bad.

Something is either left or it is right.

Something is either right or it is dark.

There is this bifurcation that takes place.

And I think that what I've found, the longer I stay sober,

the truer most things are at the same time.

That it doesn't matter if I don't want to be here,

it won't limit my ability to be useful.

I don't want to do anything.

95% of the things that I'm forced to do as an adult male,

I don't want to do.

I don't want to go to work

or even brush my hair sometimes, you know?

So it's just like, but all of a sudden you get sober,

you get a little bit of time under your belt,

you start getting an ego that heals itself.

And then you're like, I can do whatever the hell I want.

What I have to say somehow becomes an authority

on the universe, you know?

And so if you're out there and you're struggling

and you're thinking because your heart doesn't feel in it

today or your mind is out to get you today,

that has anything to do with whether or not

you should be at the meeting tonight.

It doesn't.

And a little bit about me,

'cause I only got 35 minutes and like Susan,

trying to sum that up in 10.

I'm incredibly grateful to be sober, man.

I've had a shift of consciousness

as a result of working the 12 steps in Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I was a victim of that shift of consciousness.

I did not know that it was happening to me.

I had no idea that my life was going to change.

I had no idea that my usefulness would be restored.

I thought Alcoholics Anonymous was a cult.

When I grew up in Washington state,

I was born near Mount Rainier and my dad was a drunk.

My mom couldn't handle it.

We left.

My dad would show up.

My mom was a codependent also.

So she fell in love and we were in someone else,

another man's home within six months and they were engaged.

And this guy was true blue, all American barrel chested,

cowboy from Billings, Montana.

Son of a gunsmith, tech Sergeant in the Air Force,

youth pastor at the church, can fix anything, right?

Big old mustache.

This guy was so country, his middle name was Buster.

So Buster dragged us to church four times a week.

And when we didn't listen, he beat the shit out of us.

And that's how I grew up,

going to church and hiding the bruises.

Being told to love one another and turn the other cheek

and watching the door shut

as I hear my mom getting smacked in the other room.

So, and then my dad would show up every once in a while

and try to see me and then Buster would answer the door

with a deer rifle, 30-06 and try to kill my father

on the doorstep.

We had about 150 weapons in the house,

just the son of a gunsmith.

You learn how not to touch an eye millimeter

by getting pistol whipped by one

and almost get your nose broke.

He was belt buckle kind of guy.

And despite that, I had a pretty, other than that,

I had a pretty decent childhood.

I mean, I can paint you guys this picture

of how horrific everything was.

But you know, I remember when I was three years sober,

maybe, yeah, maybe about three years sober,

my mom had found a letter from this guy during the divorce

and she decided she wanted to read it.

Now my entire life, you guys gotta understand,

I had this monster who not only kept me from my father,

he beat the crap out of my mother,

he beat the crap out of me.

He turned off any possibility of me ever being able

to trust God, Christianity, et cetera, all of it.

I just, when I was eight years old,

I threw my Bible in the trash

and I thought I'd never need it, or I was gone.

And he wrote my mom, you know,

he used to call me Pipsqueak.

And I remember, and she read this letter to me

and he said, "This isn't fair to Josh.

This isn't fair, tell Pipsqueak I love him.

I miss him.

I want to take him camping.

I want to."

And I realized that despite this guy's mutations, right,

he loved me, that that was the best he had.

When your only tool is a hammer, everything's a nail.

And I forgave him, I 100% forgave this guy.

I don't hold any animosity toward him.

You know, he built me tree houses.

He taught me how to fly model planes.

He tried to teach me how to fix stuff,

which I wasn't interested in.

He tried to do stuff.

It's just, he was raised by another cowboy

who beat the crap out of him.

That's just the way it was.

And Alcoholics Anonymous has given me a new vantage point

to be able to take a look at the lens

of my traumatic upbringing and let it be okay.

God uses garbage to make flowers.

You know what I mean?

It fertilizes.

Everything in the forest belongs in the forest.

Everything in our lives feeds everything else in our lives,

including the darkness, including the bad stuff,

including the mistakes.

And it's crazy to me that God, a higher power,

the ultimate verbatim, the periodic table,

I don't care what it is, you know, to you,

the immutable universal law that causes flowers

to grow through concrete.

You know, like there is, whatever that is,

has transformed my life and made an accountant

for all of my mistakes.

And the longer I stay sober,

and this is gonna be weird, guys,

'cause I'm weird, like I said, so I already warned you,

Bill calls me the rabbit hole guy.

So you can already get a taste, you know,

because when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous,

I was 18 years old.

I had long black hair.

I had four holes in my face and the piercings

they made me take out to enter into sober living.

I had a upside down cross carved into this arm

and a pentagram carved into this chest.

I had cigarette burns all up and down my arms,

combat boots, was playing in black metal bands,

upside down crosses and pentagrams all over me

and looking at people at the log cabin

like I wanted to eat them.

And I didn't do my laundry for the first 90 days

of my sobriety 'cause I didn't know how.

Never done laundry before.

You know, my mom did everything for me.

I was that guy sitting in the command center

writing a manifesto online before it was cool,

studying demonology, thinking I was gonna find

buried treasure if I scrawled stuff on a clay tablet.

Like I'm telling you, I might've done the other stuff,

Susan, one time for about two years straight.

And you know, and I would just drink.

Now the other thing I'll backtrack a little bit.

After that whole thing happened,

eventually one night I got knocked unconscious.

I was eight years old.

It was the eighth concussion probably

that I'd received in that marriage.

And my mom called the cops on him.

And here's the other thing.

He was threatening me to not tell her

and he was threatening her to not tell me.

So there was this bubble

and there was a convergence that took place.

And when that convergence took place

and everything got out on the table,

my mom called the cops on the guy.

He got arrested.

We packed all of our stuff

and we left in the middle of the night.

And we didn't have any money.

And we lived in the back of a pickup truck camper shell

in someone's front yard that she knew from high school

while we got on our feet.

And my dad came back into my life for a time

and I spent time up on his ranch in Washington.

And he lived out in a little town,

crap town called Eatonville near a dairy farm.

And so you could smell the cows every, you know,

but he had a plot of land.

We had ponies, chickens, the whole nine.

And I got to know my father a little bit.

And then promptly when I was 10 years old, he died.

I got pulled out of school.

I didn't know my dad had a problem with alcoholism.

I had no idea that he'd been,

my mom was in cigarette filled rooms

in the AA meetings with my dad

while he was reading the big book,

but he never got a sponsor.

He never worked the steps.

He was one of the hungry ghosts

that fades in and out of these rooms.

But he never got it.

He never got the message

and wasn't capable of hearing it.

Or, you know what, the longer I get sober,

like I said, guys, all the lines fall apart.

It's just one big thing.

And I don't know if that was his,

I think some people might come here to suffer.

I don't know if everyone gets to win.

I don't know if some souls just have work to work out

on this plane and that's just how it is.

And so he did not get the answer he was looking for.

His work concluded and he left.

And so I was 10 and I remember getting pulled out

giving the Taco Bell, double decker taco,

and then told your dad is dead.

And right after that, I mean,

I started running away from home, smoking cigarettes,

all that anger that I'd felt

that was already demonstrating itself.

When I was four, they started sending me to therapy

'cause I was drawing pictures of dead bodies of monsters

and all sorts of weird stuff.

And they're like, "Is your home life okay?"

And by the time I got to AA, I had 14 years of therapy.

I've been into way more therapists

than the double of the people in this room.

I've had three psychiatric evaluations.

And when I was, by the time from 10 to 12,

I just needed a drink and I didn't know it.

I had so much anger and fear and problems

with interpersonal relationships

and trust and you name it, I had it.

And I finally got, when I was 12 years old,

two years of that, my mom picked me up

and took me to a hospital

and told me my grandpa was having a heart attack.

I'd run away to some guy's house, she picked me up.

I had blue Liberty spikes in my hair, cussing, F word,

every other word, smoking Marlboro Reds, you know?

And she took me to this hospital

and said, "Your grandpa's back there."

And we walked through and they shut the door

and lock at them in a mental institution.

And I spent about a year in a mental institution

and that's where they put me on all the medications

that I came into Alcoholics Anonymous.

I've been on a lot.

I've been on the Seroquel, Respiradol, Depico,

Wellbutrin, you know, Selexa, Prozac, Respiradol,

if I didn't say that already, Trazadone, you name it.

I was on a lot of stuff.

I had six medications when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous.

If you're on medication, welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous.

You're allowed to be here on that stuff

and you'll figure that out with your sponsor

and hopefully not with the pressure of the group.

'Cause I know some of us have good and well-intentioned,

especially in this age where everyone's impulse

seems to be treated immediately

by someone who has a profit motive

that may or may not be incentivized

by the pharmaceutical companies.

I get it, that like sometimes we want to be,

we want people to get honest,

but if someone really needs that stuff,

I've watched people kill themselves in Alcoholics Anonymous

by being pressured to get off their medication

'cause it's not sober.

So we just gotta be careful, you know?

We have a big responsibility when someone who's in need

and is damaged walks through these doors

and doesn't have anywhere else to go.

We don't wanna make the last safe house on the block

an unsafe place for people.

And if you're an atheist, welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous.

I thought I was one.

I wasn't really an atheist.

I was more an antagonist of God.

I think I was just, man, I was one of those.

It says some of us that have been violently anti-religious

in the big book, and that was definitely me.

I was playing in black metal bands,

driving around looking for churches to burn down

with my friends drunk in a blackout,

like just mean and angry and so pissed

that everyone had screwed up my life, you know?

And that's how we got here at 18, and it was there.

And I started drinking

when I got out of the mental institution.

I tried killing myself while I was there.

I didn't succeed, but I'll tell you what.

When I put the laces,

I got transferred to a medium security residential

management treatment center.

All in all, this whole thing, inpatient for a while,

outpatient for a week, put back in inpatient for lockdown.

And then, like, that would happen.

That all happened for about a year when I was 12.

And when I finally got out, I tried drinking.

I tried drinking, and it was wonderful.

It was just what I'd been looking for.

And the only problem is that if I tried hard liquor,

which is what all my friends thought was cool,

it felt like an alien was trying

to burst out of my solar plexus

because I'd get violent, abdominal,

and, like, the cramps in my esophagus.

It felt like I was going to poop myself

and vomit at the same time.

So I only did it about 30 times, right,

before I discovered malt liquor.

And when I discovered Steel Reserve 211,

it was just enough to get you drunk.

And it was just, but it wasn't so much

that it caused abdominal cramping

with all the psych meds I was on.

So that was my recipe, man.

And I would just drink, and I ruined everything in my life.

What that was capable of being ruined.

I got kicked out of high school at the beginning

of 11th grade, sent to the special kids continuation

bad kids school.

They only, I only lasted two months there,

and they kicked me out of that.

You know, then I got sent to independent studies,

and I got kicked out of that.

And then finally, I wasn't going to do homeschool.

So I walked into AA with the beginning

of an 11th grade education.

I read many wordy books and engaged in windy arguments.

I could tell you all about the ancient Egyptians,

but I couldn't tell you Jack or S-H-I-T

about staying sober, about interpersonal relationships,

about vulnerability, about transparency,

about open-mindedness, honesty.

I remember the first time someone in AA told me

I was arrogant.

I was like, me?

I was, I didn't really understand arrogance.

I was like, me?

Are you kidding me?

You're arrogant for even saying that.

And I fought with everyone too.

I mean, I fought tooth and nail.

And so if you're one of those antagonists in AA, I get it.

I thought this place was a Stepford wife.

It was like therapy for porphy, you know,

or without insurance.

Like you just come here, you coddle each other

over your petty emotional achievements

in an unthinking universe destined for deep death.

And you just pretend like the fact

you got your driver's license at 42 years old

is worth something.

And that's how I'd share, you know?

And they'd be like, yeah, I was just,

I needed to be potty trained

when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous.

I pissed the bed a lot when I was drinking.

I don't know if there's any other bedwetters,

but I peed every night.

I mean, every night I'd pee myself.

And I just got used to it.

And I peed myself.

I ruined free mattresses in my sober living

because I kept pissing myself.

My body was just used to unloading

in the middle of the night.

And that's the guy who came to AA.

That's Josh, Josh Standifer, 18 years old.

I'm a musician, I'm destined for great things.

And then what happens eventually is you turn 21

and you realized you were gonna kill yourself

by the time you're 21.

What do you even do?

What am I supposed to do now?

And I'm sitting here 20 years later, I'm 38 now.

And a lot has happened.

So much has happened.

I remember, I thought that the all-male sober living home

was like a Stepford Wives assembly line.

This thing, like they ordered them from China,

popped all these kids out

and they just all said the same thing.

You know, I'm being my brother's keeper.

I'm being honest.

I have a relationship with my parents now.

And they just go in the closet at night

and sit down on their porch.

And then they just get orders from the mothership

the next day to come walking out, say the same thing.

Easy does it, next time I'm up on gas.

And I was just really cynical

'cause I'd grown up in a church.

I'd seen the pageantry.

I'd seen the tithe, right?

And I see what you're passing around in this basket

and you call it the seventh tradition,

but it's no tithe when I see it.

And I was just sardonic and hard to get through to,

hard to get through to.

And yet the love of Alcoholics Anonymous

pierced through that.

Slowly but surely, people thought I was funny.

So I would just go on a tirade, you know?

This is before podcasts existed, you know?

But I'd go on a tirade and people would just laugh

and laugh and laugh.

And I would start to laugh too after a while, right?

It turned from anger to kind of a standup comic routine.

And that was healing.

It was healing to laugh at how messed up my life had become.

And to just kind of be like, yeah dude,

but at least we're still alive, you know?

And I started that gallows humor carried me

through the first year of my sobriety.

And my sponsor, I went through three or four

before they appointed me one in the house.

'Cause I do this one, two, three steps,

four step, no thanks.

And mostly 'cause I was lazy,

I wasn't afraid of the self-searching or anything like that.

I'm just lazy, I'm an idea guy, you know what I mean?

Halfway, thank you brother.

And I'm an idea guy, but you need worker bees out there

actually swinging the hammers, you know?

Put me up in the air conditioned office

and I'll make sure and tell you how it all goes.

I could play a good foreman, but not a very good trenchman.

And I finally got appointed this guy

who was like the antithesis of myself.

He was a jock from Poway, California.

You know, good looking, tall, muscular, just this big guy.

And he was the kind of guy I'd get in a fistfight

in high school with.

And he was my sponsor and he took me

through my first nine steps.

And then I graduated that house, somehow by some miracle,

I went through the whole program and I just didn't leave.

I thought about it a thousand times and I pulled stunts.

I don't know if you guys ever pull stunts,

emotional stunts to like, pull a big stunt

just to see if they care about you.

It kind of goes like that.

Pull a big stunt just to see if they care about you.

Kind of the emotional and the immature stuff

that children do, except you're trapped in an adult's body.

I remember a couple of times I would pretend to run away

from the recovery house and I'd hide on the roof

and I'd watch him all go up

in the neighborhood looking for me.

And I remember one time that the manager saw me up.

They're like, Josh, are you on the roof?

You know, get the hell down.

And I'm like, no, you know?

And he's like, Josh, come on, man.

Look, let's talk about it.

They say, this is a selfish program.

'Cause I'd heard this in the media, you know?

Like the only reason you're gonna help me

is 'cause it'll help you stay sober, you know?

And I just was like that a lot.

Just grandiose, over the top, emotionally immature

and really, really sad and really, really lonely

and really, really afraid of showing you who I really was

because I did not think that was good.

And Alcoholics Anonymous worked on me

and I got another spot and soon I left that house

and I got a sponsor who was really working the steps.

And we got into the book and then I found the answer.

Now I have the holy white light at Bill Wilson

coursing through my veins.

And I was out there exercising the demon of alcoholism, right?

We went through the book, the 12 and 12, the service manual.

That's the big sleeping pill.

A lot of people in AA sometimes complain about insomnia.

Read the service manual, problem solved.

And I started sponsoring a ton of guys

and listening to a ton of fist steps.

And I felt like, I looked around at AA and thought,

man, most of you old timers are lazy.

You're easy, doesn't it?

Your way from the meeting back to your house

and you're not doing anything with these guys.

I'm doing couch commitments.

I'm ripping people's keys out of their hands

and giving them more juice and honey while they got DTs.

And I had one guy whose arm had ballooned up

from cellulitis sleeping on my couch.

Like just growing up in my car

on the way to get them into a hotel,

just doing the Lord's work in AA.

And I got this spiritual ego that just got big

and it almost killed me.

I got so lonely, I judged all of you fornicators

and energy drinkers and gamblers and alcoholics anonymous.

And while I was just sitting there

trying to work a good program,

I was staying away from the newcomer women.

I was straight laced.

And well, really, what I discovered in an inventory

after I left that fellowship,

that fringe fellowship within Alcoholics Anonymous,

and I had my spiritual ego death,

is that I wanted to sleep with all the newcomer women.

Every single one of them I wanted to sleep with.

And they'd be safe with me, you know, I'm a good guy.

But looking spiritual was not important to me

in the social currency.

And so I would rather spend my time

looking spiritual than sleeping with newcomers.

And when I broke down all of my judgments,

I came to find that most all, every time I was the thing

in me was a secret that resembled the thing

I was judging in the world.

That it's easier to burn the monster in the street

than it is to confront the monster in the mirror.

That if this was World War II Circuit 1939 in Germany,

I might not be the one hiding people

in the basement or the attic.

I might be the guy with the armband.

That I'm capable of that.

And I'll tell you what, you'd think that the secret

to human judgment is accepting the judgment, but it's not.

It's accepting that that thing is inside of me

and learning how to love the ugly pieces

that society tells me I shouldn't have.

Learning how to make enough room for all of me to exist.

There's been the secret to learning how to give love

and patience to the rest of the world around me

and to forgive quickly.

There's no Buddhist outage that if you want a happy horse,

give it a large feel.

And I have learned to do that with myself.

And as a result of doing it with myself,

I do it with a lot of people.

You know those types in AA, I was one of those.

Coffee pot goes on the left side of literature.

Not the right side, it's the left side every week.

Get it together, Rick.

I was just a micromanager and that still lives in me.

It's still there.

And that'll start revving up.

And then I just kind of laugh it off and back off

and just relax, you know?

And I am, when I was five years sober,

four and a half years sober

is when that spiritual ego burst.

And my girlfriend had just broken up with me.

She was drinking again.

I was in a relationship with a newcomer

and then she left me again.

I was going to Al-Anon.

I was trying to hold it together.

I was sponsoring half the goddamn room.

And I didn't feel like my life was together.

I didn't feel like I had a deep relationship

with my sponsor.

I had just yet another man in a position of authority

telling me what was wrong with me every day.

Like I had my whole life, every principle,

every cop, every, you know, all of them,

just telling me what's wrong with me.

My sober living that was basically behavioral modification,

telling me what's wrong.

And I called Bill Cleveland crying.

And I was four and a half years sober.

It was a Wednesday night.

He invited me back to his house.

He said, "Come over, man."

And it was 10 o'clock at night.

It's an old guy, you know?

I was like, it was kind of forward.

I said, "All right."

And I came over there and I was crying in his basement.

I was waiting for him.

And I knew I was gonna ask Bill Cleveland to sponsor me.

So I was waiting for him to bark the orders.

I was waiting for him to say,

"Open up to page 68," you know?

Or, "Open up to page 86," or, "Open up," you know?

Or, "When's the last time you did an inventory?

What's your mens look like?

How many people are you sponsoring?

How many meetings a week are you going to?"

I was waiting for the interview to help reveal

the causal reason that the effect was taking place

in my life as people had tried to prescribe spirituality

to me up until that point in Alcoholics Anonymous.

And what Bill did is Bill held my shoulders.

Big guy, Bill's huge.

And he's like, "You're okay.

You're one of the good guys.

You're okay."

And it slipped beneath my consciousness, my intellect,

all my bards, the porcupine quills.

It went right into my heart.

And up until that point, I thought sobriety.

And I go until five 'til, you said?

- Great. - Up until that point,

sobriety had been additive.

It had been this thing that we're missing.

We're broken.

We come in here like half-crushed cockroaches,

praying that maybe we'll get to live half a life, you know?

'Cause we're like cockroaches who've lost their legs too.

We'll never grow new ones.

But I feel like sometimes that mind at that gets spread out

into the material world as well.

I guess since I'm a drunk and I'm only worth this much,

I'm never really gonna achieve anything

other than just come into the meetings

five to seven times a week.

I feel like maybe I'll never try to take a risk

in a professional life,

or I'll just settle for whoever loves me.

Because deep down inside me,

I got these slivers that go all the way into the meat

where I don't believe I'm worthy of love.

You know, I've got all these problems.

And I think that Alcoholics Anonymous is gonna be the solve

that helps me live with it, right?

I realized in that moment

and through the next experience of several years

that that's untrue.

That's not true.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of subtraction,

not addition.

We're not missing things.

We have too many.

And they're all untrue most of the time.

And what happens when you're drinking and you're using

is you have to adopt certain life philosophies

in order to survive the alcoholic environment.

You have to learn how to lie, cheat, and steal

if you're gonna be any good at drinking.

You have to do that.

And that's how you survive.

And when you come to Alcoholics Anonymous,

it's a brand new environment.

The organism must adapt to that environment.

And the adaptive advantage within AA is communal.

It's together.

It's all of us.

It's being honest.

It's being transparent.

It's making your true problem available

for the surplus of experience to offer solution, right?

We need each other here.

And it's a totally different game plan.

It's like, it's the difference between a bureaucratic,

state-run organization and a nimble startup.

Two totally different business models.

And so I realized that the God-shaped hole

I've been sharing about for five years,

we all have a God-shaped hole, was an illusion.

That there is no hole.

The hole exists in the mind,

which is why nothing ever fills it.

It's an illusion.

And self manifested in various forms is what defeats us,

according to the literature.

And that is why the self regenerates

the longer you stay sober.

All of a sudden, you're a spiritual guru like me

at four years sober, sponsoring half the room.

Or you become a gambler, or you become a sex addict,

or you become a food addict, because the ego changes rooms.

Alan Watts has the cops and robbers.

It's a game of cops and robbers with your ego.

Cops come into the first floor,

robbers run onto the second floor.

Cops come onto the second floor,

robber runs onto the third floor.

Over and over and over again, like a skit.

And when I realized that there was no hole in me,

that I was already complete, and that in fact,

I just had a bunch of things I'd learned to protect myself

so that I could survive the hostility

of an alcoholic lifestyle.

There was hope for me.

I thought, now check it out.

There's like three major things

that happen to every person in their life.

I'm just gonna say three.

Me, my father dying when I was 10 years old, right?

Getting beaten during the psychologically developmental years

of my life.

And maybe my mother, the only one I have left tricking me

and putting me in a mental institution for a year, right?

If either one of those things would,

and she didn't know what to do, I was in terror.

All the doctors were sitting my mother down and saying,

have you heard of a guy named Ted Bundy?

You have to do something

to engage this kid's antisocial behavior,

or he's gonna hurt people, you know?

She didn't know what to do.

And I was a terror.

When I was 10 years old

and the Heaven's Gate people chopped their nuts off

and did all that stuff, I was in thralls.

I got, I cut out all the news articles

and pasted them onto a poster board and hung it on my wall.

You know, my mom took all the knives out of the house.

You know, like I was not a cute cuddly little furry friend,

you know?

- I like baseball.

- You know, I'm like, I like colts.

You know, so, but what has happened since then is that,

so if you were to remove one of those three formative

elements in my life, would I be the same person?

Would you?

You probably have three things that happened to you.

Think about it.

If all three of those things never happened,

who would you be today?

And the purpose of this thought experiment

is to lead one to the conclusion

that the answer is you'd be someone different.

And so if you'd be someone different

absent those causes, then your personality

is a lot more flexible than you probably thought it was.

And that maybe your identity is a little bit circumstantial.

And in essence, if you keep on following

that train of thought, that crap,

all the stuff I defend and think and believe

is kind of only relatively true,

not really fully true like I think it is,

like I defend myself in the world,

the mind can begin to open.

And if you open it totally, all the way,

include everything, everything exists,

everything's allowed, the whole ride,

all of us, a little bit.

And so if it's all BS, I came to think,

what if I just created new BS that helps me

and helps those around me?

What if I, we talk about old ideas,

but we never define them in Alcoholics Anonymous.

So I wrote down my old ideas and the way I used it

was through the fear inventory and I'm gonna shut up soon,

but I wanna talk about this.

'Cause it was counterintuitive to me.

I was out at a little men's retreat,

four guys, five guys up in Maine on five islands

out on this beautiful 1800s cottage

that was haunted as hell.

Stuff making noise in that place the whole time.

And I was out on this tuberculosis ward

that's like the open netting for the air

because people used to get TB

and they thought the moving air helped people.

And so I'm out on this thing writing in a fear inventory

and I had done the fear inventory the way Dr. Paul did it.

I'd done the fear inventory where I just asked the questions

where I see that self-will is the reason I have these fears

and now that relying on God will lead me,

I have financial insecurity 'cause every time

I try to take my will into my own hands, I'm bad with money.

Of course I haven't.

Now the new God conscious and God centered way

is to try to run my thinking through a higher power, et cetera

when it comes to money, women, anything.

I've done all that, but it didn't do much for me.

So what I did instead is I wrote down a fear inventory

and just felt intuitive like a lot of things in my life.

Imagine this, imagine we have sensory organs

that have shut off.

Imagine that those are there still,

that they're a part of us, right?

The Aboriginals believe that there's the biggest

and largest brain is in your gut, right?

And the smallest and most inaccurate brain is in your mind.

They call it nanduparu, at least one specific tribe.

And that's also the word they reserve for a fishing net

when it's too twisted and messed up to use it.

They say that's nanduparu, throw it away.

So I took my fear and so I'm afraid of love.

That was one big fear.

I'm sure everyone here has felt that

or if you've ever inventoried that, I'm afraid of love.

That's not a fear.

The fear is the tip of the iceberg.

The true thing beneath the water is I believe

I'm not worthy of love.

It's a subconscious belief.

And when I changed all my fears into beliefs that way,

I created a new belief.

I am love and am love.

And I did that with everything.

Success, I believe I'm not worthy of success.

Or, you know, I'm afraid to just be one of the crowd.

I believe I'm not significant enough to make an impact.

And then I created a new spiritual action

or a spiritual idea and I started living my life like that.

Why not?

I've just established that everything I think

is probably just circumstantial anyway.

Why can't I play with it?

And so that's the 20 years now today, I'll shut up.

I try to keep a good attitude.

I try to be honest too.

And sometimes my honesty embarrasses me

'cause I was literally complaining to Mahash

the whole of like in side notes, the whole way up here.

Oh God, you know?

And I don't want to be, but I'm complaining.

It's a part of me, it happens.

But that doesn't stop the truth from coming through me

the minute I show up.

Doesn't stop God from using me the minute I show up.

It's, and so if you're imperfect out there,

you can still be used to spread the light.

You can, there's no other way to be used to spread the light.

The cracks are how the light bleeds through, huh?

And last story and I'll shut up for real.

It's about a certain simple attitude.

That's what Alcoholics Anonymous is about.

It's about taking this attitude with me.

And the attitude is beautifully illustrated.

There was this, there's this monk

and this monk is walking and minding his own business.

And here comes this ronin samurai.

This is back in feudal Japan.

This ronin is just, he's been sleeping in barns.

He's been drinking nonstop from his gourd.

And he spins this monk around and says,

"Monk, I want you to teach me about heaven and hell."

And the monk looks up at him and narrows his eyes

and says, "You with your greasy hair, with your rusted sword,

you want me to teach you about heaven and hell?"

And the samurai, no one talks to a samurai that way.

He's so enraged and dishonored that he draws his sword.

And just as he's about to chop this little monk's head off,

he goes, "That's hell."

And the samurai who almost just killed this monk,

who sees this guy almost surrendered his own life

to teach him this valuable spiritual lesson.

His eyes fill with tears, he drops his sword,

and he falls to his knees to back.

And the monk leans down and touches his shoulder and says,

"And that's heaven."

And that's the attitude we have to have.

It doesn't matter.

We just, I'm humbled.

I'm humbled by the life that Alcoholics Anonymous

has given me, and I believe in giving it back.

And I appreciate you guys letting me blah, blah, blah,

and blow hot air.

Thank you.

(group chattering)

Nailed it