John Coltrane’s most beloved piece was his recording of “My Favorite Things”.
God,
Here are a few of my favorite things about being sober for 33 years:
No hangovers…if nothing else had improved, just that physical hurt, beat-up and numb-sickness that plagued my every day until 2:00 pm...just that being gone would have been enough.
Not drinking led me to stopping taking all those pills. No Elvis, Hendrix, Prince or Micheal Jackson death for me.
Thank you God for freeing me from the opioid epidemic. More people die of pills than in auto accidents in the US now.
Stopping drinking in AA taught me how to stop addictions. I had a two pack a day smoking habit and I stopped 32 years ago, last October 23. That is really important to me because my mother died from emphysema and my brother is now dying from that at this very moment…as did Bill Wilson who started AA.
Everybody on both sides of my family, except my father (who was bulimic), was fat.
I used AA’s methods and lost 60 pounds 30 years ago.
As my wife and I traveled across America ten days ago we were shocked at the obesity levels in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and our home state, California.
I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to go to OA and FA to learn better how to take care of myself around food.
AA also lead to SLAA (and, ironically, out of AA, at least on a heart level) after eight years.
The sex addiction to masturbation and to cheating on women was deep down in my soul and it took all of 12 step’s tools, religion and most of therapy’s panoply of skills to pull me out of that abyss.
Combine that with love addiction and I was the Devil’s slave (that is, if I believed in a Devil).
But it was from recovery from this addiction that I learned how to write books about addiction, how to start 12 step groups, how to make hundreds of videos, and to write music about addiction.
It taught me the root cause of addictions.
The work I did freed me from my family of origin.
And I learned about chastity…the diamond-cutter of all 12 step tools.
I am grateful to have learned about not debting which I stopped over three decades ago. With 80% of Americans in debt and the average consumer debt being $97,727 all I can say is “Thank you God”.
There have been other gifts, too. I lived a life of madness. I didn’t know it until I stopped it.
I was always busy. Always doing something, achieving something, accomplishing something…I was a total workaholic.
Busy, busy, busy…I was a madman. The steps and breath prayer, helped me reach my soul and I finally stopped all that madness.
Then there was the soft tissue stuff. Codependence, it’s opposite narcissism (ask any of my old girl friends), al-anonism, anon-anonism (being involved with an anon who won’t get well) relationship addiction, romance addiction and victimhood (the results of an abusive childhood). As a result, I am not afraid of people anymore and that makes my life a lot easier.
There are a few other addictions and recoveries…but that’s enough.
Spiritually, I learned that I had a lot of resentments that I was holding onto that really hurt my relationships with others and myself and AA helped me get rid of those through old fashioned self-inventory.
AA addressed my fears, which were mostly of people. I was so afraid I wouldn’t talk and then they taught me to talk...and now you can hardly shut me up.
I also learned the intrinsic value of prayer, that prayer is just good mental health, no matter who or what you pray to.
There was also sanity that I learned and it was an incredibly simple technique that AA used:
The way they do that is: if you keep your sobriety first, before even your family, job or education, then you have to take one step back from those three things…and doing that, you suddenly have a new perspective on family, job and education.
It is as simple as that, and ironically…makes you much better at your family, job or education .
A stunning gift from AA was learning the value of serving others….that gave me freedom from selfishness and gave me endless joy.
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and Sex Addicts Anonymous would lead me out of AA as a home base after eight years, but then after twenty two years the “S” fellowships were too restrictive in their 12 Traditions and I took everything I had learned in the 37 fellowships I had participated in and started a new fellowship, Prayercall, to stop all addiction...and it looks like we just might have found a way to do that.
I learned to commit to woman and to be emotionally intimate, through sharing my feelings and why I feel that way.
I learned not to look at women as sex objects, not to fantasize about them, and not to sexualize conversations with them.
One sex-positive thing I learned from recovery was how to restrain myself orgasmically…indefinitely. If you don’t think that is a genuinely worthwhile technique…ask your wife to be brutally honest with you.
There is a Christian passage that says “Seek first, the Kingdom of God and then He will then add all these other things to you”.
I have put in my time and sought the Kingdom of God in all the above areas and my experience is that there clearly is a will of God for all of us, in all these specific areas, but God doesn’t peddle or soft-sell these things to his children. I have to want it in my own heart…and I do.
As a result I got to marry and love a woman deeply, all of me, and now that I am recovered there is a lot more love in me to share with someone else.
As a result of that love I got to father again…at 64 years old!
Finally, and only in the last 5 months, I have been able to go back 40 years to see if there was any good in my life, pre-recovery. It turns out there was. I was a pretty deft avant-garde composer, in my youth…and I am now able to do that several hours a day.
I sometimes feel sad that AA can’t hear all the things I have learned, that really spring from the life-giving roots that AA gave me, but I will always humbly remember that it was AA that was my home. They took me in when I was unimaginably sick and showed me a true Easter experience.
As Coltrane would play “These are a few of my favorite things”.
Thank you God. Thank you AA.