When you enter a 12-step recovery program, it is recommended that you get a sponsor. That person should have at least a year of good sobriety, and preferably more.
My sponsor was a man named L. He passed away a few years ago. He died sober and happy. His life before sobriety was a catastrophic mess, filled with shame and depression. All kinds of embarrassing crises caused by his addiction to alcohol.
Which was a shame because he was a gifted classical pianist and a brilliant man.
But after he got sober, his life took a strange turn into a dimension he would never have realized were he not to work a program of spiritual recovery, a program that featured his amazing work sponsoring hopeless drunks like me.
Helpless. Hopeless.
I went to meetings and started thinking this is not for me. Aren't I smarter than these people? Am I not better educated? What is this silly religious stuff they are trying to get me to believe in? Am I not above all that?
And were it not for L, I may not .... no, I would not be alive today. Because L was smarter than I was. He was eloquent. He was well-read. He was a classical pianist. He knew what to do with my objections to the meetings. He cared about me and wanted me to have what he had...which at that time, some thirty years ago, was 10 years of his own sobriety. Plus happiness. His eyes sparkled and twinkled, and he laughed when I expressed my anguish. He just laughed.
He was always trying not to laugh. He insisted that he understood my pain, and identified with it.
"I was too good for this myself," L said. Then he would point to a framed slogan on the wall of our meeting hall that said, "Your best thinking got you here."
Here! In this room full of drunks drinking coffee and telling our near-death stories.
As I work now, thirty some years later, on my Death Wish project, at capturing the epiphanies and breakthroughs---the mental miracles that occurred for me then (and are available to everyone) I am lifted almost daily by people who are writing to me with their support......
Look at what a brave woman named Monaica sent:
Dear Steve,
I’m really grateful I found you.
You don’t have to know someone to touch their lives.
Because what we’re really talking about is “the kind of love that has no price tag…”
My sobriety date is June 10th, 2002.
I’m an AA baby. My parents have had a treatment center for over 30 years. My father has literally helped tens of thousands of people get sober.
I was raised around criminals, killers, and abusers who transformed their lives.
On Thanksgiving every year my home was filled with people who had nowhere else to go.
These are my people.
Thank you for your incredible commitment to giving it your all…to learning the truth about yourself so you could teach me about the lies that I tell myself…for teaching me to powerfully create instead of take.
Anything I can do to be of service to you as you create your legacy within the prisons would be an honor and a privilege.
May You Stay Forever Jedi…
Monaica Ledell
President, Truth Hacking