There's are many AA sayings about meetings,
including:
"Many meetings, many chances;
few meetings, fewer chances;
No meetings, no chances."
"The trouble with staying home, isolating and listening to my own head is
I get a lot of bad advice."
I was told in my first days in recovery the most important meeting we should go to is the one we don't feel like going to. I wish every AA member would take to heart that advice given me so freely.
We go to meetings when we feel like crap and we leave afterwards feeling good again.
We go to meetings when we feel good and we leave afterwards feeling even better.
But when we first arrive in AA we know nothing about the importance of meetings, or anything else about recovery for that matter.
Over time we learn of our need for meetings - along with having a sponsor, working through the steps, studying AA literature, getting a home group, doing service work, eventually sponsoring others, and more.
It's in our early meetings where we - gradually - learn there's more to our recovery than just going to meetings!
We learn we can't stay sober forever on meetings alone - important as they are to our ongoing sobriety - but it's those early meetings that ground and connect us to AA until we're ready to start the work of recovery.
I had never been a joiner or groupie of any kind (well, maybe there was a rock and roll band member or two back in the day) when I arrived in AA, so being advised to go to 90 meetings in 90 days was both a shock and an impossibility for me at that time.
I did go to as many meetings as I possibly could, though,
because I was terrified if I didn't I would drink again.
And there's solid reasoning behind the "90 and 90," even if mothers of small children (as I had then) can't always manage it.
That's because the more meetings we get to, the more people we'll meet and the sooner we'll feel like we're a part of it all - because we WILL be a part of it all.
In AA we soon learn that alcoholism is a chronic, terminal illness busily killing alcoholics around the world just like us every single day.
Meetings are our medicine and that's not just in our early days, either.
As we mature in recovery we get even more benefits from regular meeting attendance.
I can't think of a single excuse for not getting to a meeting in this time of Zoom.
I also think Zoom meetings are the best infusion of new energy into AA since women started showing up in big numbers in the 1980s.
The atmosphere of love and service in our meetings can and does (and, in my own case, has) keep us clean and sober for one more day during times when we aren't sure we can even survive one more day.
We will never, ever, stop being addicted to alcohol. We are forever "one drink away from a drunk."
The longer we stay sober, the easier it is to forget what it was like during those horrific last days of drinking that brought us to AA in the first place.
Going to meetings reawakens our personal memories by giving us an up close and personal view of those shaking, red-eyed, unkempt, angry, frightened newcomers.
We also get to hear from the retreads (those who manage to return after having left AA for another bout of hellish drinking) who make it back.
But I've yet to hear a single one of them stand up and tell us how great it was to get back out there puking their guts up every morning.
No matter how busy a life AA gives us in the real world, we must make getting to meetings a priority. Without them we remain at high risk for relapse, no matter how much time we have in our recovery.
I'd be a wealthy woman today if I had just one dollar, or pound, or euro for every time I've heard a retread returning after a slip say:
"I drank after I quit going to meetings."
How can any of us forget we were absolutely unable to quit drinking before we got to Alcoholics Anonymous?
We can forget because - unlike us - our disease never forgets.
And it wants us back.
Attendance at meetings offers us a chance at a new, fulfilling, and ever-expanding life.
Meetings give us all the direction, connection and support we need to reach that "life beyond our wildest dreams."
As one of the oldest of AA truisms states:
"Meeting Makers Make It."
When I first came into AA I was advised by George B., who died sober, that if I wanted what he had I needed to make 90 meetings in 90 days, and I only had to do that 4 times a year. And so I did for several years. And because I did, I learned to listen and listened to learn and not to leave before the miracle happened. I learned that resentments are like peeing in my pants - warm and comforting at first but eventually chapping my ass. I learned that I wasn't the best, the worst, but another sick and suffering alcoholic with a personal yet universal story. I have heard people tell my story in California, Colorado, England and Australia.
ReplyDeleteThe Big Book tells us that we are people who do not normally mix, and at a meeting we shine with equality through shared stories and a willingness to be there for the next sick and suffering alcoholic. We learn the canny nature of our disease and begin to untangle our knots. We learn to become whole and useful. The meeting is where our experiences are shared as lore, shared in the faith that present and future alcoholics will use our personal journies as their own.