NEW LOCATION FOR TLC

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Please visit www.thoughtlifeconnection.com for all future info and blog posts on Thought-Life Connection (TLC).

A brief Message From KC

THE TLC WORKSHOP is ON for this SUNDAY 8/16 12:30-2:30p Malibu Bluffs Park, Michael Landon Center  P.C.H. @ Malibu Canyon Rd (is an exit off 101)  Below is a message from K.C.   

Hello all, 

As it turns out I will not being going out of town with my son Shane for business reasons… As much as I love being with my son I found in the idea of going away a certain amount of sadness about not being in Malibu to carry the message… No cause for alarm just relaying to you all the work that is going on in Malibu is to carry this message to the world… What we are doing is contextualizing the 12 steps for everyone alcoholics or not… This is a truly enterprising endeavor that I believe will have a by the grace of God a prolific effect on the world by giving anyone and everyone a translation of the 12 steps that can be understood by anyone and everyone… this we are attempting to do by removing the stigma that is attached to the 12 steps by being directly related to drug addict and alcoholics.. People who are on the outside looking in at drug addicts and alcoholics seem to be concerned that if they accredited the 12 steps as being a philosophy worth knowing that they themselves would have to admit they have a problem… Or that if they did not have that kind of a problem how could the 12 steps work for them and where would they be able to learn about them without having to sit in room with a bunch of people who have a problem they can’t relate to… Thus what the purpose of the TLC workshop in Malibu is trying to fulfill… So this workshop is close to my heart and needs your support.   I Do Not underestimate nor should you underestimate how important this TLC workshop is in terms of the benefits that all who attend are showing the way for a better world by transforming and transmitting what we are learning about:  how the 12 steps can and do enable anyone to become happily and usefully whole right now in the day we are in…. Alcoholic or Not…. 

From my heart to you

KC

Sunday August 9th Webinar

Here are some notes I took from the 1^st part of the meeting:

Stop attaching pain to change. Instead attach excitement and adventure to change.

I discover a new vocabulary in finding what I am looking for. I can have and achieve everything I want, but I shouldn’t get it with guilt and remorse for getting the things I want.

My ego is not my amigo

How have my instincts warped me? The universal self is so important. The universal soul is what I want to recognize. I don’t want to take it personal if I am a power driver. I simply want to discover if that is what I am so I can expose it and eliminate it, if it is true. I cannot change what I cannot see.

The great Question – how to I change that?

How do you deal with people when they do you wrong? We recognize that like ourselves other people are to some extent emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong. Then we approach true tolerance and see what love for our fellows actually means.

Why Do We Get Loaded?

The question was raised this week as to why does someone get loaded. We looked at several paragraphs in the 12 & 12 that suggest that there are an infinite number of reasons why we get loaded. We get loaded to enhance a good situation and we get loaded to try and improve or make less sever a bad situation. I remember getting loaded simply because it was snowing out and I thought that being immune to the cold because I couldn’t feel anything would be a cozy feeling. Getting loaded is just one thing we do when we are not ok with ourselves in the current moment. I get excited and exert myself too heavily on those around me or I get so down that I suck the energy from everyone around me. These are the extremes of course. Ultimately the reason KC offered clear and simple is that whenever I have gotten loaded it is because I think I can. The Doctor’s opinion in the Big Book offers that men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced.

What I have found at this point is that why I got loaded doesn’t even matter as much anymore. What’s more important to me is why do I want to stay sober? This life, this new character I’ve learned and continue to learn about is an incredible journey. I experience the most amazing people in the most amazing way. I have no interest in drugs and alcohol today and I have no interest in getting into “drama”. It’s a waste of my time and I would much rather spend time talking with you about you than talk with you about someone else. If I talk to you I want to know about your interests and about the things you’ve learned in your journey with regards to living this life. When you start talking about what someone else did or said the first thing that comes to my mind is that you should be having this conversation with that person, not me. Then, especially if that person is someone I know and like, it makes me feel very awkward and uncomfortable. I’ve learned that when I am feeling this way it is a good indication that this is NOT God’s will. God’s will feels good, not God’s will feels bad – uncomfortable.

The question was raised about taking contrary action. The idea is that we take “contrary action” because we are so used to doing the “wrong” thing that we need to do the opposite. So if I am accustomed to lying then I need to take contrary action and tell the truth. Many examples can be given about this. The point that was raised first is in step 12 on page 125 where it says “right action is the key to right living”. The point is that telling the truth shouldn’t be “contrary” action; it should be what I want to do based on the building of a new character. So the idea is not to take contrary action but to make efforts in the building of a new character that change the very core of who I am. So I should not be inclined to want to lie, but instead I should WANT to tell the truth. Then it is not “contrary action” at all. It is the action consistent with the way I want to live my new life – in alignment with God’s will for me.

Step I – Passion

One of the things I was happy to find out in Step I was that I did not have to be homeless to get this program. I was just about homeless anyway, but the point is that I did not have to necessarily get to the same point that some of the early AA pioneers had to get to in order to recover. There was hope for me even though I hadn’t completely bottomed out. I still had some of my dignity. Not much, but some. The step goes on to explain that as long as I grab hold of these principles with all the fervor with which the drowning seize life preservers, then I will more than likely get well or for that matter improve my life drastically. Fervor is passion. This paints a certain picture. I needed to be desperate and it didn’t matter what the experience was that got me to the place where I was as desperate as a drowning person is to survive. I can handle more than some, and I am sure there are many who can handle more than me. I worked as a lifeguard when I was a kid. We were taught that when approaching a drowning victim, you extent the buoy at arms length because the victim is going to grab hold of it and keep going towards you. The danger is they can pull you down as you are trying to help them. That’s how powerful someone is when they grab hold of something with the conviction being described here.

Eventually what I learned is that when I apply this principle – the principle of laying hold of something with all the fervor with which the drowning sieze life preservers. What I realize today is that anything I grab hold of with this kind of passion is something I cannot possibly fail at, but I need to be clear. The kind of passion we are talking about here is the kind of passion where I eat it, live it, breathe it, and can’t imagine living without it. I want to spend every waking minute of my day doing it. The step also tells me that I need to be as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be. So I need to be passionate and I need to be willing to listen. Humility is tied in here because only a humble person is willing to listen. So when I am both passionate and willing to listen I am unstoppable. This has been my own personal experience. I sit in certain step study meetings today and I listen. I write notes because I know I cannot remember everything, but I remember a whole lot more when I have written something down. This is how I’ve learned as much as I’ve learned and I still have a long way to go.

I’ve applied this principle in my relationships and seen the relationships flourish. I’ve applied it in my business and seen my business grow. This is not a suggestion, this is a guarantee. People who are immensely successful at what they do are that way because of passion. Because there is only the one thing they want to do and keep their focus on – many of them don’t have families because they are so driven and focused on wanting to be the best at something. This is not to say that we all have to be so focused on one thing that we cannot enjoy families. It is just to illustrate the spectrum.

What Thought-Life Connection has been doing for me

In my slightly more than 10 years of sobriety I have experienced an incredible journey. When I got sober on April 5, 1999 I was a mess as you might imagine. I was stuck in a world where I did not really know how to let go of the past, especially when it seemed like that was all I had. The reason that was so is that my present at that time offered me nothing. I started a long journey into my future. Often times I teetered from the past to the future and back, but rarely living in the moment. I heard constantly that I needed to be living in the moment but I was missing that big important piece of information – HOW do I live in the moment? “Look at your feet” I was told and that worked for about 30 seconds or as long as I could keep my eyes on my feet. As soon as I looked away or if I looked at my feet long enough to get bored my mind jumped back into the future and the past. What I needed was a design for living that should be how to live an entire live centered on something other than me. This was the real how and of course this opens the door to a whole list of other questions. How do I get this life? Where is the guide to this design for living? Well I sensed it was in the 12 steps, but no one really showed me how to really look into the 12 steps and see what was in there. So I went on and listened to a lot of speakers talk about how they just applied the principles in their lives and their lives just kept getting better. And guess what? That’s what I started doing as best as I could with the information I was given. I went out to be of service, got involved in Hospitals and Institutions with Cocaine Anonymous and spoke at a lot of rehabs around Los Angeles. I became the chair of H&I and I got to feel how good it feels to get out there and selflessly help others. But was it so selfless? I did get something in return, but what I got in return didn’t cost the people I helped. It was a product of the universe – I go out and help someone and in return I feel great. I get a buzz. So my life did get a lot better. I applied the principal of being of service wherever I went including into a business I started. I offered help to people who wanted my help, always carefully not to forcefully impose my help upon those who didn’t want it.

My life progressed and got better and better. I learned to listen and pause and really take in what was going on around me. I got out of a deep depression I was in when I first got sober. I was laying around in bed all day on Saturday watching TV and eating sour patch kids (I love those). I would watch old re-runs of 90210 and wish I had a life like these kids did. Talk about not living in the moment. Then I would wish I could meet Jennie Garth (she was my favorite). This was a depressive state for me and could easily have lead me back to the bottle or extinction as it discusses in step 4. Instead I picked myself up and went to a meeting and asked for help. My new sponsor then gave me the direction I needed to get me going (I just jumped back to the beginning) and that direction got me to a meeting, which got me elected GSR, which got me involved in H&I, which launched a whole new phase of my life and gave me many of the building blocks I needed when I started my business. I learned how to organize information (all the rehabs, who was speaking, what week they had, how to reach them and so on). Every experience leads to the next.

At 7 years of sobriety I was wondering what was missing. I had an amazing life. My own business, a beautiful wife who was and still is amazing to me, 2 Dogs who show me unconditional love on a daily basis (make that 3 now), and a few really good friends who really care about me. Something was missing. I felt there was something more I could be getting out of this life that I wasn’t getting. This was the time I walked into the Daily Reprieve meeting for the first time. The first meeting I heard nothing because I was too busy judging KC and wondering who HE was. Luckily I had picked up some tools in my first 7 years of sobriety and one of them was to keep an open mind. I looked around and noticed there were plenty of people who were coming to this meeting to hear what KC had to say including the person who invited me to the meeting. I never liked the idea of being a “follower” and then I remembered that we all have people we “follow”. That’s what makes twitter so successful – the idea of following people who have interests that are common to my own. So I came back and started to listen and sure enough I started to hear something the interested me.

I came back each week and then was invited to the Monday Night Men’s stag. Going there I heard a lot of references to “what KC said”. Eventually I figured out that KC really had something to say and it was not only a message of depth and weight, it was exactly what I was looking for. This was the message I needed to hear in order to begin the process of taking my life to a new level. I started writing down pages & topics and today I have a little notebook filled with this and some quotes from the book. Pretty soon I found I was learning about the 12 & 12, the principles found in this text and how I can apply them in my life for one basic purpose. To learn how to live happily and usefully whole so I could learn to pass that along to the next person who wants it. So when I thought my life couldn’t get any better I touched on something that made it a whole lot better and it had nothing to do with money or material possessions. It had to do with learning about who I really was and following that up with a sincere attempt to become what I could be. With this understanding in place and always developing I have what feels like an unstoppable passion for life. So much so that I recently asked KC about the line between fervor and passion like we talk about in step one and being driven blindly by instincts like we talk about in step 6. We discovered that the key difference is that passion feels good, while being driven blindly does not.

I could go on but it’s time to get the webinar going.

Daily Reprieve – Seth’s recap for July 1, 2009

Last night we spent a lot of time talking about being driven blindly. It occurred to me that in some contexts this could look a lot like passion. So I asked KC after the meeting about seeing the line. Where and when does it become clear that we have crossed over from doing something with passion to being driven blindly by it. I spoke with KC after the meeting about this and we agreed that the way you know the difference is the same way you know the difference between God’s will and “not god’s will”. Gods will always feels good. So if I am doing something passionately, this will feel good. When I am being driven blindly by something, it will feel bad. My feelings are a good barometer for what is going on with me. They are a reflection if you will, of my thoughts. So when I am feeling good, my thoughts are on a good frequency. When I am feeling lousy, my thoughts are on a bad frequency.

We talked about that feeling of isolation in step 5. How I can subtly isolate myself. I can go into a room and notice how different everybody is from me. No one in here understands what I am going through. There is no one in here who has been through what I am going through. No one else owns a business. No one else comes from the sort of family I come from. These are the kind of isolating thoughts I have to watch out for. They keep me apart from everyone and then I lose my sense of purpose. What’s the point of living a life that I cannot share with anyone? My wife doesn’t understand me! I love that one. I’ve been with her for 10 years and yet my mind can tell me that in my own voice and I will believe it for a minute. She understands me better than I understand myself!!

What about not measuring up? This is how I was raised! I was raised in a home where if I got an A I was asked why not an A+?! I found out eventually that a significant part of my mental make-up was based on an extreme need to win my father’s approval. I still need to learn that I need to be ok without that. He is a skeptic. I can call him up excited about a business idea and instead of encouragement and reciprocated excitement I get ominous warnings about everything that can go wrong. Then I will sub-consciously punish him by not calling for a while. It’s not intentional it’s just that I don’t want to hear that negative message. When I do call again I avoid topics that might invite this kind of dialogue. Or should I call it monologue. This is why I do not watch the news. I need to know enough to be informed, but I do not need to be inundated with negative messages. It will bring down my thought frequency and take away my serenity. I want my serenity and I will act with passion to keep it no matter what.

I went home last night and I was exhausted. I was thinking about what KC said regarding visualization. The financial part especially. I keep numbers in my head. It’s a big part of what I do, so to hear him say not to think of a number was a new one for me. As I pulled up my driveway I asked God to simply help me feel ok and financially secure with what I have. By the time I got into bed I drifted into a deep sleep. I slept in a little and woke up still a little tired. Got into my office and started doing a few follow up things that people were asking me for. It hit me as I was getting ready to pack up and go see a client that for the first time in a long time, I was not stressing about money. I have a little in the bank

Seth’s Re-cap A Daily Reprieve

The first note I wrote in my journal tonight was to “Visualize what it feels like to be in the perfect situation”. As I was walking away from the meeting towards my car I was thinking about how I can hear an old song on the radio and it can trigger an old feeling about an old situation. A relationship I had and how good it felt at the time to be in that relationship. This doesn’t discount how I feel about my wife today. It simply acknowledges that I have a past filled with experiences and reactions both good and bad to each one. All of those experiences lead me right into this day, which includes being with my wife. I shared at the beginning of the meeting the reaction I had to seeing her come out of the procedure she had at the hospital. I was so happy to see her you would think I hadn’t seen her in weeks when it was only a couple of hours. I took this feeling with me. That feeling of love filling me up. What an incredible feeling to feel. When I get that and I am really aligned with it, I can look around the room in the meeting like I did tonight and see the good in everybody. I see love everywhere because that’s what I am feeling inside. This is what I have to remember the next time I catch myself feeling down.

We talked about why we get loaded, or more generally why we do self destructive things. The Doctor’s Opinion in the Big Book tells me that I got loaded “.. essentially because we[I] like the effect produced”. Tonight in the 12 & 12 we read and talked about how we get loaded in good times and in bad. I know that I got loaded for an infinite number of reasons. It helped me not care about what you thought (when deep down inside that was all I cared about). Getting loaded gave me a common bond with others who got loaded – a basis on which I could relate to people and I needed this because without that I couldn’t figure out how to relate. I was too weird – no one was going to like me. The reasons really do go on ad infinitum, like it says on P. 47 where we read tonight.

Some of the strong points that I walked away with is that I am now entirely responsible for everything that happens to me. No more blaming others. It’s all on me. We talked about listening.

After hearing KC tonight I am reminded again that I need to visualize, not the specific circumstances of where I want to be, but the feelings that come with being there. Then the universe will catch up with my feelings and I will find myself there. I have experienced this first hand in my own life – particularly in my recovery. When I got clean 10 years ago I began to develop a sense of the life I wanted for myself. I wanted to be married and I wanted to have a good relationship with my wife. Today I can honestly say that my wife is truly the best friend I have ever known in this life. I had a sense about my career – that I loved being in front of a computer but that I also loved to be around people. I liked the idea of being able to work from home – sometimes for days on end, but then eventually always having somewhere to go. Today it is as if I woke up one day and found myself in the exact situation that I just described. I can tell you that I never expected it to work out quite so perfectly. I always figured for sure it would be one way or the other, working from home or going out places. But what situation could possibly bring about both? The answer – my own company. My brother told me on the phone a few years ago that it is as if God carved out the perfect career for my including exactly all of the things I love to do. He’s right – because a little less than 10 years ago I began feeling what it felt like to have this. So I know it works because I’ve experienced it. The same is now working for me in the arena of health. After years of trying I am finally dropping weight, and I believe it is because I stopped thinking about the weight I wanted to lose, and instead started thinking in terms of what I wanted to feel like and of course on what I wanted to look like. This is just another version of what we do here in recovery. We’ve talked about this – steps 1-6 help me find out who I really am and steps 7-12 help me develop into the person I’ve always been able to become.

Finally we talked about what we do when someone we care about is on a path that concerns us, or for that matter, not on the path we would like to see them on. KC reminded us to think about ourselves first. Could anyone convince me to get on the path of recovery without me wanting that? Absolutely not. We didn’t read this but I saw KC’s book open to it, and I think we just never got to it. P. 104 1^st Par:

We also fall into another similar temptation. We form ideas as to what we think God’s will is for other people. We say to ourselves, “This one ought to be cured of his fatal malady,” or “That one ought to be relieved of his emotional pain,” and we pray for these specific things. Such prayers, of course, are fundamentally good acts, but often they are based upon a supposition that we know God’s will for the person for whom we pray. This means that side by side with an earnest prayer there can be a certain amount of presumption and conceit in us. It is A.A.’s experience that particularly in these cases we ought to pray that God’s will, whatever it is, be done for others as well as for ourselves. 

I have had such incredible experiences in this journey that sometimes it is hard to imagine it can keep getting better, but deep down inside I know it can, and it does. I used to and sometimes still do worry about what would happen if I suddenly lost everything. We heard it tonight and more and more I am realizing that it would only mean that I get to start on a new phase of my journey, which will only hold more incredible things in store. Yes there are painful experiences we will all go through and thank god for this process because I get to have my eyes opened to the process by which I can learn and grow from those experiences, making the overall journey still more incredible. For those who are interested I have my own personal blog devoted to my journey in recovery. I invite you to join me there as well as here. This is how we can keep the meeting going every day, all day long. The most therapeutic thing for me in my whole journey has been writing – getting it all out and I would love to hear other people’s comments and feedback. Please comment here and then if you are inclined, go to http://whatitslike.wordpress.com/ and visit my personal recovery blog. I think we should all have one – they’re free to set up. In fact when you go to comment on this you will be prompted to set up your free account and you will have the choice to have your own blog. Do it!

 

Have a great week and I look forward to reading everyone’s comments on here!

 

Seth

Does anyone want to have a webinar on Father’s Day?

Please reply to this post if you are interested.

Click below where it says No Comments, or the number of comments to reply. You will be asked to set up an account if you don’t already have one. It takes 2 seconds, please do it

Thanks,

Seth

TLC Webinar Notes 06/14/09

When I make a mistake I have to attribute that to the old character. The new character doesn’t compromise, lives life with integrity. Eventually there is no reference to the “old character”.

What does a lack of humility look like? P. 71 2nd Par

True humility means to be content and fulfilled with my life exactly as it is right now.

I Don’t get caught up in the external. I find contentment and fulfillment from within right now.

Self doubt – with lack of humility becomes self doubt. (eg) “I’ve got a bad picker”.  To attack self doubt I make a searching and fearless moral inventory. What wrong actions (defects) have I been taking lately. Or lack of actions (shortcomings). It all falls into either step 6 or 7.

This can only be tracked in the petition of asking – I have too many thoughts to track on my own. Must learn to take inventory when I am winning because there is a formula when I am winning. Then I worry that the feeling of winning will go away adn then it goes away. I have to ask what is making it so “right” right now so I know what to keep doing.

Always look at cause, not effect. What caused me to do or not do things is what I can use to change things for the better.

It has to be about laughing sometimes.

So how do I find fulfillment where I am at right now?

Gratitude list.

(eg) think about my child who loves to be with me. I can think about  that even when he is not there and feel the feelings. In general terms I think about someone or something I love. KC asks people to talk about the people they love. While talking about it we feel it and it feels good. It feels content.

What’s a good feeling? Learning how to be a great dad.

Emotional Insecurity – Step 4 p. 52 1st Par

How many times did I get into a relationship, looking for a relationship and then woke up, wanted out and didn’t know how to get out of it? On the other side, how often have I gotten into a relationship when I didn’t expect to and then fell head over heals in love with the person? Very few, right?

So how do you know when you are feeling like a relationship is wrong and you should listen to that, and when you shouldn’t? P. 118

When the value system doesn’t work, I have to let it go. Who gets credit for what I do or don’t do? Is my partner telling me that I used to be a better partner? Only I can know whether or not I am as good a partner as I used to be.

As I continue in this path I get more and more to a place where toxic behavior is unacceptable. I do not have to participate in it. This is my value system. I can’t live in it.

Be a loving person adn that is what I will bring into my life – is a loving person. One down means I don’t measure up. This is unacceptable.

What is my value system? I have to look at my own value system – my ideal of what a relationship is supposed to be like.

If I allow myself to get into the right principles in defining a relationship then when I come to understand what I am all about then I know what I am looking for. Relationships are about like attracts like. I want someone like me and when I find true matehood, there is simply no room for anyone else.

How many times have I looked in the mirror and said “I measure up”? The time to do this is right now. This is the application. I have to say it right now. Say it! Then I habe to recognize that I habe more to do in this life, but I am in the meantime content and satisfied with where I am at in this moment.

How am I in my relationships? How much giving, taking, nurturing, comforting do I do? I can never become what I want to be in a relaitonship until I find out what is stopping me from being that.

Gos which ones would you have me apply in my relationships?

Page 80 – calm thoughtful reflection – this is in step 8 and not 4 because we are not ready in step 4.